skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that there is a whole industry created around Photoshop, all artists use it, it's taught in every college/course, and there are a million books written about it.
For a startup to compete against that momentum would be extremely difficult. There is also considerable competition from open source/free programs like GIMP and Paint.Net. Pixelmator seems like it's doing well, though.

I think the opportunities lie more in creating niche tools. Just look at all the tools created the last few years for photographers, the top one perhaps being Adobe Lightroom. It contains most of the image editing tools from PS that a photographer needs, but is built more around the photographer's workflow.
"people are unwilling to have unmanned trains?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTrain_%28Vancouver%29

When I moved from Vancouver to San Francisco I found it completely bizarre that they required Drivers for BART. It took me a couple years to get over that.
I got the impression that the penalty for not having health insurance comes in the form of a tax (up to 2.5% of income). Am I misunderstanding?
It's pretty simple math. The U.S. pays 2x the (nationally) for health care for comparable (and usually a more poorly ranked) level of care.

The U.S. ranks relatively poorly -- near the bottom of the industrialized countries -- on almost every measure of performance. The only exception are measures where simply paying unlimited amounts of money into your care will get you something.

If we can move cost down from 20% of GDP (or whatever the figure is), to a level that everybody else enjoys, like 10% of GDP, we'll have realized a very large savings at a national level. Even if the cost of the program grows north of all estimates.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-knockage.h...
You talk about moving between states like it's changing a pair of pants. That's a pretty big deal for most people. A monopoly in an area the size of Alabama is like a monopoly in an area the size of Bosnia.
Because scams are OK, as long as they are really more profitable than honest ads.
Many of these sliders have special behavior which is quite useful. For instance, the "blend if" sliders have two controllers, each one of which can be broken in half by option-clicking it, the threshold slider shows a histogram above it, and many of them have keyboard control of one sort or another (which is not always reasonable to completely homogenize).

It is true that having such a diversity of styles is a bit absurd. They could do certainly do with no more than 4 or 5 styles, all mostly visually similar. Still, the actual behavior of all these sliders is pretty solid, in my experience, and I'm not really bothered too much, as a long-time user, that consolidating widget appearance isn't Adobe's top priority.
As near as I can tell, the official definition of Rugged American Individualism requires that it's practitioner be a healthy white male with a net worth of more than $20,000. You can recognize one of these Rugged Individuals due to the products they consume, the (large) vehicles they drive. their devotion to their football team, and their reluctance to pay taxes for anything other than roads and weaponry.

As such the systematic dismantling of our policies to prevent torture and hold torturers accountable; our eager rush into aggressive war and our continuing efforts to thwart prosecution of our own war criminals is perfectly comprehensible in the defense of the Rugged Individualist Lifestyle.

I am sorry that I did not adequately communicate the biting sarcasm that I habitually apply to our political discourse, or the barely repressed anger that I feel in my forced complicity in the crimes of America. In such light I think that your inability to see the swiftian satire I intended to lighten the last line of my last post is perfectly comprehensible.
Right, modeling health care as it is in the U.S. based on capitalistic concepts doesn't work. It simply isn't setup as a simple supplier-consumer relationship.

Disagree? Quick! Who's the supplier and who's the consumer in the present system? It's not the patients.
"... You need to be prepared for tough questions. ..."

I think the point of the exercise is to really nut out the obvious questions. But how do you practice answering tough questions?

Reading through the posts here on prospective YC applicants highlighted the need to be able to think on ones feet. The number of questions fired at you is high. The best idea I can think to simulate this is be using skills developed by comedic improvisation.

Earlier this year at an un-conference ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/collections/7215762254... the best session I went to was a entrepreneur/hacker who is also a comedian. Dan ~ http://twitter.com/danwalmsley explained that by play acting ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/4031549850/in/set-7215... meant each person could act and re-act real time. This is a skill that could be practiced post RAQ and as you correctly point out, a place to answer tough questions.
the reason behind this is simple. A basic task of the state (a framework for society) is to insure[sic] that its people can live (even at the eventual price of others' lives, albeit in other states). This is why the state would (normally :) not kill you, and to the contrary, has to do everything to keep you alive (think euthanasia controversy, obesity, tobacco and alcohol price in healthcare). Therefore, when you fall ill, in most normal[!] societies, people would have to help you -- even before validating your PIN code, or even if you are not holder of a visa or mastercard (are there any other credit cards left?). Like the neighboring lady looking after the kids you were alluding to once. And this inevitably has monetary costs to the society: this is why the compulsory health insurance.

