skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In addition to the 1099 nightmare, there's also the S-corp self employment tax nightmare where all s-corp income has the 15.3% self-employment tax imposed, not just the earned income. I predict a mass switch to C-corps.

From http://www.businessbrief.com/feds-take-aim-at-small-biz-loop...

Both House and Senate bills address what some lawmakers see as evasion of employment tax by certain individuals. The Internal Revenue Service has stated that many taxpayers receive nominal salaries and take their earnings through distributions by S corps., limited partnerships, or other entities. The House and Senate bills would change that situation by imposing self-employment payroll taxes on 100% of S-corp. pass-through income when:

- The S corp. is engaged in a professional service business, with the key assets being the reputation and skill of no more than three employees, or

- The S corp. is a partner in a professional service business.
Why we use Fortran and Python
I don't like the dismissive 'fear of failure' and I don't like the default answer of 'what if you have a family' and this post has little else.

And failure isn't scary, being old and unaccomplished is? Come on, that deserves some more introspection than that! You're still driven by fear if that's the case.

Much more interesting is what are the real motivations if you don't accept fear of failure is the reason. Or if you do, then what to do about it. Or if you ask what is there about failure to be afraid
of (and you aren't allowed to say 'nothing really' because that dismisses the fact that you are afraid of it).

Motivation and fears are way more interesting than this gives them credit for.
Oops! Well, you're right - my first language was Russian - but at this point English is my primary language. I'd attribute that mistake less to my heritage, but rather to all the wine I drank last night :P
We May Actually Live Inside a Black Hole, Vincent
If you're trying to Google the referenced explanation, he said "DMV", and it's here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/07/the_threat_of_...
Dell ships infected motherboards
Storing passwords in plaintext (or obfuscated) in a database is not what the author is saying. He's simply saying that they're not using encrypted HTTPS connections, so if a user logs into one of the offending sites over a publicly accessible connection (i.e. public wifi), anyone nearby could use a sniffer app to see their password travel over the network.

Regarding the Super User post, he's correct that storing passwords as reversible rather than plain text is a LITTLE different, but if their servers are compromised, the hacker could simply run the reverse function on your password to retrieve it. The one situation where it's safer is if the database tables are hacked, but the server's code is still secure.

I'd argue that storing reversible passwords is almost the same as plain text, but I'm interested to hear if people think reversible is significantly better than plain text.
My education.
A small percentage of stock market transactions are Company to Investor. Most transactions are Investor A to Investor B which only indirectly impacts a company’s value. Clearly they are related, but it's generally much better for investors in healthy companies for that company to get money from the bond market than the stock market.

PS: Consider a company with consistent revenue/dividends but zero transitions on the stock market. Its value is going to be heavily influenced by stock market conditions, but it's ability to raise money is going to be dominated by the state of the bond market.

Edit: My point is what it means when a transaction between Invester A and Invester B happens on the stock market at a given price.
The question is how "much" monetization, right...? I think because it's a very tightly targeted group, there is a fair amount of room - whether for some of the more innovative offerings below, or just B2B things for startups - but it seems like scalability would be a difficulty, in terms of 'growing' the business. (Plus, the business aspects in that sense could corrode some of the real motivations for HN).

HN _does_ serve a business purpose and I think it provides Y Combinator with -great- ROI : )
My college degree - partially for the name that led to great internships/jobs that gave me insightful experience, but mostly for the friends (including my cofounder), social experience, and general maturing that happens there.

3 years & $150k and I think it's paid for itself in the 1 year I've been out of school.
>...if they send you your password back in the clear in a password reminder email, rather than forcing you to create a new one.

This only indicates they store the password in a recoverable format. It could be encrypted. It shouldn't be stored encrypted -- hashing is the way to go -- but it doesn't mean the server has "hunter2" sitting on disk somewhere.
If a company purchases anything over $600, they still only have to submit one 1099.
That's my understanding as explained by my CPA a few minutes ago.
I feel the same way. I like talking with people about cool things, I'd say 80% of the cool stuff I'm introduced to originally comes from someone I'm in touch with. Hacker News included.

