skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As evidenced by the state described in the article...

No, it's not bad, but apparently the wealth is not spread in a way that precludes conditions the likes of which should not be seen in third world countries, let alone the first.

Of course these problems are not there for the VCs to fix, it's just that California was mentioned rather loudly as 'the place to be'.

For start-ups maybe.
Tom, my condolences on your loss, to you and to Dan's family & friends.

I fondly remember Dan's comments, his thinking & approach to challenges, and how it was always an opportunity to get things done whatever the odds.

We will miss you, Dan.
Polls in the past here have also shown that most of the readers of HN are not involved in startups. There's also a big difference between "being in a funk" and killing yourself.

This situation is truly tragic, and I believe we'd all like to understand what exactly pushed Dan over the edge -- we'd like for there to be a reason that could somehow be instructive -- but from the information out there, we don't have that. As such, it's really a reach to assume that this is because he's a founder.
Can anyone point me in the direction of Sydney meet ups? Also how do I keep in the loop for Melbourne ones as I am there for work quite often.

Hope the Melbourne meet-up goes well!
Thank you for sharing this article and thank you for being an ally. Seeing fellow intellects and hackers show compassion and concern for my situation makes me smile and it gives me hope!

You're absolutely right, no matter your beliefs or belief system this comes down to basic civil rights. My inability to put my partner on my companies insurance while many other married couples at my office legally can is simply discrimination.

My inability to express my love through marriage is discrimination and denies me my basic constitutional rights.

Frankly the economic burden is hurting a lot of families as well. Filing as Single 1 and inadequate insurance puts us gays at an unfair economic disadvantage.

We need a revolution of belief systems based on love and compassion. I try to help this revolution every day by being out at work and by being as normal as possible to the persons I work with, meet, or talk to in the community.

Perhaps detracactors will realize there is nothing to fear and that my family is normal just like theirs. Many would probably just call me a dreamer though-- I am in RURAL Southern Idaho where I really ought fear for my life more than worry about insurance and taxation... maybe it's time for this geek to move to a more gay friendly city.
I agree with you, but I think if you discriminate by referrer you're just playing games, so it's fair to play games in return.

Not to be a spelling nazi, but I had trouble reading this sentence because you spelled "referrer" correctly.
I agree with the CAP theorem and it applies to my example. In my example replication only provides a backup copy of the data and is not used by the application, that's why it's active-passive (provides reliability). This configuration provides the highest level of data protection that is possible without affecting the performance of the master database/shard. This is accomplished by allowing a transaction to commit writes to the master database. The same transaction is also written to the slave, but that transaction is optional and written asynchronously. Two-phase commit is not performed.
When someone wants to just "fit in," they are consciously trying to conform. So I would argue that most people do this, so most people consciously conform. Most people don't want to be different or weird, which is often what innovation looks like.
I still fall for that one every time I have to do a referrer check. In the long run referer will probably become the preferred spelling.
The counter-sue idea doesn't really work for patent troll companies though, which only hold patents for extortion, and don't do any productive work of their own.
Version control of really huge files
I am in in RURAL Southern Idaho where I really ought fear for my life more than worry about insurance and taxation... maybe it's time for this geek to move to a more gay friendly city.

Oh, dear Lord. Yes.

It's not because I enjoy hating on Idaho. But I imagine it's tough enough politically being a gay person in a variety of other ways; I think it's important to congregate in areas where you can find shoulders to lean on and institutions to help.
Audio Samples
Looking for best service samples, downloadble sounds, drum sample packs, Audio Samples, pro audio loops, modern beats, flash button sounds, Music Loops and many more.
I wouldn't put HA into the same bucket as scaling. Scaling includes performance where HA doesn't. You can take a simple html site and decide to eliminate SPOF (single points of failure). You immediately increase your OpEX. I enjoy scaling problems.
"groups which have essentially captured the state and municipality budgeting processes voted themselves large increases in benefits ..."

By "groups", you mean "politicians, government employees, and unions" right?

- California teachers and school employees are the highest paid in the nation. 35% above the national average.

- State employees make about 35% more than private-sector employees

- An enormous pension problem for government employees. A public-safety worker can retire at age 55 with 90% of his/her salary. The result: $65B in upcoming, unfunded pension liability. My father-in-law is a retired probation officer. He does consulting for his county and pulls a pension check–basically working part-time and pulling 1.5 salaries.

- The state spends 70% more (per capita) than the national average on social services, primarily because of it's welfare programs.

Funny story: I worked at a CA community college for a few years while still in college. Just special programming projects and IT stuff. When I quit to pursue my first startup, I got a letter letting me know I had $2,000 in a PERS retirement account. As much as I enjoyed cashing it out for our startup, it just shows how reckless CA is with spending and obligations to these groups.

