skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, capitalism includes crony capitalism and many would say corporatism (e.g. Italian fascism (the economic part)).

If you say "free-enterprise system" you make it pretty clear what you're talking about, e.g. not someone who goes to the state capital or D.C. for an earmark or law that puts his competition at a disadvantage. Adam Smith had more than a little to say about this.
I recommend reading up on behavioral economics, particularly the works of Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahnemann, and Dick Thaler. This is not pop psychology with truthiness like "money doesn't buy happiness" and "meditation is the way." Rather, it's well-researched works on happiness, fairness, and economics. Start with this great TED talk: http://blog.ted.com/2010/03/the_riddle_of_e.php and then consider Thaler's book "Nudge". You can also look at it from a marketer's perspective by looking up Rory Sutherland, starting with his TED talk http://blog.ted.com/2009/07/session_2_runni_6.php
I spent several hours Thursday night re-reading Cassandra docs and doing another test install. I am trying to decide between MongoDB (which I have a fair amount of experience with) and Cassandra for a 2 node setup where I care less (at least right now) about latency than about redundancy and convenience. I want to (initially) use an EC2 instance and a non-Amazon VPS and since I can't tell from reading the docs (and I have not seen any published comparisons), I am going to have to set up both a 2 node Cassandra install and a MongoDB replica-pair to see which does better given the hit of one service running in an east coast Amazon availability center and the other in a data center in Texas. If I am ever fortunate to have more than a few users so performance becomes an issue, I would like to add another EC2 (or two) to the mix, but still keep a service running in a non-Amazon data center.

If anyone has any links to Cassandra/MongoDB comparisons for my desired setup I would appreciate seeing them.
If Google quits, they will no longer be subject to Chinese law, which will open up all sorts of possibilities.
A friend of mine found this to be true for Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

I found something akin, not so much "interactions" as in understanding the "why" about many human things, in reading Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene.
From the sounds of it Steam sounds like a fair DRM system. I don't have anything against the principle of DRM itself - as long as it's implemented in a way that is fair to both consumers and content providers.

Most DRM "solutions" are laughably unfair on the customers.

Another good example of DRM - if you can call it that - is the Pragmatic Programmers ebooks. They just include the customer's name in the PDF file and then dont impose any restrictions on the file itself.
ING Direct's quite a bit different than your standard bank.
I know a girl who works at Indigo (a book retailer)—she buys books via Amazon because she doesn't need the aisles of books to leaf through, staff assistance or in-store Starbucks or the markup associated with it.
Paypal money market is paying 0.04%.
IMHE, there's a paradox similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect on up-down voting. The loud strongly opinionated newbies (or even plain idiots) downvote anything that challenges their point of view or their latest fad, while many of the more educated, experienced, or rational users become apathetic.
Cost of Internet scams more than doubled in '09, report says
RIM grew three times faster than Apple during this period.
My opinion (as someone who nearly died and has gotten a lot healthier):

The real problem is that study after study after study shows that diet and lifestyle are major factors in health outcomes for every single major deadly medical condition. But doctors are in the business of selling drugs and surgeries. Telling people to eat right and live right isn't "sexy" (in the advertising sense of that idea - basically exciting, attractive), it doesn't win Nobel prizes, and it is highly unlikely to get you headlined as some "hero" who is saving lives. (In fact, it seems to me that telling people to live right is more in line with what most religions try to do than what most doctors try to do. Of course, the problem with that is religion then has too much baggage about "sin" and the like -- ie you are told in essence "You are going to hell and morally bankrupt" rather than "That activity exposes you to disease" or "It will clog your arteries".)

So they frame the problem as "healthcare", then work on bills about "medical care" instead of actual healthcare, and basically miss the boat entirely. You aren't really going to make the nation healthier by getting them better designer drugs and manipulating who pays for what. You also aren't likely to bring down costs that way. Most bills of that sort shift costs rather than reducing them. Actually getting healthier is the only humane, effective means to genuinely reduce healthcare costs. And getting healthier is mostly about taking proper care of yourself to begin with rather than eating crap, not being active, and then running to the doctor for a new pill for every new symptom brought on by your bankrupt lifestyle.