So I tell you what, hugh - why don't you write me an interesting email and I'll write back? What are your key goals you're working on? Or recommend me a book, or ask for a book recommendation on a particular topic. I'll write back. All details in my profile.

Hell, anyone can write me if you're a decent person. You - yes you - what are you working on that's important to you right now?
Yeah, adding shared memory byte arrays to web workers would be really great for data-intensive tasks such as this. Anyone up for massaging the spec group? ;)
Ask HN: Co-founder quitting job and investing $ - should I ask for more equity?
Hello, I'm a co-founder and am quitting my job and investing a small sum of money (≈10-20k) while we try to raise seed funding and begin proving the validity of our existing MVP product.

As part of this should the injection of cash be in exchange for equity? If we got cash from an outside source it would be - but I don't know if it typically differs since I'm one of the co-founders. Does the increased risk of leaving my job and investing some money justify additional equity?

Some additional context (not sure any of it matters).

Startup was originally my idea
I have more equity atm (60/40)
I have a significantly better job (which I'll be leaving)

Feel free to ask any more questions :)
Etsy (not surprising since John Allspaw from flickr is head of ops):

http://www.southsearepublic.org/article/2340/read/etsys_cont...
Or how about something more challenging... toss the pancake higher, or make the pancake rotate more rotations when tossed =P
The Apache-Apple Event Bridge: run AppleScripts via Apache
Effectively banning cash/check/MO/wire transactions doesn't make this any better. This needs to go away.
This could make Cassandra a great deal more useful for many applications. Having the database itself handle keeping secondary indexes (eventually) consistent is far more palatable than doing it externally through some sort of queue. Though clearly far more cumbersome than adding a simple index through DDL in a SQL database, the asynchronous nature of these triggers brings some benefits as well.
Newmarks ipad DJ Docking Station
$170 netbook? I haven't been able to find anything reputable-esque on Newegg or Amazon for under $250, so I've been holding out for ARM smartbooks and a price drop.
Notice that you use bob.greeting() but bill.greeting (without the parentheses), while Io uses the same syntax in both cases. Whether this is good or bad is mostly a matter of preference, I think...

Of course, this implies that Io would need a separate construct to get the value of a slot (e.g. bob getSlot("greeting")), while in Python you'd just use bob.greeting no matter whether greeting is callable or not.
Ask HN: How do you stay motivated when the project gets stale?
I have two clients with nearly finished websites ready to do but pesky issues and small annoying bugs are preventing the site from going live. I am to the point where I want to find someone I can pay to finish the job just so I don't have to look at the projects anymore. This problem is reflective of my habit of always moving on, many times too early. I love new ideas and peruse them until the fun of the early creation and exploration is over. Then it gets stale and when I do keep working on it, it is passionless work.

Any advice?
Someone will suggest duckduckgo I'm sure but it doesn't really work well for me and my usually obscure searches

I must agree however that google is getting harder and harder to find what I want and more often than not searches are returning way too many blogs with minimal content and excessive ads just fishing for views.
"The best investment you can make is in yourself." ~Warren Buffet

He's absolutely right. As long as you remain alive and able bodied, your investment is protected and will yield a return and you will derive the enjoyment and benefit from that return directly, without delay and continuously.

I'll add one caveat: Before you go and spend $120,000 on an education, make sure you are acquiring the knowledge and other assets you hope to gain in the most efficient and cost effective way as possible.
Even though GameSpot's login is now secure, their signup page still submits to a insecure page.
Nah, that's not necessary. I had 700 emails in my inbox three months ago, and I got them down to 0 after about a month. I set milestones:

-Inbox to 600
-Inbox to 500
-Inbox to 400
-Inbox to 300
-Inbox to 200
-Inbox to 100
-Inbox to 70
-Inbox to 50
-Inbox to 30
-Inbox to 15
-Inbox to 10
-Inbox to 5
-Inbox empty

I figured it'd get harder to clear down as it got closer to the bottom. In the beginning it was easy - search and archive newsletters, alerts, digests, and spam. Archive all emails from someone after I got off the phone with them and covered everything, but let the old request sit in the box. Archive all emails from ex-girlfriend. Etc.

