skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As David927 mentions you probably don't owe anything. But you still need to file 1040's and 2555 for every year. So few Americans actually do it, you get the feeling that they are so happy to just receive them. Before returning to the US I did a batch of 5 tax returns with no tax liability.

The other thing to note is that if you are married even to a foreign spouse without green card you can file jointly and you now get a full $182,800 exclusion. There are also rules where you can deduct further for housing expenses as well as tax paid locally.

This is the IRS guide you should read. http://www.irs.gov/publications/p54/index.html

The bad news though is that for entrepreneurs, consultants etc. If you are self employed, in a partnership (including LLC's) you are not exempt from paying self employment tax (15.3% of the first $106,000 earned.

This is likely the biggest issue for some of the people renouncing citizenship.

The second issue also mentioned in the article is reporting of bank accounts containing more than $10k.

Final bad news for US entrepreneurs abroad is that your startup might be classified as a Controlled Foreign Corporation, which in theory could lead to it being taxed in the US. These rules are so complex they make my head hurt just thinking of them. This PDF seems to explain it fairly well:

http://www.avcadvisory.com/documents/pdf/CFC.pdf
President Barrack Obama meet Republican and Democratic Senate
Actually this might backfire as Canonical has made some pretty strange decisions lately and is a corporation after all, just a much smaller one.

What's wrong with something community driven such as Debian or FreeBSD ?
Download Windows 7 Themes for Windows 7 free - Windows 7 Download
Until Keith Bostic et. al ported it you required a UNIX license from AT&T.

Bostic cites both the GNU project and the GPL as influential.
The last paragraph of the article is

Microsoft won on the desktop by being developer-friendly and Apple won in mobile by being developer-hostile.

Quite a bit of the rest of the article doesn't seem to support that conclusion, but that does appear to be the conclusion of his article. I'm saying that Microsoft being developer-friendly has little to do with them winning on the desktop instead of Apple.

Incidentally, on the desktop Apple is now making good products and being developer-friendly. They don't have a huge market share, but I recently read that they're getting 20% of the global profits from PC sales.
I would say that selling out is an admission that $1,000,000,000 is a lot of money.
The name needs changing. But the Autonomous Rotorcraft
Sniper System looks like it may have a big future — maybe on
land, or maybe at sea.

Or maybe in LA?
http://tinyurl.com/foucault-google-books
In defense of this post, raging against the decisions of a corporation (or any other entity) is so often followed by great waves of apathy and submission.

This is a gentle reminder that you have a choice and you can vote with your wallet. (Generally -- I don't think the phone vs OS specificity is relevant here)
Seems very interesting. A knol-like knowledge base of everything.

The website: http://www.oxfordbibliographiesonline.com/ . It's VERY slow right now, so I can't say more because I haven't seen anything beyond the home page.
Thanks for the help everyone!..I am looking forward to the challenge
The Invoice Machine has a pretty good interface. Simple yet aesthetically-pleasing: http://invoicemachine.com/

It may not be much of a looker, but I always appreciated how MailChimp manages to make a boring subject like mailing lists fun: http://mailchimp.com/
The backend of QPX already is in C++: it loads 1/2 of a 32 bit address space with the route data. The other half runs SBCL to recommend the routes.

Depending on how tight that latter 2 GB is, I wonder if a piecewise replacement with something else that doesn't share the same GC would work well. A wholesale rewrite would be ugly ... I'm not entirely sure it would make sense for Google to do that, and they would send a bad signal if they did, as well as likely provide another proof of Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_Tenth_Rule).

