skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds like people like this have made their own lives unhappy.

I ran the numbers, and $140k/year is more than enough money for a family of 5 (even including the taxes you pay to that evil warmongering government). You can comfortably spend $2000/month on your house/apartment, which gets you a nice size space even in major cities. (This assumes $6000/month after taxes; a 50% tax rate. You get to save $1000 and spend $1000 on non-essentials, and still have $2000 for food and bills with this plan.)

9% sales tax and 9.3% state income tax doesn't really matter. 9% sales tax doesn't affect essentials, like food. It just means that your new flat-screen TV is going to cost $1100 instead of $1000. Big deal. In exchange, you get a free school system, free roads, police / fire / etc. Taxes are a fact of life when living in a developed society. Lop the 9.3% off your salary and forget that money was ever even yours -- it's an employer's expense, not your expense.

Anyone making this amount of money can have a large living space 10 minutes away from work, savings, and plenty of money to pay your bills. And $1000 to spend on whatever-you-want every month.

If this doesn't make you happy, I guess it's time to work harder, or something. Most people would consider this a very comfortable life, perhaps even "the American dream". But taxes, the government, and society in general is probably not keeping you down, as your post seems to imply.
That's just an argument against our current court system. We allow virtually unending appeals, even with no new evidence or reason for believing that the earlier trials/appeals were somehow unfair. Some states have (or had) mandatory appeals for capital cases, even when the defendant plead guilty and didn't contest the death penalty.
If a new method of testing evidence appears and the alleged criminal is cleared of charges, you can let them out of the prison. You can't un-kill them.

edit: I heard of countless cases of young black men being incarcerated for murder in Texas in the 60's with police going quite out of their way to obstruct the justice process.
The risk of scrum
In my opinion there is a fundamental danger in scrum: On a certain level it is inherently not possible to get things done while embracing change.
Windows already supports multiple architectures: x64,x86 and Itanium. It supports 4 if you count PowerPC (Xbox 360). Office now supports 2 different architectures x86 and x64 and used to support Alpha.

I highly doubt that a company with $20 billion dollars in the bank would have a problem porting to ARM even if it didn't already have extensive experience on that platform (WinCE).

MS could easily have their OS and Office ported over and released in the amount of time it would take ARM to make any serious dent in the x86 market.

Heck, ARMH only has a 4 billion market cap, MS could easily buy the whole company in cash, at that point they'd certainly have the expertise. I'd say it's highly likely they could maintain a port.

Realistically, ARM would probably pay MS and send over their top engineers if MS expressed interest in porting Win7 to ARM. NVidia would probably get in on the action too to avoid the x86 licensing problems they are facing against an AMD & Intel that aren't suing each other into oblivion anymore. At least until the next time they decide to sue each other into oblivion.
I definitely agree that it's more cruel. Also, the person being in prison doesn't guarantee that they're not going to commit any more crimes, it just guarantees that those crimes are going to be against either other inmates or prison staff.

Personally I think that in cases of super-long jail time they may as well just change it to a capital sentence.
Thank-you! Always nice to have some figures!
Yeah...I was in a program called Kumon and learned most of my math there, more than I learned in school. There was a lot of multiplying together polynomials, so I got used to the idea of handling each combination of terms.

There was also a fair amount of factoring. Let me rephrase that: an unreasonable amount of factoring. Factoring down 4th and 5th and I think 6th degree polynomials by hand, for instance, in the equivalent of 10th grade algebra.

By the way, there are analogous patterns between even degreed polynomials, 4th degree polynomials look kind of like quadratics and 6ths do as well, with a kind of rippling pattern in the intermediate terms.

By the time anyone told me about FOIL, I just squinted and shrugged it off. I was so used to taking these polynomials apart that enumerating through all possible combinations was trivial to me.