Don't think all this is because of a lack of income either. State personal income tax is really high. Part of the reason we left 2 years ago.
What do you do when you don't feel like eliciting pity? IMO if you do this people will treat you as an oddity and try and take care of you. F that. RIP Dan, I feel for you.
Hmm,

Remember, California has the size and diversity of many medium-sized nations... so generalizations often don't work.

The scene at the forum wasn't really connected to the recession or California but US health care and US urban poor in general.

I'm surprised how little I notice the recession, much less the "collapse" of California. Of course, I'm in the Bay Area and I think that LA and especially the central valley were harder hit. But that is how the US generally has been economically - strong urban area but with hinter-lands that are poorer than one would imagine.
Indonesia earthquake: 'my room has just dropped one floor'
Drugs drugs drugs, money money money. Seems like a poor ROI in most cases. I've gone, they tried to give me antidepressants even when I said I didn't want them. Worst money I ever spent.
"However you feel about religious issues, or how "marriage" should be defined"

I've started thinking that marriage should be defined in strictly religious terms. That is, get the state out of the business altogether and have civil union experience be the same for all couples. What you do in church is up to you.

I mean, you wouldn't expect to go to the government for a baptism license?
The problem that this article doesn't point out and nobody wants to talk about: California is burdened with the largest reservoir of undocumented/illegal workers in the country. Until these people are brought into the system, until we see some true immigration reform (either by naturalizing every worker or, conversely, by getting serious about border policy) the state is in an untenable position. Things will get worse before they get better.

California and US immigration policy are a mammoth case of "walk on left side, okay; walk on right side, okay; walk in middle - squish! just like grape" which you Karate Kid fans might remember...
This is very sad. I just submitted my application for Winter 2010 yesterday and just begun to learn about Hacker News, participate, .. and Boom!
I read about Dan and find out how a great guy he was and that he has committed suicide. This is an unlucky first sad impression for me and this forum, but it also has served, by reading through all your comments, to quickly find out what a tight and supportive community the YCombinator crowd is. My condolences to all those who knew him.
Blog Contest: Win $60 In Cash By Participating In The Contest
Yes, and then of course stick to making no laws respecting religion meaning every couple with a civil union enjoys the same tax benefits.

Many would vomit at this idea because they would fear that you are "taking something away from them." Of course, ironically, the marriage they feared would be taken from them is of course the same right they are denying me.
It's not just California, it's the whole country that's in a mess. How did it get there? In a word, greed. In a few more words, people failing to understand, tolerate, care for, and stand up for each other, especially people different from them. "Me, me, me" does not work. "We" works.
What about deporting all the illegals? That would be far the most fiscally effective solution.
Absolutely on the money. These are the fruits of rosy-eyed welfare policy: rampant poverty, fiscal collapse, the poor get poorer and the middle class? What middle class?
Did you guys try mounting a new empty volume on a new instance ? To see if it was all EBS or just that EBS.
Have you thought of not using EBS and using s3 as the data store ?
Because the cost of doing that is free?
Keep in mind that those who silently capitulate don't just hurt themselves, they hurt all those who the companies go after later... and effectively, all of us.
Ask HN: Awesome/neat/favourite Eclipse techniques?
Hi everyone,

I'm the n00b that posted this question a while back ("Reasonable Java editor for heavily CLI-oriented UNIX types who hate bloat?"): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=597213

Well, your responses - especially the ones that were most convicted about how futile it is to write Java without Eclipse (or at least, one of the big three IDEs) - convinced me to give it another go.

Sure enough, I upgraded all my hardware to relatively contemporary 64-bit gear, stocked up on some additional gigabytes of RAM, and now I'm happily writing all my Java in Eclipse. You were right.

I'm getting the sense, however, that despite my curiosity and occasional perusal of the documentation, I'm probably not taking advantage of some of the neatest things you can do with it.

About 90% of the time, I'm using it the same way I used to edit Java in a text editor. Oh, sure, the highlighting is nice, and I often use the package hierarchical view to navigate to classes or methods -- handy. The auto-indentation, cleanup, templates for common phenomena (try/catch, etc.), assistance in adding imports for unresolved class names, and other little things are all helpful. As some of you pointed out, the refactoring stuff can be pretty good; doing a mass-rename of a method with one click sure beats doing it by hand, or with a one-liner in the shell.

Still, I don't feel like I'm getting that much use out of it compared to just writing the code in a shell. My intuition tells me I should be doing more. If you have any tricks you find exceptionally useful or other productivity hacks that are less than entirely obvious, I'd love to know about them.

Thanks in advance!
> express my love through marriage

You can express your love through marriage: marry a woman. "Homosexual marriage" is an oxymoron.

To the extent heterosexual marriage gets special legal benefits over other partnerships, I'm in favor of equalizing all that. But gays can't "marry" any more than two elderly widowed sisters living together can marry. It's not the same thing.