The downside is, that it is wide open to abuse by those who only wish to profit themselves from society. Many countries in Europe introduced universal healthcare after the World Wars, because they learned the hard way, that health and lives and peace are the most important in [to] the world (and ie. not getting rich from online pr0n trade). A great wealth has been amassed, and it has become too tempting to chip off bits and pieces (as always with any huge value) hoping it will go unnoticed. This has happened in most countries (.de, .uk) along with the pension funds (think Enron: the millions who lost their pension savings). Currently there are little safeguards against these white collar crimes (no coincidence either, the politicians don't really make laws against their own interests).
> For a startup to compete against that momentum would be extremely difficult.

I think it would be very difficult for a startup to make a replacement photoshop, but that shouldn't really be anyone's goal (photoshop already exists), and with actual novel ideas about how editing should be done, I think there are quite reasonable opportunities: it's always difficult to make quality software, but image editors and their market aren't inherently worse in this respect than email clients, say, or word processors, or many types of games, etc.

> considerable competition from open source/free programs like GIMP and Paint.Net

Really? I don't know anyone who uses these for serious work. I understand the GIMP gets used in particular niches, such as among free software ideologues, but I don't think competition from these would be a real problem for anyone trying to make a serious image editor.

> It contains most of the image editing tools from PS that a photographer needs

Not really. Most Lightroom users also use Photoshop, and Lightroom's goals as a product are completely different from Photoshop's (image organization, selection, comparison, rather than careful editing): they're complementary, not competitors.
Why Arby's is so low on the restaurant food chain.
Sliders are truly annoying in computers which lack them as a physical input device.

Now, if you could a laptop with ten knobs on the side of it AND an API to use them, then sliders in an app would be cool.
Ask HN: A basket of goods
HN,

22yo Kiwi here, planning to move to the Bay Area next year ( earlier the better ) and am trying to work out how much to save to get to US, ie. how much the average month in the Bay Area costs.

These are the numbers I am thinking:
Rent at $1500-2000/month
Food - no idea - $80/week?
Transport - $20 (bus or bike?)

Uhh, thats about all I can calculate from afar, how hard is getting an apartment, are there ridiculous bond and prepayment costs?

Also how is job hunting? - (degree is in finance and marketing and am currently working as one man band web developer/marketer for a company managing a sub $2m e-commerce site)

Really appreciate any responses - have been searching and some of this info is difficult to guestimate.

Thanks

- Cameron
I agree, extremely annoying. I just skipped to the last sentence in every paragraph.
Ride on Toys  from Toy Electric
Ride on Toys from Toy Electric, Leading UK's Supplier
"But how do you practice answering tough questions?"

And how do you handle answering so many of them, fired at you all at once from multiple people in the span of 10 minutes? Every description of the YC interviews says that's the hardest part and I can see why, for the same reason that grad students say that defending their phd thesis in front of a panel of professors is one of the hardest things they've ever done.
I will reply to you and Calamitous both here, since you both had some solid points and follow ups. I should also clarify as well with my 2nd question.

It's not that he's being -forced- to pay for health insuranceh. It's that the insurance provided to him through his work is outrageously expensive for him and his family, even with the company assistance. He's said that going outside of his company and acquiring insurance on his own is even more costly. So I agree with Calamitous on this in that it would be great if individuals and small business received the same tax breaks as large companies do, well that would be a great thing. This, in some form, is in the bill, correct?

As for the first question, I agree that comparing a single state's situation with a single dominant provider is very different from something on a nation wide scale. Although the issue with doctors being underpaid wasn't exactly what I driving at. I was more concerned with the provider charging exorbitant rates and the residents not have much of a choice but to pay them. As Calamitous suggested, allowing insurance companies to compete across states lines seems like a good way to level out the playing field. I'm curious if this, too, is in the bill?

As for the last item, I agree that the thought that any company would actively suppress cures for diseases is hard to imagine. However, I still haven't written the possibility off completely. If you do agree that they at least promote treatments that offer better long term revenue streams over quicker and cheaper methods, then my unfortunate state of pessimism doesn't see the withholding of cures as much more of a step. Your comments about non-profit research do offer a good argument and I would agree with you there as well. I'm curious to know if any of the premiums that will be collected via the public option will go towards these research funds or if all of that will be wrapped up in actually paying for the plan itself.
It's more than just moving. Fewer doctors will choose to practice in the state. I'm not saying that things are fine since they can just move; I'm saying that thing's aren't fine so some of them will move.
Don't they have one GUI library team?

Nope. They don't even have one string object or math library.

When I talked to a guy who worked on Mac stuff for Adobe, he said that pretty much anything that could be shared, isn't. Every flagship product is independent, and most were the result of at least one acquisition (some circular!). Pretty much every effort they've made to rationalize things into a coherent suite has just resulted in regressions, as none of the object models line up.

