skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing the stats don't show, and I'm quite curious about, are those who are wealthy but seek greater (or even continue to seek) opportunities. The bulk of taxes don't tax wealth - they tax income (and gains on wealth like capital gains, interest and dividends get treated differently depending on where you go). Perversely, the rich have the luxury then to be subsidized for certain parameters because they don't need to pay for what they see as the benefits of living in that given place.

For this reason, you can get some remarkable statements like the year that Warren Buffett said something to the effect that there is something wrong with a system when his secretary gets taxed as a percent more than he does. Of course, we later learned this was somewhat disingenuous given most of his income wasn't personal income at all but dividends (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/tax/article1996735.ec...).

This being said, how is your comment relevant to the startup visa? The idea as I understand it would be to attract those without money but who need it from VC's - and as you say, the US is often the destination of choice for those like that. The point being to attract great entrepreneurs from countries that don't welcome them - at least a number of countries being a case in point: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4095&... - "In one 2005 poll, just 36 percent of French citizens said they supported the free-enterprise system, the only one of 22 countries polled that showed minority support for this cornerstone of global commerce. In Germany, meanwhile, support for socialist ideals is running at all-time highs—47 percent in 2007 versus 36 percent in 1991."
Shatrunjaya who guide their soul's advancement
It already only costs $4000 for a full genome. (Complete Genomics)
I didn't mean .NET in general, I just meant .NET support for ports of existing open source languages like IronPython and IronRuby.

Admittedly, I don't really dabble with the .NET ecosystem much, but when I had to use SQL Server Reporting Services for a work project and we had to create a custom data source, we had to write the component in C#, it didn't support other .NET languages (I think it also supported VB.NET, but yeah, no thanks). That would have been a logical place to allow for extending their code with a language that I was more comfortable with.

There's also the ignored opportunity to provide better scripting in their Office offerings. While Resolver One is a really cool idea (spreadsheet built and scripted in IronPython), what I would REALLY love is to be able to call IronPython from Excel, but it's probably not gonna happen.
another half of the story which is simply lack of education in listeners.

A lot of people just don't have the wherewithal to appreciate melodic music. Melody just escapes them. They want chords and riffs to wash over them while moving with a strong beat. The kind of lyric dance implied by other musical forms escapes them, and they have no hope of appreciating anything that wasn't once based on some kind of dance.

What really frightens me, though, are all these young people killing their fine cochlear structures with headphones. The wispy nuances of acoustic music don't even exist for them. They don't even exist in the same aural universe.
>Currently there is no computer, in any form, that is successful because it can be used together with other people in a physical sense. I think this new product must be great to use alone or will not meet the masses.

Game consoles come to mind.
I believe cemerick meant, "A caller of a function in an imperative environment cannot assume anything about the scope of that function's access of mutable state within the program without reading the entire program." If they verify it by perfectly understanding the underlying code, the of course that doesn't hold.

But even in the code snippet you gave us, we really don't know if global state is being manipuated. For example, A could be handling global counters or referencing global variables (common example: stdin and stdout). And how do you know that a doesn't get manipulated by f()? You'd have to check! Perhaps A's constructor registers all A's it every creates and then f() marks all A's for protection from garbage collection?

Really, we can't assume anything about the code snippet you gave us without verifying it. The code might be modular, it might be reasonably modular, or it might be a complete mess.

This boundary of uncertainty is what functional programmers are railing against, and what you're defending.
Ladies Home Journal (1900) Predictions for 2000
The main buyers and patrons of "classical" music turn out to be a pretty conservative bunch. Have you ever listened to radio stations or concert promoters try to be humorous or hip? It's generally pretty puritan and sad, like something you'd find on the Disney Channel.

Until a new generation really takes ownership of this stuff, selling it to new listeners will remain an endeavor with dwindling returns.
A pair of high-end Sennheisers can be a great investment. (I have the 580s, which were once the flagship, now outdated, but still very good.) I can also recommend the Etymotic ER4P in-ear headphones.

Inexpensive but highly accurate small acoustic suspension speakers have been a commodity for awhile. Put these with a decent subwoofer with a built-in crossover, and you can get a very formidable setup, if you are willing to move your furniture around and hang things on your wall. Really good headphones can give you plug & play high fidelity, if you can live with a soundstage that's inside your skull.

