skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand - yes there is smuggling, but on a small as I indicated. In Western Europe (the area I restricted myself to in my post) most of the fraudulent import comes from Eastern Europe and Russia, so yes they are bought legally there and then imported. Likewise, a fair number of people drive to Luxembourg where the tax rates are lower.

I take it that you mean that (Native American or Aboriginal?) reservations have autonomy when it comes to taxation and that they leverage that to attract tobacco customers from outside the reservation. Which makes sense, but I'm hard pressed to believe that it's a significant amount of total consumption. My back-of-the-envelope calculations (based on estimates of the World Bank and 40% of the EU population smoking 10 cigarettes a day) say that in the EU on less than 10% of all cigarettes smoked, no taxes have been paid. Which is not that much.

Of course if you have numbers that show that in the case you indicate the percentages are different I'd be interested to learn.
I think that dropping incendiary bombs on cities made mostly of wood and paper is even worse than dropping an atom bomb. And it wasn't just Tokyo; dozens of japanese cities were burned to the ground.
The 'about' page shows that they're heavily partisan, no shocker there.

It would be very difficult, in this day and age, to be a pro-lower-taxes group which wasn't heavily partisan.
Big-name Windows apps neglect security
Montevideo (Uruguay) here, and I know there are several of us.
FWIW, I think a majority of Mac users don't actually install Adobe Reader, since Preview handles them natively and fantastically for nearly all purposes.
The "benefit" of free health care is the removal of choices. I like having no choices.
Hey! My wife has that on our bookshelf. Hrm... will have to take a look.
Gitorious needs a "documentation" link on its front page leading to at least "overview" and "getting started" docs.

Also, as an aside, Gitorious should consider switching to a new logo, or none at all, and then choose a lighter colorscheme for the site. The current theme reminds me of a hospital room at night.

Seriously; if you ask around and find that people really can't seem to come up with a good reason why they use Github instead of Gitorious, this is why.
You don't even need GPS trackers on the containers. Just note the GPS location at the time you cut the rope. Have a transponder aboard that listens for a specific signal before it starts transmitting. Such devices would be cheap to make and might be harder to detect than GPS devices which broadcast location signals.
So, I knew that I would be downed for saying that (of course). However, I had fun looking how the score oscillated from -2 to +2 all the day. But I guess, at the end, too-smart-people won.
This post is a bit of a rant for my taste, but I do agree with him on just one point. Python 3 was not enough of a clean break for me to get me very excited about jumping. There are some new things, but a lot of it feels like change for the sake of change. I believe this is what stifled my adoption of Python 3.0.

However, I disagree strongly with the writer that having a Python 2 and a Python 3 side-by-side is a bad thing. Adoption was expected to be slow all along, and there's nothing wrong with supporting Python 2 for the indefinite future. Python 2 has been a rock for many years. Even in the release notes, it's mentioned that Python 2.7 will most probably be supported beyond the typical two years.

On top of that, I think that most people are waiting on Django, SciPy, Twisted, and others before making the jump.
Sorry if this is bad form on HN (both replying to my own message and/or posting the following), but I thought this might be of interest to a lot of readers. Before you go and pay a bomb to a "squatter" or complain about how expensive domains are here is a list of some domains that I would consider reasonable names, that I have bid on (please note I didn't win most of them) at dropping domain auctions, that could have been purchased for a fairly modest amount (yes I know some people think $8.17 or whatever it is is the only amount anyone should pay):

clovo.com	65.00
axod.com	70.00
exod.us	100.00
forq.com	190.00
disc.us	200.00
wrax.com	201.00
flysafely.com	275.00
changethings.com	286.00
stockwidgets.com	294.00
given.org	300.00
conky.com	302.00
maxan.com	303.00
coret.com	325.00
pinex.com	331.00
surun.com	359.00
broadly.com	401.00
airlabs.com	403.00
onecolor.com	428.00
typically.com	450.00
exchangemedia.com	450.00

If this is not HN style then please let me know and I will delete the post (if that is possible). If you want more examples I could post a page somewhere. But my point is a bit of research and patience and you can nab some pretty good domains for a good price (I so wish I had bought changethings.com)
Amazing what a realitively slow news day will do for some resubmitted news articles.
Indeed. PDF is a great experience on OS X, and a decent one on iOS. (While its main UI is rather cluttered, I feel GoodReader does a better job with PDF than iBooks, solely for the margin cropping and table of contents support.)
Might it not be better to make drugs less safe? Kill off all the users, and there's no market.

