skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So a government that collects 100% of your income as taxes would create the most civilized society?

This is the sort of comment that drags down discussions about politics. No one is advocating that sort of thing here.

In fairness, the comment changhiskhan is replying to, that US is "arguably less civilized" is quite a mouthful as well, and is the sort of thing that sets of long, fruitless flame wars that lead nowhere.
Best Practices To Design a Perfect HTML Navigation Bar
In the case of ingenuously asking, the connotations attached to the question have to be dispelled somehow; either by asking a different way (perhaps with more specificity) or adding an explicit disclaimer to that effect.
Whose Tweets matter most? A startup measuring influence.
The problem isn't that taxes exist; it's the uncertainty in their change. Uncertainty is an economic killer.

Most business people use the term "ObamaCare"; that has no bearing on the rise in medical insurance this year. I've seen the same rise.
> Also PICK YOUR CONFLICTS. Believe it or not, the child will want to do things differently than you do. Sometimes the way the kid wants to do it is alright, so let them have their way. The child NEEDS to feel some control over their life, give them inconsequential choices "red or blue shirt" fine it does not match, who cares.

This is very important. I don't have kids but I have been one. When I see parents micro managing their kids I feel sorry for them. Let your kids explore and decide and learn. Make "yes" the default answer.
The logical conclusion I get from this article is that if the government wants to improve hiring, they should remove all income taxes on people making <$100k a year, and tax business profits to compensate. Also increase taxes on those making >$100k to discourage upper-middle class and uber-rich hiring.

I don't think that's the solution he's looking for, but I didn't hear him offer one.
> With about 35 CPU-years of idle computer time donated by Google, a team of researchers has essentially solved every position of the Rubik's Cube™,

This is the wrong time to use the adverb "essentially". You either solved every position or you didn't.
Coherence of Your Research Paper Format Is a answer to an A Level Paper
Formatting according to the prescribed writing style is one of the most important aspects of a research paper. Therefore students must be aware of the rules on formatting according to the selected or prescribed style. You can find some advice on formats here.
Skype Spent $343.8 Million To Acquire Its P2P Software From Founders
Why give up guitar ? Playing an instrument can be a very creative process and it's also an excellent way of relaxing.

You can do whatever you want to do, just do it with moderation.
Ron Conway on what's so satisfying about angel investing
The Five Year Party
Hopefully these jobs get replaced by new jobs.

Call me negative but I hear that often and don't share the optimism. There is an upper limit to how many office workers and programmers an economy needs - and can sustain at wages enabling the living standards that we've come to expect.

The only big technical revolution that I see coming in the next few decades will be the robot revolution. Now go figure how that will affect the job market.

My opinion is that the current system of wealth distribution will have to be reconsidered quite fundamentally when robots begin to replace the low-wage workforce.

I also think this will not go smoothly, because when have such large changes ever gone smoothly in history...

Feel free to disagree, call me a "dreamer" and my robot story "absurd" - I'm used to that. But looking at what robots can do today (cf. ASIMO) I'm deeply convinced it's going to happen, and much sooner than most people expect.
The Economist and Private Eye.
I like the Closure compiler but not its templating library or its dom library. The dom library is not abstract enough (you have to explicitly create dom elements) and I generate all my js files via my own php based templating library that is a lot more powerful and concise.

A great combination for the front end through is CoffeeScript + the Closure compiler + jQuery (or your favorite dom library).
When you value your time at $0 lots of things seem cheaper. For $131 a month on CloudFront you get a better CDN than you are going to build and avoid all the sysadmin headaches, syncing headaches, etc.
PeoplePatcher: Connect people, whether they want talk to or not
"The biological pressure is to have sex, and only indirectly to have children."

I'm guessing you're a man.
Great post.

Better yet: find 10 people to write you a check.

If you're building something that your prospects want and your demo is so compelling, then smart people will crawl over each other to get their deposit in first. I've even had propects beg me to leave my laptop after a demo so they could play with it while I built it out.

10 people saying they'll buy it is a good start, but a deposit check separates the talkers from the doers.

Sometime I think investors should require 10 deposits prior to pitching. Imagine what a difference that would make.
They've also innovated commercially, this application is a case in point.

Online drawing apps have been around for years yet none have thought to integrate paid content like dA have in the form of 'brush packs'.
> Jacques, you're one of my favorite posters here, but I really disagree with this sentiment.

I agree with Jacques, and I actually lived in the Soviet Union half my life.

> American things cost more is they can't just grab a scientist or engineer and say, "Build this for us, or else..."

