skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You could streamline the US tax code but you'd eventually end up at the same point today. The tax code is written to encourage one type of behavior and penalize another. A normal working class guy would probably love a simplified tax code. But as soon as he starts making investments, buying property, saving for retirement, "going green" then he probably also wants adjustments for these activities.

Everyone wants to help the underclass but no one wants to pay more taxes to do it. So the government has to get creative about getting that money. Taking out loans, selling bonds, and getting money through sales tax, corporate tax, tourist tax, utilities taxes.

The mentality is insane, we want simpler taxes for everyone, but at an individual level we want exemptions for ourselves.

This is the last year I'm filing taxes for myself. Through a pay rise, a new mortgage and a renovation my last tax bill was shot. I was able to get help through a friend so that I paid about the same amount as last year but I know, going forward, it's going to require a professional to keep me from getting screwed.
Correct, the problem here is that even though most of the blogs are technology blogs it is very hard to categorize the majority of them as something specific. For instance, Bruce Schneier blogs about security, most of the time, so all articles that could be tagged like that are now under hacking,security.

But he also has lots of stuff that is not so easy to categorize, so that ended up depending on the ease with which the title let itself be identified either under 'technology' or, in the worst case under 'blogs'.

A similar problem appears with the 'mainstream' media websites, and it was solved in the same way with the top level category as a catch-all after other matches were ruled out.
Thanks for the link. I also went out and found this one

http://www.gladinet.com/

which offers mountings for google docs, picasa and a bunch of others...
Another Solo Founder Rap
GnuCash.

It has modules for vendors (so you can track how much you owe them) and clients (how much they owe you), and employees (including expenses).
Discontinuing signups = first step in migrating to paid-only.

If they're admitting they'll be discontinuing signups now, then paid-only service is, at most, 6-12 months away.
Right, google's mantra is "do no evil" which is worlds different than "do good".
Download sherlock holmes movie
I wanted to watch an action, thriller, crime drama , so I opt to download Sherlock Holmes movie last week, it was amazing movie on investigating storyline
Download avatar movie
Avatar movie was the most super hit movie of 2009 and which is still in box office and earned most of the revenue but I made download avatar movie as I don't like moving to theaters
One was a misspelling, as you can see from the graphs it was used only once, which is why it doesn't show up in the graphs.
Causal Speculation: A Meditation on Theory [about causality]
People are bringing flowers to the Google building:

http://imgur.com/5xJmy.jpg

http://img.gd/Dbn/full
Two similar apps that I used before for Windows are Dark Room and Q10:

http://they.misled.us/dark-room
http://www.baara.com/q10

Dark Room is a clone of writeroom, while Q10 has a few more features while still keeping minimalism.

Anyone has experience with Ommwriter? It looks like the sound effects would get old quick.
Why did this get downvoted? I didn't say anything incendiary and I don't think my statement was factually incorrect. The truth is, the Chinese government doesn't stand to lose much at all by blocking Google. Politics trumps business here - and even if it didn't, all blocking Google does is help promote local Chinese competitors, which is something the gov't likes to do anyway.
Agreed, it seems like most of the gems I'm finding are languishing 3 pages in on the new submissions with just a couple of points.
Ditto New Zealand.

A decade or so ago they decided to thoroughly sort out the tax law. Most small businesses are able to fill out their own tax (I did for years). It's about a page of information - all nicely coloured & well explained. Basically idiot proof (yes yes, I know).

Private individuals? Now things are at a point where you don't even NEED to file a tax return. Income tax is taken by your company & filed with the IRD, so unless you have extenuating circumstances, they know pretty much exactly how much you owe/are owed.

It's an absolute dream filing there, compared to anywhere else I've been.

Oh, & if you have any questions about any part of the law? They have helpful, clear pamphlets that outline all the details you need. Available over the web too. It's very cool.
I definitely sense fraud here. Observe the distribution of words in comments from the newly created accounts. "cool", "i like the way" and other patterns can be seen.

I'd like to give them a benefit of doubt but if they did this intentionally, too bad!
Leaflet printings
Leaflet printing is quite cheap and can be done quickly and easily.
Facebook backs open source Apache Foundation
tl;dr :-)

But how should this solve the conflict of encryption/privacy vs caching?
You're asking them to predict a "chill" when in fact measurements show that there isn't one.

Look at the large image at the top of the article. The parts in blue and purple (which just so happen to be where you probably live) are colder than normal, the green through red bits (mostly ocean but also Greenland) are warmer than usual.

This is just a more extreme version of the usual brain dead "If there's global warming, why is it snowing?" nonsense you get all the time. Emphasis on Global warming.