On the other hand, if it's running out of headroom (address space), a 64 bit rewrite might make sense today, in which case all bets are off. The company started in 1996 and the world of CPUs and memory is very different today.
Why hasn't OpenCalais gotten more love?  I'm smitten.
How to Create Web-Based Data Visualisations
Why I Think @TheOnion Has Unfollowed A Record 485,000 People On Twitter
A waste of your time, maybe. But look, he got 9 karma points from it so far!
1. Gmail + Kmail local archiving
2. Still hesitating & jumping between Eclipse & Emacs
3. Netvibes mainly
4. PS3, though sync between gadgets still an issue (iPod, PS3, computers...), PC when PS3 not capable. Searching for better solutions.
5. A full backup locally, else SpiderOak
6. A mix of both ;)

I could also mail you more info on some points if you want to.
That's true even if you have a great background and plenty of funding. Few businesses make more than the founders would have made working for someone else for the same number of hours. This is not to say dropping out of high school is a bad idea, just far more risky than successful people might think.
Programming in the early 90s felt like the Wild-West - anyone could strike gold, anyone could make pickaxes, and anyone could build a town around a set of rail-tracks. Almost all of the large game companies today started as small programming teams in the 90s. I don't know what could be more exciting for startup.

The fact that feature-rich tools, IDEs and libraries don't exist for JS/Canvas games is EXACTLY why I love it. There is so much opportunity here for those who love to build and innovate. If you don't believe that JS/Canvas has a future, I can't change your mind. But if you think that there is a future for browser-based games running JS, then this a very exciting field to jump into.

Before prototype, mootools, and jQuery etc., JavaScript frankly sucked. It was alerts, statusbar texts, and title bar changes. I see Canvas being in that category right now. There is a lot that needs to be done before you will see a thousand "Top 10 tricks to speed up your Canvas game" posts but that's exactly where the most exciting part lies.
The Foreign Earned Income tax credit if $91,500 for 2009. But more than likely you'll still be on the hook for Social Security and Medicare (depending on the country) so you'll likely be paying a minimum of 15% tax.

Anything over the $91,500 gets taxed as if earned in the normal US tax bracket. So if you happen to be running a successful business abroad, get ready to pay the US dearly.
Ask HN: Where in the cloud is best to host node.js?
I'm working on a new system who's server component will be using node.js. Like any other start-up effort I'm looking for a place to host this with zero-to-low cost initially but with the capability to scale up rapidly when necessary. I've used Google App Engine in the past for this sort of thing but as far as I know, I can't use it to run node.js.

Can any of you offer suggestions or tales of your experience with cloud hosts who would be capable of hosing a system like this?
>>>They'd get more points from me if "tastelessness" was spelled properly.

DOH! So this guy coined Reeze's Law. It states, once Post or Send is hit, typos multiply. And there is no way to see them until everyone else has. Thanks.
Another resource here in the US is the Extension service: http://extension.org . This has been their goal online for awhile now - to provide peer reviewed material that is a "cut above" the stuff you'd find online. Kind of a cool transition from local county offices considering extension has been around since 1862.
I would double-check your tax specialist. I've never heard that before.
I proposed this idea around the time the last pirate attacks were in the news. Merchant ships could provide some sort of landing pad and automatically detaching power umbilical. Such drones could "visit" transiting merchant vessels and land there to loiter in good weather. Once the merchant is out of danger, the drone could fly to its next assignment.

My original idea involved launchers in standard cargo containers, linking to a remote control facility on demand by satellite, but independent drones only requiring such landing pads would be even cheaper.
New Silverlight 4 Training Kit Available
This is great, I mean, think about all the issues you run into with workstations -- gone. The iPad is so sandboxed that, barring poor memory management, this thing should always run like a champ. It'll be interesting to see if someone writes a full fledged editor, git/svn client, and development stack for the App Store. 10 hours of mobile coding would be sick.
A true anti-Google. Slow and non-relevant.
6. Same here but I'm rather using SpiderOak because it encrypts your content before sending it over the network.
Sniper Autonomous Rotorcraft? Plural could be SARs, or a networked system would be SARS.
It might be bad for Common Lisp; I can see a number of them switching to Clojure. In his talk last year (NOTE, seems to be gone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xquJvmHF3S8) Dan Weinreb gave Common Lisp only about another 10 years and guessed that Clojure is the future of Lisp.

