skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Though I'm not arguing for what the original commenter was arguing for, I don't think it would be a conflict in their line of thinking. I think the OP would argue for the right to suicide, but not for the right to commit suicide by head on collision with another car. It's the same idea.

Plus, we would want to be very careful with pregnant women wanting to commit suicide, because their body is going through so much stuff at the time. Those desires could very well be contrary to what the woman is really living for. A pregnant woman with suicidal desires (in OP's argument) should be seen as someone who needs assistance to live, not assistance to die.

Again, just stepping inside that thinking and not necessarily arguing for/against OP's argument.
The Second Coming of Peer Review
Not going to explain the French education system once again but...

If you have good grades in High School and enough motivation, you can get into CPGE: two years to prepare competitive exams for Grandes Écoles, the top schools in France. CPGE is free.

Then if you are admitted to a public Grande École the fees are under €1000 per year. You will earn way more with your (mandatory) internships. Oh, and if you're poor the State will give you grants that are more than enough to pay for scholarship, rent and food. You will not get these grants if you study at 42.

Actually, if you are very good the very best Grandes Écoles (ENS, Polytechnique) pay their students to study there.

So to sum things up:

- The best schools in France were already free.

- Less competitive education (university) was already free.

Something like 42 in the US would make a lot of sense. 42 in France fills a niche, but not much more.
Yes, exactly! I'll like to add a few more points.

- The approval process for FB ads is dead simple. Ads are usually approved in minutes vs Google day(s) long wait. The longest it'll probably take is a 1 to 2 hours (usually as a result of a new image upload). This makes it very easy to iterate and improve upon your result

- FB gives pricing flexibility. You can choose whether the objective is for branding (CPM) or if you're looking for conversion (CPC, CPA). The ad units lets you focus on your objective
I've never pushed for a focus on getting likes; instead, it is just one stage in the conversion funnel.

I consider them akin to email addresses, just with a much more variable ROI. You do have to manage your fan base, cultivate it and engage it as you would a large mailing list. They are definitely not a direct revenue driver though.

As an affiliate I've not used FB pages to profit, but I've got a few friends in the industry that have pages with massive followings. They are very skilled at monetizing their followers, but it is also an extremely tough thing to do. It is definitely not for the faint of heart - or wallet :)
Perhaps. There are two problems that significantly weaken that kind of transmission mechanism:

1. It is not clear how sensitive to interest rates business are anyway. If you have an X increase of savings, which reduces business revenue by X but also decreases the interest rate by Y, which of those effects is stronger? It seems to depend a lot on circumstances.

2. To a first approximation, there is no incentive for banks to decrease their interest rates in the first place, because they won't have extra money in the vault!

This may seem counter-intuitive, but it follows from how the banking system works: If you transfer money to bank A and leave it there, the bank is initially going to have more money in its account at the central bank (aka "reserves" aka high-powered money). This earns zero or negligible interest, and so the bank does have an incentive to get rid of it.

However, when you did your transfer, that central bank money (aka "reserves") arriving at bank A did not come out of nowhere. It came from the bank you made the transfer from, say bank B. B now likely has a short-fall of reserves (because while bank B has "lost" X amount of reserves, and the sum of customer accounts has been reduced by X, its reserve requirements have only decreased by rX, where r is the reserve ratio).

So, bank B will be happy to borrow (X - rX) reserves back from bank A, probably at current market rates, while bank A must hold on to the remaining rX due to its own increased reserve requirements. Everything is back in balance without any change of interest rates.

Things are slightly different if you put your money into a different type of account or bank bond in such a way that the sum of all reserve requirements in the banking system decreases. In that case, banks have surplus reserve requirements and will therefore bid down interest rates in the interbank market.

Under normal circumstances, the central bank - which has a fixed interest rate target - will step up and sell assets in exchange for reserves so that the surplus reserves disappear. Hence, banks still do not have any incentive to reduce the interest rate that they offer to the public!

This really only changes when the central bank decides to change its interest rate target.

What about interest rates offered to customers? It seems that those really tend to be calculated as cost-plus based on the central bank's rate target (with some long-term expectation thrown in). Plus, they probably move with some delay because that market isn't so fast. Since the target rate has been at zero for a very long time now, savings behavior really shouldn't make a difference.

Mostly though, I think it's the first point that matters: Business decisions aren't that interest rate-sensitive in the first place, at least compared to other considerations.
Update: maintenance has been taken over by the JRuby team! Yay!
That's an interesting view that doesn't really reflect history or political reality. Do remember that the democrats lost their supermajority in the senate when Ted Kennedy died.

If democrats could have truly passed any version of the bill they desired, it would likely be a single-payer system or at bare minimum include the public option. Why didn't either of those come to be?

