skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I agree about closures, but why lambdas would be so much better than named functions (already available)?

Because sometimes you want to conditionally create functions on the fly. Named functions are a very awkward way to do this.

It is unfortunate that we even have to have this argument. Anyone with significant experience in functional programming can tell you how useful unnamed functions are.

And it's important to realize they are not necessarily anonymous in local scope. They're anonymous in the global scope.

> I think named functions help code readability, which is among Python's top goals.

Anonymous Lambdas need not be a detriment to readability. Why do you think it would be otherwise?
Yeah, and he did all of that because we have a society that enabled him to do it.

Good for him. Seriously. But if he doesn't feel obligated to pay back towards that society then he's either missing something inside or fell victim to a convienent ideology that told him it's good to be selfish.

Whatever happened to noblesse oblige?

Not to mention, of the millionaires I've met, most aren't entrepreneurs and didn't create any jobs, they just worked in finance.

EDIT: To add: If your friend has those millions and likes the society he earned it in, it's probably worth him paying back into it purely as an investment. If we actually funded infrastructure and education in this country, we might see better returns from them.
First, how do you know that I'm cheering for anything? I stated a simple fact. It doesn't mean that I approve of it. And my post was in response to this claim: Yes, but in practice, this means that the middle classes pay most of the tax

While "the rich" might pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes, it's just flat-out false that the middle class pay "most of the taxes." Whether this should or shouldn't be the case is a discussion for another day.
Interesting analysis. I guess some additonal reasons why Facebook is not IPOing are:

1) Expectation that facebook will benefit from high profits in the future - IPOing would mean sharing these profits with millions of shareholders.

2) IPOing involves significant costs - companies often spend more than 10% of the money they actually raise on actual IPO costs

3) Preference not to disclosure internal company information to the SEC which it would have to do if it IPOs (this would also involve additional legal costs)
You mean smaller businesses that create fewer jobs?
DNS Cat
This seems like a great opportunity for Mint.com. Just flag any known fraudulent companies in everyone's personal report.
Bilski Ruling: The Patent Wars Untouched
Would just like to thank all for the positive comments. Upward and onward!
How most IT job interviews are done
Are you donating all the extra money you have to the IRS? Are you skipping all deductions, even if you're eligible for them? Why not?

Your argument is essentially that we have a duty to pay as much tax as possible. But this is predicated on the belief that paying taxes is the best way to benefit society with your resources. Obviously, this is a long-standing debate that we won't solve here, but I would argue that the government is a terrible, terrible steward of resources, and I'd much rather have the money in the hands of "the rich", who seem far more likely to invest it and create jobs and institutions that better society. And yes, enrich themselves along the way. I'm fine with that. A rising tide floats all boats.

Again, I find it humorous that people who get all worked up over someone minimizing their tax liability through tax avoidance (completely legal) seem really interested in raising tax revenue, as long as it's someone else's money. None of them are sending donation checks to the IRS, which seems the height of hypocrisy. You have shit you don't need and someone else needs shit you have, so why not donate the money and let the IRS help those poor folks out? If you truly believe the government is the best way to allocate limited resources, why wouldn't you do this?
YouTube - iPhone4 vs HTC Evo
Six-time champions win American Solar Challenge
Where do you draw the line? The bigger businesses create more jobs and do more for the economy, and even with the lower percentage they leverage in return for this, they are responsible for the majority of actual tax dollars taken in.

If individual income tax were eliminated, while it sounds good, it would be one less thing for people to get riled up about and take an interest in politics.
More Linux commands - A practical reference
$ mutt -f imaps://<username>@gmail.com@imap.gmail.com
Libraries nave a novel idea for e-book lending
Yeah, but they make more than 50% and more than 3/4 of the income, respectively.

No, the linked Wikipedia page says:

the top 5% with gross income of $137,056 or more pay 57.1% (earning 33.4%)
No, I mean the small businesses that have created almost all of the new jobs over the last 20 years. A few here and a few there. Some of them got really big.