What we should do is make it illegal for hospitals to treat overdoses.
Bug Triage & Backlogs ... Unseen Broken Windows
Yes, but I don't think drug lords have a problem with the supply of those.
If customer acquisition cost is low enough to make your one time pricing make sense, then by all means, go for it.

I would guess that it would only make sense for software so cheap that recurring billing didn't make sense. ($10-20 total lifetime value of a customer).

The trouble is that getting customers that cheaply is difficult, and even harder to scale. Upselling existing customers with recurring revenue can be much easier than getting new customers.
> And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable, so far as it goes

I agree with you that greater clarity is good, so long as it doesn't sacrifice truth, or accuracy. But the context here is that Continental Philosophy/Deconstruction/the Humanities do not seem to even consider the pursuit of clarity to be worth its while. It seems, in fact, to value verboseness and unclarity above all else.
You can still get angel investors to help you without traction, including myself. Anyone looking for advice can feel free to email ha@hackerangels.com, and we'll try our best to help.
Because their blogging platform (and their site) runs on ASP.net?

Haven't worked with ASP.net in years, but afaik it's hard to do custom URL routing in it.

(Basically, ASP.net doesn't let you do things you can shoot yourself in the foot with, but that doesn't keep you from shooting yourself in the foot in the language: I remember running into an issue a back-end developer I was working with had with returning JSON from a webservice. We ended up wrapping the JSON in an XML document to make ASP.net happy)
OHMIGOD, It's full of stars!! There are tons of great books here. The download rate is a slow (of course). Reddit guys are working on putting the stuff on torrent somewhere.
The Coral Lighting: A Fresh Idea by Palucco « Lighting Universe
Grace Hopper's Revenge
Not to be a total pedant here, but word of mouth from a friend whose livelihood depends on Bing is not a great indicator of how great Bing is.
http://img.deepgamers.com/1278097072.png
A friend of mine has benchmarked the beta of Chrome along with several other browsers on his own PC. It's pretty impressive except for that weird box that gets cut out from the acid3 test.
The entire startup process is about managing risk-

The classic programmer with a sketch on a napkin has a Lot of risk. There may be assumptions that never pan out, and he may never be able to write what he's said he would.

Once there's a prototype, it moves the slider further to the "Less Risk" category. Things are moving, it CAN be written, now the risk lies more in growth and marketing.

Traction solves that problem as well- Now it shows that the code works, the marketing works, and the team really can pull things off. The slider is firmly over on the "Rather safe, as things go" category.

Here's the problem- Entrepreneurs see the slider too.
By the time I'm over in the "Hey, this thing is actually gonna work" category, the need for angels, particularly the micro angels like Gabriel, has diminished.

At that point in the process you're actually making money, and you can look at the slider, see that things look likely to succeed. This is in part, what is responsible for the increasing number of startups bootstrapping. By the time they get a working version, decent marketing, and some traction, they start to realize that they have a good shot at being able to do this on their own, and keep the equity.
Why not just enforce a death penalty for drug use?

And maybe excessive parking tickets?
No, we - we being Python Core - want a calm, orderly transition to Python 3 over a period of several years. Python 2 will be around for some time, and we all know and accept that. Yes, if you have dependencies, using python 3 in production is not feasible. Even those of us who would like to be using Python 3 full time can not due to dependencies.

