skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whole discussion is baffling. The US health care system consumes almost 20% of GDP. That is twice as much as any other developed country - without seeing better health care results.

Making changes to a system that corresponds to one fifth of the annual economic output will obviously have massive consequences. However, it is hard to see how you could possible make the economics of US health care worse. ACA gives more people the ability to individually choose their health care insurance, thus increasing competition and hopefully giving the health care buy side more incentive to drive down prices.
>It's rolled into the price of the PC they bought

Are updates included for free? If not, it could be more expensive in the long run.

>I rarely see a Windows machine crash these days

I wasn't just talking about Windows and besides, not all bugs are visible -- they might manifest themselves as security holes. Companies (should) care a lot about security, if they did, I'm sure they'd be more interested in OSS.

I think I'm trying to reason with HN and not the average Windows dependent company. How many of us have relatives using Linux or Chrome OS? Very few? That could change down the line.
The Only 2 Real Excuses Why People Refuse To Take Cold Showers
Shhhh... 99.9% of the Y Combinators are SaaS.
Probably because of silly things like a stable ZFS implementation, jails that are more mature and sophisticated than LXC, a licensing model that is more preferable to many businesses, and one of the best technical documents I've ever seen.
Well, there are two problems with that scenario.

1) There may not be other services in the area - or all services throttle. Your only solution is to move house.

2) The user may not realise it is their ISP which is the problem. "NetFlix sucks - it's so slow. But TimeWarnerCastPlayer is awesome - it's so fast!"

NetFlix isn't "squeezing" anyone. Customers are requesting data through their ISP, NetFlix are sending it as asked.
An aside but:

"I once realised when watching a DVD on my Playstation 3 that you can set the speed to 1.5x. Which means you can finish watching a 2 hour movie in only 1hour 30 mins and still understand what’s going on. “That gives me 30 minutes of life back!” I said excitedly."

Or you can read the Wikipedia summary in 90 seconds and get 1 hour 58.5 minutes back but that's not really the point.

How about just don't watch the movie? There's no obligation to watch any of them and there are so many that there's always going to be something you miss however much you try and cram in.

Watching a movie is something which is meant to be a pleasure, or thought provoking, or profound or any number of things which are going to be largely lost at high speed. At that point you're just reducing it to consumption so you've seen it and maybe it's just me but what's the point of that?
Choosing not to have a certain level of health insurance or any health insurance at all is also a choice. Or rather, it was.
finally, someone figured it all out
How many off the books $30,000 jobs do you think there are?

I'm sure there are lots of them, but I wonder if there are so many that it is something to worry about.
How we are going to disrupt the $1.2 Trillion ECommerce industry.
How is it squeezing out other traffic? A packet is a packet, under the net neutrality model all packets are routed equally. Capping packet flow from a provider would be like Subaru owning chunks of the national highway and setting a limit on the number of Toyotas that are allowed to be driving at a time. If Verizon doesn't have the capacity to support the evening demand, they should increase their shitty infrastructure so they can deliver the service that they sold to their customers.

And what if I want to compete with netflix myself? They have the cash to make a deal with Verizon, I don't.
Don't forget the ongoing nuclear bomb standoff:

Israel believes that if the Iranians get the bomb, it will be used against Israel. Given the small size of Israel, this would be another genocide. They will therefore do _anything_ to prevent Iran getting the bomb.

Iran believes that if they _don't_ have the bomb, then they are forever at the mercy of US politics, potentially including an invasion in which millions of Iranians will die, just like the war with Iraq. If they do get it, then they can also hold Saudi Arabia hostage until their demands are met.

This isn't going anywhere until someone either takes their finger off the trigger or pulls it.

As you say, the US has no interest in a stable, free, democratic Iran unless it can be bullied into giving up on certain interests.
That's not funny or educational or even interesting. It looks like jealousy or unfounded hate. I can't really think of anything 37signals has done to warrant this. They make good products and treat both their employees and customers well. Am I missing something?
>people would leave that ISP for another one that didn't throttle Netflix

That assumes people have a choice for their ISP.

If I want high speed internet I have two choices. Both of them are huge national companies.

If they decide to go the throttle route, where do I go?

>Secondly, why are they throttling this service? Because they can't charge effectively for it.

That's an interesting take considering how they offered a product at a certain bandwidth and I agreed to pay for that bandwidth. If I use it to capacity, the services I receive from third parties are somehow 'exploiting' the model? I don't think so.

If the post office offers to ship anything under 10lbs for a flat rate, is a company taking advantage if they offer, say, a 10 lbs cheese of the month package using that USPS service?
We dumped TWC for ATT because of constant timeouts when trying to access movies on demand at peak times.
Kind of shocked they won't be offering a Kindle version. I was a big fan of the 1.5 edition.
Unions are member-supported organizations with finite resources. (Really, national and international unions have basically infinite resources, but the business owners have finite resources to allocate in order to deal with them.)