They also specifically say that this behaviour hasn't been shown to be connected to climate change which annuls your accusation that they'll claim any weather, cold or hot, as support for their hypothesis.
When did "IE does it" become indicative of standard, expected behaviour? Just askin'.
What happens to "Mr Small Chinese Exporter" is never a concern for such a government like the Chinese one ...
Thanks for the insight, it's really helpful.

I think I'll probably keep this as a learning exercise, then.

Thanks!
I believe the motto is "Don't be evil." I keep seeing "Do no evil" in places, including on large news sites, which is odd, because it completely lacks the sense of humor of "Don't be evil."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_be_evil
Agreed. I don't think we want to resort to hacking the system to keep good submissions in view (notwithstanding the name of this site).
Any large company who does a seemingly good act is almost always motivated by how it will enhance the business to do it.

Google stopping censorship will make most people think "Google really are a nice caring company" which will make them want to use them instead of "evil" Microsoft etc.

People who don't understand this either don't really understand big business or have never been around a large company before.
The Unlicense: A License for No License
It's going to get better once they start selling it outside of the US.

From the outside it also looks like they are under a lot of negative press -- which seems a bit dubious and probably a sign of being some kind of threat to either operators or cell phone competitors.
I have some idea of what I am talking about, because I do work for a large online forum, where the legal department has made it very clear that we do not need to honour requests by users to have their accounts deleted. We keep the right to display their contributions, because they have granted the forum copyright on those contributions. Not an exclusive copyright, mind you. We only have to anonimize their accounts and contents.

There is an inverse to the disease described in that article: the idea that someone with a lack of expert knowledge cannot possible say things that are correct, just because you disagree with him.

The following:

[something] cannot override statutory rights.

is a blanket statement, to which anyone can find counterexamples. You're just not trying, because you are too focussed on your original point.

In general, I know jack about the practice of law and I know it. However I know about this specific instance, because lawyers told me how it works, and I actually do know a bit about theory of law. I'm trying to explain to you how this specific practical fact of law could come about, based on theory of law. Specifically, the fact that laws fall short, for instance because of ambiguity and because of conflicts with other laws. Even the basest constitutional rights give rise to such conflicts, which is why judges are needed to interpret laws. Quite a few laws are around, specifically to stop gaps in other laws. Example: the first sale doctrine.

As an example of an obvious shortcoming: you are allowed to go wherever you want in a public place. The law specifies no limitation on that. However, there certainly is one very certain limitation: you cannot occupy the exact same space someone else is already occupying and you cannot get him to move by claiming your constitutional right to occupy that bit of space. It would be silly to actually codify such limitations in the laws, because their number cannot be exhausted. However, it is a very clear limitation on one of your fundamental rights. This is not my intelligence speaking: this is my knowledge of fundamental problems in philosophical theories of law and their very practical implications.
This article feels a bit scattered... capitalising on a recent news item? Nail in the coffin: "loosing market share"...
What causes the crashes? It sounds like a rather bizarre system!
Again, it depends on the value you attribute to a news.YC comment, and a reddit "identity". I agree with and understand the immorality of plagiarism, I'm just saying it only applies to work one puts more than a couple of minutes of effort into.
9 Hours later, after parting with this gem:

> "As a matter of fact, the reason I cross-posted is that I don't think the comment in question deserved the top spot, and would frankly be ashamed if such writing/logic were ever seriously attributed to me."

It's a new low for HN from what I've seen to date.
Has anyone tried boycotting this area of Texas? It would be amusing for PR purposes alone. Would they be able to run their courts without access to Microsoft products?
from what I can tell by observing HN the server goes down several times an hour and has a script wrapped around it to keep it up

Very interesting. That sounds a little like an equivalent of MaxRequestsPerChild, which makes sense given it's a custom webserver, rather than Apache. How do you synch up what you're seeing with this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048348

Why doesn't the leaderboard do this a couple of times an hour?
Does anyone know of a customer service/support story where Google ends up being shown in a good light? I've heard this so many times with AdSense, AdWords, and Google account users that simply got disabled without any recourse or a chance to talk with someone about anything.

And now Google wants to do a consumer-focused play by selling directly to the end users and surprise, their lack of customer service mentality is not helping them.
Good or Bad, right or wrong, it is possible that this will have a psychological impact on other multi-national corporations, in which they will realize that they don't have to deal with China on China's terms.

I have a different take on the whole China thing and I believe that until the Chinese people bring about change that China has the right as a sovereign nation, to set any rules they want and that if American businesses don't like it then they should leave.

This is a huge problem with America, our business men "explore new markets" in some tin pot dictators land and that tin pot dictator, as usual, does something that big Amari-corp does not like and the we send in the cavalry. When in reality the corporation should have packed up and went home and told Mr. Tin Pot that they will be back when he can act appropriate.

No matter what the motive was, I commend Google for not lobbying and wasting American tax dollars to protect their business interest in a foreign land and for realizing that if the terms are not agreeable, the proper thing to do is leave the market no try to impose you will via governmental and military influence.