As for the OP - the transition/migration plan hasn't changed, and I'm personally sorry he feels burned, but Python 2.7 has always been on the roadmap for release. Our goal has been to make the 2.x series evolve into a gentle ramp into Python 3 as humanly possible.

The best way I've heard it put - use Python 3 if you can, Python 2 if you must.
I should also point out that once you have traction, you may not need investors at all. - Sums it up perfectly.

Now that I actually have some traction, and I can roughly calculate how long it will be before I am ramen profitable, investors just completely fade from the picture.
Any word on licenses/copyright?
I found Kodu very interesting. It's a graphical programming language by Microsoft Labs, that allows kids to create games. It runs on the XBox and uses only the XBox controller.

The XBox part turned me off right away, because that's the last thing I need in my house while we're homeschooling our children, however, I found a free academic version that runs on the PC: http://fuse.microsoft.com/projects-kodu.html
Sorry, but that's really not true. In fact, much of the lack of clarity (to outsiders) comes from the desire to be concise, and not verbose. You may think that they are being purposely obscure, but I promise you, they are trying to be as clear as possible without sacrificing truth or accuracy, or nuance.
I should also point out that once you have traction, you may not need investors at all.

Oh how true.

I was recently pitching an angel who was telling me that he didn't see a market for my app when my cell phone vibrated. I checked voice mail after the meeting. It was the president of one of my customers, asking if the angel "got it". If not, no problem, just get back there because he had a bunch of new requirements and some more referrals. He never understood why I was pursuing funding when there was already so much demand for what I was building.

That's one time I wish I had been rude enough to take the call during the meeting, and handed off the phone saying, "Don't ask me. Ask him."
Python has a strong culture of having one obvious and good way to do things.

This is, I think, where people new to Python stumble up. If they were Dutch, the obvious way would be easier to spot.
Maybe the author should consider this possibility:

Startups don't use it, because:
- there may be other technologies that are better for the job
- startups rarely care about Microsoft's heavy marketing which alone can convince a lot of managers to use a technology just because it's from Microsoft

And one of the worst things is that it's a Windows technology, say what you will, but if you want .NET you need Windows, and pay a zillion $-es for license. Yes I know there is Mono, it's very close, but no cigar, it's like wine, it lags.

But in the end I want to ask a question too:
What could .NET bring to startups that other languages can't?
I'm not sure what country you're in, but in many countries there are legal benefits to structuring the equity participation as options. These can include that the employee is not required to be an accredited investor (e.g. millionaire) and that there can be tax benefits (incl. 83b election in the u.s.), and less paperwork-filing requirements. So in most cases, it is normal that the structure is options. In some cases restricted stock is used. Typically the options can convert into stock at a cheap price.

I think a sign-on bonus would be very unusual.

Have you worked at a startup before?

Congrats on receiving the offer -- best of luck!
But will you have to buy a full pallet of them from the aisle next to the socks?
You're misrepresenting.

Some of the increases are the result of expiration of the Bush tax cuts.

Others are new, the result of healthcare initiatives and other programs.
I've tried this route and the problem is that my company wants some open-source stuff and some closed source stuff. So a private Gitorious setup isn't great because we can't put our open-source stuff there.

If self-hosted Gitorious allowed for private & public projects then I could let it face the internet and have the perfect solution. I've seen a few implementations of private projects with merge requests, but sadly the Gitorious team has largely ignored them.
Story submitted some time ago, much discussion already at:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1487982

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1488099
Comprehensible to whom?

Masters of continental philosophy have no problem rendering their fields comprehensible to, say, graduate students in the field. Some (easier) texts are comprehensible to undergrads.

Any "lack of an internal structure, consistency, truth" is imagined by Chomsky.

Really.
Agreed. The assumption _is_ heavy and I even have the same sample set around. But only if you look at either small companies/freelancers/startups (Yes, I know where I'm posting this).

For corporations (read: Process, more process, and some paperwork) that I had to work with this would not be possible. Deploying this strange new thing instead of clearcase/perforce/team services internally? Hard to sell maybe, but possible. Putting your source up somewhere else, out of control: No way.