Incidentally, I always considered it more artful to factor quadratic equations to solve them rather than applying the quadratic formula.
SSBkb24ndCBnZXQgaXQuIFdoYXQncyBzbyBzcGVjaWFsIGFib3V0IEJhc2U2ND8gSXQgc291bmRz
IGxpa2UgYW55IHJldmVyc2libGUgY2lwaGVyIGlzIGFuIGFjY2VwdGFibGUgYW5zd2VyLg0K
Maybe Apple (and other similar stores) should stop putting their name on bags. Just use a plain one.

Or at least give people that option.
Let me say I am not a fan of being stealth, but I do beleive that you should have more of an idea than these guys seem to have about what you are going to do before you announce you are starting a company and go out and get domain names and a logo. 2 points to them for being out in the open though.
Hey look, I can play my DVD in Linux now.
I understand your view. The situation makes me sad, and angry, all around. And I'm not talking about just this case.

I have adopted a "we are homo sapien" (note: not plural) outlook toward humanism. Ideally, for me, we can let these guys live while we slowly improve our civilized society to a point where the niche that conditions these criminals can absolutely no longer function.

They slowly die out and we have no blood on our hands. I think we're still primitive, though. I acknowledge that I am very lofty and this issue is very complicated. I would just really not like to have anything to do with death.
Ask HN: which features shall we charge for?
We launched the free version of our website a few days ago at http://twendly.com/. We found that, as we've expected, people are using twendly to do researches. The Pages/Visit is 7.78; Avg. Time on Site is 00:07:15.
Here is one message from one user:
@wikiReader: @alexdong twendly.com is really cool :) -- just spent a good 20 min with interesting results.

Now we have a few features we could charge for:

#1. More search results: eg, you're preparing for ycombinator interview, you want to get a sense of what does it feel like, so you search for http://twendly.com/?q=ycombinator+interview. Right now we're displaying only 10 people in the result set, we could charge people to see, say, 100 results. (This is one of Linkedin's business model. )

#2. Deep drill-down: eg, you want to check out Dustin's tweets about memcached http://bit.ly/5uV6hW, we only show matches within last 12 months. Potentially we could show all of them or even allow user to click on the monthly breakdown to filter by month. Deep index is one of our advantages.

#3. Automated Twitter list: eg, if you want to follow people who talks about couchdb, you'll have to click each follow link and maintain the twitter list by yourself. We've already got the code to make a search into a 'dynamic list' sync with search results.

#4. Adsense type news. Allow people pay to put their ads onto the search results.

What do you think? Reasonable to charge for these? How much shall we charge for? Why?

Cheers,
Alex
Well said. The sort of control that Apple is trying to exert is terrible for both freedom and innovation; if Microsoft had it 15 years ago they never would have allowed the web to develop as it did. Yet Apple's fanboys are cheering them on as they position themselves to block any development that might interfere with their business model.

This is a major reason why I ordered a Nexus One today to replace "my" iPhone, which Steve has made clear is only mine in the sense that I paid for it.
Factoring a single 768-bit key let's you read every message sent to a single person using 768-bit RSA. Of forge a message signed by someone using a related system to sign documents.

PS: Don't forget, a large bot net could use 1 million CPU cluster to crack the same number.
An interesting feature of this story is that the victim's internet friend was the one who reported him missing. 20 years ago, a guy like this would have had no friends at all, and, as the murderer intended, nobody would have noticed that he was gone for a long time.

Maybe she would have even gotten away with it, especially if she had taken the main part of his money, which she did not have time to get, and fled the country.
I agree that's definitely worth consideration. I am nowhere close to being an expert on these things but I would have thought that most of the big technological leaps in the justice system are probably behind us. Fingerprinting, DNA matching, fibre analysis, ballistics... All of these things are pretty well established now.