I hope that it will sever as an example to other businesses that they can leave a market if the terms are not agreeable. If enough do this, then it will surely bring about reform.
I think it has to do in part with requesting pages that cause large datasets to be accessed, in particular requests for the posting history of say edw519, nickb or other top posters seem to have a (very) bad effect on the server.

Some of this has been fixed but it still happens plenty of times.

Maybe PG can shed some light on the exact cause of this, I'm just making guesses based on my interaction with the service.
I guess they put this off mainly because of the performance hit. I found the following quote regarding HTTP vs HTTPS performance on SO:

One point that has been brought up by several others is that SSL handshaking is the major cost of HTTPS. That is correct, which is why "typical session length" and "caching behavior of clients" are important.

Many, very short sessions means that handshaking time will overwhelm any other performance factors. Longer sessions will mean the handshaking cost will be incurred at the start of the session, but subsequent requests will have relatively low overhead.

SO Ref: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/149274/http-vs-https-perf...

I wonder which they view as more significant, gmail latency or increased server load?
You are not the best at programming. Live with it - Strictly speaking this is only true for N-1 of the population...
That's a good question, I don't know.

The symptom is invariably the same, the connection is refused for a bit and then the server is back up again as if nothing happened.

The times that it is down vary from just a few seconds to 10's of seconds, but rarely more than that.

It would be nice to know what is going on there, it certainly doesn't look very good.

Also HN can be terribly slow at times, much slower than would make sense given the number of people visiting it on a daily basis.

To see if that bug still exists I just tried it by requesting vaksels posting history and sure enough the connection timed out and the server was unreachable for a short while, then came back up.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vaksel

Does it work for you?

It's a pretty weird bug.
Maybe modify the CSS / look of etherpad so you get a collaborative writeroom?
...actually going to war is NEVER good."

I wonder if African-American slaves would agree. Or West Europeans, especially those in concentration camps. Or South Koreans.
And I don't think it was a mere once-off typo: "The only person who might loose..."
Two things have happened in the last ten years that made tax filing harder for a large number of Americans. One was closing TeleTax. This telephone-based system was effective and had good customer satisfaction. The IRS closed it and forced people to use an e-file provider. I think they did it because of the ideological privatization thing.

The other thing was the change in the NYS tax system to get rid of the IT-100 form. This form was like writing in your address and attaching your W2, and then the NYSDTF would calculate your tax and send you a bill. This was replaced with the harder-to-fill-out IT-150.

So, tax filing for most Americans, in the age of the internet, has only gotten harder. It's retarded.
They are our representatives. We (assuming you are also a voting US citizen) voted them in. Are we not equally complicit?
The idea of having a browser slander websites that don't use some privacy icon is an evil one.

The idea of having a browser report sites as "safe" just because they have a privacy policy is even more evil. What does it mean for a site to have a "good" privacy policy if it's hosted in a country where it's easy to get a warrant? Should Firefox stigmatize every site hosted in China? What's the meaning of a privacy policy for sites that don't use https? What's the meaning of a privacy policy for sites that are hackable?

With that aside, anything that replaces the need to read gobs of legalese is a good thing. So put those things in the privacy policy, if you want to be friendly. I'd love to live in a society where legalese is broken into a short syntax of well-understood subroutines, where people simply walk away from complex contracts.

But, regarding the ideas of having browsers do things: having a browser tell the user their personal information is safe in the hands of some company's server is the wrong attitude to encourage and is also generally factually wrong.

Another problem with this idea is that, if it worked, it would stifle innovation online. What if there's a good reason to share a user's personal information? What if things like OpenID (or some other thing we haven't thought of yet) go against the technicalities of some standard privacy policy axis?
The Origins of APL - 1974 (Video)
Found it at:

A Programming Language (APL/J/K – The Movie)
http://www.aprogramminglanguage.com/

APL the movie seems like a pretty fantastic project, I wish it the best of luck!
Find-a-Haitian: open, crowd-sourced missing persons search
Some Actual Larrabee Information
"If he forgot to initial a box". Perhaps you remember Zoë Baird? She didn't pay the "nanny tax" on an illegal alien, and that controversy prevented her from getting to be the attorney general.

That's more than a box, yes, but then the followup nominee, Kimba Wood, DID pay the nanny tax, and herself broke no laws, but had hired another illegal alien. The echo from the previous nominee's case, plus her 5 days of training as a Playboy bunny while a student, prevented her from being attorney general, giving us Janet Reno.

It's really hard to say which things will cause problems.