Of course, that sh*t don't sell. (Yet. Maybe I will find a way around that problem. :0 )
I noticed the following characteristic about one friend who always sounded cheery.

When things go wrong (and there's often 1001 ways things go wrong, and 1 way where they go right) - We often slap ourselves and say "It could have been better if.."

However, I noticed my friend tend to think along these lines - "It could have been much worse, but that didn't happen. Somehow we got through it."

What doesn't kill you, make you stronger anyway.
Ask HN: Tax implications of selling a website?
I recently sold a website of mine for $90,000 through Flippa. I am a single member LLC (not taxed as a corporation) and the agreement, and payment, were between the buyer and the LLC.

Will this be taxed as ordinary income, or a capital gain?

In previous years, revenue from the site and expenses associated with running it have been reported as part of the gross sales and ordinary expenses of the business. I held this website and domain for more than one year.
Control+Option+Command+8
Sorry, but having worked with both, Visual Studio is miles ahead of Xcode. I even did an app for a client in C++/Qt that wanted it running in OS X ... developed 100% in Visual Studio. That's because at the time (at least) Xcode wasn't even having Intellisense (and Visual C++ does have the best intellisense available).

Visual Studio Express is free to use ... and it's enough for almost every need you might have. And before that you could use the #Develop which is an open-source IDE for C#/VB.NET.

And while Xcode doesn't even support intellisense properly, Visual Studio is in a different category altogether considering that you can also develop with it web applications / Silverlight clips, supports many more languages and has a really healthy plugins ecosystem.

Not to nitpick, but Microsoft is endorsing Mono lately as THE Linux/FreeBSD/OS X alternative. On Linux I can have a dotNet app that uses Windows Forms running ... can you do the same with Cocoa?

Of course Mono for Apple would be an abomination that had to be destroyed (considering how they sued Psystar and even Wired on publishing an article about hackitoshes)

(pretty ironic I'm defending Microsoft, since I've been badmouthing them for years, but compared to Apple they start looking like saints)
Well who didn't see that one coming?
It will be really sad to see netbeans go. In combination with jvi it is a slick development environment - the only one thats ever tempted me from vim and emacs. I'm sure the people that have developed plugins for netbeans will be gutted if Oracle don't set it free as an open source project.
The express edition can not be compared to XCode, which has a single edition (the full one).
Obviously, you should talk to your accountant.

But: it seems to me that if the website was an asset of the LLC, then the sale of that asset would be viewed as income of the LLC on the corporate tax return, but since corporate taxes are on profits, that income may be offset (in whole or part) by various expenses.
How to Win Friends and Influence People Summarized
Brazilian Startups
Does anyone know where I can get more info about South American startups? Mainly Brazil. I have an interest in that market. Portuguese/Spanish sites welcome. Thanks!
"Andy Lees, a Microsoft senior vice president who oversees development of the mobile-phone software business... explained that Microsoft workers often use rival products to better understand the competition"

If that was what he truly believed, then the mobile-phone division is in trouble, because their leader is completely out of touch with reality.
At the moment I am reading this, several most recent (and, it seems, perfectly legitimate) comments have been downvoted to zero: one by Mz (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1189009), jacquesm (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1189007), algorias (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1189004), coryl (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1188999), as well as arnorhs (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1188988) and pbhjpbhj (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1188906). And a few minutes later, they are now back in the positive.

Could it have been a case of vandalism?
How can rapid evolution be harmful? It's the same sort of evolution that happens with other software and hardware platforms. My laptop is obsolete when I buy it but I still buy one every couple of years.
good point, it's really an introduction to 'how to get disciplined and organized in your code hacking'
It has a certain elegance and conciseness and having different syntax for recur and the mutual recursion trampoline is perhaps more than inelegant.

