skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(a) You can make the same claim about a lot of specific cases in the tax code, many of which you would not then imply we should just blow off.

(b) You argue that the money is not worth the many man-hours of labor needed to recover it, but provide no evidence for that. What's the threshold gain (over enforcement expenses) the government should get to justify imposing or enforcing a tax?

(c) You note OMB's fraud number, but don't acknowledge that two wrongs don't make a right, and that the number is therefore not directly relevant to the discussion.
So what's up with all the links to hottie223? Did people get hacked, or paid to post the links or something?

http://youropenbook.org/?q=hottie223&x=0&y=0&gen...

[edit] Nevermind, as I scrolled down, the profile pictures started repeating, guess it's just ordinary spam[/edit]
For first time starters (according to 37 signals book "rework"), a few tips about turning ideas into products.
I call false dichotomy.
NY man said to use computer skills to aid al Qaeda
It's because they're thin wrappers around Facebook's stream search, a feature we shipped in July of 2009. The actual search engine is Facebook's. These projects are just hitting an ajax endpoint with a query and dressing up the results.

Ironically, this is the very same feature that I prostrated myself over here when it was down for a few hours 8 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333000). Which way do you want it, HN? :)

If I can preempt the inevitable flood of "How do you sleep at night???" variants: note that you can't really use this to target an individual user. There are 400 million people using Facebook. If you query something embarassing, you might see some titillating content go by, but that doesn't prove much of anything. Those same search terms typed into Twitter search, or for that matter Google, turn up a lot of material that I would not choose to share, but these people have apparently chosen to do so. If you really want to invade privacy, stream search would be a spectacularly stupid way to do it; any given result has a 1 in 400 million chance of being from who you're looking for.

Like Google, Twitter search, and every search box on every web site ever in the history of anything, this search feature is privacy-neutral: it only allows you to see what you were already allowed to see. Does the fact that Google'ing for "my rectal surgery" uncovers some over-sharing make Google, or the web, evil? Or is it at least possible that the good done by answering legitimate queries outweighs this apparent harm?
A method call is two separate messages. One going to the object with the parameters, and another with the result. Note that even void-return functions involve two messages; in that case, the return message simply indicates completion of the function that is bound to the method.
Dropbox API and RestSharp for a C# developer
Not a big user of either twitter or facebook, But I am trying to understand this. How are these two examples different?

http://i.imgur.com/ZuDt1.png

http://i.imgur.com/U3xcm.png
HSBC Direct is an online-only bank that offers slightly better rates than ING Direct. In fact, their rates are possibly the best (and ING the 2nd best).

The downside to HSBC, is that their web interface and operations of business are antiquated. While I have an online checking and savings account with them, I really only use the savings account. I just can't bring myself to deal with them because the user experience of ING Direct is so much better. For example, if you want to transfer money from checking to savings (or vice-versa), with ING it's instantaneous; but with HSBC you have to wait a business day! Ridiculous, I say.

HSBC is great if you're traveling/living in east Asia. I traveled through nine countries in Southeast Asia last year and never paid an ATM fee. Their ATMs are all over, and they're also partnered with many other Asian banks.

If you live in the USA (like me) I'd say keep your 6-to-12-month cash reserve in HSBC. And do your day-to-day banking and short-term savings with ING Direct.
Thanks for Answering... I learned a lot.
> If your partner claims to be unhappy with your relationship, but you're really sure they're actually miserable with some other aspect of their life, then this seems like a workable strategy.

Wouldn't it be a lot quicker, more respectful, and less hurtful to simply express this to your partner? Maybe encourage him/her to attend some counseling before committing to a decision?
At two I was a committed vegetarian, at four a committed socialist, at six a committed atheist. I could calculate the kinetic energy of a bicycle in motion before I could ride one. At four years old, I most certainly did feel de-humanised when refused a vegetarian meal or spitefully tricked into eating meat. I'm obviously a distant outlier, but the standard deviation is much greater than most people imagine. At the other end of the distribution, here in Britain a tenth of all 16 year olds can't understand a bus timetable, fill in a job application, read the instructions on a frozen meal or make change from a ten pound note. I believe matters are significantly worse in the US. Those people have all been dismally failed by a society and a schools system that assumes that children develop at the same pace. Given that in my country half of all prisoners are functionally illiterate, I believe we have paid a very dear price for that attitude.

Age-appropriate is one size fits all; It works fine for average people but fails catastrophically for anyone at the edge of the bell curve. If you think there is such a thing as "age appropriate learning and guidance", spend a day in an elementary classroom and see for yourself just how different a group of young children can be in terms of mental and emotional development. I'll wager that you'll be astonished at just how great the range is.
Haskell is surprisingly fun to hack about in. You've got a fast dev environment, a huge selection of libraries to play with, and a syntax that can pretty much be manipulated into any style of programming you want. It's also one of the few languages in which you can tell your code works by how sexy and sleek it is.