Also, when a party is actively lying, and has convinced almost 50% of their dimwitted backers that a new law is going to actively kill senior citizens, it's safe to lay some of the blame for the exclusion of that provision at the feet of that political party.
The problem is user commercial intent:
"I need to spent $3600 on a new thing for my thing. I'd better search the web with Google to find it."
"I need to find out what my ex-girl friend did last Saturday. I'd better go to Facebook."

The average Facebook cost per click is about $0.80. I would be a buyer at $0.04 cost per click.
Some of those torrents are OCR scanned copies.
Check out yql, they have api for most of the data tables.
What I was hoping was that for any given gem you could see, as part of the rendered docs, what other gems it relies on.

Basically, enhance the default docs that are generated by rdoc with additional information about the gem.

One-stop shopping, so to speak.
Even better: this feature was added by a new contributor :)
No, what I do between batches is work on YC. In the very beginning we considered time between batches as time off, but YC is so big now that there's always something that needs to be done.
US Healthcare System Explained in Six Succinct Points

1) A constant battle is underway between insurance companies that do not want to pay any claims, even legitimate ones, and doctors and hospitals incentivised to rip off patients, insurers, and taxpayers with unnecessary surgeries and Medicare fraud.

2) Insurance companies demand massive amounts of paperwork out of rational fear of fraud and unnecessary treatments. Doctors perform for-profit (as opposed to for-patient) procedures that guarantee more explanations and more paperwork.

3) Doctors and hospitals have direct personal contact with patients, but insurance companies don't. In cases where doctors put patients at huge risk with needless procedures and surgeries, it's easy for hospitals and doctors to point their finger at insurance companies. On the other hand, many sincere, honest doctors have difficulty getting patients the care they should have because insurers believe they are getting ripped off by unnecessary procedures, even when they aren't.

4) Doctors make needless tests out of fear of being sued for not doing them.

5) The vast majority of healthcare costs occur in final last year or so of someone's life. Politicians who want to do something sensible about this issue get accused of "rationing healthcare".

6) Doctors not only have a financial incentive to prolong life needlessly, they also worry about not prolonging life out of fear of being sued by family members unless there is a living will, and perhaps even if there is a living will.

== Buried a bit, but worth highlighting.
I attended the hackathon and was a little disappointed that all the prizes went basically to teams who rubbed up the sponsors in the right way. Obviously the sponsors were there to promote themselves but rewards should have been given to innovation and not just how many api's from the sponsors you can mash into an app.
Ask HN: What are the most inspiring books on leadership?
After watching Jack Dorsey's Startup School video[1], I thought about what are some of good books to read on leadership.

What are some of the leadership books that inspired you or strongly suggest to read?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEQawgkCMOU
Obviously you wouldn't store the encryption key in plaintext...
Yipes, nothing like that. That's the total value of all the companies we've funded. We assume we end up with 3% on average after dilution.
Check out Masterjun's similar Super Mario World exploits here:

http://tasvideos.org/3957S.html

http://tasvideos.org/3413S.html
You are right, we could definitely do more work on controlling all factors here. However, the numbers are so staggering (80% of a not insubstantial group of customers - something we haven't seen in any of our other channels), coupled with the anecdotal evidence we've gathered from surveys and monitoring the comments we get on Facebook (I know, not data, but in the absence of data, I make do) that it seems likely. This is also something that AdRoll has seen - they only see ~19% overlap between people who click through their general display and FBX ads (I haven't seen the study, but they imply that they did some extensive research here).
Lets all just remember that we make our own choices.

1. If you want to use Facebook, then you must follow the rules they set forth.

2. If you dont like #1. Just dont use it.

As consumers we all make choices that we need to make to benefit ourselves. If I dont like a grocery store, I dont shop there. If I get treated rude someplace. I find a new place that treats me better.
I think it's fair for you to call me out, a bit. My preface was probably not sufficient or adequately fair in itself. The specific complaint did trigger my memories of a more general circumstance, upon which I then rattled off a comment.

As to the Firefox installer specifically, now that my brain and memory have had a chance to catch up with the rest of me, I dealt with its "stubification" some time ago. When that first occurred, I was somewhat annoyed. However, I fairly quickly found that full installer downloads were provided under the... "other languages and systems" link/page, or whatever it is specifically labelled.

I did also, over time, observed that the new pattern, including automatic downloads and updates -- or prompts to update -- probably would help significantly in keeping the majority "non-technical" user population up to date, particularly on Windows, that I was using more at that time.

More recently, I've been using Ubuntu primarily, and I've gotten used to the release hitting package management within a couple of hours. I reboot daily, and usually check for and install updates when I do, so Firefox updating has just become part of the daily routine.

