skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The rest of their wealth and income comes from dividends and owning companies, which are not taxed the same way.

That doesn't imply that they aren't taxed. (In the US, dividends come out of a company's post-tax profits, so they've already been taxed. Plus, there's an off-again/on-again tax on dividends paid by the recipients.)

> IIRC there was an article from Warren Buffet in which he ponders why he pays less tax than his secretary, even though he earns far more than her.

Buffet doesn't "pay less tax than his secretary". He pays taxes at a lower rate on some of his income than she pays on her wages.

Buffet is fond of advocating taxes on other people, using himself as an example even though he'll never pay the tax in question. For example, he pushes the estate tax, never mentioning that his estate is set up so it won't pay a dime. He just happens to own companies that make a lot of money off of people who will owe estate taxes.

Even if that weren't true, using Buffet as an example is a bad idea. He has the money to get around almost every tax law. Laws supposedly aimed at him end up hitting other people.

It's also dishonest - politicians talk about going after the "super rich", but they end up passing laws that hit folks a couple of rungs down. This is understandable, there's more total money a couple of rungs down and those folks don't have the political pull to do anything about it, but ....

Note that the super-rich get to decide where they'll be taxed. Buffet can take his income elsewhere. If he does, his US secretary loses her job.
Ol' Warren is perfectly free to sack his tax accountant and write a cheque for whatever he feels he owes to Uncle Sam.

Weirdly, he has not done so.
Ask HN: How big a security risk are browser extensions?
One of the more powerful features of modern day browsers is the ability for software developers to write browser extensions to enhance, modify and tweak the pages visited by the user. As more of our personal, financial, and private lives move onto the browser, aren't we potentially exposing ourselves to a massive privacy and security holes created by the installation of a browser extension that is or becomes malicious in nature?

I realize the source code of these extensions is extractable and readable if the author has not made attempts to obfuscate the behavior. But the effectiveness of this type of review is compromised by the browser encouraging users to keep their extensions up to date. While version 1.0 of an extension may be innocuous, a users browser may suggest an upgrade to version 1.1 which could contain malicious code which could be used to scrape information from the screen of the compromised browser. If a developer's computer was compromised, a tampered-with update to a trusted extension could be deployed to a large user-base. Furthermore, a benign-looking extension could download code that it executes that could be used to compromise a user's private information.

As both a user and developer of browser extensions, is the developer's reputation the only thing in place to provide assurances to their users that their browsing activity will be secure? Are there any mechanisms in place to help protect users from a compromised browser extension? Are there any best-practices to develop extensions in a manner that provides users with the assurance that the code they install and update is benign in nature?
tl;dr? Author confuses source code with revenue. Welcome to the less-than-free world.
Significant: hundreds of posts on this topic. Obviously the social situation is vitally important. Corporate drones will never get it, so one solution is to never hire them. Look at W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc, they do (used to do?) it right.
The unexpected success of Apple's App Store (part 1)
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Backupify drops paywall; backs up your data from Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail
It also seems that the US's share of top companies is in decline with non-US countries' shares nearly doubling in that timeframe.

I find it interesting to note how petroleum and financial companies now seems to be increasingly dominant. You could almost get the impression that the US has outsourced absolutely everything except harvesting oil and shoveling money around.

Although I'm sure the picture is a little bit more nuanced than that (as you can see the same thing for other countries too) it does show an interesting trend and makes you wonder how this may turn out in the long run.
Whenever co-founders bust up, there is inevitable trauma to the business of the startup no matter what mechanism is in place to assure that one particular founder (or a faction) has the final say. In this sense (as recognized in this post), it is the people who matter more than any particular mechanism.

Having represented countless founders over many years, I have seen all sorts of startups succeed even though they lacked a mechanism for ultimately determining control and relied instead on shared governance. This is by far the norm and not the exception and simply signifies that most people manage to get along and tend to resolve their issues most of the time when it matters even though they theoretically could get ensnared in deadlocks.

I have also seen the classic bust-ups and fights over control, and these truly are a mess - hence the advice in this post to put a control mechanism in place if possible can prove helpful, at least if co-founders are willing to cede final authority to one among their group. The bottom line in this respect, though, is that most founding groups are not willing to cede such authority in this manner - I think this has less to do with founders failing to think the issues through than it has to do with basic human psychology. It simply is not easy for those starting a venture on comparatively equal footing to elevate the status of one above the others. In turn, in cases where it is obvious that there is one dominant founder, this normally is reflected in that founder's getting a disproportionate share of the equity and unilaterally controlling the company in that manner.

That said, this is a thoughtful post that will help founders to think through and deal with this issue.