The right to an attorney are with respect to criminal proceedings. A defendant does not have a Sixth Amendment right to counsel in any civil proceeding, including a deportation hearing. A fair trial is something that should be available to everyone, but if the lawyers are bogged down defending cases that their own members don't support, then either those unions or those business owners are doomed. I understand this to be a deliberate consequence of union formation, the threat of force is truly a compelling bargaining chip.

Many employment agreements are "at-will" and employers can terminate their employees without cause. In the case where such a firing is really "without cause," I agree that a union should support their member by representing the aggrieved party and making sure they get their unemployment benefits, but if the law says the employer has the right to terminate the employee for any reason or no reason, then this policeman can justly be fired with a laundry list of complaints -- that dwarfs the complaints for every other officer in the precinct -- and a last straw, is this constitutional violation, bullying a person off of public property for taking some pictures of public officials "doing their job."

If I were the union steward, I would meet with the officer well in advance of the hearing, before it had even been scheduled. I would have to open with "OK, convince me."
Ah, yes. All the abject failures have resulted in an increased distrust in big, "unlimited" government, making it harder for that government to do more damage. In this particular case, look at how Obamacare passed by a whisker, and how votes for it have sent so many politicians home to spend more time with their families.

Or how the "stimulus" produced a counter-reaction that's got the establishment utterly terrified, and using the full force of the state to repress. Which doesn't tend to end well, per Pareto "history is a graveyard of aristocracies".
interestingly enough, here's the original commit that defaulted `validate=True`:

https://github.com/boto/boto/commit/95939debc3813468264159d5...

EDIT: Looks like the original committer is an Amazon employee.
Verizon has special right of way access for its fiber cables and should be regulated as such. I can't change ISPs and the ISP is only able to exist because of exemptions from City, State and Federal governments.
The interesting thing is that the Boto S3 tutorial (http://docs.pythonboto.org/en/latest/s3_tut.html) uses s3.get_bucket() with impunity and never mentions you're paying 13.5x more for your usage if you use that bucket object for just one GET and don't pass validate=False. (Perhaps someone from AWS wrote that tutorial? :P) Probably deserves a mention there, though.
I'm with you.

The primary problem we'll have is the 'reward' system in locales with only one provider. You'll have to focus on markets with multiple providers. The solution involves building an escrowed Bitcoin fund which does payouts based on provider's aggregate throughput. How that is implemented, I have no idea.
Microsoft didn't even invent the practices. The tactics--like bundling--are only illegal when you have an monopoly and you exploit the monopoly to win over different markets.

That said, I don't believe Microsoft is a monopoly any longer, at least for consumer PCs.
Apple and Microsoft were lucky from the moment of their inception to incorporate with cleverly simple names.

Hardly. Apple was originally called "Apple Computer" and, if you recall, they changed that in 2007 to be more general (http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/apple-drops-computer-from...) unlike what 37Signals has done here.

Moreover, "Microsoft" is hardly a clever or simple name -- it began as descriptive -- software for microcomputers -- but it's obscure enough in its construction and they've been willing to build strong sub-brands (e.g.: XBox) so its worked.

The point is that neither reflect the strategy taken by 37Signals here -- one that I believe will cause them problems in the future. Who else has done what they've done? One name definitely comes to mind -- RIM becoming "Blackberry". I'm sure there are others, but saying more about RIM would just be cheap shots -- but suffice to say it didn't do them any favors.
Idea: A tool which give you some improvements advises on your code to save up money on your AWS bills
Good news for django-storages users – this is off by default:

https://bitbucket.org/david/django-storages/src/cb7366693ce1...
And this is the reason why I cannot make a complaint about Verizon that will stick. Verizon purposely hires or makes it seem they hire crappy technical people. But when a person does 'know' either through some confidential/proprietary memo or through technical know-how, people begin to have doubts on the quality of the information.

I had a deep fight with Verizon over a chromebook 3g service that they no longer offered, and I tried to get a copy of the internal memo that said the service was cancelled, but they would not give it to me. And everybody thought that the person I spoke to was lying.
I just choose not to move to SF in part due to the high prices, a high wage doesn't mean that it compensates for it properly.
Ask HN: Mantle: Another AMD screw-up in the making?
Despite previous announcements and promises there is still not a single glimpse (afaik) on AMD's Mantle-API publicly available. Will this be another notch in AMD's track-record of screw-ups? Will they wait (again) too long and let their lead be taken away by their competitors? Are they withholding as long as possible, to give OpenGL, DirectX/WGF or worse a yet to know new proprietary NVIDIA-API enough time to allow Mantle to become AMD's Glide?
One simple way to make health care more expensive with minimal improvements to outcomes would be to devote even more resources to extraordinary measures.