Go check out bls.gov.
It's great to finally have this available but I've gotten pretty comfortable with Aldiko and epubs while waiting for this.
Gattica will happen ... in china apparently.
Here are a few comments ->
a) Include some sample tickers - eg spx, usd for which predictions are available for free without any ads, use these as your demos.
b) Include some graphs which highlight the tracking error of your predictions.
c) I dont know how large your team is, but the two apis - trading and predictions seem to be two complete products. Maybe you should focus on one before you launch the other.
d) Some kind of integration with excel would be nice. I know of quite a few traders who are very analytical but not programmers and hence use Excel to build / test their models.
We've seen articles before here (I think it was HN) that dealt with psychopathy. But those, if I remember correctly, focused on the lack of a conscience, noting that some psychopaths are violent, and others are not, while all have little regard for their impact on others' lives.

I wonder how these two concepts connect up. I seem to remember that tests for the other version of psychopathy were entirely behavioral in nature. This guy talks about genes and brain scans, but he is interested primarily in tendencies toward violence and murder.

So, are we talking about the same thing here, or not?
At least in Washington, there is no state income tax, the only thing removed from a workers paycheck is federal tax and social security. The taxes come a bit more indirectly, in the form of spending from employees. With a 9% sales tax, and at least 50,000 employees each for Microsoft and Boeing, Washington still gets money. Additionally, both Microsoft and Boeing more directly support the state economy in other ways (many donations, and support of public works, etc etc). Obviously, these tax breaks do lose the state some money, but there are some benefits to keeping these huge employers happy.
It sounds like a wonderful opportunity! Be proactive in learning the business and figuring out which problems need to be solved, then take it upon yourself to acquire the skills necessary to solve them. The increased knowledge will look great on your resume, and your career there could take off.

Unless you're being undercompensated, ignored, or the company is in danger of tanking, you should stay put and take advantage of the situation. Good luck!
I would look for work elsewhere. Since you're working, you can be patient and be picky about the next job. While doing so, things might improve at your current job. And if they don't, you'll be comparing your current crappy situation to an awesome opportunity and it will become an easy decision.
Too Many Software Updates on OS X?
LED Light 10X Loupe Magnifier Magnifying Glass Keychain
Compact and portable design
Rotatable
With keychain
LED white light with switch<p>http://www.b2c-support.com/led-light-10x-loupe-magnifier-magnifying-glass-keychain-p-4097.html<p>Compact and portable design
Rotatable
With keychain
LED white light with switch
I forsee a lot of illicit copying in the future of Amazon's ebooks.

An interesting question is whether this app will work in the emulator. If so, it means you can have ebooks on your laptop.
I'm in the band of income that pays the absolute highest taxes as a % of income. I just want rich people to pay the same % as I do, or a tiny bit higher since they'll miss it less. I don't complain about paying my taxes, I see them as membership fees to live in a society with laws and running water and OSHA.

It's not about "small govt" or "big govt", those are just buzzwords. The government's hugely in the red either way. Who convinced you that this was ideological, rather than a matter of simply paying their fair share?
MP James Moore understands the issue just fine. His government's SOP is to repeat self-serving lies ad nauseam until they become true through sheer attrition.

The government conducted a year of extensive, detailed consultation after the public overwhelmingly rejected their earlier attempt to impose a DCMA-style copyright law in Canada.

After the consultation was over, the Cabinet couldn't reconcile the clear message from the public that Canadians want a balanced copyright law that reflects our rights as creators, consumers and citizens with the clear message from the corporate content industry that they want law-enforced anticircumvention.

Not surprisingly to anyone, the government broke the stalemate by ramming through the industry demand and dismissing all the public consultation.

