skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The South African Revenue Services implemented e-filing two years ago, with great success. Most income tax payers can file online in minutes, using information gathered from employers. IIRC, the number of tax Rands gathered rised significantly.

Obviously, fraud can be commited by omitting income generated from non-registered employers or informal employment, but as far as I know, they keep quite close tabs on people's bank accounts.

One factor that contributed to the success of the initiative, is the ease with which companies can submit their employees details, using software provided for free by SARS.
Given that Comscore argues that the raw web server data is flawed because of the same person using multiple machines, different browsers, deleting cookies, etc., that would be a pointless comparison. It isn't an independent analysis to take two different approaches to information-gathering and see who has the most accurate data when compared to the data gathered by one of the approaches.

The question isn't whether Compete or Quantcast or Comscore is closest to the raw server data. The question is whether the raw server data can be used to accurately judge the number of people who visit a website. If so, Comscore's data are most likely irrelevant because they are approaching the problem in a completely different way.
I second that.

I've been using Chrome the past couple of weeks on my Mac. But the last few days, that stupid font bug has been coming up again and I've been forced to switch back to Firefox...and it sucks.
Per Annenberg, the 'FairTax' reduces taxes for the poor and the rich, squeezing the middle class:

http://www.factcheck.org/taxes/unspinning_the_fairtax.html
I agree with your first statement. In fact, the conversations -- especially the arguments -- may exceed the value of the stories themselves. They often do for me.

However, the topic of climate change seems to be a lightning rod for bad arguments. Ones that devolve into comment trees that provide good examples of bad arguments that PG can use in a follow up to "How to Disagree."

Good arguments on climate change have occurred on this site. There has been a lot of good debates over the limits of science in the face of complexity, the politicization of science, etc.

However, as you put it, there are diminishing returns on this story. The good arguments have been exhausted, and now it is becoming a political gotcha style story. Again, I don't know why I was bothered by this post, but it may be because it was the third or fourth thread on this topic, just with a new small piece of information.

(P.S. I do not mean to sound like the arbiter of "Good Arguments.")
s/overloads/overlords
You're lucky. When I did it the site kept crashing. It was more awkward in my opinion than you seem to make out. However, from what I gather it's nothing compared to the US system.
Science Fiction as a tool for human survival
Add bluetooth sync and I'll buy it.
You think that's bad then you should see the CPAN upload twitter-bot :) http://twitter.com/cpan_linked

But yes I agree with you, this isn't the best way to manually consume this info. I tried it for a little while but just switched back to the relevant RSS feed, which is far easier to skim through quickly without missing too much.
Web Application Development with Tornado
Disagree vehemently. Someone who "has no idea" would get a lot more out of class than someone who knows exactly what they want to do and how to learn it. If you know what you want to do, and you already are learning it, but feel obligated to go to school (cause society tells you to), then when it comes down to the day-to-day decision of "waste time in a class learning shit you already know" vs. "hack more"... it's easy to see why the second option wins.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life (software), but I fell prey to the "college is required to succeed" dogma. I went to university for a year, spent all my time hacking and neglected the boring/redundant classes, then left after a year with a 1.7 GPA and took a coding job with a big salary.

Class was a waste of time.
This is more of an emotional argument than a pragmatic one. "Avoidance of central authority" isn't a meaningful engineering principle. If you look under the covers almost anywhere on the Internet, there are central authorities hiding: in the DNS, in routing and IP registries, and so on.