I do, nonetheless, think there is something of a "dark pattern" going around, in general, of making erstwhile stand-alone processes more dependent upon network-connected and dependent back-end services.

When I occasionally help family and friends out with a new computer, no longer can I download their ISP-provided security software and get it up and running before plugging into the network. Nope -- that's all network-dependent installs, now. (Used to be, you could sign in to the ISP, generate a license key, and then use that to validate against a stand-alone installation package.)

At least Windows now has a default firewall that actually kind of works, and most people are behind a wi-fi router that has its own firewall. These mitigate the "machine will be probed within minutes if not seconds" scenario that's been described ad nauseum in the last decade plus.

There was also a point in time when moving forward in version could and did sometimes break things. Some of use became sensitized to automated updates and no convenient, or at all officially provided, way to roll back. And some of those update processes could and did get a bit annoying of themselves with their resource use.

Adobe has switched to a online-dependent, "rental"-heavy licensing pattern. To subsequently have X million user accounts compromised. (Thank goodness I purchased my full, stand-alone installation of 5.5 from Amazon.)

Dark patterns...
I agree the system would still balance around two systems, that's fine. Remember that political campaigns are about more than just winning. Look at the likes of Ron Paul, he gets an important message our and inspires people by running for office.

In our current system, a third candidate can only help the opponent most opposite of him win, but with runoff elections a third candidate would help the candidate closest to him win.

The difference with a runoff system is that multiple candidates from the same side of the political spectrum helps your cause instead of hurting it. Right now, if either party has multiple candidates running, it only punishes them.
Intro to AI at The Ohio State University (course notes)
Doctors love to give you drugs that the salesman already gave to the doctor, it's sad. Here have a free sample!
Show HN: CinemaBuff - Actor graphs using IMDB ratings
Gotta find a problem with every idea, no matter how minute, right? This is hacker news after all.
That's good to know. No wifi would be a pretty big buzzkill though. I like the idea of replacing my Mac/iPad combo with a single device. It sounds like the high-DPI screen would be a reasonable replacement for my iPad (a.k.a. PDF journal reader) but I'm far too invested having a competent Unix-like environment on the computer side to live in Windows. Ubuntu's "convergence" tablet vision cannot come quickly enough.
I'll be moving from Germany to Boston in a month, one of the things that I'm looking forward to is the chance to enjoy this process of "being alone" and "Pushing back on discomfort".

As much as I enjoy the company of my friends, having complete freedom and no accountability to anybody also has its advantages :)

That being said, cities like SF/Boston/New York/... make it easy to keep "alone" from turning into "lonely". I couldn't imagine doing the same in the far out suburbs.
Nonsense. Overthrowing Louis XVI was one of the most important movements of the enlightenment. Napoleon was popularly supported, remember, because people were sick of the monarchy.

Democracy, direct or not, is the way forward. Accept it or not.
I wonder what would happen if US had a respectable judicial system.
Uber is a startup, and HN is a site about startups. FTFY.
It's for workers with no visa to work in the USA. No need for H-1B anymore.
What's wrong with 'correct horse battery staple'?
Very disingenuous. It's a matter of a government-led panel allocating government funds. If the family wants to keep treating Grandma indefinitely, that is absolutely their right ... if they do it on their own dollar.

The "death panel" bit is just the question of how long the government would have continued to pay benefits.
Because they thought they could get a few moderate republican votes until the very end.

In the end, thought, your parent post is correct. They got 0 republican votes on it, so they could've made it anything they wanted that they all agreed on and wouldn't be ruled unconstitutional.
You really should change re-agents to reagents.
Docker shall not be distributed or downloaded to or in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan or Syria

This statement occurs in the docker README[0]. If at all possible, one would want to keep such channeling of potentially offensive government policy out of an open source software project's public documentation. For one thing, there are many enthusiastic open source programmers residing in the above list of countries.

The NOTICE[1] document explains that

Like all software products that utilize cryptography, the export and use of Docker is subject to the U.S. Commerce Department's Export
Administration Regulations (EAR) because it uses or contains cryptography (see http://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/encryption). Certain free and open source software projects have a lightweight set of requirements, which can generally be met by providing email notice to the appropriate U.S. government agencies that their source code is available on a publicly available repository and making the appropriate statements in the README.

I'm not familiar with seeing other open source projects from American organizations state that they may not be downloaded in the above list of countries. Is the use of cryptography in docker different in a way that makes the docker organization more at risk from legal challenges from the federal government in this regard, or are docker being anal and xenophobic in blithely displaying this notice?

