skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What you mentioned exists in Houston for sure, and quite possibly elsewhere. It's probably not perfect but it's HUGELY better than state approved utility monopolies.

http://www.powertochoose.org/

Two anecdotes:

1. In FL I was in a fairly small college town, 150k people. GRU was the utility company. We paid $13/mo connection fee plus a marginal rate of $0.084/kWh (plus the "fuel adjustment" which is of course never in your favor) since it was basically impossible to use less in the heat (https://www.gru.com/Portals/0/Legacy/Pdf/RatesCharges.pdf). In TX I now pay $0.08 with no connection fee or adjustments of which about $0.02/kWh goes for line maintenance and if I commit to buying at least 2MWh/mo I can pay even less.

2. A friend from Florida had a brother who was working for the Florida Utility Commission (http://www.psc.state.fl.us/) approving or denying utilities' requests to raise their rates. Once he's been there for a few years his plan is to become a consultant to help the utility companies game the system and raise their rates.
I don't know about the Apple 'still really (being) a consumer/consumption based company'.

Apple is, and has been for a while, the market leader in video and photo editing work, which is pretty clearly a creative endeavor. In fact, for a long time, graphic work (video/photo/modeling,etc) and education were the only two markets where Apple was doing well.
I very much doubt that YC is in a position to ask every applicant for proof of their family's income and assets , another factor to note is that many applicants are from overseas.
It's almost better to think of power as static. For some areas, if you have a smaller government, it's not a loss of power so much as a void of power, which will be filled by corporations or other large organizations.

A lot of people look at a smaller government as increasing their personal liberty, which is true for some issues, but for other areas it only means swapping out one organization for another (which may not be aligned with your interests).
That might not actually be the case. You can't bring a First Amendment complaint against Verizon, but you can certainly bring one against your state-run or municipal ISP.
BMW sounds alarm over tech companies seeking data
I had a teacher that explained politics not as a left/right spectrum, but as a political circle. At the very end libertarians and communists end up being very close to each other, with slightly different mechanisms.
I doubt that was an intentional strategy. Google seems to not push worse apps to iOS in general. The new Maps UI launched on iOS first, for example.
That could work. And lack of immediate post/design previews can be taken care of with a simple Vagrant configuration to spin up a local Github Pages server directly from the repo. Like so: https://github.com/kappataumu/vagrant-up-github-pages
So with Provo having so many young people and being a technology hotspot, why do you think the public fiber project failed? (In general I'm in favor of municipal broadband, so I'm curious why it didn't work as well as hoped in this case.)
> It is really perfectible for French<->Mandarin at least.

You might prefer to say "imperfect" instead of "perfectible". While "perfectible" is a, well, perfectly good word, it is unusually rare enough that I thought you had meant to say "perfect" and made an error. "imperfect" is much more common and less likely to be misinterpreted. Apologies for the unsolicited criticism but I really was confused by this at first.
Revealed: Saudi Arabia's 'Great Wall' to Keep Out Isil
Ah, but most of the US debt is denominated in US currency... It's a convenient loophole to use if it ever becomes a more serious problem.
Not to discount the value added in this case, but remember that the report is possibly biased in the same way that many "We rewrote it and now its 10x as awesome as it was before!" reports are. Rewrites almost always tend to result in higher quality code, regardless of what the rewrite is to or from.
.NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") now on Github
Additionally, Kickstarter has the concept of "tipping", which means that contributions get refunded if projects don't reach their fundraising goal. Sites like GFM have no such requirement (which makes sense when you'll take every dollar you can b/c of a tragic event).
That sounds like a good argument for government funding, except we can't see the privately funded "internets" that might have been crowded out by public investment.

To make an analogy, Comcast could say to the critics of their monopolization that "it's a good thing that we are here, otherwise you wouldn't have any internet at all!", but would you buy it?
It seems to be caching game assets. After loading the game once (which took a while), the subsequent loading times were dramatically reduced. Though this is purely based off of quickly opening and closing the website, so I can't completely verify anything.
> Software is only is good as the guy programming it.

I guess chess computers can never beat a human then. Because the software is only as good as the guy writing it.

> What happens when the software develops a bug? Be it in the middle of rush hour traffic, or hurling down the highway at 70mph?

What happens when a human is inexperienced/texting/drunk/sleepy? Humans have plenty of "bugs" but you don't notice them.

> For all of the great things we know self driving cars can potentially bring to the table, how do we account for the issue of buggy software?

Trials. Testing. Every accident (which is inevitable) will be scrutinized and used to improve the system (unlike the 40k annual deaths in the US where that unfortunate experience helps nobody, except perhaps installing a traffic light or barrier).
How do you propose we evaluate the return on the Iraq War?
I'm going to use it in my current project ! Great work
Awesome! Roslyn on github, who would have imagined :)
It's not a market if you're forced to participate... and for that, you have to blame your $DEITY of choice or Nature as a whole, not Obama. We're all going to need expensive health care at some point.