But that's not an interesting response to you. A more meaningful response goes:

This is the first time you've connected to bankofamerica.com.
The authenticity of this host can't be established.
The RSA modulus provided is
00:ce:fd:f1:ba:7b:84:6f:08:fb:fe:86:bc:57:dc:
97:51:23:f0:7f:d7:4c:ea:49:5e:54:78:c5:d6:8e:
68:8c:76:20:24:52:f6:d6:60:0a:c5:79:ec:03:7d:
1f:4d:d2:e9:ca:ec:f5:72:93:57:87:7d:75:b6:e8:
9d:b3:33:b7:8d:b7:9b:0f:4b:0e:4f:51:ba:fd:d7:
88:63:44:53:bd:50:cc:c3:bf:1b:ca:98:d8:d2:35:
a8:10:62:4a:05:a2:d8:54:1e:e1:40:b2:be:cf:69:
80:ba:ed:63:ab:d1:74:32:48:5f:19:a1:82:86:d1:
cd:89:16:be:d6:0a:f2:61:97
Are you sure you want to give this key access to your
bank account? (yes/no)

SSL (anchored keys) works better than SSH (key continuity) for the problems SSL needs to solve, because:

* The first connection made in a key-continuity system is essentially unsecured, which creates an unacceptable window for opportunistic attackers --- none of whom care which 5% of connections they snag, and

* There are vastly more SSL connections than SSH connections, meaning not only that browsers would have store many many many times as much security state, but that users would be constantly exposed to alerts when sites regenerated keys, and

* The anchor keys in your browser, while not particularly well reported, are at least feasible to audit by hand; on the other hand, hundreds or thousands of per-site keys would be impossible to inspect or verify, likely meaning that any program that runs on your machine could replace your bank's key.

The scheme you've proposed is not only impracticable, it's demonstrably less secure (anchored keys leave no simple window in which attackers can seize control of a relationship).
For me it was a combination of different reasons. First, for someone with my cultural background, the idea of not going to college didn't even occur to me. Second, there were appealing cultural aspects - living away from my parents for the first time in my life, etc. Third, at the time I didn't appreciate the value of formal education, but I certainly appreciated the value of learning, so I used the time to work on my own projects.

I basically lived on my own schedule - I could be reading a totally unrelated book while everyone else studied for the finals. I made a point of being proud of it too, kind of silly in retrospect, but it worked for me at the time.
> Those are the most accurate stats

comScore would disagree--GA counts cookies not people. When I visit your site at home, on my phone and then at work I look like three people. Add in the fact that I use Chrome, Safari and FireFox regularly and I can look like 7 people. I dump cookies quite frequently too.

Not that comScore is perfect at what they do, but GA being a gold standard for accuracy is false.
Almost no aspect of the phishing problem is rooted in HTTPS.
Thanks to the moderator that decided to recycle this posting from the 'dead' pool.
You mean, until Grandma uses any other computer in the world, at which point she's either:

* overtly exposed to attackers because no key has been remembered, or

* at the mercy of whoever used the machine before her.
> Dora the Explorer Magna Doodle

That product doesn't have the word "tablet" in it, so no dice. And no making it to the homepage of HN.
"What is this, one bedroom, one bathroom?"

"No, it's a whole apartment!"
Sorry, mis-spoke myself - I meant later in the week. I want to let this sit and then expand it.

I intend to turn this into a growing series, related to this idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=672067

There I thought I'd start with fractions, basically from the ground up, but I think that's wrong. I think I want to engage people first, then "drill down" on demand. The comment about wanting more about the cardinality, the C.H. and related stuff is what I was looking for.

Perhaps I can do one a week. Or so.
Talkonaut for Android does support Speex (also many other codecs including G.729 through GTalk2VoIP gateway), it is not as complex in setup as Sipdroid. And you are right, it's easier to obtain free ipkall DID then point it to any SIP URI you like. Wonder how soon Google bans ipkall for breaking their business model :-).
Well, look at it from an energy cost standpoint:

Going to class 3x per year: extremely low cost. Lost of free time. 2.6 GPA.
Going to class every day: extremely high cost. Little free time. 3.x GPA (typically).

Given that semesters typically take 100+ days, you're talking a 30x increase in time spent to get a single point GPA improvement. Lame. This shows a problem with the classes and the teacher, as the teacher is apparently useless, not the student who is clearly smart enough to nearly BS a class and still get an easily passing grade.

Personally, I tend to fluctuate between 3.0 and 3.5. I do better in a lot of classes when I don't kill my brain listening to a bad teacher, and instead just read the darned book, which they test out of anyway. If going to the class is useless, and actively harmful, and you can get a good grade without going, what logic says you should go?