By the way, a common method used by a still small minority of founders to give control to some over others is the Class A/Class B common stock approach (popularized by Google) by which all common shareholders have identical rights except that the B holders get a 10x voting advantage for their shares (or any similar variation on this theme).
Government Flag
We are a flooring store located in Tempe, AZ United States of America, that handles carpet, area rugs, wood flooring, laminate flooring, vinyl flooring
Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha Download Now Available
I've got a fairly complete one: http://github.com/Kilian/ico

It uses Raphael and Prototype, and has some interesting options that most other libraries don't have (such as stacked area charts)
Usually when you're going to do a price hike like this you want to have some other big news to offset the fact that if readers read between the lines they realize they are paying ridiculously more today than yesterday for your service. The fact that they're wrapping it into this "free" banner just makes it even more disingenuous.

Better would have been "80legs is changing our pricing structure. But, as a gift to everyone who has been using our original (albeit short-sighted) pricing structure, anyone on the old pricing structure will continue to be able to use it until Q1 2011." or something. Along with a feature release, this would have avoided the impending blowback once people understand what's really changed.
PCMAG.com covers 'HP Computers Racist' video, includes HP response
برنامج يفتح الكمبيوتر بدعاء مسموع ومكتوب للرسول صلى الله عليه وسلم
This is why Ireland has always voted against EU expansion. It doesn't want to see all the money go to Eastern Europe.

It's funny, driving around Western Ireland, say Dingle, there are immaculate roads with EU flags on the signposts, then the money runs out and it's abruptly back to the crumbling ashphalt there was before (which is normal considering how sparsely populated and lightly traficked the area is... It just doesn't make economic sense to plough a lot of money into the roads there).
Very truthful. Stop following what everyone does and create your own plan. Besides, only you really know when you do your best, and you don't have to audit 24 hours of your day.

Unearned guilt is a bad thing.
Having tried Haiku a few weeks ago, I will say it has a lot of potential. The fact that is has a HIG (human interface guidelines) means it could actually go beyond a hobby OS. I'd like to see some more developers get behind this and see where it goes.
Perhaps the hardest language studied by many
Anglophones is Latin.

When learning latin I was surprised at how similar the genative case is in Latin and English. It would be like making an assumption about a platform by using your knowledge of a separate and familiar platform, and then using inference, and getting it right first time - eerie.

The pronounciation in latin is also easy, and the spelling, and the vocab has similiarities that helps with learning.

I suspect part of what makes Latin more difficult to learn than some indo-European languages is that it's very disconnected from practical considerations. (see http://www.frcoulter.com/latin/foster/foster6.html) The ability to learn like that is a practical skill in its own right though.
An interesting thing to think about even though the basic reaction is "wait, no, that's their industry secret/revenue basis/whatever". Google is so dominant right now that maybe it's going to get to the point where, in the interests of the open web, they get pressured and lobbied to release their secret sauce; after all, as swombat points out, it's not just the algorithm by a long chalk.

It's especially interesting if you consider the origins of PageRank in academia, freely published and peer-reviewed, and still not that well understood by laypeople; would the open-sourced magic of Google even be understandable by that many folk? Those that do understand it could make a fortune as consultants; at the moment, shady SEO snake-oil salesmen are so prevalent and 99% of their advice is outdated or plain wrong, something that definitively calls them out on it could be helpful.
I would love if they open-sourced their infrastructure tools such as GFS, BigTable and Map-Reduce tools. Most of these tools are built using open-source technology such as Linux.
It's not just prom teaching CS1, it's also from teaching algorithms and OS and every other course I've taught. A willingness and ability to code fast and fail fast is universally applicable and useful.
I don't get it, is the author talking about PageRank? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
What more does he want?
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The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind 'Avatar'
Google is a business. Their job, legally defined, is to create value (aka profit) for its shareholders. A more open web has helped Google, but opening up its search algorithms, a cornerstone to Google's growth, is just ludicrous and bad business.

Compared to a lot of other companies (Apple, Microsoft, nearly every other tech giant), they are an open company. It's already great that they realize there's value in an Open-source browser, and open-source OS, and multiple open platforms.
The point is that the movie could have been so much more. The visuals are incredible, I think the best ever done so far, that's what makes it all the more unfortunate that the story was weak. With a strong plot, and the visuals this movie could have been over the top, goosebumps incredible. Instead I went out of the movie theater sad that all this incredible artistry was wasted and what a shame that was.

I think Cameron lost it. The story was a nothing, and there were a few lines in there so bad, you don't even often see their equal on terrible sitcom TV. They were cheesy video game cut scene bad, only the godhead visual prevented me from wincing.