Which is my guess as well: Common Lisp is stuck in standardization amber prior to it dealing with too many things that are critical today (concurrency and network programming being the two biggest ones), Scheme is in a mess due to the mess with R6RS and moves slowly. At least it moves, unlike CL, but it's so slow there isn't even yet a standard for multidimensional arrays; at this point I expect it to continue in its niches of education and language research for a long time.
A postcard from Santorini
Sunset image from the top island of Greece!
Dont know
hai.
So the future of Facebook is Myspace? It'll grow and decline in quality until one day some small upstart that goes back to the basics of social networking will take the crown; and the history will repeat itself. Unless of course in the future with cheaper processing power, storage space, and bandwidth it will not be as expensive to maintain a very large social network.
Key Tips for Keywords in AdWords
CSS3 Please The Cross-Browser CSS3 Rule Generator
a super giant star two hundred times bigger than the sun utterly obliterated by runaway thermonuclear reactions . . . unleashed a cloud of radioactive material over fifty times the size of our own star

Huh?
The games don't seem to register my keypresses in Chrome on my MacBook running Snow Leopard.
Well wait, this doesn't say anything different than the EFF article does it? Yes you can still remove connections, but you also remove the interest as well right? (I have no idea, I like many of the above have zero trust for FB and deleted acct months ago).
We leverage Cappuccino to get a near-desktop experience for http://www.enstore.com. You can create an account to play around yourself or watch a video here: http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2009/10/06/cappuccino-in-check...
Ayo ikut & daftar Eagle Awards Documentary Competition 2010
TOP 5 ISSUES FOR CONTENT MANAGEMENT PROJECTS
This is so awesome! It certainly is a step towards the future of online games. No more flash, no more CPU at 100%!!
How not to pitch to VCs
+1 for MailChimp. The fact that they make sending out emails fun means they're doing lots of things right with the UI. They serve as inspiration for many of the things I'm starting to do with my own SaaS web app.

Regarding the 37signals apps, I find Highrise the most impressive from a UI standpoint.
I'm pretty impressed with http://www.freeagentcentral.com/, it's "great UI/UX" in the sense that as much as looking good, it also functions well.
I thought that too until I saw the tiny text informing me that "A" actually means "Z"
The Beauty of Hand Made Embroidery
When we talk about India and Indian Fashion invariably the traditional wear the evergreen sari and the salwar-kameez. Saris are the inevitable part in the wardrobe of any Indian bride..
"What I do believe is that they are interested in getting more users, sharing more information, and making more money."

I don't see why sharing more information will make more money in the long term. Keeping the users happy and engaged would seem more profitable to me. What is the logic?

"In fact, as Facebook gets more users, the quality of facebook will continue to decline, as will their treatment of those users."

I don't understand why treating the users badly would increase the value of the company.
I will try this in my next project with a customer I am having a long relation ship.
I'm Canadian actually. More power to you bud. You are preaching to the choir.
I'm a fan of Jesse BC (http://31three.com/portfolio). His designs are always top-notch IMO.

Some examples are:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com
http://expressionengine.com
Gospel Music Downloads, Free Gospel Songs - EZ-Tracks
http://www.getballpark.com/
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/
http://www.getharvest.com/

also you can find a bunch of other good examples on http://cloudomatic.com/, a directory of SaaS applications
I had the same thought too. Their deal structure seems a bit convoluted, and when this is paired with the fact that they are gleaning my personal information it comes off as spammy.
What happened when a software company stopped working for a week
Tell HN: HackerNews for iPad
Dear Hackers,

Here comes HackerNews for iPad:

http://itunes.apple.com/app/hackernews-for-ipad/id364899977?mt=8

If you have an iPad, this should help you to read HackerNews more enjoyable!

It is very simple, and it got rejected at the beginning because of that.
Did you try the "forced" versions linked at the bottom? Maybe it's detecting your browser as a mobile one.
So 320x240 is the future?

I'm all for HTML5 and all, but this honestly doesn't impress me.
Google Code?
If you want the hypothesized reason TheOnion unfollowed a record 485,00 people, the author says:

>I assumed whoever it was that managed their social media campaign had decided that enough was enough, and pulled the plug.