GPA is a laughable measurement of capability. It's much more of a measurement of boredom / lack of social skills. All my programming profs will (and have) happily write me a glowing recommendation, despite having a C average with one, and a low B with another. Of course, the C average one teaches level 450+ classes, and typically fails 50% of a class or more, so a C isn't too bad anyway.
It is an "increasingly fluid partnership between
people and computation" that will help both solve
problems neither could solve on their own.

This is a solution that makes sense right now - there is no reason to think that it will always be so, as computers get faster and machine learning techniques improve. That we think we will always be necessary is an interesting snapshot on humans in the early 21st century.
Yup, history shows this works: Twitter was Odeo's side project, Blogger was also a side project of Pyra Labs.
These guys, by the way, have done an amazing job of promoting themselves with their blog. They should be a model for everyone.
This makes me cry for our political "system".
Thanks for the link, it will be useful if I try to make a case for cassandra vs redis. Other questions: how robust are the clients (especially for php), and are you aware of any performance/scaling comparisons between cassandra and redis?
The problem with your freemium model is that there's no real incentive to jump up once you're over 50MM impressions. At over 50MM impressions, you have your own in-house ad sales force (or you should) and they can open the kimono to media buyers. I think they're kind of screwed in that they have to charge everyone and I can see the logic that a min/max model would spit out $5,000 as the magic number. Plus, the only people who care about impressions are people selling on a CPM (or similar) basis. Someone like, say, Dropbox or 37signals or even Consumer Reports doesn't care.

(Lastly, you've been around here long enough to know not to sign your comments/posts. If you're going to add extra stuff to the bottom, add some of that sweet, sweet LA sunshine.)
HR.COM- The Human Resources Portal -
We posted this mainly here.

But, if someone likes technology and is interested in startups, he is welcome. (And will surely become a HN reader afterward !)
Oh really ? Sipdroid does support G.711mu only, which a) never fits into narrow GPRS/EDGE bandwidth, b) incredibly sensitive to network fluctuations, lags and packet loss. So I believe you are a little bit unfair in regards of Sipdroid voice qality :-). Even Speex and G.729 hardly fit into poor GPRS/EDGE, trust me as experienced VoIP developer.

Also Sipdroid has a bug in RTP class which introduces huge latency, somehow they don't event want to fix it although they were pointed to it many times.
Sorry, apologies.

The whole book is interesting.

I make a lot of these little mistakes, I need to be more careful.
okay cool, thanks for clearing that up.
I haven't but I definitely will. Thanks for the link.
Smart people will find ways to make money. If they stop making things of value that are easily stolen, everyone else will suffer.
I've read allegations that David Kelly's rapid turn around from saying that there were WMDs present to arguing that there were none present was the result of blackmail over evidence of him being sexually involved with an aide.

Googling on "David Kelly blackmail" gives thousands of hits.

Here's one:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-490216/Sex-drugs-bla...
I know, but it should still be enough for me to tell the guy at the accounting that "this is my primary job" and possibly "I estimate earning 500k total this year.".

Though I'll be quick to admit the tax card is not a very big problem. :)
That's the Pedro Miguel locks, second locks on the pacific side of the canal.
A Lawyer's View of the Risk of Black Hole Catastrophe at the LHC
So, why did you go to college at all rather than just studying/working on your own? Economic reasons, motivational reasons, the seal on the piece of paper with your name on it?

I agree with your logic, although my experiences were different. There were definitely classes worth skipping, but I also had classes where it was worth it to attend. YMMV, I would recommend to anyone testing the waters before deciding on a course of action.
A webshop selling airline tickets won't rank better if you add "interesting content", thats just not the way it works.

What? Yes it will. More recent links from people will give it more page rank score. If it's a new algorithm that helps find cheaper tickets and beats out the major competitors, for example, it'll get tons of links really quick from blogs talking about it.

Ask the developers in the appstore whats more important, interesting content or a position in the top 5.