Moore is just the government's hatchet man.
But big companies also receive more scrutiny from regulators. The small business can take advantage of tax loopholes and is much less likely to be audited. There are always gray areas when it comes to taxes and small business don't have to spend as much energy/time defending themselves.
a) Very cool product.
b) Would be great if you could explore if flickr / other photo sharing sites offer apis which allow you to search for photos by camera in the exif tags. If so, then having a gallery of photos taken by the camera would be nice.
c) Improve the front page design. Too much space is wasted imo.
Could it be abused by spammers?
> On the one hand, they believe in civil liberties. On the other hand, they also believe in science.

Do they? There are several definitions of "liberal" out there, but none of them appear to match up with what you are saying.

A classical liberal is certainly in favor of civil liberties. Science? Maybe, maybe not.

By the American definition, liberals tend to be in favor of some kind of liberties, but often favor strong government controls and intervention in the economic sphere.

And science? I imagine that acceptance of the scientific consensus on global climate change trends liberal in the U.S. On the other hand, I imagine use of homeopathy and other unproven "alternative" therapies does, too.

On the gripping hand, I really couldn't say what they mean by "liberal" in Canada.

> These two things tend to clash and will do so more frequently in the future as scientists learn more about the brain.

And genetics, yes. This is something be careful about.
Yellow Pages (the print publication) is dying. The market is undoubtedly going to shrink as it goes online. The question (this is why this disruption is so interesting right now) is who will capture the bulk of this opportunity?

Seeing Interactive would argue that newspapers are actually in the best position to capture this new revenue. They just need to take advantage of the opportunity.
Does not compute, unless it's truly bad management (which is entirely possible).

You've watching this small company inaction (sic) for a month. If I was in your shoes I'd sit back and figure out all the possibilities for why this may be happening, and if I couldn't come up with one that's both high probability and good for you and the company I'd bail.

One month is more than long enough to figure out how to put someone to work. The fact that you don't get the impression that others are working hard ... that's telling as well.

Erk: here's one possibility: they hired you because they think you're good, but they've got you on ice in the hopes they'll find someone better. That would be insane, but what's happening sure sounds insane.

They've got you on ice for some reason, maybe they want to assemble a whole team, hire your boss, whatever (the latter can be very bad, he has no buy in WRT to you, nor does the company care about your value to them yet, since it's near nothing) ... but they're too clueless, distrustful, whatever to tell you to do something to keep you busy. Even "learn the latest about X", "learn Y new system", whatever.

I know from experience that it can be difficult at times to make sure there's work for everyone to do, but it's one of manager's most important jobs and they're failing hard for one reason or another.

Well, enough with the near stream of consciousness. I wish you luck.
Ask HN: best-written engineer job posting
I'm writing a job posting for an iPad developer. Does anyone have any suggestions or examples of great job postings that attracted your interests?
> I believe he has hit the nail on the head with his analysis of the problem, yet I completely disagree with his solution, which is negative income tax i.e direct government cash to the poor.

You misread the article. That "negative tax" was a test project that predated Karelis' paper. His advocacy is more in line with systems like the "Earned Income Credit" which serves as a multiplier of the "reliever" effect, thereby making the smaller problems that remain seem easier to surmount. This is actually similar to your bootstrapping proposal, in a way...
I wouldn't be extra picky or patient. Sure, he's being paid, but you can't say that he actually has a job.
It's a rather incomplete app at this point on Android. They clearly didn't anticipate how quickly Android would grow.
Ha, I was just thinking that it sounded extremely insightful by Ballmer standards...
Several people have already mentioned exercise and nutrition; along the same lines, drinking plenty of water is kind of a big deal.
IBM's amicus brief was interesting. The said "This judicial direction has resulted in substantial economic, technological, and societal benefit because software patents promote innovation both within and beyond the field of software" and had a footnote to elaborate on that point.