That also means that insurance is the wrong model.

So what's left?
So bringing some of the web designers into the terminal isn't such a bad thing after all, they have great taste.

I'm partially sad its written in nodejs, but I can't really think of what else it should have been written in.

I think clojurescript bindings would be awesome. The dashboard can be rendered from an immutable app state om style.

dnolen, I'm looking at you :).
So the premise is then any government infra to provide broadband must come with equally stringent protections on monitoring the content, similar to how government infra to provide deliveries has warrant requirements to inspect those deliveries.

However, we know that government policy is to record all meta-data, forever, without a warrant. HTTP/2 can't come fast enough, but even that doesn't really hide enough meta-data to trust the government with the pipe. E.g. You can tell fairly well what static pages on a domain someone is visiting by simply correlating the size of the response packets.

Of course, they are already doing all of this already, so maybe the ship has sailed... I think the best model is that the government provides the fiber, the L2 and above service is provided by a private entity. It certainly doesn't do much to prevent mass-collection or censorship, but it's marginally better than the Fed actually providing Layer 2.
If price is a concern, I recommend checking out Indiegogo Life (https://life.indiegogo.com/). It's a pretty stripped down product compared to the rest, but they only charge credit card fees (total of ~3%).

[Note: I work in Fundly, a startup competitor to GFM]
If these numbers are believed, less than the Iraq War: http://www.quora.com/How-much-money-did-World-War-II-cost

(Also efficient wars cost less time, and that one was even against a much more formidable enemy.)
Why is education for the citizens of a country considered something that a countries government should have no part in in the US?

It's not that the government should have no part in education; an ancap believes "a countries government" shouldn't exist at all. That's the an(archo) in ancap.
I guess you're right, it's simply not possible and they should just not worry about it.
I am from India and one of the major broadband providers is BSNL. It used to be core part of the government (Department of Telecom) but was made a corporate in 2000 (but still owned by Govt. of India which is confusing). Anyways, BSNL is the reason a lot of remote villages in India get mobile & broadband connections. If it were left to private companies, they would never expand the infrastructure beyond urban centers where they could cover a lot of people per square area. BSNL also has a lot of fiber optic deployments that private companies rent in suburban areas to provide service. They get it at a cheaper price and don't have the problem of maintaining them. So I can see how municipal internet can help people. OTOH, there is a huge cost load on the government and people in remote villages don't use Internet much. I wonder if private companies were regulated to mandatorily have presence in all areas and are allowed to borrow government/municipal owned infrastructure at competitive rates, would the situation be better? This way there is both competition and better connectivity.
I can't be sure from just a photo, but the I suggest that the procedure wasn't completely without side effects. Her left eye is not symmetrical with the right, and the left eyebrow is elevated. This could represent some degree of peri-orbital muscle dysfunction due to the procedure damaging the nerves that supply those muscles. This could improve with time, not sure how long after the surgery this photo was taken. Even if it doesn't, you could say it is a minor side effect compared to losing your vision, but as Shinkei and others have pointed out, it isn't clear whether the vision was really in danger. Takes some of the shine off I suppose...
His PBS documentary, "Touching The Wild," is available on Netflix.

"Naturalist Joe Hutto taps into a new understanding of mule deer by living with a herd in the Wind River mountains of Wyoming for almost seven years."

There's the wind, the river, the mountains, the deer, and Joe Hutto, all part of an interesting story.
>>I personally think its rather unfair to ask a for-profit company to compete against a tax funded service.

But much of the technology and infrastructure the ISPs use today was once built by tax-payer money.
I'm not a founder [but that doesn't mean I wouldn't potentially found a company someday] - I worked in hospitality management until my early 30s. If I were to apply to YC I wouldn't expect you to be interested in my previous career so I wouldn't include that. If I understand you right you're saying you'd look at what you see I've done [in the ~3 years I've been a developer] and be less impressed because it's coming from someone in their mid-30s instead of their early 20s.

Sorry to break it to you, but factoring that into your decision is the very definition of [age] discrimination.
I just wrote a reponse to Dr. Wertheimer's letter looking some of the misleading statements[0].

[0]: http://ethanheilman.tumblr.com/post/108115952435/a-response-...
KeySweeper: covert Microsoft wireless keyboard sniffer using Arduino and nRF24L01+
The cost of maintaining a fixed number of lanes of asphalt roadway is fairly constant over time. Impacted by the cost or labor and the price of oil, etc.

