skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> He himself conceded that his secretary pays a higher percentage of her income in taxes than he does

Buffet is himself a redistributionist, and was comparing his capital gains tax rate (where essentially all his "income" comes from) with the earned-income tax rate his secretary pays. In other words, Buffet was indulging in a bit of FUD, to be blunt.

Many economists believe that taxing capital gains lower than income is a Good Thing to encourage investment and savings, even if it results in strange outcomes like Buffet's in edge cases.
You're just purposely being dense now. If you aren't...
'Equation,' 'Gingerly' And Other Linguistic Pet Peeves
Do you routinely edit the source code of your web server? Just curious since I've never needed to do that.
How long would it have taken until such content had been removed at Hacker News? I guess not more than 30 minutes. Two months = #fail. A simple flag-feature would probably already do it... I hope Google draws the right conclusion from this failure.
Tried that. Didn't work.

Video player spins forever with the message "we're experiencing temporary difficulty"
This is a political matter.

In every European nation, and even in the USA, if you make N televisions channels telling the same story about the poor boy victim of youtube you get more or less the same effect I bet.

The problem here is that all this is Berlusconi-driven. Guess what happens if everybody switch to youtube and internet instead to see what his ridiculous televisions are pushing? Loss of business.

The TV here is full of similar stuff about Facebook, for instance. They are doing an immense government-driven attempt to stop people using internet. Fortunately it's too late for them.

To make a parallel with USA, remember when enough communication convinced most americans that Iraq had mass destruction weapons? 90% of people don't think with their own heads. If the government and media are evil it's very hard to stop it.

This is not to defend Italy (I'm Italian btw). If we are under the this kind of control is our fault, but this youtube stuff is only the result, not the symptom IMHO.
My reaction: Functional programming fits well with both the Unix philosophy and the web architecture. When your modules/functions do not share mutable state, there's often no reason to smoosh them all into one huge program.

Portions of Amazon and Google are written in functional languages or styles, but in a well-designed system you often end up with many smaller programs and no larger ones. Also, there's no strict requirement for one program to be in the same language as any other.

"Big" should never be a goal in programming.
Yes, it does work with Java appservers. See http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxJavaServers
The right conclusion to draw is that doing business in Italy is a nightmare:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/02/03/italy-vs-google
I've worked in advertising, and there are fewer great non-English ad networks out there (can deal with large volumes and also will yield high CPMs). Also the non-English portion is fragmented into dozens of different languages.

It isn't impossible to do, but certainly harder to build an international ad sales team.
The busy-shopping-street analogy is something I've been thinking about before; what is an online shopping street? It seems to me Max couldn't really find the online equivalent either: both Apple's App Store and Facebook have plenty quiet streets I'm sure, so building a business on those platforms does not equal building on a busy street.

Is there really a way of building my business next-door to yours - in the sense that I'll catch customers walking out your door?
The key to prosperity: open systems
... and the TV manufacturer along with the stand the TV was sitting on.

TVs should, at this point, have significant technology to figure out that someone is getting beat up on the display and stop the user from viewing it.
Exactly what kinds of buyers are they trying to attract by listing on Ebay?

Sure, the price is right, but their choice of sales vehicle doesn't make me take their business seriously.
I disagree. The same conviction could have happened in any other European country and very probably also in the United States. Any legal experts here?
Functional programming is not that uncommon in the financial sector.

Jane St. Capital uses Ocaml, and I know of a hedge fund that uses Mathematica. Goldman's high frequency trading code is written in Erlang and much of their ordinary trading code is done in Slang (their proprietary programming language).

Further, a number of places do functional programming in C++.
Cool. I'd stick that prior to the OAuth.

The UI looks terrific, and the service was easy to use. My only comment: I might evaluate 'quiet' and 'talkative' using a shorter window than 'since account creation'. Every once in a while a nice, useful-updates-only service I follow hires a community manager and then their Twitter feed goes all to hell. ManageTwitter still considers these feeds 'quiet' although they've recently become all-too-talkative.
The interesting part is that broadcast television has managed to shoot themselves in the foot by lowering the bar of production value (via reality shows) to the level commonly found among online video producers (as opposed to well written, slickly produced and expensive dramas).

By setting their audience's expectations as such, the broadcasters have made online content more appealing and therefore have decreased their ability to compete with online offerings.
An example I can think of: Imagine you sell "Webpage designs" online, vs "Wordpress themes". Your wordpress design site will get listed on design sites, you can get added to the theme section of wordpress.org, lots of people will search for your keywords. Wordpress themes is a busy shopping street.

