skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I could find one good reason for the top 1% making 18% of money to pay 27% of taxes - military and government contracts.

Many of the top earning CEOs and top companies will get a lot of their money from contracts paid via taxes (selling articles to the army, military training, other government projects with debatable gain for the community). Those taxes are paid by everyone. If the top companies' owners get money for those services, they basically get paid using the tax from all other groups. Since more money from taxes == more contracts possible, we might want them to get taxed more - otherwise it's like they're getting a natural tax return via a closed loop in money flow.
if you are the _only_ person with push access to your repo, then that's fine. i just don't want other people reading this that collaborate with people on repos that multiple devs have push access to thinking that --force is fine to use, because it will lose commit data.
Looks more like worthless Rails tips.
The oligarchy we live in might be shocking to some, but I was quite surprised to find PBR, hipster beer of choice comes from "S&P Company, a private company currently based in California"[1].

Beer, is an interesting example because microbreweries exist despite the two corporations.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pabst_Brewing_Company
You don't need to buy their brands - you're perfectly entitled to buy any other (local) brand you want, thereby strenghtening alternative brands. If people don't do that, they don't seem to want other choices.
It really says something about Wordpress that it has its own ecosystem of malware, like an OS or browser. Except unlike an OS or browser, it just does blogs. The sensible solution is probably what people get told when they use a browser with a poor security record - 'don't use that'.
Except that, as he immediately states, the data from 1860-1880 is not very good data, and thus is much less certain than modern data.

That's as opposed to modern data, which is much better. It's also opposed to other lines of evidence, such as atmospheric CO2 content. It's also opposed to physical evidence like the EIS data.

Have you watched the EIS time lapse videos? Go there and watch: http://www.extremeicesurvey.org/ It's both beautiful and powerful stuff.
Any chance of offering a download that doesn't require me to install GIT on my computer?
"But it's not too hard" is just as easily written "It's not too obvious how to".
The Calculus of Saying “I Love You”
However, unless you get the tax rate(s) correct so that the return is negative, the more they get in this loop the more they retain.

The traditional response to this problem is to limit the scope of government. The fewer government contracts, the less this is a problem.

A lot of people noted the incongruity of Ross Perot's populism, given that so much of his income was from IT contracts with various governments.
Being a middle-middle-class American in the Midwest, I can and do pretty much just buy what it is I want or need that is on the scale of a Christmas gift my family could or would get. That, combined with geeky tastes (y'all know what I mean) virtually guarantees things-I-value-as-garbage as presents.

Next year I'm going to try picking a charity and asking for nothing but donations in my name. I'm going to pick a popular one, too, not a obscure and ignorable "geek" charity or something, but one that may actually induce guilt if they ignore the request. Maybe that will at least cut things down.

(Come to think of it, maybe I'll pick a Celiac Disease foundation or something, since I have that. A bit more self-serving, perhaps, but even more likely to induce guilt if ignored. I hate a swing "guilt" at the issue, but I've tried mere protest for a couple of years now to no effect.)
I don't think it was intentional but hopefully this will get people thinking more about the distinction in guarantees between a personal service and a business one.

Am I right in assuming that Google for domains didn't do the same buzz opt in currently being bandied about?
Markets are efficient if and only if P = NP
The big brands have done a good job producing the illusion of choice. How does your average consumer know that all of these different brands are actually the same company?
I've had this happen to 3 customers. I read somewhere that the cause could be a compromised FTP password found via malware on the user's PC.
If you're interested in more behind the display interaction check out the LucidTouch project. http://www.patrickbaudisch.com/projects/lucidtouch/index.htm...
If I read correctly, the package was opened by customs officials. While slightly annoying, it is their job to open packages from time to time, and it has its uses.