The rest of the article is filler.
Smashing mag. has some good articles on this topic.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/25/designing-user-in...

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/12/10-useful-web-app...

I have worked pretty hard on the UI/UX experience for http://simplton.com/screenshots and have been happy with the results.

Also, look no further than Google, their interface work with Google Reader and Docs is excellent.
A bit of framework to turn Javascript into a Hypercard-like environment would be cool. It would also be very amenable to the Freemium model. The for-charge services would include increased server-side storage and more flexible app/stack sharing options.
Looks nice - certainly runs fast in Firefox, but couldn't get it to work in Android - however looks like a good start.
I think all the hubbub is because the browser has dominated computing in the past decade. Being able to play a game on both your web browser and your smartphone with only minor changes (input, screen scaling, and perhaps locked fps) is a big deal because everyone knows how to use a browser and the barrier to accessing your game is as trivial as currently possible. Having to actually install a game, even if it's just downloading and running an installer, is apparently a lot more annoying to users than you'd think.

Unless some kind of native backend is written to make HTML5 apps just as responsive as plugin-based ones, I don't really see how this is going to be successful for games. The performance hit is just too gargantuan.
Now how do we all get sound working in HTML5 games?
Yo dogg…

just kidding! What I'd like to see is this kind of code opened up so I can host it myself for fun. Writing a script to delete twitter "tweets" is easy enough in Bash but Facebook is another beast entirely :\
I'm not sure Windows is especially sexy either, altho Apple clearly is.

Linux will struggle for years to come in the corporate desktop market: as the article suggests, the of cost of change is just too high. Secondly, Office has not yet been matched by OO or similar. OO simply does not cut it for enterprise. As much as I hate M$ and love Linux, if I'm doing heavy duty spreadsheet work it has to be Excel.

In the personal desktop market Linux stands a better chance, but not much more. It suffers from a lack of marketing. E.g. Apple wins hands-down with a technically inferior product because it looks nice and they spend a bomb sexing it up. And of course Windows is so ubiquitous Linux gets only a fraction of the shelf space.
Weird, my last askhn isn't on that page.
http://matrix.itasoftware.com/cvg/dispatch is a very nice way of searching for flights if you have specific/unusual requirements (eg, you want to do mileage runs, or you want a weird routing to get a free stop over in an odd location to visit family or friends). It's worth spending the time learning their query syntax - shouldn't be an issue for any HN readers.
Well, it ran great on my iPhone.
You should see my YCRFC submission...
From the comments it seems that 'bigger' equals mass, and 'fifty times the size' refers to volume. I was confused too.
How to automate PDF to Word
This is a question put forward in Adobe forum I come across today. In this article, I do not tend to write a step by step tutorial to show how to automate PDF to Word using some application. I just want to notify that we need not get Adobe software as the only choice, we have alternatives.
This is a really hard one, but we've come across a ton of beautiful apps since starting Cloudomatic:

- List of Cappucino apps (these are always beautiful): http://cloudomatic.com/tag/cappuccino/
- One that we added yesterday: http://www.staction.com/ I think the app is simple and the ui is beautiful/something new.

If there's a large enough list of more obscure/unknown apps, I'll try to highlight the top 5 when I'm on this week in cloud computing later. Apps doing some crazy HTML5 /cappuccino stuff are always a plus.
A process for individual developer
What about Google Scholar?
You only have to speak an oath once for it to be morally binding.

The guy went out and got citizenship in another country and renounced the US. Did he ever pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States (and the Republic)?

If so, then I consider that a broken promise.
What you are describing isn't a code problem, but an infrastructure one - a useful network has an MTA for just such outgoing mails, with all the anti-spam bases covered.
All the various applications and servers that need to send mail will smarthost to that.
Life in Zippers
That worked. I didn't ever see the tiny text, though.
This is all fine but what he's talking about is server and DNS configuration, not "There's a bug in this code, though. Do you see it?"
Since when are the citizens property of the state?
Das ist ein nukular buttfail.