The app store analogy holds - the app store can be thought off as a mall where people are walking about. If your store sucks, nobody will come in, but people are seeing it. If there was no such store, your app could potentially be on the web and you only ever have 10 visitors.
Imagine Cup Embedded Development contest
Does youtube have a "flag this video" feature? Seems like an easy, lo-touch solution.
Ah makes sense. Would you consider this to be akin to Blueprint, et al. in any way? Providing a default set of, essentially, CSS rules and building from there?
We haven't _all_ been doing that. Some of us have been writing SQL applications that extract related data from multiple tables while maintaining integrity between them. Seems to work for us...
Student Insider Interviews 1vs100 Creative Director
Spreaker social web radio
Further, capital gains is only part of the tax he pays. The businesses he owns also pay taxes, so the tax on his income is actually the combined tax on the business and the tax on his capital gains.
O HAI. Any language that has the word "broseph" as a keyword is okay by me.
ITA software uses Lisp, and Orbitz gets its flight data from ITA.

(Common) Lisp is not, however an especially functional language. Functional programming is possible, but not the default and not especially structurally encouraged by the language. Most implementations require compiler declarations to get tail-call elimination, and imperative looping is much more common than recursion in production CL code I've seen.
No, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

Most social sciences (including economics) can't very well be exact for the lack of experiments, much less controlled experiments.
According to the timesonline.co.uk article the video was online for a full month before it was removed, and it was a top ranked video under "most entertaining". I don't think this should have gone to trial, but I do think its fair to say that Google should have done more. Does anyone believe they only got one complaint after a month?
Millennium 2: Take Me Higher Game Download Free
Remember when dealing with capital gains you are risking money whereas with normal income you are not. So any taxes on capital gains need to factor in that when you lose, you loose 100% and when you when you only get the return - taxes. If the taxes are too high then the amount of risk/reward becomes lower.
The title makes me thing that this is considered a bad thing ...

For me, it would be more a good sign, twitter is getting traction internationally, how bad can that be for them?

The comment about monetization is something I hadn't thought of in the first place, but what makes you think there are no good ad network in the Spanish, Japanese or French speaking world (just to name a few) ?

Granted, I'm French, living in the Netherlands, and I tweet in both English (for my public profile) and French (mostly on my private profile), so this is a topic that reaches me.
My current problems with e-readers:

1. Power consumption. I already have numerous other gadgets needing power. Having yet another device that needs power to work means setting up yet another place for it to charge. Granted, books need more storage space, so this is balanced.

2. Very limiting. I have numerous technology books, and often I'm flipping back and forth between two or three. I don't see being able to do this with a single device.

3. It's a single purpose device. I already have too many devices alread (iPod and Phone), and I find that too much still. Couple that ear phones, keys, and a wallet, it's far too much stuff I need to carry around. An e-book reader would be just one more thing I'd need to carry around.

4. Lending capabilities is non-existent. Unless the person also has an e-book reader (and here I'm making the assumption that I can even lend the book from device to device), they can't be lent the book. I've done this enough that it's actually rather important.

5. Going beyond the lending problem, I'm not alone, and my family might want to read something as well. Current e-book readers mean needing one for every person. Throw DRM concerns on top of that, and I don't know how it could be handled. If I want to read one book, and my wife another book, and we have only one e-book reader...

6. Cost. While an individual device isn't that expensive, you still have to buy a lot of books to make up for the difference in price. Even if you read a lot like me, not all my reading is done with books. I'm a big Audible fan, so this cuts into my time as well. But still, the device is expensive, usability is still awkward.

Side note: I've tried out Sony's e-book readers, and maybe it's just the floor models, but they seem awful, cumbersome, and something I would expect to see as an early alpha. Buttons are slow to react, touch-screen is finicky, and whats with the ugly flashing black screen every time it changes pages? God help me if I want to scroll to a certain page. End note.

Obviously both MS and Apple, amongst other manufacturers, see the potential with the tablet like devices. The magic device will solve the 'hard to read for long periods' problem, as well as the cost problem. Oddly enough, I constantly think of Star Trek and their pads they carry around. They have a lot of them, and treat them rather roughly. That's the direction I think people need to take, using those 'data pads' as a reference for how they could be used.

For some reason, I think Microsoft will get there first.
I think the likelihood that it was at the top of "most entertaining" for two months is nil. I think the likelihood that it was on the site for 2 months and the last 48 hours it was in the most entertaining section is high. It probably got a total of 20-50 views before that, which may have resulted in 0 complaints given most people would just close the window.
Heh American phone, American morals I guess. Germany should make a phone and we could have all the scheisse porn apps we would ever need. Germany would just ban all the violent apps and WWII strategy games instead.
Google is fully responsible - the fact is that they prefer not to police their networks for inoffensive content because that policy ultimately drives traffic and revenue to their company; they should be forced to review videos BEFORE they are published. Shame on them for allowing this filth.
Good article. A thought on the "Science is/isnt based on faith/ a religion" : for people who don't have the capacity to falsify scientific theories, science can be similar to a mysticism. Especially with complex theories, experts are equivalent to augurs reading the sky for the common mortal. That is why it is good to have down-to-earth experiments illustrating scientific principles, like the double-slit experiment showing diffraction. The first time I saw it was a shock because it is a counter-intuitive phenomenon. Epistemology and history give a lot of meaning to science, that is why I think it should be an integral part of the way science is taught.
It's keywords and the first page in the SERP.
I love Nginx. Though judging by the comments here, i'm not alone.