The problem is it should not fall on me to keep my manga hidden. It's actually pretty hard to keep something completely out of sight... should he make a special room locked at all times just because he _may_ have questionable materials? I'd say "you don't have the right to be offended" is the more general principle here, and solves the issue much more elegantly then privacy.
Hubris & the Meaning of Life
I think a lot of people would be surprised to find out how few companies all of their food actually comes from in the supermarket (no im not talking about _you_, HN reader, that frequents the farmers market).

This is discussed in the documentary, Food Inc.

http://www.foodincmovie.com/
Yeah, that's why I switched to discussing platinum. Not only is it generically useful, it's even useful strictly from a "we need to learn to live on Earth first" sense. We don't have enough for known green technologies.
Rails tips sure, but some of them were pretty interesting to me. Didn't know that irb had _ like in perl, and that error_messages_for took those nifty named parameters.

Some similar tips of my own:
Enumerable.each_with_object sort of like foldl/inject but without the explicit return of the memo is a pretty nice monkeypatch that exists in activesupport. Object.returning is pretty nice too. Creates an object to return and then yields to a block, very handy.
Ars Technica did an excellent writeup about exactly this kind of cherry picking:

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/10/talk-of-global-c...
this is a follow up to my previous post: A Rigged Game. http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/02/a-rigged-game.html
Things I've learned as an entrepreneur
I know it's fun bashing IE, but if anyone cares, this css rule achieves the same effect in IE:

filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Matrix(M11=1,M12=.2679,M21=0,M22=1,sizingMethod='auto expand');
Also, Jordan Cooper & I have a pretty epic debate going on: http://jordancooper.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/trees-sharks-ch...
If you use Mercurial, you can use hg-git to talk to git repos without Git.

http://hg-git.github.com/

I'm not sure if there's an equivalent for Subversion.
This is really the point. In the beer and other industries we are led to believe we have a multitude of competition between different brands. In actuality, we have two corporations diversifying. If you believe in healthy competition in the marketplace, then this is a bad thing.

The natural response is to bring your local brewer into the picture as counter-examples. The point isn't that there isn't any competition it's that there isn't any meaningful competition.
Watch out, first you start using SVN over git and then people will assume you don't own a MacBook and then your chances of Rails development jobs are shot :)

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/files/abingo.zip

At the moment that is created by hand and so it won't be automatically updated. I'll figure out a more permanent solution later.
Then why is the ice on the northpole melting?
Chip and PIN is Broken: Cambridge's Ross Anderson Comments
I felt compelled to download this paper just to see who wrote it.

Phil Maymin http://philmaymin.com/

Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Hedge fund portfolio manager
Policy scholar for a free market think tank
Award-winning journalist
Columnist for the Fairfield County Weekly
Columnist for LewRockwell.com
Author of Yankee Wake Up and Free Your Inner Yankee
Google Maps Data 3.5yrs+ Old. Yankee Stadium is Missing
Simple Video Download
Google did something seriously wrong
In my original comment I was trying to be neutral when I said "I was reminded of this story by this other thing that was on Hacker News." I was not trying to imply that the original essay, "How to be a loser", and Kafka's story have the exact same message. My intention was only to point out what specifically spurred the association without giving any analysis or opinion. Evidently I didn't do a good job, and I wish I had.

But here is my opinion on the story, if only to disabuse mtts of the rather presumptuous notion that I wear "myopic web startup goggles" and think this great story is "another piece of entrepreneurial feel good fluff":

I've loved this story since I first read it 9 or 10 years ago. It's emotional, mysterious, and ambiguous. It lives up to Kafka's claim that "A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside your soul."

I think I can see what mtts is saying when he says the story is essentially about loneliness, but I'd love to hear more. Because I think the story is about other things as well - about ambition, about art, about being misunderstood, and about greatness.

Kafka's hunger artist is a man who feels like he has never reached his potential. He's always convinced that he can accomplish more than is allowed, and has a troubled spirit because of it and because he perceives that his management and public are keeping him from reaching his potential while at the same time completely misunderstanding why he feels as he does.