(I use a Velodyne powered subwoofer with a pair of NHT Subzero-XUs, with a home-made external high-pass filter between my NAD receiver and the Subzeros. The natural rolloff from the speakers, plus the high-pass filter and the low-pass filter on the subwoofer gives me a bi-amplified system on the cheap.)
This article is very very wrong about South Indian Hindus. I'm one and I have never heard of an uncle-niece marriage. It is a taboo. Decades ago cousin marriages were common but it has all but disappeared now and is mostly taboo.
-I think this is finally going to be the post-PC decade. The evolution of SmartPhones, set tops, cloud computing and other mobile devices is going to make the PC redundant for most people. By the end of this decade I could see the PC being exclusively a business tool or power user tool.

-We're going to have some major Internet growth pains. We haven't prepared for the bandwidth on-slaught of IP video and we haven't moved fast enough on IPV6. In the US at least our broadband infrastructure is held hostage by corporations looking to maximize profit with little regard for quality of service and tons of conflict of interest as a content provider.
The rules help a lot, especially in the early training of the bayes database. It's amazing how much stuff is still caught by them... Over time, the SA bayesian recognizer gets good enough that the rules play a relatively small role. I think I had no false positives from this little bug thanks to the bayesian counterweight.

A default database is a poor idea, though. One thing I've learned in helping folks with SA is that people get very different mixtures of spam and mail. I don't think you'd like my database at all. There's really no substitute for making your own...
Something that strikes me - whenever I've seen pieces like this before, they often seem to ignore that people still write classical music. It's nearly always Mozart, Beethoven, Bach but no mention of any modern or contemporary composers... I wonder why that is. Sure some contemporary classical music is a bit more esoteric and even less likely to appeal to the average listener, but it's certainly not all like that.

Maybe I'm slightly unusual in that most of the classical music I enjoy comes from the late romantic period onwards, but I do find it slightly disappointing that often when people "discover" classical music they seem to think it mostly stopped in the 1700s.
It's possible that it will end up being a 'conditional permanent residence' that you have to renew after 2 years (the condition being that you still have the company). This is what happens for green cards that are granted on the basis of a new marriage.
I'm working on several web apps using ASP.NET MVC, either on Mono or W2K8. I have tried to launch startups in the past using ASP.NET WebForms, and I wouldn't recommend that approach to anyone, I can't get those years back. At this point, I believe ASP.NET MVC is a solid choice and I am extremely productive with it. It provides the same "programming is fun again" feeling that other web frameworks have boasted in the past. To be sure, you're still using a static language with C# 3.0/4.0, so there is more code to write in general and more considerations using the ASP.NET pipeline, however it produces solid applications. The open source argument is out of date; ASP.NET MVC itself is open source (MS-PL), you can run it on Mono, and there is plenty of open source projects in .NET at this point that provide either ports of popular Ruby or Java tooling or code specific to reducing development times on the .NET stack. You don't get the conventions of RoR, but there are alternative architectures available.
This affects Zimbra as well: http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=43766
> Automatically downloading unresolved dependencies makes your build process nondeterministic!

This. You need to be able to check in your build tools, and use them as they were to precisely repeat any build you've ever done, or you're risking bit rot. Ant is sort of painful but it works for this.

And if I want my dependencies to be preinstalled rather than checked in and bundled, I'd rather use yum so the rest of the world can reuse them too. Does Maven even support dependencies upon native (non-JVM) apps and libraries which are available for a given platform?
How to use your cell phone as a wireless modem
If I recall correctly this was the goal Steve Jobs set for the first year of iPhone sales also. I'm not sure Apple will have as much success with the tablet right away unless they get very aggressive with pricing. The iPhone was a type of product people have always wanted. It was an easy sell being so ahead of its competition at the time. Apple has to cultivate a market for the tablet and convince people they want it.
I'll have to agree with you. Duke Nukem Forever will come out as a downloadable contend for like 10€.
Maven's main strength is standardization of the build combined with the dependency management that makes it easy to get a build going instantly without having to explicitly download libraries.

"slow" - can't say I've found that an issue when compared with Ant which I used to use.

"verbose" - in configuration I disagree - the more you put in your pom the less well you're using it. In output true, but I'm not sure why that's intrinsically a problem for you.

"inflexible" - absolutely not true. You can configure a plugin and Maven will go and download it for you - so as a user you can enhance the tool directly from the configuration file (e.g. I typically use a plugin to build database scripts from annotated classes).

"opaque" - yes, but there's method in that madness. It's programming by exception (how is my project different from the default?") as opposed to Ant's (mainly) explicit programming ("How exactly is this build bootstrapped?") Once you know the pro forma you can jump into any Maven project with an immediate understanding of its likely structure - very different from Ant where you basically need to read the build.xml files to know where everything lives.