Nginx + Passenger + REE

FTW
Car insurance quotes
The site with very favourable offers on autoinsurance. Cheap car insurance and free rates.
"CRUD is actually just what were called 'expert systems' in the 80s."

No. CRUD was a programming style that arose from relational database technology. CRUD = (Create, Read, Update, Delete) corresponds to the SQL CREATE, SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE statements. CRUD was popularized by Oracle. For example, Oracle's program generators IIRC used the acronym CRUD as part of their program generator's specification.

"Expert systems" in contrast, were a specific outgrowth of AI technology in the 70's and '80's and were defined loosely as systems that mimicked human expertise.

There is no necessary conceptual overlap in the two terms.
Sometimes I wish that HN had a "+1, Funny" button like Slashdot does.
I completely disagree. We talk about people using object oriented programming languages all the time.

I think the issue is that, there are a "pure" functional programming languages (Lisp, Scheme, Closure, ML etc) and pure OO. People see the value in the functional paradigm but they don't want to give up the benefits of OO so we are are seeing a convergence where the language supports elements from both paradigms, and in general people don't look at that as functional language. I'd say javascript is a good mix between OO and functional.
Is anyone using functional programming for the web on Windows? I know of F#, and I'm sure it could be plugged into ASP.NET, but I wonder if there is a more web-centric technology stack out there for enterprise developers on Windows?
Any sufficiently complicated Haskell program will contain a call to unsafePerformIO.

But in all seriousness, you're quite right. Most interesting programs have some state in them, and the top-level logic that interacts with the UI will most likely be about viewing and updating that state.
For a continual stream of photographic evidence of what David is talking about, see http://ourdoings.com/flapic/
He was Polish, despite his parisian history, hence his famous mazurkas.
I wouldn't call server-side JavaScript "new" as such - Netscape were experimenting with it in 1996: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server-side_JavaScript
I'm not sure building the delivery first, and then the product is a good idea. Analogously, it's like buying a lot on a busy street, and taking out ads for a shoe store, then only building a store, and buying inventory, after people are coming to buy shoes.

This does not seem to me like a good way to encourage repeat business.
>>They have the same responsibility as Google has on this issue.

No, they don't. Google owned and operated the site that hosted the video; they have the full responsibility for insuring that they abide by Italian law. Guilty as charged.
To me, it's more akin to first finding a location for your business before you decide on the type of business. For example, if I want to start a bar, I don't first purchase all the equipment for the bar, and then find an available location - rather, I first ensure there is a good location at a good price, and then I rent the place and then build the bar.

A bar at a bad location is very difficult to keep profitable.
Facebook’s Petabyte Scale Data Warehouse using Hive and Hadoop
Very similar topic to this post from today:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1147767
the elasticity that Chopin allowed, and the fact that he never played a piece the same way twice (sometimes performing the polar opposite dynamics), have led to a tradition of performance in which his entire works are interpreted with Romantic freedom.

I find that this, plus the fact that many of his typical works are so short, makes Chopin the quintessential YouTube composer.
Great, thank you for that. I think I know what I'll be playing around with tonight.
Proposed online sales tax draws criticism
As they say, location, location, location. I started an ISP in Oklahoma back in the mid 90s. Instead of running a ton of advertising to drive traffic to the phones or website, I opened a store front in an 800 sqft unit attached to the front of the local Best Buy. I did my selling in person, and used some unique branding to help people remember us. This worked because a) dialup ISPs sold to a localized area, and b) the newness of the Internet scared people. I lost count of how many computers passed through our doors getting configured correctly for access.

In a pure online play, I think the equivalent of location is channel strategy. Find partners who are a close fit to your offering, and work hard to form a good relationship with them early on. If you can provide a service to their customers that adds value, it's a win for both sides.
I did the worst design of my life within GNOME.
They'll appeal to EU courts as a next move if they aren't successful in the Italian courts. Some would argue that, morally, issues of information freedom transcend those of the state and practically that Italy cannot go down the path of trying to shut out the information age without hurting themselves badly. Italian law can not change reality.
thanks for the explanation. Looks like we might have different meanings behind 'hope' here. I tend to think of it less in the way you describe here, and more like a vision of something I think is possible; hope is something that helps galvanise action.

eg, I hope to see my kids grow up with a reasonable level of immunity to brand-names, therefore, when we buy things we talk about things like what it's made of, how well will it suit our needs, how long do we expect it to last etc, and almost never mention what brand it is.
Design, architecture, and Christopher Alexander
It feels like a stunt: create the ebay listing, then have something unusual to blog about, with the hope that the blog post generates attention.

