skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And further, why bother calling it "the European model"?

Because I've seen radiators and decent insulation in literally every house I've ever been in anywhere in Europe. Warm places like Greece and Portugal included.

Differences are mostly attributable to the age of a house rather than its location. But arguably old stone houses (200+ years) in hot places have the best insulation in that they are simply built with 1m+ thick walls and super tiny windows.

Insulation. It works. For both hot and cold.

Granted, the moderner your building and the thinner walls and more cement it uses, the likelier you are to need AC in summer. In old buildings you get enough cooling by just airing the house overnight and keeping everything closed during the day ... unless of course you have a big computer in your room. Then you're screwed.
I maintain a list of upcoming developer conferences in this GitHub repo:

https://github.com/MurtzaM/Developer-Conferences
> but doesn't come anywhere near making a free-for-all spectrum workable

Why not? The ISM bands haven't become unusable even in densely packed residences with large numbers of Netflix-streaming cable cutters. Yes, cell phone towers have a longer range (which puts them at a small constant factor disadvantage), but they are also professionally maintained and can therefore make use of directional antennas and beamforming which gives them a constant factor advantage proportional to investment.

We have the technology to provide service to any reasonable density of people. It's a matter of cost, not scarcity. As opposed to, say, healthcare, this is a problem that markets should be very good at solving.
You can get LED lights in a variety of color temperatures. You can even get ones like my Phillips Hue bulbs whose color can be adjusted remotely. They aren't cheap but they're a lot of fun!
Why are you at 74F? We're having a mini heat wave in Portland, so I've been running my AC. It's set for 76F and I'm quite comfortable.

You need to convince yourself that you'd be comfortable at higher temp and humidity. E.g. in Hawaii the "natives" sneer at the new arrivals who don't like the high humidity.

Fortunately this area has reasonably low humidity. But if I were in Florida, I could probably be comfortable at 78F as long as the AC got rid of about half the relative humidity.
26 Eye-Tracking Heatmaps Reveal Where People Really Look
Battery life is short. You need at least two batteries so you can fly uninterrupted.
My parrot drone has 12 mins battery which is short. Just when you're enjoying flying the battery runs low.
That's a really cool place. Something that's been a continuous source of frustration for some people in my neighborhood are HOA rules preventing us from putting up solar panels on our roofs. I think it's up for review this year, but it seems like it would be a natural thing for this community.

Is the farm run like a co-op?
BitTorrent Bleep serverless encrypted chat
Counterpoint: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2013/12/10/why_cul_de_sac...
Inside Citizen Lab, the “Hacker Hothouse” protecting you from Big Brother
Awesome - that's totally the response I was hoping for :)
Great talented people can be live in any country and by any means I think the world is interested in interesting things created by talented people. The short version...please do.
The legacy systems were on a state-by-state basis, so such a list would be exhaustive. At the federal level, it had to tie to IRS, FBI, INS, SSA, Medicare, Medicaid, and others. Each of these systems have their own extensive security rules as well, so something like authenticating users is a real pain. And there's fraud potential too.

On top of that, consider that the system needs to serve populations that are, shall we say, less sophisticated in the ways of technology and finance than the average startup's customer base? When I worked on a state system, we called it the "Amish problem", because our state has a significant Amish population.

There are people who don't read. People who don't speak English. People who are absolutely terrified of authorities. People who have religious beliefs that isolate them from computers. It's difficult and ugly.
Of course hastily lifting the restrictions would be a bad idea. The correct approach would be to lift regulations at a pace fast enough that telcos could keep up with decreased regulatory protection through vigorous investment in new hardware. Sticking with spectrum auctions until the old equipment falls apart or telecom companies replace it out of the goodness of their hearts is a terrible idea.
It's also pretty well solved in old construction. There are just a lot of post-war apartments built as cheap housing with crappy thin walls— those are where you hear your neighbors through the walls.
info by lamblikeawolf on the modus operandi here: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/2c6tei/29_eyetracki...
An undisclosed amount, mining an undisclosed (but top-50) cryptocurrency, with an undisclosed (but legal) technology.

Mining is so rediculously hyper-competitive that I hope you'll understand the lack-of-detail. You learn to keep your mouth shut, head down, and just hope that you'll remain marginally profitable after the next difficulty adjustment.
Terry Crews By LC The General
Didn't start programming professionally until my early 30s. Quit my job to do it. Spent 9 months with no job teaching myself before landing my first job in software.
Welcome to a human cell – the fundamental unit of life
This is a wonderful benefit of living in a big city. E.g. Con Edison in New York supplies steam to commercial buildings.[1] Back when they generated electricity "locally" in each borough, the steam was almost free for them to generate as a side effect. But now they actually have to pipe steam under the East River.