Yet when he finally is left to fast for as long as he wants, at the end of it he says "You shouldn't admire it. Because I have to fast, I can't help it. Because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else."

Why would he say that? What's Kafka trying to say? It seems like Kafka means to communicate that great artists aren't admirable, that in fact there's something wrong with them. In the end, their constant hunger isn't a noble trait, it's not an acquired virtue. It's a defect, a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder of the soul.

This is probably why the public reacts to the hunger artist as they do. They find him fascinating, and culturally he's celebrated to an extent, but the public can't truly value what he does. It's horrifying. It's inhuman.

So, I in fact brought up this story because if it's related to the "How to be a loser" essay, it's as a contradiction. jsomers presents constant hunger as something admirable, and those who are content as people who are only fooling themselves into believing they're not living lives of "quiet desperation". The other way of looking at "winners" and "losers" is to say that "winners" are so compelled to satisfy their hunger that they're not capable of being normal, healthy, content humans.
<quote>For every scientist who says the world is warming, you'll can find another who says it isn't.</quote>

This statement is flatly untrue. If you look at the papers published by so called deniers, you will quickly find that they come from a small group of people (including Christy and McKitrick, two cited in this article). Moreover, you will find that they simply repeat the same scientifically debunked arguments over and over again.

The purpose of these articles, and the others being astro-turfed all over HN and other news sites, is to create the illusion of debate where (scientifically at least) there is none.

That isn't to say that no one will ever come up with a viable alternative explanation for global warming. If and when they do, the climatology community will be perfectly happy to test it experimentally. But it hasn't happened yet, and meanwhile the world continues to grow warmer.
ASP.NET is not my bag, baby, but on the gratuitously painful enterprise-friendly development platform that has put a roof over my head for the last few years (J2EE) I think you could get the moral equivalent of this done in under a month.

If you want to write yourself ASP.NET A/B testing stuff, send me an email and I'll tell you what I know about the design tradeoffs.
Going from "I think of losing as not winning" to "I think of being a winner as not being a loser" is not an inversion like the author claims. It's a change of subject from outcomes to stereotypes.
Feedbacks on Business Ecosystem for traveler and owners
We want your feedback on our Startup. We have put a lot of effort on it, on the design and on the concept. You can come and create an account for free and tell us what you think about it, Would you use it ? Is it clear to understand what is the problem we want to solve. Your advice is welcome.

Guillaume
www.tripsourcing.com
When I moved into my first apartment after college, I brought a laptop, a sleeping bag, a folding chair, and a clip-lamp. It was great. I felt I could go anywhere and do anything.

Of course, with a new job, 650 square feet, and an an IKEA nearby, I couldn't turn down a few basics. So I picked up a spartan bed, a minimalist sofa, a function-oriented desk.

Then time began to pass. Though I'd resolved never to subscribe to cable, where was the harm in a TV to watch Netflix in comfort? Off to Best Buy to pick up a 20" on sale. Then IKEA to put something under it. Now I needed shelves. Accessories. Electronics.

Time passes. Books. Papers. Storage. A couple raises? Bigger TV! No need to sell the old one; it goes in the bedroom. Office reorganization? Don't throw away that table; it matches my sofa! Now I need chairs...

As I laid the cables for my home theater system last year, I had to confront just how far I had come from my theoretically nomadic self just a few years earlier. I had an apartment full of stuff. Some new opportunities had me contemplating the possibility of picking up and moving a great distance -- something that would have been easy not all that long ago, now made quite the unappealing prospect.

I'd kept pretty fit myself. But I realized that my lifestyle had put on a lot of pounds while I wasn't looking.
The title is wrong. Buzz itself is not opt-in, auto-follow is, but not yet, and not retroactively.

The blog post also glosses over something critical:

This created a great deal of concern and led people to think that Buzz had automatically displayed the people they were following to the world before they created a profile.