The U.S. healthcare system is not set up to maximize outcomes. I guess I agree that is a problem, but it makes efficiency comparisons less interesting.
10x revenue is not irrational in a high-margin software business. It's high, but there's a lot of acquisitions, especially by big companies like IBM, HP, etc. that are at that multiple.
Overloaded just to AWS? Seems strange.
Does your boss live in close proximity to you?
Netflix has an ISP tracker on their site that shows performance by ISP. Trust me, if they know your ISP is a "throttler" they have the ways to get this in front of you and highlight "Hey you're having a crappy experience because you're using X and they throttle us. Y wants your business and will give you a $150 coupon to change. Click here now"
What bay area do you live in and who is your ISP?
Comet vs REST APIs
The idea that Microsoft would be "privacy-guarding" is completely laughable to me, when they have so much poorer security than even Google right now, and Google already has major privacy issues on its own. Microsoft would be one of the last company to trust with my privacy. At least when Google says they aren't giving direct access to their servers to the governments I somewhat believe them, but I wouldn't believe Microsoft at all if they said that to me. They've had too many Skype privacy blunders to trust them on this.
Curious that every insurance firm would rather not have you as a customer at all than simply offer to charge a higher premium or offer to exempt the consequences of a food allergy.
> in general; obviously there are outliers with 150+ IQs and fucked-up careers

Is that really the exception? I only know a handful of founders, but none of them had stable careers before they started doing the founder-game. Most of them were working in fits and starts, or were in college but dropped out.

Has anyone done a survey of this?
That's not what the Hairy Ball Theorem (HBT) says, the HBT says that there must be a point on a sphere where a continuous vector field is zero. It doesn't say they can't be pointing in the same direction except that point.
The title of this article is also very misleading. Did not find any reference to the neutrality law in the article.
Making a SoC secure is hard, too :-)
I can't speak for michaelochurch, but I have been reading his comments for the last while. I think his point is that the root problem of Silicon Valley isn't the sexism, ageism, groupthink, etc - those are just symptoms of a larger core systemic problem.

By putting all the power and attention on a few extremely wealthy key funding players (aka VCs) the cultural distortion is all but inevitable.

Picking up and setting up shop elsewhere is in the long run pointless if we're just going to mint a few new extremely wealthy VCs and continue to cycle.
Speaking of 37signals. I am looking for a good PM and CRM software. Either a piece of software that does both, or two separate that integrate nicely. Any suggestions?

We are a Web company that handles projects including Web, Film, Photography and design.

We might be developing one in house if we can't find one that meets our needs.
>Trusting part of your business process to a SaaS application is always going introduce risk.

Trusting part of your business process to yourself is always going to introduce risk.

This is the primary fallacy of the anti-SaaS argument. Cloud providers go down, but so do you. For an in-house solution to be superior from a reliability perspective, you not only need to show that cloud providers go down, but that you go down less. Which, unless you are in the infrastructure business - or have a large and competent (read: expensive) business area that's in the infrastructure business - is not terribly likely.
Is Django still relevant in the web community? I watched "Making Disqus Realtime" a year ago, where they were talking about building a real-time system using Django, gevent, gunicorn, Redis, Flask, nginx, haproxy. The entire stack could be condensed into node.js + socket.io.
haven't read it, but i believe Sam Harris has written a book that attempts to do that
Also see MimicDB [0]. Runs a transparent cache that responds to most S3 API calls locally using Redis to store metadata. Besides the cost savings, it's extremely fast. Listing an entire bucket with millions of objects is close to instantaneous.

[0] http://mimicdb.com/
I forget what exact number it is all the time. "32 signals? 39 signals?"
One point made me wondering. From the article:

> "for the same reasons developing on SQLite causes problems"

I've used SQLite with Django and Flask where it was appropriate option (i.e. as a low-traffic low-volume simple database) and never had any problems. While there are things about SQLite one certainly has to be aware of (mostly related to the type system), I doubt SQLite causes more problems than any other RDBMS, as every one has its own specifics and quirks.

Am I unaware of something?

EDIT: Thanks, now I get it. Misunderstood what this quote was about.
"iLearn: English" got featured at Abduzeedo
Most networks see a degradation in performance at peak times. That reduction in performance can result in all types of behavior. You may not watch a clip, may click away from a site etc that's loading too slowly (and that would otherwise load fine and capture your view a few hours earlier)
Thats a great idea. I'm looking into the overall implications of this. So far its the best idea I haven't thought of already! I guess the only potential concern is if some backers don't have/use Paypal. I could look into sending via Amazon Payments as well, since thats the payment system that Kickstarter uses.
> I would love to see how the DDoS was argued as being "legal".

