skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Svbtle will be open to public registration soon
Sell HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell? (#3, August Edition)
Continuing on from dennybritz's thread at the beginning of the month, I've created a new thread for the month of August.

I'm currently working on http://www.libramatic.com/ and I'm interested in seeing what the market is like
Android 4.3 App Ops - Privacy Game Changer
Fad diets don't work because they are ineffective, not because people go off them. Frankly, if you always followed fad diets, you'd end up killing yourself. Your logic is flawed.
As an Englishman I'm happy to support Scottish independence but only if its done in a binary, all or nothing way. You are either in or you are out and we have no place getting in the way of that decision but if you do choose to go it alone then, imho, that should mean Scotland no longer uses the pound, no longer has any involvement in Westminster, no longer enjoys the free movement (i.e. sans passport checks) of its people across the border and forgoes any expectation of automatic defence by the UK. Independent should mean independent.
I personally use UGVPS and ChicagoVPS. You can find a bunch of offers on lowendbox and webhostingtalk
Beware of Unsigned Integers
Companies operate within a global marketplace, buying resources and employing workers from wherever they want, in the most cost effective way possible for them.

Then they try to deny us the same opportunity. It's hypocritical.

Your argument is basically like saying it would be fine to charge people different amounts for your product based on what's in their bank account. Maybe you could do this, but people would be just as annoyed about it.
A lot of the questions are misleading -- placed with an American bias as to what they meant. Eg the first table measures whether people value:

(a) "freedom to pursue one’s goals without state interference."

vs

(b) "State guarantees nobody is in need".

The formulation shows an American understanding/bias on the issue. For a lot of Europeans (a) is not about real freedom, because it translates to big corporations and private interests shaping your life and be given free pass to exploit people.

That is, we don't see "state" as an enemy that restricts us, but as the (imperfect of course) embodiment of our collective will, as stated through democracy, that helps set the stage for our personal freedom.

So those same questions are also read as:

(a) Do you want to forgo a lot of democratic procedures, and have society be a jungle where you are supposedly "free" but in practice the "big fish" can crush you at will, or have you starve to work for them cheaper?

vs

(b) You want people to vote and use the state power to restrict exploitation and need in the interests of the majority, and thus be able to enjoy your individual freedom better.

So it's not really about valuing "freedom" vs "state", it's about how different peoples see how freedom works and what state does.
I use the SmartVideo add-on.

It helped a lot, especially when YT was slow as hell on Free in France.
Now that we have Chromecast, is it time for 'Xbox TV?'
A mechanical CPU from 1830
What 10 algorithms must every CS student implement at least once?
Use the https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap repository instead
You wouldn't say that if you had to put up with higher prices solely because of where you lived.
People really don't make that much more here; it just costs more to live. You're basically arguing in favor of price-fixing.
I agree but not sure if it's quite racism, more like prejudice. If it were a relatively poor or say (ex-) communist country with white doctors they'd be wary too.
> If you want to incentivize outcomes and efficiency, fee-for-outcome is and obvious option.

When I write a contract, there are often two prices: a minimum which is stingy and a bonus which is far from it.

The point is to say that if you do the minimum for this contract, you get a certain amount; if you excel, you get paid for that excellence.

Translated to health care, I think I'd like to see doctors doing less paperwork and more doctoring. It's not perfect, but I trust competition to pay that excellence price to those who deserve it.

That in turn means that if I need some kind of crucial care, I know where it can be found. If the system is over-regulated, that is not so.
Startup Exchange at Georgia Tech
I think the simple answer to this one is that it's a universal deployment tool. Like it or not, anyone who uses git can use it.

If I'm working on a Python project, I could possibly create a Fabric file to help automate the deployment. Anyone working on the same project would have to install Fabric, and figure out any quirks it has.

The same then applies to every other language. They tend to recreate deployment tools in their own language to solve the exact same problem. Capistrano for Ruby, etc. Everyone has to learn the deployment process for each different project.

Using git as a deployment tool means that the only person who has to worry about the deployment process is the one who creates the server side commit hook/push scripts. All the complexity is taken away, they just have to say "push to git@example.org" and all the magic behind it is taken care of.

It's universal between all projects. If I'm running a PaaS, all I have to tell my users is to put files in a specific place, add a config file, push to our servers. Without this, users of every language might need specific deployment tools, or be forced to use a generic one which might not suit their needs.
The best I've ever used, and continue to do so is:

http://windirstat.info/
How we're going to change Georgia Tech
> On the other hand in western countries you can do undergrad degree in anything and only then apply to med school.