It doesn't get as much press for tweakability as Ruby, but you can definitely muddle and muck around in Haskell for the sheer sake of creating something.

Check out #haskell on Freenode. Between the category-theoretical arguments, you'll find plenty of hacking for the sake of hacking.

edit: check out http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html and tell me you don't think such a flexible language requires a sense of play.
Why aren't you starting a new venture yourself?
This is not (really) a politics article.

Yes it is.

If you wanted a group of scientists to work on an urgent problem without distraction, giving their names to a reporter is the last thing you'd do. If, on the other hand, you wanted to be seen to be doing something about an urgent problem that you actually had no idea how to tackle ...
Template Meta-Programming and Compiler Issues
I keep my Hotmail account for three reasons - nostalgia, so someone else doesn't take it, and because Comics.com only sends one free daily comic per email address and I really want to receive Dilbert and Pearls Before Swine.

This update looks like some catchup and some new features. There's nothing there that will prompt me to change. In the context of a market leader playing defence, however, these look smart.
I think this addendum the user whose tweet you posted has describes it quite well: http://cl.ly/18ax

Twitter users, unless they protect their tweets (in which case you're not searching though them: surprise!), know that everyone can see their tweets. Facebook users have "friended" the people they want to see their status updates.

Either you're genuinely confused, in which case I hope I've cleared things up, or you're using this as a red herring.
> Or is it at least possible that the good done by answering legitimate queries outweighs this apparent harm?

For sure the latter.

We should make a tutorial on online privacy management though.
Besides Haskell, lots of rubyists have diversified into clojure, scala, and erlang. FP is a powerful paradigm, you can start looking at STM and actor models. There's 3 main FP "lineages", lisp, haskell and ML. Also, F# is a really nice implementation from what I've read about it (I haven't bought VS 2010 yet).

To be fair, when you're getting into concurrent structures, you have a fundamental conflict with the OP's criteria. (Scala and haskell will teach you a lot about language design.)

"less of an emphasis on, e.g., doing things "the right way", programming language theory, strict enforcement of rules"

-------------

Some other language i find interesting, tho i haven't written much or any code:

factor, ioke, objective-C, J, common lisp, scheme

------------

sounds like you shd go to emerging languages:

http://emerginglangs.com/speakers/
Is there an emacscasts? The closest I can find is http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsScreencasts which isn't as cohesive.
Honestly, I don't think it's that. When my parents ask me about Facebook privacy, it's a big deal. When the NYT and Newsweek run stories about it, it's getting mainstream. This is not just a vocal minority.
Indeed - especially since I've retired from reddit. Though, I do still feel obligated to respond to complaints/criticism; in this case, though, I can't comment on technical decisions - except to say that reddit's recent scaling problems are likely more to do with their dev count (4 - yes, there are four developers working on reddit. That's 1 dev for every ~2Million uniques a month) than technical decisions.
We realized that the idea won't work well in practice and that the team dynamics are far from ideal.

You got feedback about why your idea was bad, learned how to put it into words, and practiced working in a group to do so.
Heh. I like it. It's a new word for me, actually.

I think SimCity is exactly what Lenin thought of when he thought of the west.
Good question.

Weatherbill was an earlier investment. I still wish I had put more in. I remember the exact line that convinced me: "You can upload your Quickbooks P&L and we'll calculate your exact exposure to the weather." I guess I like novel marketplaces more than I dislike b2b.

For Twilio, it was the quality documentation that convinced me.

Both companies have kick-ass CEO/founders.
The built-in navigation app has an exit button. It will continue speaking directions even when it's running in the background, unless you explicitly exit.

Please explain to me why that is bad design?
Either you're genuinely confused, in which case I hope I've cleared things up, or you're using this as a red herring.

>Not a big user of either twitter or facebook, But I am trying to understand this.

You know there are people out there who are actually foreign to how Facebook works because either they don't use it or find it silly. I am not trying to defend facebook or twitter. I actually find the whole idea of following around people's mundane activity utterly stupid. ~400 million people obviously thinks otherwise.
Just don't write this stuff on the web and have your identity attached to it. It's asinine.
That will be next on my list, I don't read enough anymore.
It'll work.... but not many times unfortunately. Try 'pg'.
NYC too. But I'm from there originally.

My one non-dollar-denominated investment is also the sole acquisition from my portfolio.
Op-Ed Columnist - Children of the ’70s
That's a very Zen way of dealing with conflicts. The level of self-control to pull this off is admirable and something to learn from.
I haven't used F#, but I do love Ocaml. I haven't coded anywhere near enough in it, compared to how cool I find it.