The "meme" is a major advertisement for the film, and free for them. I know a lot of people who have rented or seen Der Untergang whose first exposure to the film's existence was the Hitler spoofs.

It's not my fault that the media corporations can't figure out a way to make money off the new distribution mechanisms.
That issue is addressed at the end of the article, and I can vouch for it - soldiers have to find a way to take the situation lightly at the time. It's the only way they can deal with what's going on at the time.
Coming from the python community, I have to wonder how much exchanges like this have contributed to the delay: http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=835742
Or just use one of the many services that solves these problems for you, like http://authsmtp.com, http://sendgrid.com, http://postmarkapp.com.
Possibly because it's a enabling/plumbing type of technology? I notice that the main opencalais.com website struggles to explain exactly what it does, and why it's cool.

There also don't appear to be many applications written with it. From what I can see, there's feedtrace and newsfacet and ... that's about it.

Perhaps if there were a really compelling example of what you could do with it, but an autotagging WordPress plugin doesn't really fire up the imagination...
That's what the US government says. The problem is, how many of these "insurgents" are fighting against the US because they feel the invasion to be illegal? The US can leave. In fact, for legal reasons, it has to. It was never authorized to invade; staying, under any premise, is unacceptable. If there's "more carnage", that's unfortunate.

But the US will never leave. Not because of carnage, but because of the fortune in oil under these poor people's feet:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/03/17/how_iraqi_o...
This is one of the most frightening things I've seen on HN. A fleet of these killing machines would be so much more effective than ground troops at "killing the enemy". What bothers me is that if these are so much cheaper to make, and more accurate with less collateral damage then it makes our regime more effective at snuffing out foreigners that intelligence deems as dangerous for one reason or another.

It seems that this is one of those devices that you can not fight with, especially if they are deployed in great numbers. What do you do, stay inside if the U.S has deemed you a threat? Hack it to try to take control of it? That seems like a scarier proposition and one that is much more likely.

We're concerned that "loose nukes" will fall into the hands of "the enemy". An attack like that would cause great collateral damage. Eighty years from now, will we be worried about a competing economy that has the technical prowess to create such a killing machine as is linked in this article? Eisenhower warned us in his final speech as president against the Military-Industrial Complex that drives our capitalist nation to create more effective and more deadly weapons.

Does mankind need this kind of weaponry?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-industrial_complex
Why Athletes Are Geniuses
The Facebook Cull
OK overview. But one option is missing, namely to use SVG. For instance by using the excellent gRaphaël (http://g.raphaeljs.com) library.
The same is true of Lua, except it recognizes when you have consecutive integer keys and implements it as an actual array.
Thats brilliant to use Selenium RC for the scripted deletions. Selenium is incredibly flexible and easy to script, though not very fast which is probably why they have such a backlog. Also because it is all coming from a legitimate browser it would be very difficult for the sites to block, though I suppose they could just block the ip of the server.
I wonder if Scratch could be hosted remotely in the cloud, with presentation rendering done locally through Javascript & HTML5?

This could be hosted as described: http://www.ngbasic.com/
Should Google be broken up into baby Googs?
I hate Adobe flash and all, but does the author know that if he installed Ubuntu instead of XP then he wouldn't be having these problems? The install process there is very quick and ad free.

It's 2010 for Pete's sake! Friends don't let friends suffer with Adobe's crap on XP.
I picked up a bunch of stuff from school that would perhaps have never fully developed if I hadn't gone there, or if I'd had my own choice of exactly what to do. I would never have chosen to take a history class, and yet in that class I learned critical thinking skills in a way that I would have had no direct cause to do outside of that environment. I gained a basic grounding in science. I learned enough about a variety of different subjects that I was able to make an informed choice on a career path.

I certainly believe that the school system needs changing, particularly as self-learning becomes easier, and I agree that kids need more responsibility (I recall aching for it in my teenage years), but the number of comments here suggesting that school is of no use whatsoever surprises me.