skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know. Honestly, I don't.

It's kind of like the "free market" discussion. Perhaps there never can be a free market? Perhaps the term is so abstract that it doesn't in fact exist anywhere and has never existed?

I support a flax tax in principle. The problem is that once we start indexing the tax to the size of the purchase, or excluding certain purchases, or giving money back? Well, I might or might not support it, but whatever the case, it's not really a flat tax then, right?
So four ox = oxenen?
I say "no". We do that in Ontario and it has been such a nightmare because it distorts spending, complicates pst filing, and leads to people splitting up coffee orders at Tim Hortons into multiple bills (because a "meal" is tax as a luxury if it is above 4 dollars, and no, this was never adjusted for inflation and yes the tax applies to the whole $4.01 rather than just the cent) and other stupid things (never buy 3 muffins at Tim Hortons, you get bumped into the non-meal bracket, but buying 6 gets you the bulk discount AND exemption from the pst because your presumably buying 6 muffins to take home to your kids, rather than stuffing your face with a 3 muffin "luxury meal"). It is so stupid Ontario is doing away with it and harmonizing with the federal GST.

It sounds like this is a problem with badly-engineered consumption tax, not consumption tax itself.

I generally agree with your proposals. However, I don't think all forms of "social engineering" are bad. We need to make the best possible statement about ourselves as a society and what our values are, and that means cracking down on the tumors. If our rich want to behave like uncultured oil sheikhs, they can move to the desert, give up their US citizenship, and act like assholes all they want; but as long as they're in America, they'll behave themselves.

The US has a problem with cultural inversion: the people at the very top of society (George W. Bush, Paris Hilton) are uncultured, mouth-breathing trashbag-fuckers, while (on the inverse) it seems like everyone must know at least one brilliant, cultured, educated people who are struggling to pay rent. This is a morale killer. It also ripples through society; the reason we have a "next-quarter" mentality in business and no universal healthcare is that uncultured trash-fuckers have too much money and power. We've got to do something about it, and preferably now while it can still be relatively legal and bloodless. I think a targeted consumption tax is great because it is completely bloodless.

[* "everyone knows" clause in last paragraph edited for correctness]
Do you consult companies in implementing these practices? What was the largest team using Scrum that you felt was still effective? At my job, there's 30 people at the daily stand-up and it just seems out of control, especially as we pass a speaking stick across the group. What is this, Lord of the Flies?
The Google Shift In Enterprise IT
And it could disappear in a second.

idk. Big money deals with a single or maybe 2 customers is insanely high risk.

How do we know how much they make from their deals? How do you know it's more than $5m?
Unlikely given the Symantec analysis. The DLL which listens on 7777 had a specific reference to the Energizer USB device. So, if it was a 3rd party attack, it would have to be an extremely targeted one.
If tunes get stuck in your head, you have musical talent. If you can play a rhythm game like Guitar Hero, you can probably play music too. It used to be that most every household had someone very good at music. In the same way that there was a lot more awesome home cooking.
Yeah, they're just selling different levels of access to their data stream. Besides the firehose, they have streams of things like all links and retweets, which require some kind of partnership.
Shellfish Could Supplant Tree-ring Climate Data
Or I like that HN encourages good discussion. Sarcastic "I already knew that" posts are not good discussion. And I did upvote it, for that reminder and for the pointers to the programs that aid in writing manpages.
Email now suffers the problem of carrier pigeons
The meat of my post was simply an attempt to show that the economic value of an individual is far greater than their salary, thus demonstrating that if one looks only at specific jobs and salaries, the analysis is not complete.

As for more specific discussion, I'm not motivated to spend weeks putting together semi-legitimate models of various stimulus efforts, and doing less than that would be pointless. That said, when you talking about crowding out effects and such, you should be aware that economists are aware of these effects, and they are part of the math that sits behind a stimulus model.

The only thing I'll address in passing about the roosevelt recession is that it emphatically did not occur during a period of government stimulus, rather it came at a time when the government was adopting austerity measures and increasing taxes, which is pretty much the opposite of the situation today.