Interestingly, I had a lot of little milestones at the end, but it turns out it wasn't as hard as I thought: There were about 10 emails that I used a reminder for "general to do" that I added to a notepad file to-do list, and archived them. Then there was about 5 decisions where there was no particularly good decision and I didn't like my choices, so I just sacked up and picked one option or the other and did it. Like, one of them was canceling something that had an early cancel fee, and I'd been waffling on it, and I just said screw it and picked one way or the other. I don't even remember the details, which means I should have probably just picked the first time I looked at it.

Anyways, email inbox can be overwhelming if it's big. Tackle it in chunks, almost make a game out of it. It's nice to keep crossing off things on the list... 700... 600... 500... 400... was quite a good feeling. It's nice to be organized, too.
No. Glass-Steagall prevented bank holding companies from holding other financial companies ... and I'm not aware of many of the former causing large problems (Citicorp, yes, but that three time loser should have been put down a long time ago). Of course many bank holding companies that were holding subprime toxic instruments as capital got slagged, but that's a very different problem.

In fact, if what you wished were true, the rescues of the surviving investment banks, American Express, CIT Group (big middle market financing company) and General Motors Acceptance Corporation would have been impossible (or at least would have had to proceed differently). The government's solution was for them to become bank holding companies. Two investment banks, Bear Sterns and Merrill Lynch, were rescued by having bank holding companies buy them (JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, the latter in the end at virtual gunpoint).
When everyone is a lawbreaker enforcement becomes selective, you could say arbitrary.
Learning to shut up (both mouth and mind) when it matters - i.e. listening more than I talk. There are no refunds on what you've said.
It is indeed sad. Kodachrome 200 was my favorite film. I loved the way it would go blue when overexposed and red when underexposed. I even have a panroamic photo on my wall I took at "Kodachrome Canyon". It was named because the red rocks worked well with the film. Though by then I was shooting on a Canon G1 and only used an old roll as a prop. Once I went digital I never looked back.
I think I remember this from way back when. IPAddress/scatter/sc.processtext.php?x=0

You should make a beta account. Something that the HNers can use to "check things out" with. I hate giving my email out.

I like your landing page. The logo/tag line caught my eye right off the bat.
More likely: most businesses will completely ignore this rule. It will either go away before it comes into force or it will be so impractical to police that it will be useless.
I think HN could charge a lot for a job board. I think this is the site with the highest concentration of people I would want to hire.
Sure there is some, but it's impact is going to be far less than a 1% tax increase on them. Especially when most small business start using CC to avoid the hassle and or simply ignore the issue.

Edit: Thanks for the down vote, but as a practical matter the IRS is going to use this as an audit trail. So a company needs to report revenue > the submitted 1099's. While they will get some 1099's their reported gross income is going to be dominated by people who don't need to send 1099's so it's going to have minimal impact. Note: There is zero new tax implications, it’s simply a reporting issue so being sent 1099’s DOES NOT IMPACT the taxes they pay.

The people receiving 1099's that are going to suffer are those who try and hide income. Companies are going to need to report revenue > 1099's or the IRS can easily find issue based on that discrepancy.

On the other hand Apple is going to need to send a lot of 1099's out to developers.
Good article, but I have to nitpick here:

Any well-versed programming language person can tell you about both recursive-descent parsers and generated parsers. They’ll also tell that generated parsers are the “right” way to do that.