The engineers at Adobe know full well how shitty their flagship products are. Lightroom is what they can produce in green-field development, and it is awesome both in implementation (mostly Lua) and usability (no bloat). Apple's Aperture had a significant public first start, and was still quickly beaten with a superior product. Quite unexpected.
The most sensible package of market- and technology-friendly health reforms I've seen proposed:

http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2006/03/19/health-car...

In particular, it doesn't call things 'insurance' that are not insurance, and faces the reality that some people are going to be charity cases, and that society will (one way or another) ration the care that goes to charity cases.

The house bill hides difficult choices in mandates that turn 'insurance' into something else entirely -- a compulsory social service, run by 'companies' that have essentially become federal agencies collecting taxes. Nationalizing the industry outright would be more honest.
You'll be required to buy some health care. Not necessarily the public plan. Any plan is fine.
Nope. Fighter planes are a special case because they're both significantly cheaper and with better performance without a pilot on board. I don't see infantry replaced any time soon.
Ask HN: A quick tutorial on Web Application Testing?
Can someone give me a quick reference which I can use to develop a proper mindset to test a web application?

I dont want tools. I want to know given an app and requirement documents how should I start.
>>I'm sure this isn't the first 50-year period without war in Western Europe.

I really doubt that. (Well, as long as we limit ourselves to times when there were Homo Sapiens in Europe.)

Also, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory
The results page of http://www.whatpeoplearesayingaboutus.com

It's just a bunch of frames in tabs that allow me to see any new references to products/projects I'm involved with. I find it helpful to have product comments in my face every time I start my browser.
Writer Lewis Page points out that the Infantry are the only branch of the military who can do something other than blow stuff up from a distance. Demand for that type of operation is only going to increase.

Meanwhile the UK govt is cutting Infantry battalions and investing 10s of billions of GBP in Eurofighter and Nimrod. Because the Taliban's airforce and submarine fleet are obviously the biggest threats we face...

Note also that it's only the USAF who require trained pilots to operate UAVs... Everyone else uses automated landing systems (etc) and regular troops fly them. It's one of the featured jobs in the British Army's recruiting campaign, there's a guy with a handset similar to an Xbox controller scouting ahead of his unit as they patrol.
Ubuntu should focus its marketing on LTS versions
Dude, I'm a public-option-supporting liberal and all that but you've even lost me. Chill out.
The DLR in London is unmanned too, that ferries commuters into London's second financial district. If that's not a terrorist target I don't know what is, so steps must have been taken to secure it.
You can't run away from issues like this; they're news, they're important. If HN is gonna survive and thrive, it's gonna have to be tough enough to get through posts like this. Really, the ratio of thoughtful-to-irrational is way higher here than on even Reddit. It's all good.
perhaps bluetooth syncing then?
"Learn how hackers can bring down planes into buildings at 5"

That reminds me of the 'Soft Walls' concept for fencing aircraft to where they belong:

http://softwalls.eecs.berkeley.edu/

It's like DRM for flight routes!
Is foo == foo.deserialize(foo.serialize())
Because some random person submitted it and 7 other people upvoted it, and because it makes some articulate and useful points?

Your post is not a rude Q&A. It's just a rude question, and posed rhetorically since the author is not here.
Violence had been on the decline since the beginning of time. If it's not our children's children, then it will be their children.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_...
The problem is that 95% of people simply aren't capable of being entertainers or researchers, not in the meaningful sense of creating something genuinely original. That's not elitist, it's a fact. Those people would have to come come, more or less, from the ranks of the 5% needed to operate things.
If you don't consider being dead an acceptable option, then health insurance sounds just right for you!

Seriously, this debate only makes sense in a context where you consider health insurance to be an "optional extra". It's not. Health insurance is as basic as roads and garbage collection, fire departments and a police force. Out of the whole developed world, it's only in America that something as fundamental as health insurance is considered an optional extra.
Like the red swingline?
Taxes are taken out of money I make or spend. This is funded by fines I owe whatever I do.

Sorry, I'm not sure I see the difference. At the worst, this is an increase of 2.5% in your taxes unless you do something (buy insurance) to avoid it. They might well call it a fine but in both cases its just paying a percentage of what you make. You might not like this increase, but thats a separate point.

Let me know if I'm missing something though...

Edit: I think they are calling it a fine so that people will avoid it as much as possible in an effort to make sure people purchase health insurance.
The problem is that that ratio is not stable over time. Political posts attract people interested in debating politics, which is a much larger group than people interested in hacking and startups.

Also, even (especially?) amongst smart people, there is a large range of thoughts; from some guy here whose profile says "venture communist" (whatever the hell that is) to plenty of libertarians, and everything in between. Most of us are likely to be relatively convinced of our views, making debate mostly fruitless and quite potentially incendiary.