That said, I stand by my original point that proper analysis is complex, and that there really isn't any substitute for it. Anything less is just noise... so let's leave it to the technocrats.
The Ubuntu One music store and free software for profit
UIUC
I use DD-WRT, so anything malicious from the router provider would have to be in hardware.
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Mail#1960_to_present

Contrary to urban myth, Royal Mail does not own the trademark on the colour red, but a specific shade of the colour red: "Royal Mail, the Royal Mail Cruciform, the colour red (as part of the Royal Mail logotype) and SmartStamp are all registered trademarks of Royal Mail Group plc."
Good points. I guess it would make a difference in discoverability of survivors if Apple got more aggressive and purged, say, 50% of the app store, but this isn't likely.
Thermopower Waves in Carbon Nanotubes - A New Way of Producing Electricity
I don't disagree, but I also don't see why that should make me self-conscious for having fun playing those games.
It loads through the side of the drum, rather than the end—this addresses two major mechanical sore-spots in traditional front-load washers (which are otherwise vastly superior to top loaders).

It's not an entirely new concept (cf. http://www.staber.com/), but our approach to the door and very ingenious and novel.
That's true, though even "proprietary" competition is better than monopoly. Look at almost any industry except software for an example of that...
QR codes are just an embedded block of text. They can also redirect you to a URL, so in that case, it's just a shortcut to typing.

Stickybits allows you to actually write to barcodes (effectively using the barcode as just a pointer to lots of media)

No easy way to do this with QR and be social. Unless you set up a website.

No marketing, just want to use codes and attach digital content to real world objects.
No I didn't install it. The charger has a light to say if the batteries are charged. I don't want some crappy poorly written big flashy dial popping up on my computer to say my batteries are 75% done.

So I don't know, it probably just displays a dial, some adverts for batteries, etc
It's about $25 Million a year.
Why You Still Need Business Cards
Movie based on Nithyananda Story
I don't know anything about ICC V4, but you've made me curious. Could you elaborate on what this does and what the problem is?
I am doing a SAAS and not for developers. I'm not sure how it came across that way?
We do have a Television License but it is effectively a tax on any household that views television. The charge is £142.50 per year, which pays for the BBC, a broadcaster which is funded by, but independent of, the state. Our broadcast media is regulated rather differently than most. Compared to the US media we have incredibly liberal standards of taste and decency, especially past the 9pm watershed. All broadcasters have a legal duty to act with fairness and accuracy, a duty that is quite strictly enforced. The BBC has strict legal responsibilities regarding quality, which many believe leads to a positive halo effect in the broadcast media.

Although it is a contentious policy, especially amongst the tabloid press, the system works extremely well. The license fee is guaranteed to the BBC and ensures that they are immune from government interference. The BBC Trust regulates the actions of the BBC and ensures that they act in the public interest. Although I would not wish to cast aspersions, I can say that having scrutinised the broadcast media of most of the developed world I am personally quite happy with our system.
The Single Sign On
Of course the other factor:

Twitter: funding $160m, you say rev $25m
Twitpic: funding $0, rev $5m

So I think twitpic comes out pretty fantastically well.
revenue took off when they moved from Adsense to other ad promoters

For those of you struggling with adsense, take note.
University of Maryland (College Park) - Go Terps!
Underwater Skyscraper is a Self-Sufficient City at Sea
> subtract the average temperature from the observed temperature for the same month ... If it's getting hotter the anomalies will get bigger.

Based on the above, it should be noted that anomalies are signed, and an anomaly of +5 is bigger than an anomaly of -10, if I understand correctly.
Google Testing Progamming/YouTube Search On Dish Set-top Boxes
The problem with most types of tax scenarios like you describe, is that the truly wealthy will always find some place else to reside where they can escape the taxes. They are the ones with the means to do it. Tax systems that target "the rich" nearly always net less than they should on paper for this reason. This happens in the US routinely. People flee states like New York and New Jersey and move to places like Florida.