I don't think you get how this works.
interesting content doesn't mean a thing if it doesn't get linked to.

And to get linked to, you need to become some sort of an authority/celebrity. A good example is Jason complaining about ComScore and getting posted about on Techcrunch. If you or I wrote that same post, we wouldn't get a single link out of it. But when you are a celebrity, every little tidbit gets your more coverage.

Granted sometimes you do get some recognition. i.e. I got linked to from LA Times for my post comparing Techcrunch to Kid's Choice Awards....but that was because the post got some recognition by being on HN front page for a day.
And here's one driven by an AVR:

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/plotbot
"As many as 81 percent of those polled are opposed to Chinese government accepting Google's demands."

Having been to China myself, this result does not seem doctored. One argument often made is that censorship as necessary to keep people in order, and particularly necessary in China due to the population. The Western doctrine of freedom of speech, as the argument goes, has little applicability in a country with over 4 times the population.

Revolts and rebellions are also often seen in a much more negative light in China. Here in the west, they have resulted in many very positive changes, and are widely-regarded as being sometimes necessary to growth, and a way to keep the government in check.

Many of the Chinese I've met are also fiercely patriotic. "Why should our country cave into demands of a foreign company?"

Obviously, I'm generalizing here, and from a small sample size too. This is just my personal experience from the people I met and spent time with there, and opinions held by more highly-educated people often did not follow this trend and tended to be more critical of the government.

Note that this is a regurgitation of some common arguments I heard- absolutely not my personal view.

But they do have one point: Why do we care so much about Chinese censorship, as long as it is only affecting people within China?
The industrial base of Japan and most of continental Europe was destroyed in strategic bombing campaigns or captured by the Soviets after WWII.

Nazi scientists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_paperclip

Global superpower is the USSR

Income tax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MarginalIncomeTax.svg
Here's the thing (from an admittedly biased observer):

The big version of the climate story is about politicization and over-reaching. Assuming for a moment that professional scientists make a course correction and come out with some sort of ethical guidelines about social activism, public standards of proof, open data, and letting some sunlight in the publishing process? These things are going to take a long time, probably several years. All the while there will be little spikes in the story here or there. The main theme, however, may take a decade or more to play out.

That means that the story isn't going away as a serious science (by science I mean the practice-of-science) story. It's just going to simmer.

I happen to agree that sometimes this particular story leads to long threads of he-said, she-said, but at the same time I think it's a legitimate story about something we're all somewhat interested in. You could make the same observation about functional programming, or Apple products -- lots of things tend towards pointless conversation. Lots of things appear on TV news.

It's just a guideline.

And for the record I don't think long threads are necessarily a bad thing. The assumption is that they have limited returns for readers, but if a discussion is a conversation and not a debate I think it's usually helpful to all involved.
Making money in the App Store is about as easy as using an ATM machine.
a bit biased - there are clear advantages that local storage has over cloud storage.

anyway, the article links to a longer, more in-depth article about it at http://www.itworld.com/operating-systems/93787/googles-chrom...
The core issue isn't "the government already has this data".

The core issue is "the how-much-tax-do-you-owe algorithm is terrificly complicated". Sure X counts as income ... unless you're blind, or you've got 3 kids, or you adopted a windpower system conforming to X,Y,Z standards during the tax year (but not between 1 July and 15 Aug), etc., etc., etc.

Why is the code base so complicated?

Look to something called "public choice theory". If the tax system is really complicated and easy for politicians to modify, then they can sell modifications to the tax code to campaign donors (never listed in the clear as "Joe's Trucking pays no taxes this year", but always obscured as "a measure relating to certain income deductions for firms within 16 miles of an interstate but not more than 24 miles from a navigable body of water connecting to the Mississippi, excluding all firms that have filed for a rebate on depreciable expenses in the preceding four tax years".