Most of the time that advice will save you from wasted effort, but sometimes I think it keeps people from going down paths that may actually be fruitful. Sometimes the thing that everyone knows is true isn’t. (For example, every language I know of with a lot of real-world users actually does use a hand-written parser.)

Recursive descent parsers are good when 1) you have a simple grammar and 2) you want fewer dependencies. Most lisps have hand-written recursive descent parsers because lisp grammar is easy.

Also, MRI ruby (aka CRuby1.8) uses a generated parser.
Eh, the main difference to me is that now it is part of the official source, it will likely be included in package manager builds on major Linux distros, instead of having to compile from source at all.
Unfortunately, in practice the "simplest implementation that works" is understood as the crappiest implementation that seems to work.

IF you are young and naive, you could argue that this was an honest mistake. In every other case, trying to push to a client the "simplest thing that works" it is either professional negligence or borderline fraudulent cost externalization.

Not being paid by the hour is not a valid excuse. It is a symptom of either naivety or shady business practices.
Hence my point I guess, prices only are going up, not down for some weird reason.

This is an acer aspire one. I only use it like an hour a month tops but it's nice to have an emergency backup.

I'd like to try it with Chrome OS someday.
Well that's one reason i originally started the project that i've been working on, Farnsworth. It was originally a direct clone of Frink but I have since decided that i want to take it in a different direction (in syntax and design). It's currently at the prototyping stage and is likely to change drastically (i have LOTS of drastic plans for it). I'm currently working on documentation and tests for the prototype so that i can understand what i broke and when. you can read more about the project at http://simcop2387.info/ The prototype is currently resource hungry and written in perl, but desgined for me to be easy to hack and change on so i can replace parts of it as i decide i don't like them.
Name one database that won't have scaling issues for sure

You are, in effect, asking someone to prove a negative.

I don't think there's any contention that scaling will always be an issue, but, rather, where along the scale curve debilitating issues occur and how painful the resolutions to those issues are.

For example, with MySQL, without sacrificing ACID properties[1], one cannot even separate a table's indexes onto a separate spindle from its data. For rotating storage, this make creating a new index astonishingly painful. Even with SSDs, more sequential/bulk I/O combined with eliminating contention for the paths to the drive, there can be a performance improvement.

Then there's query optimization. Is there even anything remotely close in MySQL to the EXPLAIN ANALYZE functionality in PostgreSQL?

I posit that scaling issues with MySQL come early and, once they do, require sweeping and expensive changes to address. One can't merely exercise a little cleverness and cheap hardware to tide one over for another factor of 2-4 growth.

[1] i.e. InnoDB, not MyISAM
Review my startup / help beta test BreezyPrint for iOS
IPS/IDS is a well over a billion dollar a year industry. The products mentioned in the article don't even make up a measurable fraction of that. Market leaders are products like Cisco, Macfee, ISS, Tipping Point, etc.
It's hard to imagine any "orderly shutdown" that would have resulted in their bonds being worth much, especially during the process (that's Leahman's commercial paper AKA ordinary borrowing, not anything exotic or toxic they were selling). The Reserve Primary Fund's inexplicable overexposure to Lehman bonds then caused them to "break the buck" which started the cascading failure of the world's financial system.
If you've managed to embed an integer into your char array and you are using that integer as an accumulator, you're probably "doing it wrong", very wrong. More to the point, you've got bigger problems than gcc's optimization specifics.

As for this particular example, result is allocated on the stack and is guaranteed to not lie within s, so the gcc optimization is perfectly safe.
How do you find the free time? I am simply too tired to do anything most evenings after work. I don't think it is just a matter of willpower, otherwise, why sleep at all. I don't watch TV, but I have 2 hours commute time per day.