I'd still recommend for folks to see this movie, it is incredible, but what a shame...
Obviously I skimmed the article far too quickly. Here's the relevant bit:

Compare the numbers of gifts for the two banners:

#18: 832 gifts, $15073.47 total
#22: 301 gifts, $9572.83 total

Not close right? But look at the average gift sizes:

#18: $15.84 for Paypal, $21.87 for credit card
#22: $27.92 for Paypal, $36.58 for credit card

So I was totally wrong in saying that #18 did better overall.
> My opinion is that no matter what you call the oligarchy of corporate wealth and public influence that runs the United States, you can't call it fair. The playing field is tilted toward those with power to tilt the playing field.

Ignoring the bit about "fair", that's true, but you don't understand what it means, especially as it relates to "fair".

> So the moral thing to do is to tilt it back.

If it was possible to tilt it back, it wouldn't be tilted. (Reread the first paragraph quoted.)

If you insist on giving govt power, that power will favor those who are the best equipped at tilting govt power to their benefit.

You can't keep them from tilting things in their direction - you can only affect whether there's anything to tilt in their direction.

If you're satisfied with crumbs, keep shoveling power at govt, but stop complaining that others are getting a full meal. If you want to stop them from getting a full meal, you've got to get govt out of the food biz. Yes, you'll lose your crumbs, so you get to make a choice.
Wait - preserve local edits? That sounds bad.

It is a handy tool for dealing with versioning and rollback. But i'd hate to be the guy who deploys a hot fix and suddenly rpm is out of locker entries.
Link does not work for me.
"register with Apple, get more benefits"

They are just better at making their users pay for stuff. And it is not only benefits. I don't remember exactly what it was anymore, but my feeling really was that I had to give in and register my Mac. Usually I never do that.

However, by no means do I want to defend Norton. They are not even worth discussing, they should just be purged from the earth.
http://www.briansolis.com/2009/12/ning-proves-that-there%E2%...
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/ easily brings down this bogus claim. I honestly don't think much would change even if they did open-source their PageRank algorithm because the people willing and able enough to exploit it already do, and regardless of how much their PageRank increases Google will send your domain deep into an internet abyss and out of their index.
You are flying in the face of the "real time web" with this one.
Their job, legally defined, is to create value (aka profit) for its shareholders.

This is a meme I see a lot, but never with any evidence. That the board has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders I can understand. That it would have a legal obligation to create value, well, I think that would be hard to define, and I have never seen any evidence for the existence of this obligation.
Truth be told, not many. From my readings the most popular tax dodge among the truly rich was the flying nun exemption - donate more than your total income to charity and you owed no taxes.

How could this be a win over high taxes? Simple. You would donate an asset that had appreciated for the full value of the asset, which was less than the purchase price. As long as you had a supply of rapidly appreciating assets, your effective tax rate was much lower.

The most popular kind of asset to donate for this purpose was art. The most popular place to donate it was to foundations run by the rich families in question. And appreciation was easy to guarantee when everyone else was following the same strategy.

So the idea is buy 5 Monets for $1 million. A couple of years later donate a million to the family run foundation, the foundation uses that million and buys one Monet from you. You then donate 4 more Monets at the new found valuation of $1 million each. For $2 million in expenses you have now canceled out $5 million in income.

The most lasting legacies of this tax loophole are insanely high art prices and public museums full of extremely expensive art.
All the Dells I recently had came with proper OS installation disks that did not come with other crap. Possibly you would have to check "give me the CD" when ordering the PC, though.

I also so far had no problem installing said OS on other PCs, but mileages may vary (so many different versions of Windows floating around).
Is it? I just downloaded this alpha and ran SunSpider. Chrome 4.0.266.0 got 506.8ms +/- 6.6%, Opera got 763.4ms +/- 4.4%.
So does Google Chrome include the Google Spybar? Because there would be your answer... In any case it seems likely that Google paid for Chrome on Vaio.
Well put. Almost any good idea taken to its extreme is a bad idea.
May I suggest taking a look at Parsely? Its the syntax they use on www.parselets.com. The documentation for implementing it in your own apps is a little sparse, but the data format is awesome. Here's one that describes scraping HN:

http://parselets.com/parselets/yc/14

Might not be a fit for your project, but in terms of describing parsing instructions to a crawler its the best format I've ever seen.
I've had good experiences with Dell, but it might depend on the category you buy from. I've only bought from business selection so far. Also you might have to uncheck some things in the order dialog.
Darn. I can't edit the link. I swear it worked in rehearsal.
> You pay for kids your kids go to school with, and you have a choice of paying in private school tuition or in mortgage payments and property tax.