But what about people who already had a Google profile, who did have their contacts automatically displayed to the world? Google still hasn't acknowledged this or apologized for it, and they continue to act like everyone who is complaining is getting upset over perceived rather than actual privacy concerns.
I'm not convinced that using Wordpress is what directly caused this. From the article, this was a "quite popular website". If someone from, say, Google, got a keylogger on their computer, especially one that directly faces the internet, I would be considerably more inclined to assume it was a targetted attack, rather than just a random infection.

Just telling someone to use something else doesn't help at all. Telling a user to stop using Windows because they get infected often may help if they were simply downloading stuff they shouldn't, but if they were actually being attacked, moving to Linux, since they will know much less about keeping it even remotely secure, would lead to a potentially far more dangerous infection.
Are You Fun to Follow on Twitter?
I am moving to San Francisco from Nebraska. I pretty much got rid of all my stuff already except books, clothes, and computers. It felt awesome to get rid of everything, I suggest you try it.
Social Tools: for work, for fun, both
1. There's consensus that evolution is a valid theory. It doesn't mean every scientist is on board. That would be impossible.

2. If you say the world is flat or that evolution doesn't exist -- if you won't accept the result of the scientific process, you're holding us back. I don't approve of names, but you'll get one.

3. I'm sure creationists get surpressed too. Not all views are equal; you have to have superior science. If you do, you'll be listened to.

4. Trillions in beuracracy? Ha! Listen. The oil industry is the biggest industry the world has ever known with revenues of 8.5 million a second. It was 2 million a second just up until 2003. That' a huge jump for the world's biggest commodity. Sure it's partially because we're using more, but it's also because there's only so much oil. We know that. We have to switch. Let's do it now and save ourselves money and possibly help the environment in the process. (I think the pressing effects on such things as water supplies for poorer societies are more important, but I'm guessing your soul won't move you much, and that it's smarter to appeal to your wallet.)

5. Point out a rounding error in evolution. Who gives a fuck. Either prove it or disprove it, but rounding errors are not interesting to anyone but you and your ilk.

6. Watch Bill O'Reilly much? That's just conspiracy nonsense.
Echolocating bats and whales share molecular mechanism
Is PBR really a choice? I mean if it came down to all those brands and PBR... I am sorry.
Sweet, I can post George Carlin and be on topic!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
Here’s what bothers me: http://i48.tinypic.com/23sc7ep.png http://i47.tinypic.com/2a7snkl.png
Those are all (cause -> problem -> money for solution) dependencies. I don't see why you want to get money from a company owner to solve any of them....

Not exactly. They're

(Problem -> Root Cause -> Solution) "dependencies". The very nature of negative externalities is that they're problems that societies have to deal with when one entity decides to profit at the detriment of his neighbors.

Here's an example of "negative externalities" that is actually true, and took place near a town where I used to live.

Assume: You're a property owner, and you don't want Pig Farm, INC to buy the parcel next to you and put up a pig farm because of the smell, potential health problems due to the (literally) toxic waste, etc. Yeah, there are regulations, but Pig Farm, INC has figured out that if it has a facility with 99 instead of 100 pigs that it can skirt the laws.

Problem: Pig waste is toxic, and causes health problems that you're beginning to notice is affecting your children.
Root Cause: There's a pig farm next door to your house.
Solution: Move. Or get the pig farm move.

Problem: You were there first. Why should you move? Besides, you can't afford to move because you're behind on doctor bills resultant from the toxic pig farm emissions.
Root Cause: Doctor bills coupled with the fact that nobody will buy your house because it's next to a pig farm.
Solution: Take the loss on your house and move anyway; health benefits outweigh the desire to hold on to your property in a place that is making you and your family sick.

Problem: Pig Farm, INC bulldozes the house you used to live on and builds another facility, which conveniently holds 99 pigs. What used to be just your problem is now your former neighbor's problem.