In general, the wealthy will always be able to afford and find a way around things like the inheritance tax and the housing taxes you describe. If the tax is severe enough, people will take drastic action.

The above aside, from an economic perspective, you don't want to discourage people from buying "stuff" with their money. In your example, I'll take private jets and big houses. Lots of people at various rungs on the economic ladder are employed to make and support those things. From the guy that drives the fuel truck (or cement mixer) all the way up through the engineers who design the plane (or archtects who design the house).
"Home schooling can be part of the answer I just hope you are allowing your children to grow."

Do you honestly worry that he isn't allowing his child to "grow" by homeschooling?

Public school is hardly the sole source for the teaching of "socialization" skills for children.

Exchanging 50% graduation rates for lessons on "dealing with difficult people" is hardly a bargain.
HTC Android Phones Found with Malware Pre-Installed
Metric mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter (1999)
> Personally, I write the type signature before I write the function implementing it. It is a nice thing to look at as you are writing the function; it keeps you focused on what to do. Oh, and it is great documentation, that the compiler ensures is up to date -- if your function does something the type signature disagrees with, your program won't compile. Excellent!

That partitions the function definition. And it's optional. And it could be somewhere else.

And you get to argue with folks who like point-free because it's shorter.
Colorado State University
Implementing what? It would be a copy of the current store, just with a much higher crap volume. Hell, they could even take 50% of the price of the apps for the crapstore.

They'd have to add a second data source in iTunes (a config file most likely) and probably unhardcode some URL's in the backend to the appstore where they hardlink to things.

Additionally, they'd have to make a copy of their appstore app and point it at the crapstore.
Former NSA Tech Chief Does Not Trust the Cloud
Tell that to Wil Shipley

The inventor of the wooden bookshelf?
BTW, why not Andrew Kaz? http://www.classicsapp.com/
From CSS to processor design in just 5 comments! Only on HN ;)
You should probably bump that 75K to 100K and throw in s $30K side order of benefits and about a $1-$1.5M defined-benefit pension .

At least that's the going rate for most "administrators" in my neck of the woods (Milwaukee).
Palm unleashes webOS PDK beta on the public
google form please
The "flat tax" is, in my opinion, a red herring.

If people want a simplified tax code, that's one thing-- but there's nothing inherently complicated about a progressively graduated tax rate. It's as simple as looking a single number up in simple table.

Tax simplification has nothing to do with the flatness of the scale, and it's being used as an pretext to shift the tax burden from the very wealthy to the not-so-wealthy.
SetJam CEO letter about first angel presentation
All of the financial data is neat, but am I the only one surprised by the line:

- Moved to South Carolina because of The Patriot, the warm weather, and the beach

The Patriot?! I liked "Braveheart goes to America" as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure I'd up and move to SC because of it. An answer that bizarre deserves a followup.
I'd say only this: if the GPL gets in your way, that's
because you want to distribute proprietary software, right?

Wrong. Compare GPL to MIT and you will understand.
If you stop working because you completed your task for the day, you belong in a cubicle. Dime a dozen, and a dozen too many.
"also, "ls" lists files in your current directory."

It's fantastic that you're very comfortable with Unix-based operating systems! Unfortunately, there are lots of people that aren't. There was a time when you weren't.

This is probably the most straightforward explanation of man that I've ever seen, and I have bookmarked it in order to pass it on when I encounter people who would benefit. I don't know about you, but I really enjoy helping people out who are struggling to learn something new.

I hope someday we can get past Unix "RTFM" culture.
When is a good time to switch, and where to? Does it make sense for smaller sites, too?
As far as I know there were at least some backports.
one good thing about HN is that it's selective. there's always some small nugget of information in a post, if you look hard enough. that shouldn't be sufficient for an up-vote.
1. This is a flat income tax, not a flat sales tax.