Your choice of phrase "express my love through marriage" gets right down to the heart of it. Marriage is not for an expression of love. It is a social institution of special standing. It is for creating the next generation. It is not for "expressing love" or "finding happiness."
Actually Los Angeles County's unemployment rate was only .6 percent higher than Santa Clara County (12.6% vs 12%). San Francisco does a little better at 10.1% but it's still above the national average (see here: http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=usunemployment&met=u...)

In reality California's unemployment rate gets dragged up by the smaller counties in the extreme north and south. For example, Imperial County (which borders Mexico) has a 28.7% unemployment rate while Shasta County (about 40 miles or so south of Oregon) has a 15.2%
- State employees make about 35% more than private-sector employees

I'd like to know how they came up with those numbers, care to reference?
Hackers and Founders Meetup this Tuesday in Mountain View
Beer, Talking tech and startups. What's not to like. :)
Is it that simple? I can't tell if your comment is tongue in cheek. But if you consider the hundreds of billions of dollars it would take to locate, process, and deport every illegal, if you consider increased labor costs for local businesses many of whom would go under without a plentiful supply of cheap labor, and if you consider that America has never really been about "deporting people" (quite the opposite) it seems like simply deporting every illegal is a horrible solution.

Equally horrible is to have to provide ever-increasing social and welfare benefits to millions upon millions of undocumented, non-tax-paying workers who are now also unemployed. There is no quick fix here. But if you were to naturalize those workers, give them SSNs and DLs, encourage them to partake of the "American dream" or what's left of it...maybe in ten or twenty years you'd find things had started to improve.

I don't really know. If this were a game of chess, I'd simply resign.
Sugar daddy
A Sugar Daddy is a successful man that excels in his field not only in the office but with his SugarBaby.Online dating offered on SugarBaby4u brings affluent single man that are successful can now find romance with beautiful woman
I've got a question: Is it possible to make Eclipse SVN-aware even when SVN-over-SSH (SVN over SSH remote command transport, aka svn+svn://user@host/path/to/repository URI scheme) is being used?
I can't express my love through marriage TO A WOMAN because it is not physically or emotionally possible for me to love a woman. This is not equality it's saying "seperate .. but equal." This creates too much room for legal ambiguity.

You may think it is a "choice" but it simply is not.

This should be simple for you to understand since you didn't choose your gender attraction either.

Science agrees. It has been scientifically proven that the brain and the hypothalamus is gendered within the first trimester of a pregnancy and that the gendered brain may not match the body's gender due to androstendione, a stress hormone similar to testosterone that binds to receptors that testosterone should have bound to creating a female hypothalamus in a male body, creating a third gender class - males, females and homosexuals.

Why did God give me a larger hypothalamus? Why did God create me as a gay male? Why does man continue to persecute a minority gender class God created?

Of course I don't expect you to have the capacity to question the legitimacy of your prejudices; A quick read of your other comments on HN showed me that you're also racist..
In that case, I'll carry on with my Postgres evangelism. Thank you for your time.
I have a feeling this comment will not go over well with the community here, so I am going to attempt to get a more descriptive response.

Your response states that by definition, marriage requires opposing sexes. You can't 'marry' someone of the same sex by definition. That's a legal definition. A social definition could be different, and I think the issue stems from the fact that the social definition and the legal definition are conflicting.

Please explain how you define what marriage should be, and your justification for that definition.
Well America is a very individualistic society. Unless we have a massive cultural overhaul, most people will keep thinking in terms of "me."
It's good stuff.

All my employees work from home and when we need to get together to bang on something, we use a shared desktop over VNC. Getting the appropriate responsiveness and speed out of VNC is a matter of using the right client; plain-vanilla standard VNC and UltraVNC is pretty slow, but TightVNC is quite acceptable. I haven't had any problems with NAT traversal on it either, although we run OpenVPN internally and every person's work machine is on it, so the routing is directly over the tunnel to a server reachable only through the VPN concentrator.

My favourite thing about VNC is that it really scales fairly well even to a large number of remote viewers, and doesn't incur licensing costs per marginal head. We are also VoIP guys, so of course we run Asterisk internally and all have pretty decent handsets or softphones that are just one three-digit extension away from each other. Push a few buttons and we can all hop on an internal conference bridge and on our shared VNC - it gets things done.

Still, sometimes it's too much overhead just to perform a simple task and screen does quite well.
>and the middle class? What middle class?

I'm the type to prefer the government stay out of my money and personal business, but let's get real here. The greatest expansion of the middle class in American history (late 1950s) occurred at a time when the top tax bracket was 90%.