Have you seen how complete Ocaml's coverage on PLEAC is? http://pleac.sourceforge.net/pleac_ocaml/index.html
What's the point? It only attracts more competition. It's nice to be public when you can sell to your readers (hello Joel), but otherwise there is little direct gain in disclosure.
If YC were just investing the dollars, it'd be a terrible deal. But it's doing a great deal more.
How far along do you expect a prototype to be?

E.G., if I'm building a social web app, do you expect to just see a prototype with a few of the basic concepts? Or do you expect a first version that's already online and starting to get users?
Is it fair to say that 200+million Facebook users are vocally concerned about Facebook security? I seriously doubt that.
Tuts Networks' New MobileTuts+
Well, as an investor in Kickstarter, I approve.

I feel bad for the Diaspora kids. They can't help but fail. Everyone will forget about it shortly, except for the people that gave money. I wish them the best of luck.
The latter. You aren't learning anything until you are interacting with users, and learning is the most important thing you can possibly be doing.

Through friction the apple is polished, I think.
I think many children are far more capable than most people think.

As to preferences, I had a fairly long hart to hart with my mother over the God question when I was 3. At 2 I decided I don't like fresh tomato's and at 29 I have yet to change my stance.

PS: A friend of mine found out that it was easier to get his children to fall asleep when lowed music was playing than in a reasonably quiet room. If your open to the possibility you can find all sorts of interesting things about your children even at fairly young ages.
Get this man some upboats. He's just making a joke.
sorry not the same.

when I type an email I have an expectation that only I and the recipient will see the email.

similarly, a vast majority of these people are not intending to broadcast these updates into the public space (non-anonymously with a photo of their face attached next to the update)

I personally don't have any moral outrage over this, but that is the issue. You've built up an expectation of privacy with people and then took it away without enough user messaging. One dialog if I remember correctly, saying something along the lines of "Share your updates with everyone." (what does "everyone" even mean?)

tldr: you switched the defaults on people and they haven't realized it.
yes, I agree. Non-web (e.g. cleantech, biotech, semiconductor) startups could benefit from a more traditional business plan approach... but of course, they would still benefit from some of Steve Blank's ideas on customer development.
Similar past cases:

- Azia Kim from Stanford: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=5120

- Michael Godelia from Harvard: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/4/11/murky-past-trail...
What are the problems with bad entrepreneurs that keep you from seeing the pitch itself?

Thanks for your time answering these questions.
You are assuming people don't know that they're sharing with more than just their friends. You don't have any data to back this up. There is, however, evidence to the contrary. 35% of users adjusted their settings when presented with the privacy transition dialog back in December, and that's not including the people who had modified their privacy settings in the past, which made them not default to "Everyone".

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_brags_35_adjus...

Some of these people in the search results know they're sharing with everyone. Some don't. The mere presence of people who don't understand their privacy settings doesn't suggest that a large portion of the Facebook userbase shares that confusion.
How does a startup approach/contact you if it's looking to raise funds? I understand you don't lead the rounds, but you might potentially introduce a startup to lead investors.
I found these with a quick search: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsScreencasts
Figure out my email and send it to me, but I may not respond.

A better idea would be to send it to AngelList.
A great, great site to go for advice is the www.fredmiranda.com forums. They have tons of info already available that you can search through and on top of that, their buy/sell forum for used gear is highly reputable and you can save 20% off new prices for great, clean and high quality lenses.

Hope this helps! Good luck and good shooting!
Can you tell me what other use you get out of Multitasking?

On the iPhone, we already have notifications, so IM does not need to be running.

And you didn't address my point, I can understand you wanting and understanding it. The large numbers of people getting into smartphones DO NOT.
> a vast majority of these people are not intending to broadcast these updates into the public space

[citation needed]
While you congratulate the author because you both believe that business plans aren't the best vehicle for starting a company, he's actually in favor of business plan competitions, not against them. The changes he advocates--such as building a prototype and getting user feedback--are criteria already part of most competitions, however.

College business plan competitions exist to bring awareness of entrepreneurship to an academic setting. A typical judge is either an angel investor, venture capitalist, or successful entrepreneur. Interaction with judges allows both serious and non-serious contestants to improve their idea from round to round, even competition to competition. Among other things, these judges take into account what kind of leg work the entrepreneurs have done to support their entry.

As far as theory versus practice, real-world judges run the show. They are the ones who give feedback and pick winners, not academics.

Since students typically attend college far away from where their chosen industry is based, business plan competitions enable them to pitch their ideas to adults with a lot more experience than they or their professors have.