But I no longer live in NYC. I don't miss the rats or cockroaches or traffic or air pollution. C'est la vie.

[1] http://www.coned.com/newsroom/energysystems_steam.asp
> I'd imagine the cost of an OS license is a total non-issue compared to what they're charging the client

I think you'd be wrong if you knew how much the total sum of all Windows licenses cost in a large-scale deployment. That is why they usually install the kiosk with a decade-old Windows OS, usually Win2K or XP embedded which arguably costs less than a Win7 or 8.1 license.

> As a potential consumer of a kiosk, I don't particularly care what OS it's running.

I am afraid we are not particularly talking about consumers, but the companies that make these things.
> beamforming doesn't work as well from the mobile station

Beamforming gives roughly the same advantage to TX and RX. While I'm sure mobile stations will eventually take advantage of it for power conservation purposes, very large advantages still stand to be gained even from a one-sided implementation at the base stations which can have multiple sufficiently separated antennas.

Radio astronomy provides a very good example of this: from Earth, stars look like point radiators, yet VLBI astronomy still yields an insanely powerful RX advantage once you get up to effective apertures the size of Earth.
Maybe this is facile, maybe it is illustrative, but I find it interesting to compare HealthCare.gov and Twitter. Twitter has raised over a billion in funding so far, has been going 8 years and has over 3,000 employees.

Healthcare.gov is at about 3 years, $840M, and I can't find a number for how many people were involved, but it's likely also in the thousands. Healthcare.gov has delivered life-altering value to about 6 million people and cost about $150 per user (soon amortizable over at least two years). Twitter has about 200 million active users getting everything from minor titillation to revolutionary aid and has cost about $6 per user. Neither of those "prices" seems shocking to me, and I'd pay $6 to use twitter and $150 to use Healthcare.gov.

If anything, healthcare.gov seems cheap in that context. In terms of scale of effort; if I took a cursory look at twitter's functionality, and even taking scale into account [1], I'd spitball it as taking maybe 3 or 4 small dev teams for the website and API, and another dev team per app; maybe 100 engineers total. I'm sure they have more than that though; because a cursory spitball guess is an insult and there's likely a lot of hidden complexity and business logic discovered only you if try to do something like twitter very well. I'm also sure there's a huge mass of employees dedicated to wet, human, problems too like sales acquisition and support and what direction the shading should be on the twitter eggs and why the logo should just be a bird.

And so it likely is with Healthcare.gov, interfacing with hundreds of different healthcare providers, handling different administrations and so on; probably a real deep mess. I'm impressed they got it working at all; especially as when they set out it was never intended to be used much (as I understand it the idea was that the state exchanges would handle the larger burden). The frontend seems to have been shoddy, but how much of the expense was that?

[1] I have built and operate services at the same scale as twitter.
WST EXCLUSIVE TWEERKING VIDEOS
I've done this in Melbourne and Canberra and have friends who have done it in Hobart.

It's quite possible in many of Australia's larger cities.
I deleted contacts from the site that I apparently imported in 2006, first, it was nearly impossible to find the page that allows you to delete them, and second, they are still showing up as suggestions with the reason of "you imported this contact."

They really are gobbling up everything they can, and even if they say they are removing stuff, they never will.
Think about it this way, 326k users who've handed over their address books and every incoming/outgoing email address they've used. Their power/value isn't in their users, but their corpus of identities.
Lots of VC's assert they want more female, minority devs. Where are the results?
I'm more than a little frustrated. I attended YC Startup School in NYC recently.
I went home, excited, made connections, and started making calls, pitch decks, and iterating my app.
It seemed to me, when leaving, there were lots of doors open to minority women, lots of companies asserting they wanted diversity in their portfolios.
In practice, I just HAVE NOT SEEN THIS. Period. Many sites, like Angel.co or Gust, require a referral to even 'get on radar'. As a minority, I learned to code in a non-traditional way -- pure necessity, with a splash of the useful bits of my CompSci studies at a state college. As such, I don't have the range of remarkably brilliant ivy leaguers with their own clout on either platform.
I'm submitting video with my initial contacts to show, yes, a mixed-brownish-female is out there who CAN code, has a mission, has support, and an investible product. I'm sending this to every VC I can find with mission statements, press releases, or other online media alluding to this.

Am I doing something wrong here? Should I be louder or more aggressive in my approach? To be clear, I'm not implying that my minority status should guarantee results. I'm pointing out that those who claim they ARE looking for more women for their portfolios... don't really seem to be doing much to back up their statements.