"thinly documented" - Yep. The documentation is horrible and that's its biggest problem in my opinion.
I use headphones because the only time when I can spend some conscious time listening to music (not just filtering it with my ears) is when I'm taking a 30 min walk to the gym and then 30 min back. I realize, it's a trade off though, but don't be so hard on that.
If, in an alternate reality, Isreal used our current method.. people have to remove their shoes, remove the belts, empty pockets, coats, take out their electronics, have ID's examined twice, etc.. If that was the isreali method, I'd bet my bottom dollar that people would be here saying that such a system wouldn't scale to our busiest airports.

It would seem absurd on its face.

But, it does scale. Not elegantly. But it does. We're capable of amazing things when there's political will.

And I'll tell you this, I fly far more than the average American. And so I chat a lot with other pax. I feel strongly that a headline reading "Airport Security Focus Shifts from baggage to passenger: _Keep your shoes on and answer a few questions_" would be very well received in this country.
Ask HN:  Should I remove the level limit in the DropZap web demo?
It seems risky to me because someone could just copy the javascript and I won't be able to put the level limit back in. I could try some form of Javascript copy protection, but anything can be broken.

Moreover, people could just play DropZap in the iPhone/iPod touch web browser unless I explicitly prevent that from happening (which might upset Google).

It's not clear what I should do...
Nine times out of ten, I ignore comments unless I'm stumped. In fact, I'm tempted to make emacs hide all comments unless I explicitly expand them.

Given that Jason Baker just got out of school and is espousing a bold "I'm too smart for X" opinion (where X is, in this case, code comments), I'm not too inclined to pay much heed.

Only write comments that aid in understanding. I tend to comment a lot, but that's because I like someone to be able to approach my code and immediately understand the purpose of a particular code block. It's faster to read the comments than to both trace and digest the code, no matter how understandable it is.

After over a decade writing software, I much prefer over-commented code to under-commented code. No, comments aren't free, but the alternative is worse. Too few comments make your code unapproachable to others -- and eventually, yourself.
+1 and that doesn't even touch it's added value as a deterrent.
Apple has filed a number of patent applications for tactile feedback on touch screens in the last year or two.
That's understandable. Have you heard of any new classic rock bands lately? I doubt that. They do exists though. It's just that people lose interest in new faces playing the same old things. I mean sure, the scores may be different, but still somehow the music sounds the same, because they do combine chord progressions and melody parts in a certain painfully familiar way. Well, most of the time at least, that's what happens to the second generation of the genre followers.

Same as in web-apps industry. People like twitter and they are doing a good job. But having yet another one in a different skin would make no sense.
I like the way some languages support in-code documentation. That way, if you're like Jason Baker and don't read most comments because of the low signal-to-noise ratio compared to straight code, you can generate the documentation and simply read that. You get the high-level overview.

For those that like lots of comments to fully understand the code, you can read the documentation at the same time as the code comments. It's really the best of both worlds.
Maybe things have changed since 1985. This article found that 33% of all marriages were inbred in Bangalore, Mysore, and Karnataka: http://www.jstor.org/pss/2803361

Also, according to the article I just linked, "The highest rates of inbreeding were observed in the Hindu community among whom there was a notable preference for uncle-niece marriages."
So I played a couple rounds of the game just now to get a feel for it. Could you do a timed variant of the game? As in free play on level 1 for N amount of time?

EDIT

Here's a link to the demo: http://dropzap.appspot.com/
> - Major changes will happen in Iran, one way or the other. The current trajectory they are on does not seem sustainable for a decade.

I feel bad for the situation in Iran. I also predict tumult, but with no real change for any amount of violence and bloodshed. This is because the people still want a theocracy, which will inherently be totalitarian. You can't have it both ways; demanding freedom along with a theocracy is paradoxical.
Five Things for Startupers to Track in 2010
How to Become a Problem Solver
igraph is also a must-have for network analysis in R. Great for data analysts familiar with the environment.
This phenomenon is similar to the class of posts that say "why [business] is like [poker]" etc. A vast majority of these posts are by people with amateur-at-best experience with the comparison topic. This article is no exception.
From the Science of White Space to the Growing Importance of Privacy
I am doing solo part time development (1 day/week) on a very large orphaned enterprise system. The builds are done using maven. The build takes about 15 minutes because maven is going off to various sites looking for no longer supported versions. I removed the dependencies; not much improvement. I tried mvn -o and the build dropped to 3 minutes. But war file was broken in mysterious ways. The currently irreducible step is 6 minutes to make a war out of a half-dozen project wars. So tossing maven is an urgent item on my plate.

The attractive part of maven is that it manages all the version dependencies for a large development team. For a solo developer it is way too much pain.
I use the ssh blacklist utility and it works pretty well. Although it opens up the IPs after 4 days (default), which I don't really liked, so I pumped that up to 14 days which seems to work nicely.
Quality can only be attained by employing quality people. Just by giving folks more time will not automatically turn into quality product. Many times quality people do not require more time to make a better product. They just need to be left alone.