In summary, it's not about "money for the solution" it's about an "equitable solution". If one farm in town is causing 95 percent of the town's health problems, and causing loss of equity to 98 percent of its residents, that's a good thing only for the CEO of Pig Farm, INC who's raking in the money with the increased salary due to demand for bacon and pork and sausage.
http://olds.ycombinator.com would be an interesting twist.
Books^2: When I buy a paperback novel to read on a plane (or while waiting to get on a plane :-) I often finish it in some distant city and leave it someplace where somebody else can find it. Just too much work to sell for a pittance, and too valuable to simply toss out. So I leave its fate to Fate.
The paper linked to is a low quality imitation of the current literature. Among its flaws it has the common fallacy that if a problem has a large number of states than inspecting all the states is always hard.

I strongly recommend instead some of the interesting actual work on Nash Equilibria and Correlated Equilibria:

"Nash equilibria: Complexity, symmetries, and approximation" Contantinos Daskalakis, Computer Science Review (2009) vol. 3 (2) pp. 87-100

"Computing Correlated Equilibria in Multi-Player Games" Christos H Papadimitriou, (2009).
Start seems ok, until you do: start "C:\program files".

WTF

LOL
Did I say something offensive?
It seems like you liked the story, and I'm glad for that. If you haven't read it before, then I'm especially happy that I introduced you to it. It's one of my favorites, and I've probably read it at least 30 times over the years.

However, it seems like your comment was only intended to shoot down what you perceived as my interpretation of the story, and to do so in an insulting manner. I'd like to know why you think the story is essentially about loneliness and what you think it says about loneliness, and I'd appreciate it if you did so in a way that's not insulting.
Antitrust law is a farce -- Greenspan's essay on antitrust is excellent. A law is just only if it's applied evenly and if people can understand it, antitrust law fails these 2 very minimal criteria -- activities legal for some are illegal for others and it's hard to know in advance what is and isn't allowed.
And, apparently, according to some research, it's not always a good thing: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1023445...
I might've considered tuning in if they offered some episodes on Hulu or their own site so I could check it out first. Given the majority of prime time TV is available online now, I have enough to fill my time that the networks that won't stream aren't worth my time.
The real title of that piece. Robert Bork, William Baxter and the Monopolization of America

It's very sad almost every comment here is about beer brands. It is just the first example.
Robert Bork, William Baxter and the Monopolization of America
A deceptive and disingenuous presentation of tax burden on Americans.

Doesn't take into account state and local taxes (sales taxes, auto registration, etc.) that are regressive in nature.

Also, it can be argued that those well endowed should incur greater tax fees — after all, it is they that have more stuff to protect and defend. What about costs that all pay (subsidies for stadiums, roads, public works, etc.) that overwhelmingly benefit the affluent.
Reminds of an excerpt from the book, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (via http://mrteacup.tumblr.com/post/386598513/the-consummation-o...):

The consummation of desire is thus a necessarily disillusioning experience for the modern hedonist as it constitutes the ‘testing’ of his day-dream against reality, the resultant recognition that something is missing. The real experience in question may yield considerable pleasure, some of which may not have been anticipated, but despite this, much of the quality of the dream-pleasure is bound to be absent. In fact, the more skilled the individual is as a ‘dream-artist’, then the greater this element of disillusionment is likely to be. A certain dissatisfaction with reality is thus bound to mark the outlook of the dedicated hedonist, something which may, under appropriate circumstances, prompt a turning to fantasy. It is more likely, however, that the dream will be carried forward and attached to some new object of desire such that the illusory pleasures may, once more, be re-experienced. In this way, the modern hedonist is continually withdrawing from reality as fast as he encounters it, ever-casting day-dreams forward in time, attaching them to objects of desire, and then subsequently ‘unhooking’ from these objects as and when they are attained and experienced.
Or have a used book store buy them in bulk. They won't pay much, but it's a single transaction so it doesn't use a lot of time.
You mean like http://fairsoftware.net ;-)