Especially for verticals where the law heavily influences your ability to share just about any data (depending on country and laws this might include insurance companies, banks, energy provider, probably quite some more).
It is a rant; but its to be expected to a certain degree. Python 3 is a big change, and while some may think it's "change for change's sake" (honestly, it really isn't) I expect we're going to hear more rants like this as the days go on.

We're steadily adding features to Python 3 which will make it an even nicer target, and things like NumPy are being ported soonish (there are python 3 builds available for it), so, yeah.

It's unfortunate we can not make the transition a cake walk for everyone, but as you said, Python 2 is a rock, and it would have been grossly irresponsible of us to just walk away from it. At this juncture, python 2.7 simply makes sense - it helps ease the ramp, and fixes bugs / makes other improvements, etc, etc.
I have seen this repeatedly from the lawyer side. Founders beat the bushes to raise initial funds with varying degrees of success. But, once they can say, we are adding x number of real customers per month - or, just as good (sometimes even better), we just signed contracts with a, b, and c enterprise customers (even if these are just entry-point contracts for consulting services that will be a precursor to product sales) - the interest level among investors can go quickly off the charts. Investors are always eager to sign on with a winner, especially at an early stage when even a small piece of the company can ultimately acquire great value, and this I think explains why the "traction" point can be a great spur to excitement for them.

That said, I have also seen a number of cases where early customer sign-ups ultimately led to little once the initial excitement faded. Startups targeting the enterprise market are particularly vulnerable to this, where they may get all sorts of customers signing up for trials of a product but then are ultimately unable to convert them into large, paying customers owing to the small and untested nature of the startup involved. In such cases, if traction does not reach a critical level, the early gains may sputter. But this doesn't change the basic point, which is that investors will often want to scramble to sign on once they see the initial signs of such traction (even if it later proves illusory).

This is a nice piece highlighting this important point.
Blogger adds real time web analytics
Here's a submission of the actual report, instead of a forum talking about the report:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1490734
Randy Komisar VC on women entrepreneurs [video}
Newspeak: A new programming language in the tradition of Self and Smalltalk
http://newspeaklanguage.org/
No, I'm saying that people who currently chose a life of crime would look for other criminal activities.
Company Sues Woman For Posting Negative Review Online (Angie's List)
Thanks for the leads. Looks like some interesting reading.
Website URL: http://newspeaklanguage.org/
Speaking as one who actually understands it, I don't know what makes you think you are qualified to claim otherwise.

I don't understand a lot of high-level physics, but that doesn't lead me to imagine that physicists just sit around bullshitting each other all day.
Perfectly Write In God's Vineyard: Deaf, Dumb But Certainly Not Blind
The 2011 tax rates have not yet been determined. If Congress lets all of the 2001 tax cuts expire, then we will get the rates cited in this article. It seems likely that they will only let the 2 highest income brackets return to the 2001 level, and keep the tax cuts on the lower income brackets.

http://www.mydollarplan.com/tax-brackets/

Does anybody know when the each year's tax rates are effectively set in stone?
Isn't this common? They are employees of the company so they should understand different weaknesses of the code and should be able to exploit them.

When I was working at (huge tech company with 8000 employees) we did the very same thing and we were able to get full root-access to our SAAS servers from finding our .svn folders to get a full dump of the system code, then grepping through that code to find system level exec commands.

I would be more surprised if they (facebook or the old company I worked for) had found nothing.
Good work on Python 2.7 btw. :)
Full emacs keybindings:

A lot of key emacs bindings--C-a, C-e, C-n, C-p, C-f, C-b--work in any text field (even, say, the Hacker News comment box). But M-f and M-b (which are really useful since they get you forward/backwards a word instead of just a letter or a whole line) don't work. When I try to type option and then a letter, I get weird symbols:

Here's option-b: ∫

Here's option-f: ƒ

To get make M-f and M-b work, go to Preferences->Settings->Keyboard and check the "Use option as meta key" box.