They just knew better than to blow all the money like California did :P
Doesn't sound like the rule is "wrong," in the sense that factor sparsity is not actually a common occurrence or matter of economic fact. Rather, the article suggests that it is often ideologically misapplied.
There Are More Slaves Today Than at Any Time in Human History
It is totally feasible. Ike did it in the 50s, right before he fired the whole border patrol and immigration control apparatus and reformed it.

It would be very cheap right now because there is a lot of idle shipping. You load the illegals on boats and drop them off at a home port. In the case of Mexico you take them to the far south, not just over the border.

This can be done and it would have massive popular support.

Naturalization is a horrible idea. We need to get the illegals out and seal the borders. America needs zero immigrants with less than a high school diploma, especially right now. Nobody making less than $90K should be let in this country to work, period.
It's a cent or two on the dollar to task the existing police and federal apparatus vs pay out the social benefits the typical illegal alien consumes.
Here's how mine works:

http://www.rockstarprogrammer.org/post/2006/aug/26/space_eff...
Looks like a scam. 4-8% of the company for no real money invested in the company.

There isn't much to be talked about the background of founders.
I worked with Dan on making iPhone Application using TS webservice. Without any doubt, world wont be same without Dan - He was a great person !
My condolences to Tom, and Dan's friends and family
Will California become America's first failed state?
Agreed. I run the IT dept. for an agency that provides mental health services to abused and neglected children. The program qualifies for "cost reimbursement". That means every supply given to our Mental Health program (pencils, computers, etc...) is billed right back to the state who then pays us the exact amount back. All you have to do is prove the supply went to Mental Health staff.

A couple years ago our Therapists complained that all the other agencies had LCD monitors and they didn't (this was back when LCDs were still relatively expensive). I tried to stop the purchase but the truth was they were right, the state would pay no matter what and every other agency like ours HAD bought their staff new LCD monitors.

In the end we spent about $15,000 of state money replacing monitors and ended up throwing out CRT monitors that were only 1 or 2 years old (and which the state had also paid for). Worse there are about 8,000 agencies like ours in California and they all did the same thing.
I resubmitted in the correct format: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859776

Should anybody prefer to use it.
Dog bite injury attorney in Orange County California
If you need a dog bite injury attorney in Orange County California, Paul Ralph has successfully won many cases.
I call bullshit on each and every one of those "facts".

- Teachers and school employees in California are paid less than teachers in NY, NJ, MA, VA, and DC.

- Public-safety workers (i.e., cops and firemen) get to retire early. Other public employees have to wait until the normal retirement age. Also, the pension doesn't pay "90%" of salary; that number is the modifier used to determine pension contributions.
- Your father is violating the law by receiving a pension and working: pensioners cannot work for any state/local agency for pay and receive a pension from a state/local agency.

- Bullshit. California spends less per capita on its social services than almost any other state, primarily b/c we have so many people. (Do you even know what per capita means?)

- True story: California pays several hundred billions in taxes to the federal government each year. It gets back less than 70% of that money in the form of federal dollars. Without California acting as the nation's piggy bank, 40 states in this country would be insolvent.
"Protips"? Funny. The article is ridiculously light on details. From experience, I've found there's a lot more involved to converting a svn repo to git. After done, there's also something else I consider very important: verifying all the data after it's been moved. A few months ago, we (xfce.org) switched from svn to git. I kept track of what I did and published the scripts I used:

http://git.xfce.org/admin/xfce-git-migration

Some of it is Xfce-specific, but I tried to abstract most of the site-specific stuff into env vars and such, so it should be reasonably adaptable to other sites.
You've clearly never been to a third-world country or California if you think that our problems are anywhere close to third-world status.
Awesome, thanks for organizing this. I'll be there in 40 minutes (missed the original post)---hope someone's still around!
http://www.sacbee.com/737/v-print/story/1917289.html

The Sancramento Bee asked the government for salary data and then did some number crunching. The average public sector employee, excluding the university system, made $68k (median: $66k).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics and other federal bodies maintain average wage stats for all states which should be comparable to those numbers. In California, the statewide average wage is $48k, the median about $36k.

If you want to spend some time doing your own stats analysis of how much pay is for "comparable" jobs across the two sectors, a) it will be tough -- "comparable worth" is a very subjective notion b) you'll have one of the best linkbait ideas of the century and c) expect death threats.
"But the latest U.S. Census survey, from 2007, shows the average annual salary of California state government employees was $53,958, compared with $40,991 for the average private-sector worker."

source: http://seekingalpha.com/article/153159-california-s-pension-...

which is actually more like 31.6% higher ... sorry, bad head-math
Voted you down for the last sentence, which ruined an otherwise measured and reasonable response.
Schools start to move to OpenOffice
Even if its true, I'd worry about the times when it gets something wrong. Any unusual attributes in a case and an expert system would probably have a tough time dealing with it properly (whatever proper means in the context).