I agree that a lot of cases got turned on their head when DNA matching became available, but what technologies do you envision providing the same sort of disruption in the future?
Do you genuinely believe that a company with such a huge investment in data centers is demonstrating a lack of focus by concerning themselves with energy?
Anyone here with Java hosting experience want to do a (cheap) paid account model? Looks like we all still need a well maintained one.
When I saw something like this at my kids' Montessori school, I thought, they could do that in a textbook. (Most Montessori materials involve manipulation that can't be done on paper.) I wonder if modern textbooks have this illustration.

http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/photo.html?th=gw/cq/eviq.jpg...
Rogue Marketers Can Mine Your Info on Facebook
A relative of mine always used to say "just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me." Perhaps he was right.

Also, given the topic of his research, nuclear weapon design, it doesn't seem too unlikely that government agents would tamper with his vehicle. The article seems to sensationalize a lot about the man. Running SETI@home isn't exactly that strange of a thing to do. Isn't it built into the PS3.
Microsoft moving towards a Natural User Interface?
I'm not really sure why people are downmodding this. While RevRal's opinion may fly in the face of the emotions everyone is likely experiencing after reading the article, he still makes a valid point and touches on a subject that I think speaks volumes about our society in general.
Clearly you've never been to the bay area. Especially if you're working in San Francisco, then you're looking at living in the outer richmond or sunset if you want $2k to stretch out to enough space for a 5-person family. Expect to pay more like $3k on rent, or $5k on a mortgage. Anybody spending more than 25% of their net-income on housing is living beyond their means.

Add in $700/month in food, $300/month in insurance premiums, $1,000/month for a car (between car payments, gas, insurance, average of 10 parking tickets per year and $200/month for a garage parking spot). All of a sudden you're living paycheck to paycheck.

My point is, executives in that article are complaining that they are unable to coerce engineers into giving their companies an extra 50% of their time for free. I'm not saying it's poverty, but I fully understand how the life of a corporate wage-slave is stressful enough to induce unhappiness and an unwillingness to go the extra mile.

The past decade has been a loss for the economy. IPOs are gone in exchange for M&As which only benefit the founders and investors in any signifiant way. Yet startups still dangle football of IPO-induced wealth to hoodwink engineers into working themselves into an early grave in order for the founders to become marginally wealthy. And the big companies who would like us to work ourselves to death would gladly outsource our jobs if they could overcome the lack of talent and communications issues of workers abroad.

And in the end they're still renting, and not able build wealth of their own.
I would be surprised if they thought that that feature alone was what did it. I would not be surprised if its one of dozens of features that does though.
It doesn't always have to pivot on technology -- there will always be overzealous DA's and corrupt judges. Once again, I'm not for or against capital punishment, nor have I done sufficient research to form an opinion, but I can just imagine the Kafkaesque hell an innocent man or woman can be put through to be put on death row.
Ask HN: Why are video games violent?
I was thinking of picking up a ps3 since the price of the console has dropped so significantly the recent months. I was looking for what games that might be interesting to play with when I realize that pretty much all games recommended (with scores greater than 90%) where violent games. I have been playing shoot em up since the my amiga days and of course Duke Nukem 3D/quake/doom, but after playing Battlefield 2 in clan, I grew tired of all the Shoot'em up. So now I'm looking for something that does more than put a weapon in my hands, stimulates my narcissism, and pretty much dumb me down.

My question is this; why is violent games so dominant? Do we yearn so bad for reptilian behavior?
Many 'GodModes' to be found in Windows 7
We certainly have to be safe from past attacks, but Schneier's point is that with the government's strategy, that's all we're safe from. It would be a lot better to use a strategy that defends against all attacks we know to be possible, and not just the ones that have already been tried.
Just wanted to highlight an interesting thought and see what people thought might be the current trends leading to a NUI:
"Altogether, the devices show Microsoft's vision for the future of computing, one that increasingly will rely on a host of natural user interfaces to let people abandon the keyboard in order to speak, point, touch and, eventually, think their commands."