If you still have energy in the evenings, you should consider yourself lucky, rather than be condescending.
I've learned that there are two types of people in the world: those that can extrapolate information from incomplete data,
BreezyPrint (http://www.breezyprint.com) is a service that lets you print from mobile devices. It's easy to set up (~2 minutes), incredibly easy to use (printing takes ~10 seconds), works with practically every printer ever made and supports nearly 500 different kinds of attachments. You can watch an introductory video here if you like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBENYGv9rj4

We launched in April on BlackBerry only, and have just crossed the 1000-user mark. We offer a 14-day free trial, and so far, about 30% of users seem to be converting to paid once their trial ends.

Everyone's first question: "When's the iphone app coming?" It's coming very soon. If you want to participate in the beta (hopefully launching late next week), click here: http://www.breezyprint.com/iosbeta (redirects to a google docs form).

Everyone's second question: "How does it work?" BreezyPrint consists of a mobile app, our server in the cloud, and a small piece of client software the user installs on his PC (Mac client yet to come). Through the PC client, the user selects printers to use with BreezyPrint, and the list is uploaded to our server. When the user initiates a print job from his mobile device, the device queries the server for the list of printers and displays it to the user. The user selects the printer he wants, and the document is encrypted and sent to our server, where it awaits download/decryption/printing by the PC client associated with the selected printer.

I'm very aware of the various competitors in the market and have some (proprietary) plans for beating them, but I would love to hear any feedback from the HN community on what we can improve.

In particular:
1) Any suggestions on how to make the use process clearer, without adding a ton of extra pages to the site?

2) Is there anything on the site that just doesn't make any sense to you?

3) We're pricing at 4.95/mo or 29.95/year, and the fee is for the service, not any one app itself (it's a per-user, not per-machine, license fee - so if you switch devices, somehow lose everything, etc., it doesn't cost you anything). Any thoughts on this?

4) Any other suggestions? What question(s) should I have asked, that I missed?

Thanks very much in advance for any feedback. I've been lurking on HN for probably about six months now, and have learned a ton. Looking forward to hearing what you all think.
Honestly, I've found I sleep best when I'm traveling and forced to sleep on my foam mattress pad (not the inflatable variety) and sleeping bag.

Though it may be more traveling and being out in the world and doing things that causes me to sleep soundly.
This actually looks pretty cool and useful, but it's in beta, way to douse my excitement with a cold bucket of waiting
You're arguing a strawman.

Trying to push to a client the crappiest implementation that seems to work is certainly everything you say that it is - but that's not the same thing as delivering the simplest implementation that works.
I would like the answer to that question as well... Although I have this problem with my personal projects (that are supposed to be "fun"), not so much professionally.

The problem is that when I get bored with (which might happen very soon, as in, after a few days), it stops being fun... so then your choices are to go on anyway, in which case you're doing drudge work instead of something enjoyable, or move on to a different project, which will likely meet the same fate.

I haven't found a solution for this yet, although I suspect that it might help to have a few other people working on the project as well.
I'm thinking of it in terms of RAID.

You are talking about RAID5. However, RAID5 is useless if more than a few disks go offline at the same time.

RAID1/10 is most useful when there's a higher chance of multiple disks failing at a time, or when the odds of multiple disks failing in your RAID5, while low, are unacceptable.

Of course there are other things at work when you talk RAID0/5/10, but this is a large part of it.
Even though I am German, thanks for the warning ;)
That sounds like a lot of work. Dealing with inbox becomes a fulltime job.
I'm not saying that I have reached my dream, because I haven't. I am slowly working towards what would best be called a lifestyle business.

I didn't make the first step for a long time because of some faulty assumptions.
I live on the Skytrain.

My experience, shopping for electronics on my round-the-world trip, is that the US (especially Newegg) is the cheapest place in the world for quality electronics, thanks to a combination of competition, large market, and low sales tax.

Note I said quality electronics, not the horrible knockoff stuff you can buy in the developing world.
Here's an article at CNN Money if that helps.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/09/smallbusiness/irs_1099_flood...
I just have gmail tags like 'facebookspam' that skip inbox and I can peruse at my leisure. Usually just to mass mark as read.