skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if underlying users get a chance to respond to negative material. At least this site can be focal point for rebuttal. Negativity shouldn't be feared.
Benevolent?

I would call that worse than a normal authoritarian society, as they at least knows what is going on.
Zhuko - Free Local Classifieds
Zhuko provides free local classifieds fun and efficient. With user feedback and ratings, to a clean, informative website. Now you can shop locally with confidence.
He's looking at total tax revenues. Some things you might not be taking into account, from most likely to least:

1. Corporation tax. You wouldn't be paying that directly.

2. Value added tax. You do pay that kinda-directly, every time you buy something with VAT on it, but unless you keep more careful records than most people it's hard to assess just how much you pay.

3. National insurance. Effectively an addition to income tax that doesn't get reported as income tax and that (unlike income tax) is regressive rather than progressive.

Back of envelope: Consider someone paid £30k/year (modestly above the national average). They'll pay about £7k in income tax and a bit less than £3k in national insurance. The corporation tax rate is comparable to the income tax rate, and nationally profits are something like half of wages, so probably this person's share (so to speak) of their employer's corporation tax is about £3k or so. Call it £3k. This person's take-home pay is about £20k. Perhaps half of that will go to things like food, utility bills, mortgage/rent payments, etc., that aren't subject to VAT, leaving £10k; perhaps they'll manage to invest £3k of that, leaving £7k; then VAT at 17.5% on the remainder is about another £1k. So, crude estimate: this person accounts for about £14k of tax. That seems to fit well enough with Mankiw's figures.
You forgot to take VAT and other indirect taxes into account.
This is really old news.
I encourage you to take a step back then, and read The Little Schemer. It focuses not on the high level cool things in Scheme, but instead putting forms together to create things you find in every implementation out there.
I would pay to outsource the risk of being a PayPal merchant. I want to be able to serve my users with the option of paying with PayPal, but PayPal for merchants is totally unreliable. Especially in the virtual good/currency industry they seem to have the tendency to lock your account for no reasons at all, and you can be without money for over 180 days.
Quick Ways To Improve Your Alexa Rankings
I agree it's annoying, and I agree it's a hard problem... but I don't think there's any money in solving it.

The target audience is HN readers... and we still make for bad consumers.
Is Complete Transparency Feasible?
What if all software was open source? A code to unlock the desktop
SCO loses court battle against Novell
With Hirings, Yahoo Steps Up Its News Coverage
In E-Book Era, You Can’t Even Judge a Cover
I want a personal assistant for 5-10 hours a week. Not a virtual one because most of the things I want done are in meat space. Stuff like filling out forms, doing my laundry, waiting in line for me at the DMV, and dropping off my netflix returns in the mail. It sounds petty, but I really hate running errands and filling out forms. I'm considering hiring someone off craigslist.
Ah gotcha. I included NI but not the other two.

Based on the tax I'm paying currently your figures do seem about right.

EDIT: actually your income tax figure might be a bit high. I'd say it's about 4.5-5K
I.B.M’s Bid to Woo Software Startups
A richer spouse maybe, but I wouldn't give a hoot if I was making almost all the money in a partnership. I hope most people wouldn't either.
ok all this drama just given me as idea ..... i am to patent "WALKING INTO A SHOP THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR" and sue any shop owner that violate.
The fact that people vote for their leaders based on superficial stupidity and not based on issues.
Here's what you can't find among a plethora of web design consultancies, cms systems, off-the-shelf website design services, html templates...

A small business/startup website solution that is compact, editable, live and clearly describes the product and company.

No, its not vague or different every time. It should:

1) Clearly describe the product

2) Clearly describe the company and what it does.

3) Does not look mediocre. (E.g. those static html sites based on those usual narrow rectangular templates with links at the side or top).

4) Easily changeable. (i.e. updates on parts of it without much html tweaking)

Extra:

5) An easy-to-update company blog, ability to upload multimedia content such as embed product videos. A startup is changing quick, and so should the website.