[0] https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/blob/master/README.md

[1] https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/blob/master/NOTICE
Getting closer, can't wait for 26 ever since that massive memshrink improvement hit the front page.
> "Auoera(sic) " [sic]

You mean Aurora, and I'm not sure why you use "(sic)" here. It means "that's how it was written upstream, I didn't invent this!"
Don't think of likes as "getting someone to like my page will make them more likely to buy." You need to think of them as "this increases the network of people who will interact with my content, ads or otherwise, thus spreading them to their friends organically (so I don't pay)." This actually should discourage people from buying scammy likes, because that network will be substantially more valuable if it is more representative of who you want to reach.
Well, the conservative argument, which probably has some merit, is that patients are disconnected from the economics and thus don't play their role in the invisible hand theory.

But I still don't see why insurance companies with a little help from patients aren't able to reel in costs.
It's about both because they are often the same thing. How we deal with the present informs us how we may react to the future, and how we view hypothetical future situations tells us something about our present, often by drawing parallels that point out the ways in which our assumed (often inherited) beliefs are often in opposition with our stated, rational beliefs.

It's always boggled my mind that some authors have such little regard for science fiction. In my opinion, it's one of the most powerful contexts you can use, when done well.
How to Win Friends and Influence People (but buy an edition printed before Carnegie died; more recent versions have been rewritten by other people)
I've heard this from other media buyers, and I've had the exact opposite experience. Out of our monthly budgets, FB is 65% and google less than 25%.

I'm really curious as to what/how you're advertising on there. Some do well, some don't, but I've managed to convert many losers into winners.
Legislation Unveiled to Bar NSA’s Bulk Phone Metadata Collection
That's about right. Their ads do have an insanely short shelf life relative to other paid ads. You have to be aware of this and plan for it. However, an engaging ad will continue serving long after you stop paying for it, which helps mitigate this.
Neat! Where did you get the data?
Multi-credentialing
I'm not saying it's the only one, just that it's by far the biggest one. If you have a choice between writing malware that could affect 70% of computers or 10%, you pick the 70% demographic. If Mac suddenly had the biggest demographic of users, we'd be seeing a lot more malware for it.

The malware might not exploit X application, and sure, Windows has been plagued by Adobe, but there's nothing that makes OS X fundamentally more secure. Especially considering that a lot of malware today actually relies on social engineering rather than 0days.
for Lisp on iOS & Android see https://wukix.com/mocl

intro talk (at Bay Area Lisp Revival): https://wukix.com/mocl-balisp8
He really does. The talk he gave at Mozcon 2012 basically fried the audience's brain. And the way he combines targeting w/cross-platform marketing is unreal.
The market doesn't fail, it can only be failed.
My guess: They've had a breakthrough in through-the-ground radio and will soon be offering broadband globally with kilowatt transceivers attached to the sea floor.

If we're speculating, why not shoot for the moon? :D
i will risk my karma here and say that if all sites were required to pay for user's contribution, that would force sites to charge visitors for using sites, and this might in turn would stop this crazy ads mania and convert sites to subscription-only.
How do these direct democracy solutions scale? Hardly linearly with population.

I doubt you can organize USA's 300++ million people in the same way as a conservative and homogeneous small country (at least much less heterogeneous than USA; no gang/ghetto subcultures, for instance).

Edit: Cough. The same point were made in other comments, but clearer and with good examples. I'll leave it here anyway.
Agenda - Lightweight job scheduling for node
Because those systems couldn't even get the votes from their own party.
I use this for all my domains not with namecheap. It really makes managing things much easier.
Agreed. I also like the bulk uploader and power editor. It's easy to launch 200 variations of ads in a matter of minutes.
Totally agree, although the author's use of vlc definitely qualifies as a clever hack.

I want more hackers to realize how insanely easy it is to programmatically generate video with ffmpeg. Just write a program that dumps raw RGB frames to stdout! You can turn that into any video format conceivable, including gif.

Here's a little demo I wrote. Generates a video of the Mandelbrot set coming into focus:

https://github.com/acg/generating-video-demo

Example gif:

http://imgur.com/RiqEHJJ
Living in southern california not really. However if I went on a hike, I would want weather analysis in a given hour range (I got stuck in a hailstorm in Yosemite recently). But that would be a less frequent use case.
While many founders wanted a small federal government, it was tried and failed twice with the Articles of Confederation. There is a level of power that the federal government needs to have or the states will simply bicker forever. On the other hand, state legislatures had to be taken out of the loop on electing senators (see the 17th amendment) because they fell into endless bickering. Different issues are best addressed at very different levels of the federalist system.

edited 13th to 17th amendment, oops http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
In general most people will operate in their financial self-interest over the long term.

Taking it back to startup-land, this is why sales team compensation structure is discussed at such length at the board level. You generally get exactly what you compensate for, and it's easy to create unintended consequences.