The footnote said:

"Without the benefit of patent protection, software companies would be forced to rely on secrecy which limits the public’s ability to learn from software innovations, since patent documents are a significant source of technological disclosure. See, e.g., In re Alappat, 33 F.3d 1526, 1571 (Fed. Cir. 1994) (Newman, J., concurring). Given the reality that software source code is human readable, and object code can be reverse engineered, it is difficult for software developers to resort to secrecy. Thus, without patent protection, the incentives to innovate in the field of software are significantly reduced. Patent protection has promoted the free sharing of source code on a patentee’s terms—which has fueled the explosive growth of open source software development."

Another interesting brief was the one from the FSF. They spent 13 pages on their "Interest of Amicus Curiae" section (where the submitter explains why they have an interest in the case). That's something like 40% of their brief.

In this 13 pages, they talk about how Linux should be called GNU/Linux, the 1992 US Air Force contract with NYU to produce a GPLed ADA compiler, how RMS is a genius, and much more. It reads like a press release.

For comparison, most of the rest manage to state their interest in a page or two, and then get on to their argument.
Well, the wikipedia cites the WSJ, which is behind a paywall. I suspect that they're either wrong or creatively fudging things.

After 100k your FICA payments taper off to nothing. That's money off the top, right into your pocket. Additionally, the capital gains taxes are only 15% compared to much higher for income. This means that the wealthy have a hugely advantageous tax situation.

Although, I thought that the bottom of the top 5% was higher than 137k. Another wiki here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_... puts it at 157k, which is probably high enough to tilt the math towards what I was saying. Certainly over 150-200k your tax burden as a % of income starts going down, due to the decreased FICA contribution and potentially a share of income from capital gains.
Because mutt + IMAP is incredibly slow, even with header caching. I switched back to Thunderbird after running it for a few days. I think a big part of the difference is that TB pulls mail in the background while mutt doesn't.
time to get a new iMac Gary :)

The video is a couple years old.

Edit: Now I notice there's a whole thread below pointing this out. Carry on.
Congress? That doesn't really explain why the state is bankrupt. Don't you think Sacramento deserves just a wee bit of blame? That and California's ridiculous constitution that has voters deciding on complex matters of state finance instead of legislators.
curl http://news.ycombinator.com/ | sed 's/points/<span style="color:red">points<\/span>/g' | bcat
I agree. I was going elaborate on how picky, but in the end I figured when he see's an opportunity, he will gauge it relative to the current situation. Which isnt hard to beat :)
I thought COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) only applied to people under 13, and only when accounts are created.
Win With Web Metrics: Ensure A Clear Line Of Sight To Net Income
Does anyone know what percentage of Apple Inc's shares are held by California residents?

I'm guessing that if Apple returned its nest egg to shareholders as a dividend, rather than investing it, California wouldn't see much out of it.
What happens when you do something useful anyway?

I've been in a situation like this before. LMI hired me because I was the only person in the community who knew both Lisp Machines and UNIX(TM) ... but I didn't have anything to do because Western Digital was running way behind in their 68000 UNIX workstation that was going to be the chassis for the LMI Lambda CPU (the 68000 UNIX CPU board was optional).

So I figured out useful things to do: recruited people who saved the company, produced the first software update for our existing customers, figured out a short cut for providing TCP/IP, worked with the technical writer; those were the big things I can remember three decades later.

But eventually I timed out and quit after 8-9 months. Most frustrating. On the other hand I did all of this in full consultation with the leaders of the company, including leaving.
You use Windows because you feel in control? That's odd. I describe using Windows as feeling like I'm locked in a padded room with a start button.
(Free) Fully Licensed algXchange.com API Key for Bloggers
Well put, mister!
Thanks for the hint. I have not been asking for help (there are plenty of places better suited for this, the Clojure community is very supportive). I was simply sharing my experience which I thought would support the point of view expressed by the parent post. Thanks again!
Don't use Rockstar or Ninja! OK in all seriousness, For me at least (before I became a freelancer) talking about the work environment, the people and the app would attract me more than the gory details of what you expect. Most everyone that writes apps, knows what is required of them. I would keep it simple, what you want them to do and what level in their career you want them to be at.