As for the rest - absolutely agree.
Yes, purely out of curiousity I'd be interested in what's happening behind the scenes. Is memory being leaked? Is garbage collection (assuming it's used) not good enough? Is it a deliberate design choice for HN?
How we develop KashFlow and what happens to your suggestions
Should evolutionary theory evolve?
cover story from the Jan 2010 issue of The Scientist discussing possible amendments (amongst others?) to be factored into a refresh of the Modern Synthesis that was set out in the 40s - namely Evolvability (looking at capacitators/potentiators of evolution), Facilitated Variation (heritable changes that stem from complex forces and factors during development) and Multilevel Inheritance (basically epigenetics)
That seems to me to be a pretty rough guess. They took some apps and estimated penetration based on the new registrations of those apps.

That's not exactly hard data, the title suggests it is.
> But I figure I don't need the internet drama, and I already find amusing ways to exercise my philosophy degree.

"If you exist, would you like fries with that?"

I'm sorry... I couldn't resist though :-)
in summary, this is the cover story from the Jan 2010 issue of The Scientist discussing possible amendments (amongst others?) to put into a refresh of the Modern Synthesis that was set out in the 40s - namely:
* Evolvability (looking at capacitators/potentiators of evolution),
* Facilitated Variation (heritable changes that stem from complex forces and factors during development) and
* Multilevel Inheritance (basically epigenetics)
Try to retrieve the posting histories of the top 10 of the leaderboard, see if they all come up for you without weirdness happening.

I can't get it to work, some will work, some will give blank pages and sometimes the server seems to restart.

Would be nice to see what someone else gets.
This has to be due to the fact that Google didn't do/have any sort of marketing. Every other phone had a carrier behind it as well. It's an apples to oranges comparison! The iPhone 3GS had two previous iPhones to pave it's way, the Droid had all kinds of viral marketing going for it from Verizon, the MyTouch had a lot of marketing from T-Mobile with stars like Whoopie Goldberg and Chevy Chase. The only thing that Google had behind it was geeks like us who read HN and blogs like Engadget.
Google China hack hit 33 other companies, says researcher
Google's leadership is taking a strong stance against China. A stronger one than governments are willing to take[1]. If they're prioritizing ethics over the profits of the company, they're just an anomaly. The responsible parties could be fired for stating so, since the stockholders employ them to prioritize the profits of the company over all other non-legal concerns.

If they're doing it because it increases their profits, then it is bigger news: it means "Don't be evil" works. The market is more closely aligned with "bettering the world" than most people believe. Corporations have always seemed less ethical than governments in the past, so it's a very exciting possibility.

The author argues that Google's actions in China were not motivated by ethics. Unlike the author, I think that is an exciting thought.

[1] At least in the last 20 years or so.
I agree. From the article:

> Flurry drew up the estimate based on new handsets appearing in its data over the launch period allowing it to give quite an accurate prediction.

Given that they have nothing to validate their numbers against, how can they claim that they're 'quite .. accurate'?!
Could the poor English have anything to do with English being a second language for the writer?

I think you'll need to find better criticism.
[...] so it's not clear exactly what Amazon is doing.

Shouldn't Amazon be providing customers with reports to this effect? It can't be that difficult to say that within each 10-minute interval i you got X_i% of a CPU, received N_i packets, etc.

This is the sort of data Amazon should collect themselves to analyze the systems within the cloud, so the customer never (OK, rarely) sees a problem.
It only means no referer if you change from one to the other. Different hosts using https pass referer normally.
english speakers should switch to a systematic phonetic spelling scheme if this minutia bothers them.
And that is why I don't want to have mobile internet.

Internet usage doesn't have a cap on it - it is either pay a flat fee for free usage (even if my usage is 100% every single day) or the $0.10/GB that appspot charges.
Starting a real bank is hard, lots of solvency requirements and lots of very large lawyer fees in your future.

It might be more feasible to start a credit union:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_union
> They said the cyber attacks have exposed Google's inability to protect its users' privacy

This can always backfire on them ... once groups like those at 4chan get working on Baidu :) And I'd be willing to bet that Google has a much more reliable security. Not to mention that this statement is kind of hypocritical ... since when are they concerned about privacy?

Also ... these PR spins won't work for them internationally ... since communism has a negative image, and this is one of the factors considered when extending a business to China.

So they have a more relaxed communism, allowing privately owned companies to thrive ... but look, Google announced they were hurt by the Chinese government, and apparently they weren't the only ones. Whom would you be more inclined to believe?

And Google is also good at PR :)
In western democracies governments come and go and do not generally have a strong relationship with the population! I believe that this is different in the PRC where most of the population will ultimately put party and country first. Google is not taking on a temporary western style government it is effectively taking on most of the country! - who will no doubt largely side with the government line.
Is it really true that pulling out of China will result in Google getting hacked less (i.e. protect their IP)? If the attack really originated in the gov't, it seems like the gov't wouldn't have any trouble getting past any filtering in order to gain access to Google.