Every little thing you add to a language makes it that much more difficult to remember and correctly use everything. The closer Clojure stays to Scheme in the Scheme to Common Lisp continuum the better.
" If someone makes factual errors in their post downvoting is a perfectly valid signal, for instance."

Reply with the facts as you understand them.
> Recently, the principal and school teacher council released a (very long) list of books we're not allowed to read

Frankly, that sounds like an excitable kid making up stuff. (I've known kids who made up the same thing.)

However, it doesn't matter if it's true because schools can't stop kids from reading what they want. And, as you've pointed out, that school is a voluntary choice.

> > No one is stopping those kids from getting those books.

> That's a little naive. If a kid requested or suggested the book for the school library and it was refused on the grounds it had been banned; how is that a good thing?

It's no worse or different than any other reason for not carrying something. Why are you so hung up on why the school doesn't carry something?

The amount that schools can carry is in the noise compard to what's available. Compare Amazon's book list to any school's library, and Amazon misses a lot of things.

> it appears the service was popular.. indicating that the non-provision of that material was actually stopping kids from getting the books as part of their normal routine.

I knew a kid who ran a Playboy/Hustler lending library. Please distinguish. (School refused to carry/discouraged and kids wanted.)

> The implicit suggestion by a school that actively bans a book is that there is something wrong with it.

Except that they don't ban, they merely say "we won't get these things for you, just like we won't get the vast majority of things".

And, if you think that kids pay attention to that stuff, you clearly don't have much experience with kids.
For sure, and e.g. the media player is quite clunky, and the SD card has no standard layout. But the ability to have e.g. my todo list, or my calendar items, or a twitter feed etc. as widgets on my home screen is more tangible. And application association mechanism is useful too - I can replace the various media players, browser etc. and actions from different applications respect my wishes, rather than following some one true way. And I can get notifications and alerts from background apps - works really well for me monitoring various remote services.
The Problem with a 0.00% Yield
I sometimes click on the wrong arrow accidentally, and on HN there is no way to repair the damage.
This is already right on the main page, with the original title
Why Do Some Relationships Fail?
Silk Icons: A Comprehensive Open Source Icon Set
The problem is that we are given a single qualifier that is then conflated to represent a variety of reactions.

Even just one additional qualifier would go a long way to disambiguate the community opinion.
Maybe I'm one of the rare few but I've had innodb files getting corrupted with no way to rebuild them. When my 10GB database got 100% unreadable, I gave up on MySQL for anything that's mission critical. I don't care why the DB got corrupted and why stuff like this ( http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/07/04/recovering-in... ) didn't work. I just don't want to ever be burned like that again. Sure I had a complete backup of the DB but it takes a long time to restore 10GB over the net.

Drizzle is using innodb too. How do I know the same thing's not gonna happen again? I much rather like the MyISAM .frm files because if one table gets corrupted, I can restore just that table from backup. Innodb corruption destroys the entire database.

Also, will Drizzle innodb finally get full-text search? That's the only reason people still use MyISAM tables. However, MyISAM locks the full-table so that becomes a bottleneck pretty soon.

Honestly, here's what I want from Rackspace and I will pay good money for it the next time I need a good SQL db: Give me a fast, reliable SQL db that works like MySQL, lets me do full-text searching without locking the whole table, and lets me change table structure without locking the whole table. Also, I don't ever want to worry about replication, syncing, sharing etc. Make this a cloud service. Amazon's SimpleDB comes nowhere close to a decent MySQL setup. Give me the features of MySQL in a cloud but without the hassles. And I'll pay for it.

Other than SimpleDB, I don't know one decent cloud db. Everyone talks about Cassandra, Redis, Postgres, and tons of other DBs but I don't want to manage yet another large database system. I want to write queries and build my app. I really think there's a big opportunity for a startup that offers a reliable cloud db service. Of course, there will be a fixed latency on every DB call but I think an overhead of 100-200ms/page is acceptable for never having to worry about the backend DB.
The scam was primarily perpetrated by a small number of drivers, with 3,000 of them overcharging more than 100 times, the agency said.