This isn't quite right. If you want access to anything but a fly-by-night medical school, they're wanting hard science and most likely a focus in biology.
There's a culture of piracy here that's pretty interesting; people bring entire TB hard drives and small NAS devices into work to share entire collections among each other. (This has abated somewhat now that internet prices aren't so extortionate.)
The only thing I can tell you is to go and get health insurance ASAP. Both for yourself and your dependents.

Get one and be safe, one serious illness can bankrupt you these days(actually it always has). But my point is even a week of hospitalization can be pretty expensive. And don't be under an impression you will be able to travel to Bihar or wherever when the need arises. During cases of emergency those are not practical solutions.
Ya maybe with robots and such.
> Peace? Is this some kind of trolling or are you that ignorant?
Pretty much every major conflict in the second half of the 20th century was instigated or at least participated in by the US (Korea, Vietnam, both Gulf wars, Afghanistan, numerous conflicts in South America and SE Asia where the US tried to topple local governments etc). How about supporting various local militia groups all over the world to fight local regimes (Al-Qaeda and the Taliban come to mind).

The U.S. spent decades and trillions of dollars fighting the Soviet Union so Europe didn't have to. You can send the thank-you cards in the mail.
>why don't conservative men fall over themselves to fill that role?

Because different sexes perform different roles in different species? Even watched a nature documentary?
If the solution involves a tunnel or tube from SF to LA then I fail to see how it can be as cheap as has been claimed. I suggest it's an accelerator that launches capsules ballistically, "skips" them to maintain velocity, and recaptures a good deal of energy on arrival.
So if i understand this correctly, you can only write in the screen buffer using a character of 8x8 pixels.
> For instance to open a new hospital you have to get permission from other hospitals in the area.

This sounds like a terrible law. Where can I look for more information on this?
Emacs didn't work very well on the Bouchon loom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basile_Bouchon) but dammit, they tried.
China Daily reports that more than 300 million Chinese already are studying English—nearly one quarter of the country’s population. And in the next five years, all schools will begin teaching English in kindergarten, and all state employees younger than 40 will be required to master at least 1,000 English phrases.
You've framed it as consumer friendly but basically your hypothetical shop, on top of being another middleman, has gained a weak local monopoly on MRI's. That sounds like it's going to be bad for both consumers and hospitals which is why it would never happen.

As a sidenote the problem with MRI's isn't a lack of supply. A popular factoid a few years ago was that Pittsburgh had more MRI machines than Canada. Even if that was only half accurate it tells part of the story about high MRI costs.
Could Viber's Latest hack be apple's fault?
My largest system builds and deploys with Fabric. We deal with multiple load-balancers with unique content, and it works perfectly. I use it for a master control Python script that watches/adds/etc our servers and our data.
I am glad you did. My first point of contention is the fact that there is only one version of a definition file for a library. I sometimes do not have the luxury of choosing just the version that they have in the repo.
Objectification of Women Goes Much Further Than Sexy Pictures
I don't disagree that HN has been preoccupied with political issues recently.

Given the nature of these political issues (and their direct impact on tech) I'm not sure that this is such a bad thing.

As far as this thought:

> Great minds could be focused on better things.

I disagree.

I feel our focus on these things is extremely important. Don Knuth says it well here: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/iaq.html

> "If day after day goes by with nobody discussing uncomfortable questions like these, won't the good people of my country be guilty of making things worse?"

Of course, this is just a re-wording of Edmund Burke's famous (and oft-used to the point of cliché) quote: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." The point is nonetheless valid, however. If hackers don't commit to thinking, speaking and debating about political issues relating to tech - who will? Sure, HN might be an echo chamber where we preach to the choir until our faces are blue - but it provides a place for us to hone our arguments, build alliances and keep our fingers on the pulse of the hacker community when it comes to such issues.

All of that said, I couldn't agree with you more on this point:

> "Very few are evidence of some "interesting new phenomenon". Most are a rehashing of the same old topics."

I'd definitely like to see less than 7 articles on the front page every time Snowden opens his mouth, unless all those 7 articles each have something unique and interesting to add to the discussion.

I'm not sure how this can be reconciled with the fact that if 7 different posts about the same thing make it to the front page, then there is obviously a massive interest in the community on that topic. What about the wishes of all of these contributors, who have voted already in our debate by putting the content on the front page in the first place?