I saw the iPhone dieting app, for example, that tries to skip the manual process of entering in caloric data by photo recognition.
wow, worst advice ever!

funding is not a guarantee of success. in fact, a funded team has a harder challenge than the non-funded team. as soon as you take funding, the window for liquidity shrinks dramatically. venture investors want their money to grow by 10-20x. if things don't ramp in the way expected, then the investors will walk away and the entrepreneur will be left with a business that can't sustain itself and has to shut down. the more money involved, the less risks that can be taken. chances are very good that this funded team will not exist in 2-3 years.
Hmm, I thought the screen was 8.5" x 11". Turns out the screen is 10.5" diagonal. The Kindle DX screen, OTOH, is 9.7". So the screen's a little bit less than an inch bigger, diagonally. Its width, however, is 1.3" bigger (8.5" vs 7.2") than the Kindle DX's, though.

They're both small by textbook standards, but the QUE might be pushing it when it comes to eBooks.

Edit: It has the biggest screen, and also the longest length and width, of the products in its category. It is lighter than others, though. Its form factor will appeal to some potential buyers, I think.
http://www.givewell.net/giving101/Changing-Someones-Life

You can save someone's life for under $1,000.
The Fun Theory: $25k grant from VW for a "fun" project
This isn't an EC2 issue, this is a SAN issue. Wether it is EBS or an NFS drive, meh. This is an architecting issue and while it is a result of the underlying hardware, the underlying hardware is not the constraint.
Think you know what relative returns are?
This will lead the way so they can start taxing BMW and Mercedes to revive buggy whip manufacturing. Truly visionary.
I'm constantly amazed that France's economy is as good as it is, given how much they love shooting themselves in the foot.
While I agree that we are better off without software patents, copyright does not fill the same role. Copyright protects against direct duplication of a work, while patents protect against a range of possible implementations.

For example, if you install a copy of Microsoft Word on your computer off of a friend's CD, you are violating Microsoft's copyright. If you instead write your own word processor from scratch, then you are not violating; Microsoft's copyright is independent from the copyright you hold on your word processor. But if Microsoft has a patent on a fundamental aspect of word processors, then your new word processor violates the patent, and Microsoft can limit what you can do with it.

The question is: Is the "risky and costly project" the act of implementing the word processor, or the act of inventing word processors in the first place? (And: Do patents provide incentives for these projects?)
Good Enough isn't mediocre, it's good (enough).

If you're selling to NASA, Good Enough might mean you machine it to the thousandth of the inch, with the best possible materials.

If you're selling to Joe Schmoe, Good Enough might mean you machine it to the tenth of the inch, with materials purchased to trade off quality and price.

And both of those products might be just what their respective markets want, once you look at availability, price, etc.

Good Enough is Good Enough.

edit: Besides, has anybody ever seen a product where engineering didn't list ways to make it better, if given more time and money?
I have adopted a "we are homosapien" (note: not plural) outlook towards the humanities

While I have no idea what that means, I would like to point out that "homo sapien" is not the singular of "homo sapiens"
Zippers are surprisingly practical. E.g. for a file system: http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/Continuations.html#zipper-f...

If you want to read about Zippers and don't mind using your brain, then the presentation in "he Derivative of a Regular Type is its Type of One-Hole Contexts" (http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~ctm/diff.pdf) is right for you. He talks about the connection between math and computer science:

"Apart from the implementation of this technology, and
the development of a library of related generic utilities, this work opens up a host of fascinating theoretical possibilities - one only has to open one’s old school textbooks almost at random and ask ‘what does this mean for datatypes?’."
Brute forcing a 768-bit key would require multiple, potentially billions, of such factorizations, correct?

No. There is only one possible factorization of an RSA public key. RSA public keys are, by definition, the product of exactly two primes.

Once you have factored the public key, it is trivial to derive the private key from the two factors.

RSA is only secure because it is hard to factor numbers. This work shows that it's just hard, not impossible.
Haha, very much along the lines of what I was thinking.

Isn't the idea behind capitalism that good businesses succeed, while bad businesses fail? What happens when all of the bad businesses are propped up by government subsidies?