Having said that Quality people are also people. People need deadlines or else will fall victim to student syndrome (all assignments and projects are done last 2 days before the deadline, refer http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/Predictably-Irrational Title: Problem of procrastination).

Quality people loving what they do, need to be put on deadlines which they agree to as being reasonable. The business should for the most part function around these deadlines. When a customer imposed hard deadline shows up on the radar, a healthy conversation should settle the acceptable quality/feature cuts to meet it.

The essential task of the leader is to make such sudden showing up hard deadlines as minimal and as far apart as possible through insight and foresight. The quality of the leader can be directly judged using the number of such deadlines that prop up in a given span of time.
Are you pitting XML against Protocol Buffers? Because they are completely different things. Being self describing is a big deal.. it makes interchange far far easier and obvious. As does being human readable, debugging a web API in a browser or via curl is a serious plus.

Having just spent the past two days reverse engineering an API that used protocol buffers, I can tell you I would have much rather done it against XML. :)

As for parsing, I guess I don't get what the big deal is. I've long since given up on SAX parsers and occasionally use pull parsers, but for the majority of applications using a DOM parser gives you a very OO friendly approach to turning that XML into your objects, and it is dead simple. Sine the generated Protocol Buffer objects are immutable and can't be used as base classes, I suspect the amount of code to turn a 'message' to your domain objects and vice versa is very similar between protocol buffers and a DOM impl. At least it has been in my experience, neither is hard.
In the 20th century, classical music went a lot of interesting ways. A lot of the really innovative composers were focusing on dissonance and atonality — Bartók, Stostakovich, Varèse, Stravinsky. With that, there starts to be a challenge to find music that grasps you instantly. I tend to find that once I figure out something about a composer, his works start making sense to be, but before then it frequently sounds like noise.

When I think about modern composed music, my utterly-amateur mind goes in three directions — jazz, minimalism, and scores. There's a lot of interesting music being made for movies — do the scores of Jaws and Indiana Jones or Sweeney Todd and Phantom of the Opera count as classical music? Certainly musically there are certain things in common. Jazz, meanwhile, is an absolute paradise of talented musicians and musical experimentation. Charles Mingus comes to mind, as does John Zorn as a more modern composer.

The only movement I'm really aware of in modern classical music that has a distinct classical taste is that of minimalism. Philip Glass is an obvious first name, but then Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young were all composers whose music emphasized certain kinds of repetition. But when you begin listening to them, you realize how diverse each one is and how it's almost silly to group them together. Riley's music tends toward electronica and unpredictability, Glass eschews the term altogether, and Young's music tends towards categories like "drone", at which point you're talking a genre that includes a lot of rock music, also. Then you look at how Riley influenced bands like the Who (who named a song after him) and how La Monte Young worked with John Cale of the Velvet Underground, and it starts looking like that branch of classical music got submerged in avante garde rock.

But that's all the perspective of somebody who admittedly knows less than he wants to. If the classical music scene is different than that, it's done a damn good job of hiding it: I've found no other category of music that might help me understand what's going on today (and I'd appreciate the helping hand of any user who knows more).
And admittedly so.
I never thought to use Pandora for classical music! Upvote for a marvelous suggestion.
The government of America, or of Afghanistan?
I am facing same. Anybody tehre to help us?
The TSA is not supposed to care if you are doing something illegal, they are only supposed to prevent you from bringing certain things into the secure area of the airport. Liquids (or cans that contained them) are what they are supposed to watch for. Laptops are fine.

Customs is another story; they would probably ask about your laptops.
That's an utterly biased and thoroughly wrong accusation. Name one of those songs lacking melody and I'll point out exactly what line could get stuck in my head. Even songs that use chords as a hook don't get the entire chord stuck: There's a single line that catches you.

The real problem is a little bit more complex: We instinctively set up divides between us and things we don't know, so that we may more readily dismiss them. I'm actually in the middle of writing a New Year's post about that now.
I'm not being hard on headphones per se, but on killing one's high-frequency hearing by blasting loud electronic music into your skull. If you are truly an active listener, then you are probably not one of those people.
Could you elaborate? Why would this be better than the existing demo?
That counts as "not terrible", but is still more involved and less reliable and less flexible than Dropbox for the common case.
The reason classical music is less popular among the masses is not that it does not appeal to emotions - a lot of people would argue with that.

I'm curious if you'd say that about Romantic music, which tried explicitly to evoke an emotional response in the listener.