The cost of maintaining a fixed amount of network bandwidth however, doesn't that decrease more-or-less with Moore's law? Especially if the lines are fiber, the cable can break and need to be replaced, but it never needs to be "upgraded" and the devices at either end will become exponentially more powerful over time for the same cost per port.

And to your point, if you the muni is responsible for little more than the fiber line itself, it really is a simple matter to maintain them, i.e. completely predictable cost structure.
RubyGems blames YARD, YARD blames RubyGems: awesome (not)
It's not 100% clear unless you can read the code.

Where is the data coming from? Seems like a lot of animated data with limited data points specified.
A statement in a programming language means the same regardless of the education-level, ethnicity, or social status of the reader. I wish the same were true for English.

That would make English very boring and dry. What of poetry and evocative prose? Natural languages and programming languages serve very different purposes, despite their similarities.

Natural languages, since their inception, have been subjective reflections of people, emotions, cultures, points in time. What you wish for isn't even possible, due to the fact that different people will always have the potential to interpret things differently, based on their genetic predispositions and life experiences.

If we tried to make languages more prescriptive, we wouldn't end up with some golden era where everybody communicates amazingly with each other, it would be more like 1984 where the potential for creativity and emotional expressivity has been largely diminished.

---

Edit: I do understand the point, and of course I try to use words "properly" most of the time. There is a difference between inventing new constructs and usages in order to express something, and just simply being "wrong." E.g. mixing up "your" and "you're" is a pretty cut-and-dried error. But, at the end of the day, all the rules are totally subjectively made up, and their only true purpose is to make it easier for people to understand each other, so if you can accomplish that, the rules don't actually matter.
That's blatant ageism (and a very common misconception, too).
The confirmation of the backdoor comes from internal NSA memos that journalists with access to the Snowden documents have read. The source documents have not been made public to my knowledge.

"Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency."
-http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-t...
> The Internet isn't a special snowflake here.

That's where the majority of the world disagrees with you; [1] the Internet is a special snowflake to the point of most agreeing it should be a basic human right.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access
Yes, they do.

Microwave works on line-of-sight and weather patterns easily mess it up and drop the link.

That's why you usually also run your microwave data over a fiber link as backup. Of course, when microwave works, it gives you a decent improvement in latency, at the cost of bandwidth.
Abundance without attachment
That phone will never exist.
> Are these Vipassana retreats suitable for someone who has very little knowledge about meditation and zero experience?

If you're young, in great health and looking for a huge challenge: maybe. It's a very extreme intro to meditation. Vipassana retreats break people.

> Are there other options? I would prefer to be guided by a person than read a book, that option will just slip out of my schedule.

Check for groups in your area, meetup.com is a good resource. So is google. Look up the lineage, the teacher, etc. For school X look up "X controversy" and there will almost always be something there, that's OK but there are some weird traditions out there that you'll do well to avoid. Trust your intuition.

A lot of Buddhist meet-up groups will have a little note that says something like "if you're a beginner, second Tuesday of every month is beginner's night so show up a half an hour early and we'll square you away." Some have a "young people's night". There's a lot of luck involved.

A usual evening should be a bit boring and might include one or two 20-minute sitting meditation sessions, maybe some walking meditation, maybe refreshments, some sort of a talk, some social time, and hopefully an opportunity to ask questions.
Not sure if it had been shared earlier. Relevant to optimising for personal happiness. Since that's the ultimate variable to optimise for.
Back when I wrote video games, I often had to explain to people that was a terrible player of these games. Many people have a default implicit assumption that you can't make something that you are not a master of. Similarly, it's hard to appreciate how software can encode the accumulated "smarts" of literally thousands of contributors, all running at inhumanly fast speed.
Eh, I can trade a bitcoin for +/- 200$ bucks, currently. That seems like a example of "good for something".

I can also transfer currency of any type, via the internet, without interacting with a financial institution(buy bitcoin using your preferred currency, trade bitcoin, the received converts bitcoin into their preferred currency), this capability also seems like it could be "good for something".

I feel like the "it's internet funny money!" claims are just as wrong as the "bitcoin will change everything about currency" claims.
Try calling again. It sounds like you talked to only 1 or 2 people; sometimes it takes a few tries with call centers to get to someone who will listen to you. It's totally annoying, but in the end maybe the person you talked to was distracted and was just having a bad day. It was wrong of them to not listen to you, but if it's a chronic problem with that person, some sort of automated satisfaction survey should eventually pick that up.
Why We Think Paid Leave Is a Worker's Right, Not a Privilege
Brush him off.

As a foreigner I feel the same about English and its declining quality of grammar on the web
Perhaps you're right. Mark this one down to schools teaching outdated things as fact, I suppose.