Do the first 4, I'll buy it. Then add 5.

Examples:

http://www.rethinkdb.com/

http://pivotallabs.com/

I have researched and both have spent considerable amount of time building theirs, and they have all 5. Why not do it off the shelf?
Don’t Let The Logo Design Price Stop Your Way
However, the biggest difficulty about the logo acquiring process is the logo design price. Many business owners who wanted a high class logo design unwillingly had to turn away from a good logo just because the logo design price was too high. You have to make certain that this does not happen to you.
You made me click. Have I just been recursion-rolled?
Congratulations, I've been quite excited about this, show's how much people value you and your posts. Enjoy!
I tried this a few years ago (for businesses). It never really worked out because you have to sell it to people.

In the end it filled with affiliate marketers (it seems it was useful for them :P) so I had to scrap it.
Good to know. I'll be checking that out, and if it seems worth having something HN specific (or, more particularly, HN marketed) I'll put up a post here and drop a line to those Brisbanites mentioned in this post.
TheDeadline - Your Intelligent Personal Assistant
Is it really gives all students an iPad? More like they up your tuition and force an iPad on you. Nothing is free, but they sure can spin it that way.
How to make money, or rather, how to survive and support a family.
AppDynamics Puts the Management in Application Performance Management
What would you say about this correlation between GDP growth and government spending?
http://mol-eng.com/growthsm.png (taken from: http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3012 )
> "Students will be able to download their textbooks to their iPads from the iBook Store. In addition, iPads can be used as phones and for air and file sharing, as well as note-taking."

The iPad isn't a phone. Many textbooks don't have good PDF versions. If the file sharing is similar to the iPhone (and it looks that way) it's going to be a lousy share-by-email experience. You can't use the Dropbox app (or similar), because Dropbox files live in the "Dropbox" directory, and your other files will be in the "Documents" or "Presentations" directory. And note-taking? Sure you're joking. The iPad is a "hunt-and-peck-required" device. How can you possibly pay attention when you spend a full minute on every sentence?

I suspect this will end up as a major disappointment -- the iPad isn't ready to replace a laptop yet. It's a consumer's device, and college isn't exclusively about consumption of content.
Awesome Syntax Changes in Sass 3
“Will you ever give users the option to take down their profile?”
“No, because if we did that, everyone would take their profile down”

I find that remark quite amusing coming from the creator.
finally, I was about to drop dropbox because I am running out of space.
I absolutely love the service, but their prices are just 2-3 times above the competition. I would buy the 100 GB in a heartbeat if it would be 50-70 USD a year.
Who pays for the iPads? Presumably it is in the tuition fees? In any case it is probably more of an advertising thing than a revolutionary teaching thing.

Can't get mom and pops to buy you an iPad? Go to Seton Hill and they don't have a choice but buy you one.
This article has the prices... (though I see that they are listed in the comments of your link)
Google Reader is painful and lame
As for the wire protocol, there are two parts to it:

Simple framing is described here:

http://api.zeromq.org/zmq_tcp.html

Extension of the framing for multicast:

http://api.zeromq.org/zmq_pgm.html
ZedShaw starts a rant blog
>How about people attending less prestigious schools?

Nothing wrong with less prestigious schools, but most are specialized in a few focused areas. My own school is not a prestigious school, but it is in engineering and biomed.
Escape from PDF
I have all this data that I collect and it's very difficult to make sense of it or to break it down into a form that tells me what steps I should be taking next to improve my bottom line.
A calling is an activity you find so compelling that you wind up organizing your entire self around it -- often to the detriment of your life outside of it.