Actually, you almost never have a choice in the US. You "get to" pay property tax whether or not you have kids. In most cases, tuition for private school is completely out of pocket, which means that you're paying for a public school that your kids aren't in AND the private school.
"if" or maybe "="? What is faster in python?
State Academia here - No free coffee. We sorta have a informal 'coffee club' in our office. You bring in a round of homebrew and make it when there isn't any in the pot. You also hate on the people who make weak coffee.
I think you're missing the point, the article is pretty much a direct response to:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html
(submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1008908)

In it a Google open source zealot rants wildly about openess being ultimate, apart from search algorithms which should be closed. It also fails to mention all the times open has failed (communism being one of the more spectacular failures of open).

A cynic might surmise what they actually mean is content should be open so they can profit from their closed search algorithm.
"It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained."

I'm not a systems admin, but I presume this is because you can write a for loop that counts through your machines and does something to each, right?

In that case, couldn't you just have nested arrays?

machines = ['mailservers'=>['Earth'=>'some IP', 'Mars'=>'some IP'],'devservers'=>['Dopey'=>'some IP', 'Sneezy'=>'some IP']] ...etc.

Now everyone can connect to a machine with a memorable name, AND you can loop through all the dbservers if you need to, AND anyone who doesn't understand the system can look in one place to grok it.

What's the problem?
The article missed the most important point, which is mental flow. If you are engaged in anything complex then a certain amount of your job can only be done when you have established a good mental flow. Tracking your time closely will keep you from ever entering mental flow, and therefore blocks productivity.

Put into pg language, detailed time tracking only works for people on a manager's schedule, and not those who are makers. See http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html for an explanation of that.
> Consider the power of the federal government to bail out those "too big to fail", and that bubble seems pretty unlikely to pop.

Every bubble pops. Trying to keep a bubble from popping makes the eventual pop significantly worse.
I've seen it now in both 3D and 2D. You lose some of the wow factor of the visuals in 2D, but it's still beautifully rendered either way.

I also found that the 2D seemed to have more color depth than the 3D, but that might just have been my eyes trying to adjust to the 3D glasses.
Obama picks Schmidt as cyber-security chief
In the context of a publicly traded company this is the definition of fiduciary. The company has sold stock to investors with the sole purpose of increasing the value of the stock. Therefore, it is up to the board to make decisions that reflect this duty.

You can argue about the timeline (short versus long-term growth), but you can't say that there isn't a legal obligation to attempt to increase value.
Kawasaki interview: The man who made apple cool
EASTL -- Electronic Arts Standard Template Library
> communism being one of the more spectacular failures of open

Wait, what? Communism is a spectacular failure of centralized planning over the entire economy. It has nothing to do with open or closed in principle, and in every implementation it has been aggressively closed in terms of information flows and decision making.
The algorithm used by Google today is light-years away from that described in the PageRank paper. It uses a form of PageRank, but it also uses many other parameters.
A linguist once told me that Icelandic was the hardest. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
Additionally it may be the case that a large part of the value of the algorithm is created from its secrecy. If the algorithm was open it would be trivial to create sites with artificially high rankings which would reduce the value of the search results.
How on earth was communism an example of "open"?
I thought open source was about software, not about logic (business or otherwise) - am I missing something here?
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Google rankings are determined by much more than PageRank.
The stated goal isn't to help other search engines; it's to get the community to help Google improve, for the good of all its users.

The theory goes: if you let more people look at the algorithm, they can suggest better answers than Google alone, to thwart the spammers who are gaming the system either way.

But I suspect the real goal has more to do with the deep suspicion that Google can or does do a significant bit of hand-tweaking. And these people want to force the algorithm into the open to either end or curtail that.
This blog scrapes HN comments and reposts them on the blog without permission.

In the process it serializes the threading and so it's going to destroy the threaded nature of these reposted conversations. In this way it's rebranding the information served here, misrepresenting the attention commenters here give the post, and confusing the outside reader.

I know there's an attempt to smooth these difficulties with the "This comment was originally posted on [[Hacker News]]" line but that leaves me still confused as to the origin and meaning of the comment quoted. I interpret that to mean, ridiculously, that commenters at HN gave their permission explicitly to repost comments on Feint. Actually, it even appears to me that they personally moved it.

This is, of course, very similar to the the controversy AllThingsDigital stirred up a little while ago (http://waxy.org/2009/04/all_things_digital_and_transparency_...) but I don't think Feint is really making a large improvement over that situation.
Things get interesting when one tells a truth. Are we saying he lied through omission? Or is the truth actually ambiguous?
chrome is taking the good path
but its hard to stop some of the opera habits, including F4, F12, "/", past&go, direct search in Wikipedia/ebay