While the 1.8 million overcharged trips is a large number, it represents only 0.5 percent of the 361 million taxi trips taken during the 26-month period the agency studied.

Given the tiny percentage, I think calling it a "scam" is a bit over the top. Who doesn't make an occasional mistake?

-------

A single cabby was accused this month of overcharging passengers a total of $40,000.

On the other hand, this was probably not a mistake. But in many cases, I would guess it was an innocent mistake.
While I agree that the per-user karma is worthless, comparing the rating of comments with the rating of stories is a bit like apples and oranges: multiple users can submit the same story, and when one submission "wins" over the other, little harm is done to the whole of HN. But when a comment is downvoted solely because people disagree with it, it hurts the discussion because the well constructed comment is less likely to be seen. Furthermore, this works both ways: snarky comments with little added value suddenly get a lot of appearance.

It's a very difficult problem to solve, but to just "not give a hoot" is hard, given the fact that the order of appearance for comments on HN depends so much on karma.
Yeah, you couldn't install any applications on the device, which is the ultimate control. You can easily argue that the device is much more open now that developers are able to create the 150,000 apps that have been downloaded more than 3 billion times.
I agree with it "costing" something to down-vote, I actually thought it already did.... hmm.

However, when you click the down-arrow, what if it prompted you with options like Digg does (minus an "other" option) as to why you are down voting, and you have to choose one.

If the reason why you are down voting is not listed, you learn pretty quickly what reasons are valid for down voting.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1213841/Derren-Brown...
Perhaps because MySpace belongs to a very powerful "news" organization with close ties with government.
Sad to see so logically flawed argument getting upvoted—that means many of us don't bother to think any more and vote purely on "four legs good, two legs bad" mentality.

The worst enemy of freedom in software is not Microsoft,
it's Apple.

Makes no sense. Neither MS nor Apple are enemies of freedom of software. Apple is using a lot of OSS, contributes a lot to several projects, pushes for open web.

You're pretty free to develop and distribute software as you want on Windows.

And? You are just as free on OS X. And OS X kernel is open source. Can you get Windows kernel source?

On new Apple devices, they control the way the software
is distributed

Yes. And that's because it's a win for majority of the users of said devices, not because Apple is "the enemy of free software".
BTW, how does an Apple App Store compares to Zune marketplace? I guess the latter gives you more freedom?

they tax you,

Huh?

they make you obey their rules

And who doesn't? If you don't like the rules, don't buy Apple is as simple as that.

Imagine a world with appstore as the main way of
distributing software for any kind of devices.
This would be hell.

That would be hell because? That would be hell to whom? To those who want to have a convenient way to buy apps, without worries about making backups, with easy way to get upgrades, without a fear of getting malware?

Stop using Apple.

No, I won't. It gives me the biggest freedom so far.

Use Linux

Then worry more about making linux more useable to ordinary people, who care about usability, not some fuzzy freedom ideals.

or if you can't, use Microsoft.

Thank you, but no thank you. You don't need Apple to tell how you use your devices, I don't need you to tell what I should or should not use.
I usually do. But the downvotes work as a signal to the people reading the thread, just as they're meant to.
This list only includes problems from theoretical physics, I prefer a list that also includes some problems from experimental physics and applied physics. Problems about superconductivity, neutrino detection, among others areas.
> There's a difference between downvoting a +10 comment down to +9 out of disagreement and downvoting a +! comment down to 0 out of disagreement.

I suspect that most people read once or twice a day so the difference between voting when something is +10 and +1 is when they see an article relative to its posting time.

In other words, most folks aren't looking for "close" votes to affect.