From this definition I would say that a family is a calling (and IMHO the most rewarding one). I've seen too many exceptions to believe that you can't do both.
it looks more like it's gamma distributed to me: you could imagine the generative process is something like a sum of exponentially distributed decisions times.
Fantastic! I just always knew that in our distopian cyberpunk future, we mercenary code gargoyles would all be covered in some kind of digital war-paint-camouflage as we wage secret mercenary wars on behalf of covert multinational-mega-city-corps.
It would be interesting to know if the referrals they win this way have higher/lower likelihood of developing into paid accounts.
Backup Windows Vista | Windows Tricks
Miegakure
Miegakure The 4d Puzzle Paltformer! Miegakure is a puzzle platformer game, where one can explore the fourth dimension to solve different puzzles
This. The technology we have at the moment actually assists a great work-life balance. If you're spending fourteen hours a day working at the exclusion of everything else, you're simply doing it wrong. That's the long and the short of it.
Agreed. It's a good service, but I just can't justify the cost. I'd pay $25 for a 10GB service, but I don't need the amount of space they're providing.
Even if this doesn't generate a lot of sales by itself, it will get the product out there and exposed to more people so it's a good move that way.

Defiantly a lot of people out their which would find the product really useful that wouldn't have heard of it.
Any Cocoa application (it’s an Apple thing obviously, so it’s only going to work if the application is using their file browser), File > Open. Source list on the left, under the “Media” heading find “photos”. All there, browsable by events and groups, or as a continuous list.
Google says Malware targets Vietnamese activists
jSCrypto uses AES-128 only, a 10-round cipher with a small keysize, to which there are a number of side-channel attacks available. AES is also a very slow performer due to its computationally demanding nature, and still it does not supply additional benefits from the large amount of work it puts into scrambling data - a perfect example of another case of this would be the good old DES standards, with its measly 56-bit (7 bytes) keys, which are computationally more demanding than newer, safer ciphers, yet still so easily broken.

In comparison to this, a cipher that is both fast and also secure would be f.e. Blowfish, a 16-round cipher supporting 448-bit (56 bytes) keys, while still, on 448-bit keys, operating about 25% faster than the not quite as secure AES-128 does with its 128-bit (16 bytes) keys. Blowfish is entirely free of patents, whereas most of the cipher modes of AES are patented.

The second most important factor in a cipher's security is its keysize. If the cipher withstands all cryptoanalysis on its full amount of rounds, the last resort is brute force, and with brute force every extra bit of keysize matters to the feasibility and practical possibility of breaking the data. 128 bits of AES is today broken with modern parallel means in ridiculously short times (read: hours). Every extra bit of key theoretically (but not always practically) doubles the work required; a 129-bit key is twice as large as a 128-bit key; a 130-bit key is four times larger than a 128-bit key; a 448-bit key is 320 times larger than a 128-bit key.
Thought from last night - we need a HN "problem registry".

Not that new software ideas are hard to come by, but it'd be interesting to build up a list of specific pain points with eg) email.
I'd say that there's a lot more variables that you didn't control.

It seems fair to say that a big contributor to our economic success in the 50's and 60's was due to every other first world nation having been reduced to rubble in the 1940s.

Manufacturing and innovation in Japan and Europe didn't really roar back until the late 60s and 70s.
Leaving aside the fact that it is really hard to judge and distinguish between "nowhere" and "somewhere", is there any evidence that a significant number smart folks go nowhere? More than 20%? More than 50%? 80%? 90%?

In my experience (anecdotal), smart people tend to share two distinct features: they are lazy and they are effective. They are only as lazy as being effective allows them to be. By effective I mean that they attain their desired outcomes.

In short, most smart people go where they want to go.
Exactly, there are even situations where one's family is the reason for whatever semblance of career they have. Look at that Octomom person (I never thought I'd reference her on HN).

Her entire "career" is based around her ability to breed.

I think it's entirely wrong to say you have to choose between one and the other, because there are lots of cases where the model is broken.
Related, there are various indian companies that offer the virtual equivalent, but I've never signed up because of:

a) worries about cultural fit

b) they all seem to make the signup process that little bit too painful

c) there's always a slightly offline feel about the process, I want something more web 2.0, on the level of raising a bugzilla ticket for someone to book me a holiday.
Sorry, I'm not following. The graph shows the distribution of distances between cars (and people and sheep). Each distance is, to some degree, an individual decision made by a driver (the driver in the rear). How are you imagining the generative process? I was imagining it as each person making a single decision.
I think most people would like this, if they trusted the person. This is the kind of role a equerry/butler fulfilled in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In the 20th century, you could expect a secretary to do this kind of thing (maybe not laundry!), even if it was not strictly company related. I think this made sense for businesses since secretaries were cheaper than you, and some things you have to do on work time - e.g. banking, government interaction, mail.