PLEASE. Correct me if I'm wrong. Tell me your experiences. Throw down a tip or two if you can!
Propeller acquired by Palantir
Look so cool! Still hard to understand
That looks like a pleasant enough development, but the commute to any employment center with jobs allowing you to service a half-million dollar mortgage seems rather unpleasant. And, of course, all that driving offsets a lot of other environmental benefits.
You need a few hundred acres of property and you need to get it zoned appropriately. Then you need to get either investment money, or court groups of developers to build this.

Establish a development committee and some staff to bringing commercial businesses and people looking for office space (so the people living there have some place to work). Local county/city transport authorities to build transit links into the development. Ensure they can get into and out of the area cleanly, it won't work if it's an island. Most of your population will be commuting into and out of it no matter what you do.

Build it in phases and sell it as you go. You'll need to build the residential sections first (businesses can't survive without customers).

Hire an advertising team to draw people in and blanket the region with adverts. Work with local real-estate brokers to hi-light this as a destination they should show all clients during a house hunt -- even people not looking for a place like this.
VulnHub [1] is fantastic. It is an index of VM's set up specifically for CTF challenges, with links to walkthroughs as well. I have been having a blast working my way through them.

Most of the VM's link to the creators' website / blog, which is a good way to find more information and resources as well, as they tend to be active security researchers.

[1] http://www.vulnhub.com
It just seems out of place in this conversation. This is about discoverability while you're talking versatility. It's about having people around, being a living, breathing city.

While having a network of isolated silos with 45 hour commutes in autonomous vehicles is an interesting idea, it is in direct conflict with the vision espoused here. It'll be hard to reconcile the two.
I was going to say something about how the US market is a lot bigger than the Swiss market, but I've had to reconsider. Switzerland is a country of 6 million people and is about the size of an "average" US state. Most US states are a little smaller in population (If Switzerland was a US state, it'd be the 13th largest), and a LOT larger in area.

So for a "normal" state, Switzerland actually has a bigger healthcare market. California, about 5 times the size of the Swiss healthcare market, still manages to screw things up royally though.

People are often blaming the US legal rules. In Switzerland, if you want to win a court case that a MD acted improperly (justifying damages), you have to get a jury of his peers (ie. MDs) to agree on that (which is not impossible, but ...). In the US, you have to get a jury of patients to agree on that. Needless to say, there are many, many more medical cases in the US, with spectacular damage payments (damage payments are also standardized in the EU. If an MD kills you through negligence or outright a mistake (not satisfying the level of a criminal act), his employer (even though they're mostly freelancers, this is an exception in the law) owes your family 300k euro (inflation adjusted since 19xx, so it's a bit more). In the US, it's not fixed, judges decide, but it seems that number runs into the tens of millions of dollars.
Mad support for this sandbox suggestion. It would be amazing!
Weebly (YC W07) announces membership site beta
Portland legalizes Airbnb-style short-term rentals
The poster seemed to ask for companies that: 1. applied to YC, 2. were accepted, and 3. then turned down the offer.

But I'm not sure why that would ever happen - the terms and content of the YC program are published in detail, so it would be a waste of everyone's time to apply if a team is not planning to accept the offer.
Your point about the opportunity cost intrigued me. Personally, when I lived without a car in Texas, my buying habits were also influenced by that fact. So, I usually bought only the stuff I really needed, as I simply couldn't carry shit.

Now I have a car, but luckily I am careful not to buy food that I don't need. I have seen others loading up on all kinds of junk food though
Looks like Palantir is on an acquisition spree

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8105058
Microsoft should dump Windows Phone -Robert Scoble
Wikipedia Begins Taking Donations in Bitcoin
Mainframe2 announced support for Microsoft Azure
Someone oughta add speech boxes
This does not seem to be a fair assessment. The "life-altering value" is not provided by the cost of the IT project, but by the total cost of healthcare in the US.

That's 3.8 trillion dollars, or 11900 USD per person per year (first figure divided by 300 million). Wikipedia lists the per capita expenditure as 8500 USD per person per year for 2011, not sure why there is such a large discrepancy.

Total amount of people on healthcare in the US is listed as 11.7 million jobs.
It's a statement in a press release with no details by a company widely believed to have fudged reported numbers in the past to look a lot more impressive.