^sigh^ whatever happened to letting the market decide...
And that's why it's 1000, not 2^256.
Equivalent perl one-liner (Perl regex may be more convenient):

perl -e 's/pat/rep/g' -p -i file

-i.bak instead of -i works the same to create backups.
Where is the bleeding edge of the internet?
Marine stingers are present in these waters during the summer months
The Boxee Bookmarklet: Add web videos to your Boxee Queue in one click
That was one example of one new major API that Allan's publicly mentioned he will be using in 2.0. Obviously there would be other changes, and obviously you wouldn't just be able to use whatever has been introduced in 10.5/6 to make it happen. Ultimately every rewrite, new feature addition, feature change, etc. has the consequence of pushing back the release date.
I remember hearing a year or so ago that Hermes (or some other similar luxury brand) had started to offer plain white bags at their stores for customers who didn't want to be seen buying high priced luxury items in the midst of a rescission.
Ask HN: Framework or no framework 
Last month I used my spare time to create a simple Django admin database that sorts lawyer names scraped with a simple spider I wrote in Python. I first tried Scrapy as suggested here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946640 but then I realized that I could do the same directly with Python in a much simpler way. Is the same true for Django?

Do you recommend using Python to develop my app instead of learning Django? Is there a good book or online source that builds a pure Python site in a tutorial fashion?

An example: Currently the search box only searches whole last names. One person I demoed wanted to see search suggestions so that he can search for names he doesn't exactly remember the spelling. Will this be easier to implement in Django or in Python?

I am new both to Python and Django.

Thank you
Fabulous Adventures In Coding : First Cousins Once Removed
In Europe there is, due to the falling tax revenues, a debate about who should now carry the burden - which is temporarily being placed on high earners but that will ultimately reduce revenues even further as they flee to more accommodating jurisdictions.

It is an anomaly (in European eyes) that the most profitable businesses, particularly overseas technology businesses, are paying little or no tax currently.

I suspect these companies are going to become a target for tax on both sides of the Atlantic over the next two years as governments try to reduce deficits - there are not many other sectors making profit right now.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1hn/call_for_new_siai_visiting_fello...

"At bottom, we’re looking for anyone who:

* Is capable (strong ability to get things done);
* Seriously aspires to rationality; and
* Is passionate about reducing existential risk.
"
Link to previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946640
I believe life without parole to both be a worse punishment than death, and one with a small means of reparation in cases of wrongful conviction.
If you'd read the article you'd know that the cars aren't being randomly broken into. They are being targeted by people who saw you place the expensive computer in the trunk. So if it's out of sight or not is totally irrelevant in this case.
stop your project but try to build on that concept and improve it. And let them know
If it has 'science' in its title, it probably isn't.
There is precedent.

Becoming your own government entity (Reedy Creek) seems to have worked out for Disney.

I for one welcome our new Google overlords.
Bank Theives Foiled by GPS-Spiked Cash
Revitalizing family's travel agency using affiliate-linked blog. Thoughts?
Apart from wrongful convictions resulting execution, death penalties are also very expensive, as the costs of due process through all the appeals have to be paid.
^sigh^ whatever happened to letting the market decide...

It was realised that it was not the most effective method to maintain profits for those established individuals and organisations that have the clout to influence government policy. Let's hope that one day this changes, but I'm not holding my breath.
Obviously more blog posts coming. Just getting started, but notice the affiliate links to each post. Like it?
Um, I suspect that may have been the point.
Those are polynomial, not exponential.

Polynomial time: O(n^c)

GNFS time: O(c^(n^(1/3))

Exponential time: O(c^n)
Yes, but I do not want to live with the knowledge that people like that are allowed to exist in the world. Punishment be damned, eliminate them from the gene pool.

And if you really believed in human dignity, don't you believe that exerting that sort of punishment is not only cruel to the perp, but to the prison guards who have to handle them?

And what of the money we spend on prisons instead of our children? A .45 only costs a few cents.
Super-long jail time is a death sentence. It's execution by incarceration.