Besides, who's to say that +10 to +9 is actually different from +1 to 0? The score just tells you the difference between up and down votes. It doesn't tell you that the +10 was 10-0 while the +1 was 100-99. Do you really want to argue that a downvote is inappropriate in the latter case?

I think that public scores are arguably a mistake because folks read far too much into them. Someone didn't like something - get over it.

That said, I think that scores should be hidden except when they get "close". Or, maybe they should disappear if you vote "too much".
Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that everything that you'd like to work actually works. E.g. \mathbb, for things like the set of real numbers (\mathbb{R}).

Or am I missing something?
If you're at all interested in this stuff check out Stumbling on Happiness by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert http://bit.ly/cfze2u. For a preview, here's his Ted Talk: http://bit.ly/bRAkXW
Users get update because they feel like the rug has been pulled right under them. I for one, thought "Mixergy is kewl, Andrew is building an awesome community" but as soon as I saw his subscription model I realized that he was not building a community, he was building a business around a community. Building a community and building a business around a community are not the same thing and I probably won't be able to participate because I probably won't pony up to see a video. But funny enough, I would have bought a book if he had one in Kindle form like I have for Paul Graham, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jessica Livingston, etc. I probably would have gone to a conference like I have for Ruby Conf, Java One, Future of Web Apps, and Google I/O. I would have bought audio books as I did for Seth Godin, John Maxwell, and Stephen Covey because of Leo Laporte's and Jason Calacanis' podcast ads.

Andrew can fire his staff, fire his clients, and fire his users and he can certainly follow whatever business model he wants but for someone has had interviews with Seth Godin subscription models are a plain ol' boring not-purple sort of cow.
A better motivation: Toyota is "a Japanese corporation that created devastation for the UAW."

Employing non-union workers doesn't count, you know.
The "brain scan" crowd has a recent history of over-reaching (and unverifiable claims). Usually what they show to the press as a single scan is come sort of composite of many sessions (so would be useless in practice). In particular the amount of amplification typically used is so great that you can measure a dead salmon's brain "reacting" to images of people of you allow this sort of methodology: http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/090927-dead-salmon-br...
This list is rather one-sided. What about gravitational waves, nuclear fusion, turbulence, super high energy cosmic rays?
A person with 50 years of driving experience is probably not a good driver.
Top Ten Errors Java Programmers Make
I'm pretty sure he means they tax developers at 30% of each sale, whereas you could just sell your shit independently and save yourself that 30%.

Just say you sell an application for $4.99, this means Apple takes around $1.50. If you sell 100k copies, Apple is gouging you $150,000.

Great, you don't really care because you made $350,000. Not so; You're going to lose a shitload of that to the IRS. In essence we're looking at being double-taxed. It sucks.
I read this book after I divorced, and I remember seeing a lot of my own relationship in it.

Bottom line, everyone is not you, and to make the most of a relationship you need to understand how they see things, and accommodate.
Ah, I knew I was missing that! I was shocked when I couldn't recall that. And it's exactly the "social media" feature phone I was talking about. Thanks :)
If you want to stop Apple, you need to bring something
clearly better to the market,

Oh, please, someone crying how evil Apple is do that. I guess that's the only way for you to understand what real
users want, what Apple does, and why it does it.

is and why you don't need Apple's crap anymore.

I won't need "Apple's crap" when someone will finally get what usability and user experience means.
you need to understand how they see things

Isn't that the hard part?
I didn't mean Apple was uninterested in Android at all. Quite the contrary.

What I meant was that they're uninterested in the lower end, lower margin feature phone market that Android is successfully wading into with partners like HTC and Motorola. That's why we've never seen the $99, stripped down WalMart iPhone pundits have murmured about for years.

Apple obviously cares about the Nexus One and the Droid. They don't seemingly care about Motorola Backflip that Jim72 pointed out, for example.
VS is the best IDE out there, hands down. I read a nice rant about how it causes brain damage (by Intellisense pushing you into bottom-up design), but it's great at what it does.