I personally don't put much weight on it. I could see them saying the same thing if they had 1 >$1m day which we already know they had back in October 2013.
is literacy a natural state? If you consider the history of the us, probably just barely.

on to your argument, such as it is: pretending that our two choices are we can have easy access to information or not is, well, dumb: we can certainly allow individuals (as europe has demonstrated) to remove things from google while retaining access to, oh, 99.9998% (first estimate of google's index that popped up on google: 30B pages. removal requests: 70k in 2 months. 1 - 7e4/30e9) of information in the world. And that is a severe underestimate: information can still be returned, just not for particular searches as far as I understand. So starting with humane things like removing revenge porn, whether the host is or is not within us copyright jurisdiction, ad probably moving on to relatively private facts about peoples' lives is a great place to start. I'm not sure where we'll end, but I'm far more comfortable with governments -- who, after all, nominally represent the governed -- deciding than with google.

edit: for another example: particularly the HN audience which runs young, white or asian, male, glibertarian, and tech employee has little to fear from personal info leaking online: sf doesn't care about most things, ranging from lgbtq to bdsm to swinging to whatever. But there's a lot of places that do. You don't have to look far to see what would happen in, say, utah to a high school-aged transgender kid. Restricting that information online is completely reasonable.
> Switzerland, Germany, and Singapore all have mostly-private competition-driven systems (more private than the American model, even)

I'd call them "social".

They're all two-tier systems. The basic tier is heavily regulated and meets my definition of social: government dictates terms, price, profit margins, and provides funding such that everyone is guaranteed to be able to afford it. It's no more private than your typical govrnment contractor. The supplementary tier is private in name and practice. I agree that this is the best arrangement and I suspect we mean the same thing and are just defining "social" differently.

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/Files/Publications/F...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Singapore

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Germany

> The way I see it, there are two features that really distinguish the American system structurally. First, there's the state-by-state laws and regulations, resulting in effectively 51 different legal regimes.

Agreed. This is a huge problem that needs to be fixed by regulating at least the bottom tier of health care provision at the federal level.

> Second, American insurance is provided primarily through employers

Employer-provided insurance does have a very strong purpose in the free market that adds value vs individual insurance: it dramatically decreases the risk of the bandwagon effect (people with need X pile on to policies that favor need X and sink them). Put differently, it chops off the long tail of P(claim rate in insured population deviates significantly from that of national population). Risk=money, so employer-provided care actually does decrease the cost of providing health insurance. It also increases the effective bargaining power of employees by allowing them to act as a bloc and making it economically viable to actually analyze and compare the nuts-and-bolts of a large number of alternative plans.

Of course, there are other ways to achieve the same thing, but they're all "social": the government can dictate terms for the bottom tier of care (so all insurance plans look the same to someone maximizing personal utility of an individual plan) or the government can outright provide the insurance (no choice = no bandwagon effect).

I agree that the freedom-reducing effects of employer-provided care are decidedly un-American, but I contend that they occur as a direct result of allowing insurance companies the freedom to set different terms in the basic tier of their individual plans.
Indian Inventor Makes A Open Source Glass Clone
Another reason I find the comparison to twitter interesting is that both Healthcare.gov and Twitter have no intrinsic value; their innovation and value is that they facilitate and mediate in ways that couldn't have gone before. The real value is provided by the parties with whom the connection is made; healthcare professionals and medicines in the case of h.g, other users and communicators in the case of t.c.

Something else I should have mentioned before; it is also very tempting to look at the outward functionality of something and not see the mistaken paths that led to nowhere, the research and measurements and experimentation it took to arrive at a working destination. That's another area where I'd guess the two sites have costs.
This would also explain why "good teachers" are suspected to be the determining factor in a child's educational success.
The management panel is SUPER clunky, though. I don't have to mess with my domains often, but when I do, I like it to be a pleasant experience.
This article on an urban planner's objection to suburbs on financial grounds (most succinctly put as suburbs are a ponzi scheme) is relevant for thinking about why this project is -- relative to a more suburban/sprawl alternative -- less costly than it seems:

http://time.com/3031079/suburbs-will-die-sprawl/
Nice article, I never considered the duality of product and sum types before.

The importance of effective ADT usage is generally under-emphasized when discussing the benefits of statically typed FP languages* like OCaml and Haskell — even though it is the way to maximize the utility of such languages, IMO.

With the right data representation, composability improves and algorithms fall into place naturally. This is further enhanced by a language like OCaml — since the compiler catches type errors and non-exhaustive matches on ADTs, any bugs are likely holes in your application model.

There are many benefits in using ADTs, modules and other type-system features to guide your program design. Others have described those benefits very well already — just read anything by Yaron Minsky or Jane Street.

* Data modeling is critical for any problem domain, and statically typed, non-FP languages (Java, C++, etc) certainly have facilities to encourage effective modelling, but languages in the vein of OCaml and Haskell really push to make the type system do as much work as possible.
Cool, thanks!

I just requested beta invite on your website but didn't see your contact details (mine are in my profile).
Yeah, it feels complete but unintegrated. I know a lot of the outstanding Swift tickets are around better integration, but there's a wide gulf.