One possible solution is to implement some sort of clustering system that groups posts about the same topic into a single "uber post" (with links to articles and a single comments thread). I'm neither a NLP nor a ML guru, so I have no idea how feasible this would be to automate given such a small data set. I'm also not sure if a manual tagging / grouping system would carry with it more overhead than it is worth. Most of the time (when we are blissfully ignoring the NSA, censorship, etc.) the front page is reasonably diverse.
I really like what Google has done here.

There are a lot of "smart TV converter" boxes running android being sold for ~100$. They are great for bringing things like skype/youtube/presentations to the big screen. The main problem is controlling the UI via wireless mice/keyboard or special remotes. They really suck. And it looks like Chromecast has solved this input issue by turning ones smartphone/tab/laptop into the input system.

One thing I would like to see is eliminating the need for the TV remote in this process, which would still be required to switch between AV/HDMI input coming from my STB to chromecast input.
Hacker News is reddit, reddit is Hacker News.

I think the only alternative is go create a competing site with heavier, visible moderation.

A non-political Hacker News might have enough people interest to garner a decent audience. I am pretty fed up with the screeds myself and would welcome any (well-executed) alternative.

I haven't seen any competing sites/CMSes that weren't incredibly half-assed.
Another such dilemma is lecturing vs querying. In the quest to explore the topic of Righteousness vs Pragmatism, the author becomes deceivingly director-like. It'd be more pragmatic of him to explore the topic without spewing out one-all advice
It's probably because everybody has got on opinion on political issues, whereas technical matters might generate less feedback...
Free GeoIP API
There's a great article on this here:

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/the-head-g...

Basically, academia loves those who conform to its thinking. This promotes robots, and alienates creativity and intelligence.

This is from someone with impeccable academic credentials and experience in multiple disciplines.
> the system is automated, meaning it has the encryption key in memory

But it doesn't have to be in memory, or otherwise stored, anywhere near the bulk account data. If the encrypted password is transferred up the application layers to another physical resource that knows the key, and the passwords (encoded and not) or securely wiped from memory immediately after the comparison then this offers some useful protection over plain storage. An attacker would need to compromise both resources (the data store and the key holder) in order to get hold of credentials. For this to be meaningful the security of those resources and the communication between them must be very carefully designed and implemented, but it is wrong to say symmetric encryption is necessarily no better than credentials stored in plain form.

> There's no good reason for using [symmetric] encryption

As per my other post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120089) the reason this is done is to permit partial password checking which is used to reduce the chance of successful reply attacks. Unless there is a way of achieving both aims the decrease in risk (and to a certain extent perceived risk) through stopping the replay attacks needs to be carefully considered along with the decrease in risk through using storage methods that make this replay protection impossible.

Of course security keypads as used by some banks (my mortgage provider uses such a system) is a better solution, if well designed and implemented without cutting corners, but there are cost and convenience implications there which may put off the companies (cost) or their customers (the inconvenience of having a small device to not lose).
I think the reason HN has seen more politics recently is that the topics directly relate to every-day life of hackers. Most of the things happening on the political scene are pretty much irrelevant to us (or to anything, really), but when someone is trying to break the Internet, we take notice.

pg actually described this quite nicely in 'The Word "Hacker"'[0]

[0] - http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

To quote:

To hackers the recent contraction in civil liberties seems especially ominous. That must also mystify outsiders. Why should we care especially about civil liberties? Why programmers, more than dentists or salesmen or landscapers?

Let me put the case in terms a government official would appreciate. Civil liberties are not just an ornament, or a quaint American tradition. Civil liberties make countries rich. If you made a graph of GNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you'd notice a definite trend. Could civil liberties really be a cause, rather than just an effect? I think so. I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people. Authoritarian countries become corrupt; corrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak. It seems to me there is a Laffer curve for government power, just as for tax revenues. At least, it seems likely enough that it would be stupid to try the experiment and find out. Unlike high tax rates, you can't repeal totalitarianism if it turns out to be a mistake.

This is why hackers worry. The government spying on people doesn't literally make programmers write worse code. It just leads eventually to a world in which bad ideas win. And because this is so important to hackers, they're especially sensitive to it. They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm.

The another, more mundane reason, would be that political topics are very conductive to flamew^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussion, and we fall prey to this like everyone else.

As for my personal feel, I do think there have been a bit too many political articles here recently. Not because the topics are bad, but because most of them don't add anything new to the story.

Maybe it's time to start posting about Erlang again?

ETA

As for other solutions, maybe let's just wait 'till the
Snowdengate blows over while aggresively flagging any political non-topics that tag along for a ride?
People use the meaningless term "hacker" as an excuse to submit and comment on everything in my experience.