As long as the tax code is monstrously complex and rapidly changing, it's a nightmare to keep a SOFTWARE code base in sync with a LEGAL code base.
Osteoarthritis Costs And Cell Therapies
I feel the same way. They make it sound like quants are these high falutin half-Gordon Gekko/half-Charlie Epps figures who use their sheisty siren call of maths to seduce the otherwise noble and innocent investors into foolish endeavors. That's simply not the case: it was the other way around.
Does anyone know if a sikuli script can be run from the command line without having to use the sikuli IDE?
Interestingly, when Markowitz invested his own money, he invested 50% in stocks, and 50% in bonds. If the creator did not believe in his own creation, I don't think anyone should. BTW, Engle's work is kind of useless in the real-world...
This is still about an open web. Using gstreamer would just be passing the burden onto others without solving much. Users would be able to watch h264 videos, but they wouldn't be aware of patent issues and wouldn't care since it works for them.

I agree that ironically they could still use flash to access youtube (even though they eem to take all the votes for theora in consideration), but there are also big websites using theora such as dailymotion or wikipedia. But there is a huge differene between a html tag and a plug-in.
Tangentially, how do you get into a PhD program without any academic letters of recommendation (if, for example, you've been working in industry for a few years)?
Producing Open Source Software (Ebook)
The number of hooks in Firefox seems likely to be a contributing factor in it being somewhat slower (in some regards) than Chrome and Safari, which are both extremely basic in their customizability and extensibility via third party plugins. Flexibility does usually have a cost, in software and in physical systems, and Firefox definitely goes to the extreme on flexibility. I'm about 50/50 on whether the trade is worth it, and I waffle between Chrome and Firefox as my primary browser.

Firebug and AdBlock Plus are both quite demanding plugins, having to analyze and manipulate the DOM so often and in so many ways. I don't think one can expect them to have no impact on performance.
Cool. It is interesting to see over 75 members in the FB group. I was aware of only about 10 HN users in Israel from almost 3 years using the board.
Perl vs. Php vs. Ruby
Algorithms course material
I've a friend who was born and lived for about 14 years in mainland China, and holds the belief that the bulk of the chinese people are somehow not 'ready' for real freedom.

Of course, her head nearly imploded when I had to be the one who told her about Mao's 50-80 million killed.
I think it's partially due to the rate of content they create now.

Before you'd be on the front page for a while, and now you are off by the middle of the day.

Which also explains the Page Rank thing. Front page is PR8, 2nd page is PR6, 3rd page is PR4, 4th page is PR3, 5th page is unranked.
Here is a step-by-step guide: http://www.ehow.com/how_4783750_scratch-art-drawings.html

My only recommended change would be that step #4 doesn't use nearly enough black. You don't just want to lightly color over the background, you want to literally put a layer of black wax on top of the background. When you're done, no color should really be showing through.

It can be a lot of fun with children, enjoy!
The MacView: An incredibly well-done concept tablet
Yet another article blaming the poor quants. Anyone with nonzero experience in finance knows that quants have no power and earn no respect. Of course quants know that models have limitations, but if you tell your boss that one should be conservative, the only thing you will attain is to get yourself fired. The ones to be blamed are the ones with decision-making power, and everybody knows that quants have as much decision-making power as the IT guys.

At least they talk about Aaron Brown. In any case, I was expecting more from the WSJ. They used to be better than this...
I stumbled upon this today... The page has a link to everything.pdf (http://compgeom.cs.uiuc.edu/~jeffe/teaching/algorithms/every...) which is an 765 page pdf & covers all the material from the course. It can also be a good reference/text book for a self-taught algorithms course.
funny how "if you have nothing to hide" never applies to gov't.
I want to make sure that when a child in India or Brazil or Kenya discovers the internet, there isn’t a big piece of it (video) that they can’t afford to participate in.

And yet...Mozilla browsers are the ones that can't view most of the video out there. Are you really doing them such a favor by deciding for them (and your existing users) what formats are ok to view and which aren't? Or are you just shouting "think of the children!" because it's uncouth to criticize?
Usually use a nickel or a penny to scrape through the surface.

Yes, overlay - use big cheap black crayon to cover up the patterns - not the expensive Crayola type