As well, I would include what you are willing to pay if it is below market (not that I am saying that you are paying below market) that way expectations are set before time is wasted on either side.
slight typo:

"Snapsort is camera comparison machine, constantly comparing cameras, so it's advice is always up to date"

"...so it's advice" should be "...so its advice"
>For good or bad, Microsoft has committed to backwards compatibility.

I wonder if they couldn't get around this by breaking compatibility on a new OS version and then running something akin to Wine to run apps for older OS versions.
This article is about setting up a computer to fetch from Gmail and store the messages locally without using IMAP. You don't want to use mutt's built-in IMAP support because it has to load a message (if it hasn't already been read) each time you to move to the next one. So rather than being able to zip through 1000 new messages in a mailing list every night without any delays, you have to sit there waiting a half second for each one to load as you read. Doesn't sound like much until you realize that's adding 10 minutes to a routine that would otherwise take about 20 or 30.

The setup shown in linked article is ok. But there's a better way.

http://wiki.github.com/jgoerzen/offlineimap/

Creates a maildir from an IMAP account. Syncs read/unread, new messages, IMAP folder moves both ways. Supports filtering, renaming/mapping, and more. Has a special Gmail mode. I run mine on a cron job to pull new mail from various accounts every few hours, and then go through all of my mail once every couple of days when I feel like it.

I can run it on multiple computers to keep them all in sync. Unread/read status is correct and synched across multiple machines, messages aren't deleted from the server when you fetch them, reading messages is super fast, I can still use other IMAP clients if I want (like GUI clients, or my phone). Love it to death.

It's not updated very frequently anymore (at all?) but it still seems to work. You can also check out http://linux.die.net/man/1/mbsync which I've been meaning to try switching to, so that I don't need Python for anything anymore.
Don't forget the Hairspray
The title is "Gattaca" for a reason: four bases found in DNA are adenine (abbreviated A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). It's fantastic movie IMO.
Last I heard, Exxon-Mobil, the most profitable corporation in the entire world, doesn't pay a dime in US taxes.

You heard wrong: http://blogs.forbes.com/energysource/2010/04/07/exxon-says-i...
Indeed, I really was kidding, so no offense meant. I am an info-sec professional by trade, so I'm naturally a bit cynical and paranoid when it comes to offloading certain things to third parties. It's good to know you have a privacy policy, though. It wouldn't hurt if you explain your data retention and destruction policy, though. If you'd like some ideas from me on ways to improve your handling of ephemeral data, let me know. Contact info in my HN profile.
I don't think there is actually a "duty to shareholders" to reduce taxation by jurisdiction-shopping. At least, having done some research, I'm unable to come up with a single case where a shareholder lawsuit against a company that declined to do so succeeded.
>Microsoft create a development environment as powerful as Visual Studio. You create "native" Windows applications that has full but controlled access to disk files, system resources, Internet connection...

Perhaps this could become a raison d'etre for Silverlight.
Ask HN: Do you know how to create core dumps for windows processes (user-level)?
Ask HN: Do you know how to create core dumps for windows processes (user-level)?
Hi all, I have been trying to enable core dumps for windows, and it is suprising that there is virtually no documentation for this. All I could find was
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb787181%28VS.85%29.aspx
but seems to not work on windows 2008.
Any Windows hackers around here that could help me?

Also, does anyone know a good forum for asking windows related questions? The Microsoft one really sucks.
I don't think many people would be willing to invest $6,000 USD (minimum!) to test old versions of IE.
I don't know about other people, but I don't go out of my way to avoid taxes. I certainly don't create new companies or change how I do business in order to avoid taxes. If there's an actual deduction box on a form that I'm eligible for, sure, I'll check it. But I don't really spend days thinking up ways to hide my income. Any time I would've spent on that could be much more productively spent by just making more income.