The idea of letting users self-moderate on HN has failed, in my opinion. If admins allow these stories, albeit tacitly, then they won't go away. We've had countless of threads discussing this to no effect already, and nothing's changed.
Prototyping Code in Clojure – A Simple Audio Displaying App
HN is currently the best site I know of for quality political discussion. It doesn't cover the broadest range of topics though, heavily leaning towards politics related towards technology. I'd actually like to see a broader range of political stories. HN has grown hugely over the last few years and I'm sure PG is resisting the urge to become more than a site for hackers. Having said that it seems to have become that already. Some way to tag and filter the stories would seem like the best way forwards. Any thoughts?
Was previously on HN, e.g. here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6075542
Maybe it would make more sense to compare it to prices in Europe or other places with similar medical standards.

My guess would be $100k in the US is about $50k in other places. At least my travel health insurence charges twice the rate if I travel to the US compared to "rest of the world".
"They post about it, because it affects them" is a pretty big subtle indictment of the community, I think.

Not that I necessarily disagree, but it's something to think about.
There's a few way to improve content without altering the system (which can take much longer and have positive/negative effects).

One way to instantly get more diversity in content is to frequent the "new" page more often. I find myself doing it more lately to vote up unique/interesting stuff that might otherwise get passed over. There's actually quite a few articles that are front page worthy that get passed over, but it takes time to go through and look. I just take a small break from working every now and vote a few up instead of waiting for them to hit the front page.

Another is to be more discriminative with what one upvotes. Avoid upvoting things from questionable sources or those that fall into being link bait/deceiving.

A third suggestion is to submit content that's accurate, informative and more diverse in hopes it gets upvoted. Try to find articles that you generally wouldn't find on another community.

Fancy algorithms and solutions aside, content on a forum is mostly a reflection of the current state of the community, for better or for worse. Alternatively implementing restrictions/policies would irritate some percentage of the community, but mostly that comes down to whether it's a percentage the community that one wishes to cultivate and maintain. As a community grows larger, interests become less focused more watered down as the community becomes more widely known. No major online community thus far I know of has been spared of that.

Addendum: I don't come to HN for the politics really anymore than I would come here for sporting news. I came here originally for the hundreds of insightful hacker/technology related discussions I have bookmarked and found more useful than any previous forum I have frequented. When discussions stray over into other interesting things at times, that's okay, but too much of any topic, tech/hacker related or not, becomes trite and repetitive.
New Apple supplier 'even worse' than Foxconn alleges labor watch group
The hype around this is kind of weird to me - really, watching Netflix Instant on your TV is exciting? I mean, I talk about watching shows on Netflix instant pretty regularly with fairly non-technical people, and I'm assuming there's an easy way they're watching on their TV. It's almost comical how many devices I own capable of streaming Netflix, from my (fairly cheap) plasma TV to my 2009 Samsung HTIB to my PS3. I mostly use Apple TV.

Chromecast is cheap, but for the demographic that's been paying $9 - $25 a month for Netflix for a while, this is a solved problem.
Loom — Cloud storage for photos and videos
There are many ways people are charged based on what's on the people's bank account. Look at the airlines for instance, they mastered this skill since 1978. I see nothing wrong here. There are high-price markets and low-price ones, to circumvent it, there are smugglers to run the line - you can buy digital content using a proxy in USA or UK and using a one-off (digital) UK credit card which is easy to buy.

Same thing goes about say, smartphones in Russia. It is an accepted practice to buy iPhones from smugglers where they are 60-70% of the price in a retail store due to Apple price policy for Russia, i am fine with that. There are different prices for different places based on a lot of factors, trying to fight it will only increase price levels EVERYWHERE because the volume will go down.

An ideal-perfect pricing system is where the product is sold to the maximum number of people who want it and can afford to pay at least an equivalent of incremental cost of production and delivery (which is, for digital goods, near zero), yet everyone pays a maximum amount he can afford. One of the criterias for price setting is the country (there must be many others of course, again look at the airlines and learn from them).
Except bitcoin establishes a public, permanent and irrefutable link between yourself (or at least information that, except in specific circumstances, can be linked back to yourself) and the provider.
Advanced Conversion Tracking For Your Blog
I suspect that PG has given up moderating Hacker News and currently sees HN mostly as an effective marketing channel for YC startups. Lately most replies from PG and many founders seem filtered to prevent the inevitable backlash. The raw opinionated discussions likely happen elsewhere and i miss reading those.