Now, personal secretaries are all but gone and personal assistants are only really available at board level. So although companies are paying less for payroll, they are losing out since I know phone the bank at work, on work time. I also hate forms and errands, so the company is further disadvantaged by the ego-depletion doing such things causes.

(N.B. I have nothing to back this stuff up, just seems like the way things used to be vs now)
i guess high risk = high gain?
An obvious alternative is to pay to be with another payment service provider who sucks less.
A Pivot visualization of a blog
Would budgetting in time set aside for non-productive endeavours be helpful? If so, how much?
Agreed. Wish there was little more notice.
We have similar problems. For example, I'm fairly certain some sort of bayesian model could tell me valuable things about my data. Someone who could run with that provide me an automated way to extract probabilities of desirable outcomes from my data would get money very quickly.
I would need a decent 2D CAD for linux. 3D even sweeter. problem is that dudes who usually code and dudes who usually draw with CAD are two totally different breeds. And that's why we don't allready have a good CAD for linux.

I would be possibly willing to pay 200eur for a copy(but I want to see a proper demo first), and I don't think I'm alone.

And I don't need anything fancy like Autodesk's "AutoCAD revit architechture visual suite", just basic "draw lines and circles" kind of functionality.
Maybe it's a metajoke
How To Translate Your Blog Posts Into Podcasts
I've often wanted the same. The main problem seems to be that it is probably hard to make a living as a personal assistant at the prices you and I are willing to pay.

There is also the trust issue: would you really trust a stranger enough to do sensitive things?
If the file sharing is similar to the iPhone (and it looks that way) it's going to be a lousy share-by-email experience.

That's funny, because I never mail myself documents on the iPhone.

You can't use the Dropbox app (or similar), because Dropbox files live in the "Dropbox" directory

If all you want is to read a document, what's the problem?

And note-taking? Sure you're joking. The iPad is a "hunt-and-peck-required" device.

And you're basing this on what data?

I suspect this will end up as a major disappointment -- the iPad isn't ready to replace a laptop yet. It's a consumer's device, and college isn't exclusively about consumption of content.

Currently, everyone needs a laptop to sync content with an iPad. If everyone has a laptop, what's the problem? It's not as if college is devoid of consuming content.

Also, everything you point out looks like a business opportunity to me, not some sort of overwhelming world-halting problem.
Stop spamming...
The ABC in Australia still offers RealPlayer streams...
Driving Theory Test Training material
Teeth.
Have you got a source for that? Im not disputing it but it isn't mentioned anywhere I found.
I'm told my maximum is 8GB. Who gets ten and why?
Nope, then the employer will assume you must be covering something up (which is true) and not hire you "just in case".
It didn't occur to me that I could hire someone until I saw this: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bipan/i_used_to_have_a...

It just so happened that the previous day when my girlfriend asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I gave her a list of errands to run, people to call, and forms to fill out. She says I should just pay her instead of hiring someone, since she admittedly does do a lot of this crap for me anyways, but something doesn't feel right about hiring my girlfriend to be my personal assistant.

Regarding the business side of things, it might be feasible if you had a central service that could distribute the load of multiple clients among a stable of assistants. You sign up for X hours per week, and you get an assistant on retainer. Maybe you pay a premium if you prefer to work with one person exclusively. Locality could be a problem though, because you would ideally want your assistant to be pretty close to where you work/live.
> The iPad is a "hunt-and-peck-required" device.