A large body of entries come from full-time undergraduate students who gain valuable feedback about one or more ideas they've been thinking about for years. The other group of people these competitions attract are PhD students seeking help to convince the college to make their research available for commercial licensing, subsequently founding a startup that licenses this same research the founder created as a student.
- doesn't have a prototype.

- will only walk me through the prototype in person.

- won't even tell me what the product does without a meeting.

- doesn't know how to communicate (way too verbose often)

- doesn't have a clear pitch to deliver

I've seen all of these.
Great. Thanks for the recommendation.
Hotmail update takes aim at Google
That must have been a very quick search because that link is in my post :)
Just tried etacts. Pretty cool service. I know another company doing the same thing albeit on mobile phones, showing caller's social context on incoming calls (sociallyapp.com).
Has FB bashing fallen to this level, querying "going to the strip club" and listing the results with a big "see, I told you so"? I scrolled through maybe two hundred of the "strip clubbers", most seem to be the kind of people who put this in their status updates for sensationalist value, judging from their pictures.

I also queried "I love my wife", "I love Shakespeare", "quaternions" and wound up wasting more than an hour on this site. It's fascinating and not all in a bad sense. In fact, we should have a Digg-like "best 100 best statuses of the day" site.

Point of the matter is: If you don't want your statuses to be public, adjust the settings. At this age and time arguing most users don't know how to do this or were somehow duped is appalling.
I have a first gen iPod Touch, and that's 16GB. I think they're 64GB now
The Craft of Text Editing [1999]
Interactive Brokers has an internal prop fund, Timber Hill, that uses the trades happening on the brokerage to execute their trades (its a proprietary form of liquidity - every major electronic brokerage does this). Basically, you aren't just paying for the trade you are also paying for it in that you don't have direct access to the markets and IBKR will front run you before your trade is ever executed. Its like an implicit trading cost thats hidden.

Volatility trading is more math-focused, but requires discretionary trading as well. Its less automated, and requires more specialized knowledge than other strategies. Volatility strategies aren't run by random people coming out of school or other industries. They are almost always run by a trader with a very well developed back-end including a quant (who is trained in volatility modelings - not as easy as the books lead you to believe) and still a very sophisticated trading system with access to both the options exchanges (which are unwieldy) and "normal" equities exchanges.

Its all possible, but can you make a living at it? Its a big maybe. Can you actually make more than your normal job or even a fraction if you were with a well endowed quant fund? No way. Not unless you have been in the industry for a long time.
Well, in the article, I especially told to forget about making money with toolbars. But I'm not confident one can easily teach this kind of good manners to developers...
Your argument would be a lot more plausible if Facebook didn't have a habit of resetting peoples privacy settings, and if those settings were clearly, easily and permanently settable.

As it stands, I can only presume your defensiveness and your obviously nonsensical comparisons to twitter (a system where everyone knows that everything is truly public) make me think you know, deep down, that your employer has made some bad decisions.

I'm curious: does facebook train their employees to identify themselves as employees then to rail angrily and arrogantly at people who have privacy concerns, or is that your own initiative? Either way I'm unsurprised by it. Facebook seems like the sort of place where such utterly unprofessional behavior would be the norm.

Facebook: unilaterally changing your privacy settings then berating you and making disingenuous comparisons when you get upset about it since 2004.
Google To Microsoft On Office Vs. Docs: Oh Yeah?
Let me rephrase. Something wider in possibility.

When I started delicious, I had no idea that it would someday be a company. Instead it was a thing I wanted to make. But it turned out to be very pregnant with possibility.

I'd like to see you do something that is similarly wide.

Does that make any sense?
I agree, Mac OS did it right. But I'm not a fan of packaging two different architectures in one installer. It makes the package bloated (which is also a problem with Windows installers).
Ask HN: How do you manage and organize Ideas?
My own habit is to just quickly write down the idea in one sentence and plan to come back to it later. But the problem I am facing is I never really get back to them.

How do you manage things?
Very nice.
However, should not irb take from the $EDITOR environment variable, like several other such programs and allow editing of contents by itself, rather than requiring another gem to be required.

I have earlier tried out other "plugins" to irb (iirc wirble to name one) .. these usually used to slow down loading of irb, and often result in messy outputs. So finally, i use a clean, default irb install. I'll certainly try this out, however. Thanks.
An interesting aside to this thread is that it was started as a debate over class vs prototype based inheritance by Steve Dekorte. Steve went on to create Io four years later. A great example of putting your money where your mouth is.
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Hulu is customizing ads
Would you have any advice for a startup that needs advisors and experience growing a company more than it needs straight up cash?

Is a company that makes this known a turnoff for angels, as by doing so it admits it doesn't have 'everything quite worked out'?
The merry little god of unintended consequences is getting ready to once again laugh his ass off.