Also, yes, you can run away from these discussions; the site is moderated. Other sites with a narrow focus (lambda the ultimate) do just fine. It's sites that grow and grow that decay.

Also, if it's "news" and "important" then there are plenty of other sites where you can talk about it all you want. There are not many other sites for the discussion of hacking and startups though.
No, you couldn't, that's what this subthread is about. A PRNG with 32 bit entropy will only ever produce 2^32 different sequences of random numbers and so only 2^32 different shuffles.
If you want more, you must introduce more entropy, either by using a larger PRNG, or using a hardware RNG. Calling the same PRNG fro diffferent threads (don't forget your synchronization primitives!) might also work as a cheap source of entropy but will likely have either bad statistical properties or horrible performance: for it to make a real difference, every single shuffle of a deck must be interspersed with many calls to the PRNG from other threads. If calls from other threads do only happen between shuffles, all you gain from introducing shared state concurrency into your program is that the same 2^32 permutations are generated in a different order.

But, as I remarked earlier, if this is just for a game that is for fun where opponents can't cheat you or other players out of large amounts of money by predicting which permutations may or may not occurr, you may get away with whatever PRNG you have at hand and only swap is out once many players start to complain that they had this very hand one or two billon games ago.
> The U.S. pays 2x the (nationally) for health care for comparable (and usually a more poorly ranked) level of care.

The United States also has only 5% of the world's population (304M/6,700M), but produces a heck of a lot more than 5% of the world's medical innovation. Over the next 20 years, one side effect of this sort of bill might be to slow that innovation down.

> The U.S. ranks relatively poorly -- near the bottom of the industrialized countries -- on almost every measure of performance.

With an incredibly unhealthy lifestyle, it's pretty incredible how long American longevity is. A fine on obesity would probably do more to increase American health than a fine on being uninsured, but that's unlikely to happen.
But as a programmer, if you know that you have to write a parser, you should take a few minutes to google it before writing the code and see if this isn't already a solved problem. And it is, essentially; there are so many parser libraries out there.

I can even speak from experience on that. In my internship during my first year of university, I found myself wanting to write a little parser to read config files for my program. It would have been something like "double myvalue = 42\nint myotherval = 20" etc. I figured this should be a very common problem, since so many programs use this kind of configuration. Googling it let me find even better, cross-platform config libraries which use the registry on windows or config files on other platforms, and saved me from writing the parser in the first place.
"... And how do you handle answering so many of them, fired at you all at once from multiple people in the span of 10 minutes? ..."

I don't know. I'd say learn to identify the questions you can answer as best you can. This is what I mean by having some form of roleplay, verbal, improv skills. Pick the Q's you do know, pick the ones that are important to your product.
that is assuming we can't genetically engineer ever and for people who are already born not able to alter our DNA through some kind of viral infection mechanism.
>The people that buy into other platforms for "security" are misinformed

While I don't doubt what you say, isn't there something to be said about the fact that more attacks are targeted at Microsoft's platform than, say, OS X?
While Vista may be more secure, isn't there still a higher chance of getting nailed by a security flaw in Vista than OS X purely because more people are attacking the former?
This seems contrary to the purpose of the bill... it can only be properly funded if people aren't covered, but it's goal is to expand the number of people covered...

My understanding is that the more people that are insured the less money the bill needs. If you get private insurance, government money isn't needed. Obviously there is some overhead cost, etc... that means this won't out when few enough people are insured, but if we get to that point we'll need to rethink things anyway.
> ...(there are many internet libertarians here who obviously do not)...

The labels seem unnecessary here. You could've said "(there are many people here obviously do not)" - there's plenty of smart people who think this bill is going to be bad for the American federal government and American citizens.

The equivalent would be saying something like, "those internet left-wingers who think everyone should be taxed all the time" -> "internet left-wingers" is unnecessary, as is "internet libertarians". The people who oppose this are just people, not internet people, not labels.
I don't think its about when you code-freeze. I think its more because there are way too many bugs and variations of bugs and not enough people to try and solve them. Which is why all the developers ask for help in triaging and polishing bug reports.

This is especially true when its bugs related to different hardware configurations such as multi-screens with specific graphics cards and so on.
Sorry, you're right. Apologies. I think I would have removed that if I'd reread it before wandering off to fix pancakes for breakfast, as it really isn't germane to the point I was trying to make, and with which I'm sure everyone can agree: most of us have things we don't want the government to buy for us, and some of us believe the government should buy very little for us with our own money. I'm just trying to say that between "tax" and "forced to buy" there isn't a large difference, not comment on what I think of the whole thing, which I continue to believe is off topic for this site.