Most comments I saw from people that have used them so far have expressed surprise that one or two handed typing is quite easy/natural. A lot of people can type fairly quickly (my brother can type unbelievably fast on his iPhone) on tablets now. It could work.
Something I was looking for recently (slightly UK specific).

I like to buy FSF-level free hardware and software - ie no binary blobs, free software bios if you can get it, no binary only video drivers.

I couldn't find a store clearly focussed on selling this to me in the UK. Existing linux related online vendors often provide software that requires binary drivers, and don't clearly indicate the details of this sort of thing.

Existing stores like kd85.com are in the direction of what I'm thinking of.
Tell HN: I'm giving 4 domains away to a good home
You could also post your pitch as a comment here.
He answered that:

> The most common metric for answering this question is taxes as a percentage of GDP. However, high tax rates tend to depress GDP. Looking at taxes as a percentage of GDP may mislead us into thinking we can increase tax revenue more than we actually can. For some purposes, a better statistic may be taxes per person

He said taxes per person might be a better statistic "for some purposes" - apples and apples comparisons like modern, Western economies might be a good purpose. Apples and oranges comparisons like Japan and Cambodia probably wouldn't be a good purpose.
That's a great link, thanks. I've just started reading http://sites.google.com/site/cinterfacesimplementations/, and it looks like SFL should provide a good companion piece at the very least. Great documentation.
I'm not thinking of this in C++ or Smalltalk. I'm thinking of a feature in another language.
Why is your target demographic HN users?

Try to maximize
# of customers * $ revenue per customer
Unfortunately thats not an option, if you don't offer paypal, it will cost you users..
Times Online Obituary for Robin Milner
Many existing suppliers are available.
Self-published authors to get in iBookstore via Smashwords
I was cheating a little, clearly a payment provider who sucks less will be just as popular with users as paypal, or they wouldn't suck less!
"There is an incentive for scientists to check for errors..."

Unless your career, grants and funding are dependent on the validity of the model, or if the model is highly politicized. In those cases, there is no incentive for finding errors that undermine the model.

Richard Feynmans paper on Cargo Cult Science has a explanation of how Millikans electron charge measurements drifted over time because of measurement bias. In that case, there almost certainly wasn't any politics involved, so the follow on experiments drifted toward a more accurate measurement. But as Feynman indicates in his paper, the fact that the measurements drifted slowly and incrementally, rather than in a corrective step indicates that the scientists who made the follow on measurements were biased towards Millikans' original results - even though his original measurements were not as accurate as the follow on measurements.
LaTeX is not much easier to use than Word; it's incredibly more difficult to use. It requires you to remember or look up a bewildering number of strange-looking commands, a special syntax, etc.
Really Useful Web Tutorials You Should Have Read in March 2010
If you post your request/pitch as a comment here you'll get bonus points for courage.
There's a google spreadsheet somewhere that circulated a few weeks ago.
I agree, their prices are a bit steep. Especially when you consider you'll probably not even use all the storage; it only starts to become 'worth it' if you're was using the full 50/100GB. If they charged per GB @ say, $0.25/GB, I'd use it a hell of a lot more.
I also get a max. of 8GB. Dropbox announcement on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/posted.php?id=19891061755&share_...) says 10GB though
I'm wondering how far you can really take it, and still be inside the boundaries of the law?

What is the limits of stalking for example? Could we follow the life of a RIAA lawyer and post photos and detailed description of his day to day life?
Is it illegal for authorities to "move him on" in NYC? It happens a lot across the rest of the country (though whether it's entirely legal or not is another matter). I suspect NYC has more liberal laws in this regard.
I started paying about one month ago (50Gb account) and I must say it really changed the way I use Dropbox. I'm at 70% fill now and a few weeks ago I never imagined I'd get above 10Gb. Parkinson's corollary law at work I guess: "Data expands to fill the space available for storage." ... Just out of curiosity I would like to ask the DropBox people if Parkinson's law affects their service & if it does, do they see that as a threat or opportunity?
Not being funny, but these are pretty terrible domains IMHO Why did you register them?!