See http://skitch.com/jackowayed/dme91/terminal-fix-keybindings if you can't find it.
Well they DID casually mention they did this same stunt years ago...

and it’s actually similar to something we did a couple years ago, trying to charge the AP $12.50 for their usage of quotes from us.
The difference to me is that HN doesn't reproduce the content of the source - interesting discussion here tends to drive me to the source site, giving them the benefit. TC gives enough info and commentary in their summary that I rarely go to the source, robbing them (in a way of speaking) of my eyes.
It is illegal under US law to use unregistered vessels to evade detection anywhere in the open ocean.[1] I'm pretty sure the US government would extend "conspiring" to include your smuggling yacht company's owner and employees.

[1] http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s110-3598
so, in hindsight, how many business cases are in this rant?
The Magnetar Trade - How a hedge fund exploited the subprime meltdown
It was the fact that it's written by Grover "Drown the Government in the Bathtub" Norquist which led me to stop taking it seriously. That guy has no commitment to the truth, so I would need to fact check every assertion he's making.

If anyone has corroborated his claims using non-wingnut sources, I would be interested to read about it. Until then, I'm taking this with a huge grain of salt.
In other respects I didn't act like someone with mental illness. Most mentally ill people have trouble functioning in society and contributing in a meaningful way.

These experiences didn't let up for two years and I found myself feeling strongly pulled to do things like buy Bibles and attend church. Eventually I did both of those things and my life only improved from there.

I'm not so sure that anything I believe is logically inconsistent. I believe that God intervened in human history in a big way and in such a way that makes it possible for me to approach him with confidence.
Ok hold up. There is a BIG difference between TARGETED attacks like the one described and security holes. A targeted attack like the one described will work on ANY system PERIOD. Hell he may as well have had his bank accounted hacked and complained to citi/chase/ing/etc. The point is such hacks are bogus when it comes to "hacking facebook."

However such things are still useful since HE will be targeted if people really want to hack FB. So then vuala they found a employee who is a vulnerability and thus will try to close that hole.

I am more interested in hacking facebook from a pure-user perspective. Getting information from a random user. See how far it can be taken. That is more interesting. Saying that "if someone waiting to get hacked got hacked, then a random joe will definately get hacked" is bogus. This sort of targeted attack will get through most secure networks period.
"So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?"

good times.
Some of these books are already freely available. The others are illegal copies, as far as I can see. I have no idea how they got their hands on so many texts. The number is quite mind boggling. This won't last long, though.
Well there are some freedoms that have to be denied for the greater good; disallowing strangling your obnoxious neighbor, flinging shit onto the street, dumping in rivers, or pedophilia. It's part and parcel of living in a "free" society. I give up some freedoms so that everyone and I can get along.
I wonder, from all down voters: is there among you a single business owner who will be impacted by this?

Or you're all in the peanut gallery happy to pay with somebody else's money but never actually understanding what it takes to be a business owner in this world?

Cause it seems a pretty strong democrat bias in what should be an entrepreneur's forum. And one should have one's head pretty far up one's... bias to ignore the signs you country is becoming less and less business-friendly and more and momre of a welfare state.
Caryme asked a valid question that by no means warrants downvoting. Aside from being politically slanted, the article has no technical bearing whatsoever.

The only reason it might have any bearing on HN is the small-business angle, but again, the obvious political slant of the article negates that pretty effectively...which is a shame, given that it does have some useful numbers.
Rhinnovation: the winner of I-Prize contest
As an aside, the SSD firmwares -could- detect pages filled with ones or zeros and use that knowledge to transparently do a "TRIM light", at the cost of doubling the size of the "block in use" bitmap (to track 'free', 'in use', 'all zeroes', 'all ones') and added code complexity.

For the SSD makers it probably isn't worth the effort and debugging, since TRIM support is well on its way to ubiquity. Should be an interesting experiment though, if nobody has done it yet.