The buyers (if there are any) heard about it through blog aggregators or social news sites like this one.
If you don't know where the peak is, you can't argue that raising taxes will reduce GDP because you don't know if you're going up the hill or down it.
Parallel programming is hard. Right?
Intel and 24 Venture Capital Firm Alliance to boost startups, hire more grads
He is promoting progressive taxation as an enabler of social justice, not individual justice. There's a difference.

He acknowledges your point that the debate on flat vs progressive tax rates is a virtue vs social justice debate.

He also is debunking the idea that higher taxes hurt the economy, which is the OMG BE SCARED argument that the right uses to try to lower taxes (without a commensurate reduction in spending) in order to grow the economy and (eventually) increase the tax base. I recently wrote a similar article about this particular point (http://www.reasonablyopinionated.com/2010/02/tax-revenues-ta...) because the only thing that ever happens in modern history when taxes are lowered is horrible deficits. As the Slate article points out, there isn't a strong correlation between tax rates and GDP growth.

Personally I am on the side of Buffet and Spitzer on this issue and do support progressive taxation, precisely because of the social justice argument. I believe in equal opportunity, but abhor the idea of forcing equal outcomes.

What really irks me about the anti-progressive-tax crowd is how they don't even acknowledge the benefits the rich get from such a system: efficient and reliable infrastructure, political stability, and a large middle class (ie customer base). If the government did not make those investments, the overall pie would likely be smaller.
This is a brilliant essay, and one that fundamentally changed the way I look at things like right and wrong, and all that goes with it.
Use open source? Then you're a pirate
High Availability Principle : Request Queueing
Ask HN: text editor based on Chrome
I really like the Chrome browser, and it seems that little modification would be needed to create a text editor using its codebase. Next-gen Emacs! So, why it isn't as simple as I'm thinking?
Clojure is on JVM and it can be used with your favorite Java server.
Tips to choose a term paper topic
When doing essay writing you will more often face situations where you will not understand the term paper topic that you could write on. If you are facing problems choosing the topic you need to understand that you are not alone
But isn't Berlusconi in a constant tug of war with the judiciary? In what way do you think he has influence on this particular decision?
Agreed - Italy is a sovereign nation with the ability to make and enforce laws. If Google doesn't like it, they can stop doing business there, or suffer the consequences or breaking those laws.
Oogali posted a response to my post on his Tumblr blog. I feel that in many respects it is an orthogonal and/or supplementary response rather than a diametrical rebuttal, but all the same, it is quite a good one:

http://pseudonym.tumblr.com/post/408523735/abalashov-a-rebut...
If anything, this is a serious threat to Italy's netizens. Certainly, the rest of the world won't follow suit.
He's exactly right. The answer is to stop looking for certainties and instead look for models - theories that produce results that are as right as you can get them. We don't ever expect to reach perfection, we just expect them to asymptotically approach it.
Ask HN (the EC2 Users amongst): is this something useful for you?
We wrote this web-site to execute recurring tasks on EC2. Let me know what you think about it! Thanks
Not according to EU law. Which I think takes precedence.
GoDaddy store your passwords in clear and may access your VPS without permission
...which, to me, would suggest that we need more progressive taxation (income, capital gains, etc.) and much less regressive taxation (sales, use fees, etc.). Of course, one can look at the GDP growth rate for the U.S., Canada, and Norway and see interesting results:

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=ny_gdp_mk...

It'd be nice to figure out what datasets are available in the Public Data. That's really useful.
Load balancers FTW.
By the way, Common Lisp is neither "pure" functional nor not-OO. It's a multi-paradigm language that supports imperative, functional, object-oriented, language-oriented, etc.

Google for CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System. I'd say it's more "pure OO" than most so-called object systems in use to day.

Haskell would count as purely functional, not Lisp.
How long ago did you try it? I think I started using passenger in the past....3 months? The version of install-passenger-nginx-module I used would compile your nginx for you, and set up the configuration. You just have to change the path to your public directory.
A Bridge Lesson From High-Stakes Players Warren Buffet And Bill Gates
Could you explain what you mean by "social justice"?
I immediately thought of Asimov's essay when I read that too, so I'm not surprised someone else posted it.

Of the two, I think Asimov's is much better (if only because the Fallacy of Grey relies too much on analogy).
Pretty easy. Set up a block to accept connections on port 443, put 3 or four lines in the config pointing to your certificate, you're done.
Send only @replies to your phone (my new side project)