2. Sales taxes are regressive.

3. As a general rule, if a concept is simple enough for you to support on principle, the only real-world plausible implementations will be much, much more complicated.
Understanding that you are allowed to do random access and skimming is crucial not only to enjoy reading many papers but to technical books as well! You got taught to read something from cover to cover before college and doing otherwise is viewed as laziness, maybe even cheating. It's not until later they explicitly state you should skim and only digg deeper when there's something relevant you don't understand.

It is also often pointed out that great academics aren't necessarily great writers which I'm sure is the cause for a lot of the dryness in papers.

I'm also reasonably sure it has to do with journals enforcing overly strict formating rules to the point of blatantly refusing to publish for no reason other than being slightly over length. A hilarious tale of this is How to Publish a Scientific Comment
in 123 Easy Steps: http://www.physics.gatech.edu/frog/How%20to%20Publish%20a%20...
Soccer -- Not Sovereign -- Debt Crisis Hits Home
That is a common misconception. Flat taxes don't shift the tax burden from the very wealthy to the not-so-wealthy, as they generally include a tax free amount of income. That leads to hidden progression, so to speak. Also, the poorer you are, the less likely you are to be able to hire a tax advisor, so you cannot use all hidden loopholes etc. So a flat tax would actually mostly benefit the not-so-wealthy.
Holy hell this is awesome. Now I can weed out some of this crap.
Why online resources are not free and ChromeOS will fail
Okay, I'll bite. Is the raw data available -- with no extrapolation or filling. Just a big series of: station, long/latt, date, max-temp, min-temp? Data that no human hand has touched since the original reading?

That would be a wonderful CSV file to play around with. It couldn't be that big of a file either.
It's so easy to say that freedom means that "I should be
able to do what I want without regard for others".

I never said anything like that. I am talking code, not SUVs and firearms there.
I don't want some RMS or EFF or FSF telling others what they can and cannot do with my code just because they have some weird image of freedom.
Is customer service a basic right?
Let me guess ... it won't work on the Kindle 1. If not, Amazon should upgrade all us Kindle 1 owners to a Kindle 2 at a steep discount (or for free). We got the Kindle on the map, so how about showin' a little love?
Why don't they just ask Opera to build a better browser?
An interactive regular expression editor
There was a time when you weren't.

there certainly was. but i didn't and i don't expect to learn that kind of thing here.
An answer that bizarre deserves a followup.

It's not that bizarre. I moved to San Francisco because of all the skateboarding videos I watched when I was 13.

I'd bet that 90% of the people who move to NYC move here because of an idea of the city that is based on movies or tv shows.
Because it does not restrict me in any way.
Yeah that part was very interesting. We all know adsense revenue is a sort of lower end mark of what is achievable, but it's not always obvious what other ad promoters to try.

Any good ad networks people recommend?
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's Plan Is Working
Right. I think the TeXbook explicitly says that TeX doesn't know about rivers, but I forget; anyway, I've read the code, and there is no river detection in TeX.
I don't do those things, but that's not because it's a bad method, but because I don't care. If there was some bug in some system call, or if I needed to investigate why hardware is misbehaving, of course I'd read the Linux source. That's one of the great things about open source software; you don't have to treat it like a black box. You can just look at the internals and see how they work.

(And I have proof that I do actually do this; I had a misbehaving joystick, and the linux fork in my github contains the fix.)

Anyway, in conclusion, if you want to know what algorithm Firefox uses to process CSS selectors, just read the Firefox source code. If you don't give a damn, then don't do that instead. But if you care and you do nothing, that's just silly.
> Unlikely. But the fact that the phenomenon does exist demonstrates that people ARE interested in advertising under certain circumstances.

I think it demonstrates that people are desperate for a common experience (usually to make small-talk about.)

Superbowl ads are convenient since it is a safe subject to bring up for both people who watched the game as well as those who do not care or or do not understand the game. This is also why we have celebrities.
No no, his premise is delicious!

yummy trollspam.
> And it could disappear in a second.