Still, my idea is better than the "hypotheses become theories, which become laws" nonsense, which is still taught at the elementary school level.
Walgreens thrives on horrible UX for some reason. I haven't quite figured it out. Their purchase flow is slow, their employees seem to never be in a hurry, and their receipts are about 2ft too long on average.
Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that I only look at technical accomplishments. I like to look at whatever accomplishments that person has, regardless of what field they're in. So if you've worked a lot in hospitality management, then great, let's hear about your accomplishments there.
By the use of italics, I think he was being sarcastic.
Slightly off-topic, your questions remind me of this satire: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertaria... (never fails to make me laugh)
Classification of broadband as a public utility is a related, but separate argument.
This is really cool! Seems like it would be easy to extend and link to simple projects, that way I can run this on my second monitor and feel like a real hacker ;)
Okay, so you could to break down the ISP vertical into companies that only supply service and companies that only do the last-mile infrastructure. It would allow the government to regulate the industry without being involved in the supply side of things.

One other option is to opt for a consumer ownership model where the each home pays for the bit of fiber that connects them to the neighborhood hub or w/e.
If an education produces a non-libertarian, would you consider that of higher or lower value than an education that produces a libertarian?
"The keyboard Kamkar tested for his research was a brand new model purchased two weeks ago from a Best Buy store"

Also, Microsoft's statement:

"In addition, users of our 2.4GHz wireless keyboard designs from July 2011 onwards are also protected"

If both are true, that gives an interesting insight into Best Buy's inventory management. I bet those keyboards have a lot of margin, but tying up your capital in a keyboard for over 3 years? They should be able to do better (at least, I would expect they do better for smartphones and the like)

Of course, this is one data point. Does anybody know whether this is normal in electronics stores for this kind of hardware?
Seems to be randomly generated-
https://github.com/yaronn/blessed-contrib/blob/master/exampl...
> and wish this was true.

*were

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood
Not one of the municipalities I've called home in the last 40 years runs any of those things you've mentioned
Those are interesting numbers.

I'd virtually never opt for the car (just in bad weather, I guess).
This is pretty neat.

I think it's telling that after 50 years, and all the work on GUI's, this is still a good idea.
I've worked on projects where that was the expectation; I've set that expectation for projects.

The reasoning has both been concrete/practical and philosophical (but still practical):

* Mobile processing time is still costly in terms of battery life and performance. And the number of http calls (and their latency) also makes a difference in performance; SPAs tend to have smaller requests but larger numbers of them and it seems to me that's actually the opposite profile of what 3/4G cellular networks are good at. (And while this is all less true on the desktop I'm starting to find it annoying that we're nevertheless finding ways to make things choppy and slow on 2 GHz machines with operations not more complex than scrolling).

* This is more vague, but I find there's a discipline imposed in starting the conception of the app in terms of plain HTML/HTTP that seems to keep things better organized, while projects that start with a focus on a rich/heavy UI devolve into overspecific yet mixed concerns more quickly. This doesn't work for everything, since some apps just aren't about resources and media types. But honestly, your app probably is. :)

* Being able to debug/autotest with something like curl is pretty nice.
Some suspension of disbelief required for that "full-fledged" claim (whatever that means). The mediocre performance, low complexity graphics and Doom-like movement and shooting mechanics are not comparable to any of the "full-fledged" FPSs I've been playing since 2000.
This was some recent advice for SSH: https://stribika.github.io/2015/01/04/secure-secure-shell.ht...

It was on discussed on HN, at the time noone pointed out anything glaring about the advice given.
Not at all. I addressed that:

> In almost every discipline, crystallized knowledge more than offsets this loss of fluid intelligence. Eventually though, age catches up with us.

At some point, gains from knowledge can't make up for decline in cognitive ability. For some disciplines, it usually happens sooner (mathematics). For others, it's typically later (biology). For startups, I bet it depends heavily on what the company is doing. But at some point, age makes one less likely to be in the top few percent.

Also, while experience is valuable, the value of experience is probably sub-linear. When learning a new skill, most important knowledge is acquired early on. After that, returns diminish.
> I personally think its rather unfair to ask a for-profit company to compete against a tax funded service.

Why? If the Free Market Fundamentalists are correct, the for-profit company should have it all over the tax-funded service, because the company would be interested in efficiency and technological advances and so on, as opposed to just being a... welfare... thing... like the US Post Office and everything else which, per dogma, Does Not Work.

> You can prevent rent-seeking by repealing any "sponsored" laws that protect their monopoly.

Like the property laws which prevent others from using the wires they pay to put in, or do you think three cable companies should mean three completely separate sets of coaxial cables running everywhere in town?
Providing Optimal Care: Responding to “Man Saves Wife’s Sight by 3D Printing”