When the intelligence services do it, then it is not illegal. Nixon set the precedent here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejvyDn1TPr8
An option to deobfuscate JavaScripts in the debugger
considering that one of the measures of production (and GDP) is salaries, your argument is a bit iffy (salaries could rise proportionately due to the labor shortage, thus increasing GDP anyways, but that goes to show the uselessness of GDP in measuring "real" production).

One argument for better healthcare is people end up less sick. These guys(http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2012/09/12/u-s-workf...) seem to think that productivity decreases in the US account for almost 10% of spending on salaries and whatnot. There are 120 million or so people in the workforce, so 2 million jobs is something like 1%.

So if we make people "10%" more health , it would end up with us saving the same 1% (thus on the long-term allowing more investment later). We could get people to do the same amount of work for less, thus we are more productive.

I do not vouch for the validity of the numbers, just for the idea behind it (healthier people means more productive people).
NetFlix actually offers peering for ISPs:

https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/faq

This is a boon for indie ISPs who are too small to host a cache as the bandwidth is cheap and it makes Super HD streams available. I wouldn't call NetFlix a bad netizen.
Did you use all the hypothetical 90s browsers that never existed because there was "a monopolist giving away a bundled product for free and reducing the incentive for others to enter that market"?

No? Well that's my point.

And IE sucked from the very beginning, each and every time Microsoft could get away with it sucking due to lack of competition. Where was the spell checker? Clearly veto'd by the Office team, till IE10.

The "most innovative" browser took till 2012 to figure out that people wanted to spell check what they typed into a browser, or they intentionally hobbled their industry-crushing browser to benefit their older cash-cows. Either way it's bad. It had to be just good enough to starve the competition (and often it was easier to do that with "innovations" in bundling, lock-in and other dirty tricks than it was with features, speed or security) and then they left it to rot, when we had no other options to turn to and it took a concerted community effort to make many websites even bother to support any browser other than IE.
Compiling, huh? http://xkcd.com/303/
Choosing a Programming Language for Interviews
Not All Student Entrepreneurs Drop Out
Interesting. That's news to me. The majority of people in the US really only have one choice?
Many years ago, just after the beginning of the web standards movement, I was working at a design agency, and was asked to ensure that a client's site was 508c compliant. (508c is legislation mandating minimal accessibility requirements for websites.)

One of the things I wanted to ensure was, at least, a tolerable experience (I'm not going to delude myself or you by claiming to make it a pleasant experience) for blind and low-vision people. For low-vision, I did two things: I worked with the design team to ensure that text colours were always high-contrast. Then I aggressively played with the adjust font-size controls to see how things would "break" - and then fixed them.

For blind people, I had a bit more fun. Like the OP, I wanted to experience the site as they would, and have the text read to me. However, since I'm profoundly deaf, hearing what the computer was trying to tell me was a lost cause.

Fortunately I was running Mac OS X. It has screen-reading software built in (called VoiceOver, and it's quite nice, actually), so I turned that on. Then I found within VoiceOver a feature where I could caption what was being spoken to me. Now I'm set - once I learned the controls, I could just navigate using them and read what the computer spoke.

It didn't take long to learn what kind of experience blind people would get. As was popular for the time, the pages had the upside-down hockey stick design - links and graphics across the top and left sides of the page, with the content filling the rest of the space. I made the case to adjust the markup on the page such that the source code for the links were at the end of the document, then used CSS to put everything back where they should be.

At that point, the experience blind people were getting when they read the page was a skip link, the title of the page, then the content. The skip link took them down to the navigation.

This was hard work, done at a time when browser makers had only just begun to catch up to the importance of web standards. I ended up leaving the agency shortly after, so I never heard how well it tested out in the field. I hope the work was worth it.
Shoe-in Money-bestcbstore.com
Ask HN: Best place to find creative talent?
I've gotten pretty good at finding awesome developers on Stack Overflow, Github, and even oDesk, among other places. I'm a developer myself so this hasn't been too hard. But I'm now looking for a creative person who can take our mobile ad campaign in a fresh direction. In the past I've used craigslist with mixed success but that was a few years ago. Is there anything better out there for creative talent that fellow HNers have used? Thanks.
You should not love your mother just because she's your mother, you should love your mother because she loved you and did her best to raise you well

And if she did neither she -deserves- no love

Keyword being deserves, of course you can love a bad mother

I don't see why different rules should apply to a mother who gave birth compared to one who adopted
One generally outsources legal/accounting/tax.

That is true up to a point, but you still need to make sure your lawyer/accountant understands enough about your circumstances to do their job properly. They are experts in their field, not yours, and they aren't telepathic.

Whether or not you spend enough time liaising with your professional help and checking their work, you're still the responsible person ultimately signing contracts and tax returns, and you're still going to be on the hook if the contract doesn't stand up in court or you get audited and something incorrect is found.
A high-energy-density sugar biobattery based on a synthetic enzymatic pathway
I believe that was the number of unexplained signals from SETI which may be from an intelligent alien civilization.