How so? I'm guessing they have contracts, and MSFT and GOOG aren't the type to renege on their signed deals.
Ok, but SF and NY are world capitals, tech/biz hubs. Skateboarding was part of the cultural zeitgeist for decades. The Patriot was a big budget "B" movie that featured the carnage of a bunch of innocents. I actually like the movie as a guilty pleasure. To put it another way, I wouldn't move to Minnesota because of Wayne's World.
Yes, the problem is that things become much more complicated very quickly, and all real-world implementations do not match theory.

What that means is that principles matter. Taking this back to my original point, and follow-up point, which had nothing to do with taxes: problem solving is many times a search for definitions. Once definitions are agreed on, all solutions become a matter of applying various principles in various degrees. Real-world solutions never match the terms that the original problem is presented in. In fact, good solutions usually involve creation of a new language.

But without mutual clearly-understood terms, you never get there.
This is a good choice IMO. Even decades later, Thacker is still doing interesting work: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/bee3.aspx
I'm finding this true as well. I was in graduate school for a year and got my ass kicked. I actually failed at least one course. I was lucky enough to swing into industry with a better job than most MAs or "ABDs" get so I didn't go back for a second year.

I kept myself in challenging work and average 10-15 hours per week studying CS concepts. Now those same subjects that kicked my ass seem not only comprehensible but beautiful. What was a poorly-motivated technical mess of symbols (to me) I can now relate to real concepts in CS, and I could play with them if I needed to. (Godel numbering? Oh, that's Lisp encoded in the integers. Primitive recursion? It's a for-loop.)

So it seems like I'm "smarter" at 26 than at 22, contrary to stereotype. Because I have more experience to relate new concepts to, I find it much easier now to learn new concepts in mathematics and science, except for the fact that I have 1/4 as much time in which to do so.

The problem is that most people are taught subjects like algebra and calculus without much motivation and with no prior experience, so only natural ability and parental expectations can drive people to learn them. Calculus isn't actually hard, unless your algebra sucks. Algebra is only hard for so many people because it's poorly-taught and often not well-motivated, so only people who get a lot of encouragement (often because of natural ability and a developed inclination to solve puzzles) learn it.

The lesson I take away from this is that education (about sciences, but also literature and history) isn't something that should occur only for those who are too young to be economically useful; it ought to be an ongoing process.
Wayne's World was somewhere in Illinois. I would totally move to Minnesota if it was really like Purple Rain. (It's not - it's more like Mall Rats)
Something like Flash but not Flash ?
The best ad network is no ad network, if you have enough aggregate demand to warrant it.
Résumé (C.V.) using Google Maps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_memory_access

And the description of how to exploit it

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/hacking_comput...

The FireWire version
http://www.storm.net.nz/static/files/ab_firewire_rux2k6-fina...
To see him and his son speak, along with possible Craig Venter:

http://www.brown.edu/Research/CCMB/Conferences/SYMPOSIUMMAY2...

I'm definitely going to be there; email me if you're going/interested.
"The US has a problem with cultural inversion: the people at the very top of society (George W. Bush, Paris Hilton) are uncultured, mouth-breathing trashbag-fuckers,"

It sounds like you are bitter. I also wouldn't put George Bush and Paris Hilton in the same category.

"while (on the inverse) everyone knows brilliant, cultured, educated people who are struggling to pay rent."

If you are brilliant, cultured, and educated, chances are you aren't struggling to pay rent. If you are, then you aren't brilliant or intelligent. I also would like to hear your definition of "cultured". Some elitist douche that reads a new article on green energy or the middle east is not cultured.

"This is a morale killer. It also ripples through society; the reason we have a "next-quarter" mentality in business and no universal healthcare is that uncultured trash-fuckers have too much money and power. We've got to do something about it, and preferably now while it can still be relatively legal and bloodless."

You really think this is why we don't have universal healthcare? I really don't want to debate healthcare here, but I have seen it first-hand, and I don't ever want it here in the US. It also has nothing to do with being "uncultured" or "a trash-fucker".