Really? You think that's how these things were built. With soldiers holding engineers at gunpoint? I understand Western propaganda is of the highest quality but sheesh... I had no idea they had you brainwashed that well.

The truth is engineers who built these were very good engineers who got payed very well. It was a very prestigious profession to have. It came with a better apartment and other perks.

> but we should also mention the very real costs and atrocities they committed to get these projects done.

Please, spare us the propaganda. I am assuming you are American or British. What about their attrocities? Or let me guess, American bombs are only to kill "terrorists" and "enemy combatants" while their enemies' weapons conduct "atrocities". What about all the countries in South America, or Vietnam? Who helped commit those attrocities?

> "literally human blood, sweat, and tears"

There were a lot of engineers who would have love to shed some "blood, sweat, and tears" working on such a project. /Yes, I am beign sarcastic...
I'm surprised that you are so naive about what being "science-minded" on this issue means. There is so much variation in human physiology and digestive tract composition that a universal "healthy" diet is probably even more backwards of a notion than the USDA recommendations. What will be best for you to eat needs to be determined by your experiments with various different diets and will depend on how much you exercise and many other factors. Until we understand more about the bacteria that live in our body and how we interact with them, "science" is not going to be any better than folk wisdom. There is nothing wrong with eating the foods that have proven to work over 100,000+ years of human society.

I see several themes in the advice on this thread - don't eat too much, eat whole foods, and drink water. I have to say that this is probably the most scientific advice you will find.
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5900#c0

I put this issue into Android some time ago. Google's probably in a position to make some change here, and carriers should be ramping up to deal with mobile spam.
I bet you a dollar the 28% increase was the opening bid from his health care provider and not that far off the opening bid those previous years they ended up paying 10+%. Because that's almost exactly what I've seen for the last five years. It's just the way negotiations go. And every now and again, you have to switch providers. It's a horrible hassle, but nothing new.

Further, the health insurance reform legislation included a lot of necessary changes to make it viable to sever the employer/health insurance connection. I have a hard time reconciling his clear dislike of the changes with his claimed desire to reduce his own overhead.
just whining. he could, instead, hire freelance or contract workers. he won't have to pay much to the government, he'll just have to pay the contractor double what he pays Sally.
Very early on in the days when ICQ still had an unencrypted client that allowed you to connect to a random ICQ user that was online I played around with a very simple human backed bot that would open a bunch of connections and if it ran out of stuff to say would IM the operator with a bit of context. The reply was then saved so that the next time around when it would get in to that situation it would have a reply waiting.

It was lots of fun doing that, and I can imagine doing this on facebook would be just as much fun.
And temporarily, topeka:
(last paragraph of section)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Topeka,_Kansas&...
In what possible sense is this extortion?

If restaurant owners want to play music to their customers, in an attempt to extract additional revenue, they are required to pay a fee to the artists who composed the music. Similarly, if they want to serve liquor, they need to get a liquor license. If they want to sell orange juice, they need to (somewhere) buy the orange juice.

I'm having trouble finding the source of the outrage.
Kind of fish in a barrel stuff, but the markmanship is fine at that range.
I am not that convinced admittedly. He makes statements like this in his blog :

> I’ll leave it to the commenters to debate whether Deolalikar’s paper exhibits one or more of the Ten Signs A Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough Is Wrong.
1. Wait until a serious attempt at proving P != NP is posted

2. Write rambling blog post and offer a ridiculous amount of money for something that now is incredibly unlikely

3. Massive page views

4. ???

5. PROFIT!
I recently incorporated simply because it gives a level of legal protection and it was so damn cheap.

I used: http://www.company-wizard.co.uk/

The cost was 25GBP ~ 30EUR.

There are alot of online company registration services for UK Ltd's there is a fair bit of paperwork and you'll have to file UK returns, accounts and taxes. But recent legislation has made the whole process relatively easy.

The only extra expense I can see is you'd need to have a UK registered office. The above link offers a service of providing you with a registered office for 99GBP however others seem cheaper. For example:
http://www.companiesmadesimple.com/company-services-register...

Will provide a London registered office forwarding service for 40GBP per year.
Real-life comparison of Zabbix vs Nagios
Exactly what you're saying.

If you need to maintain multiple hosts then use proper tooling, be it puppet, chef, FAI, git, virtualization, or even a homegrown set of bootstrap scripts.

Rsync'ing random stuff from one host to another will hardly end well, except for truly one-off stuff that gets closely reviewed during the process.

File location and contents vary wildly, even between slightly different [package] versions of the same distribution. Trying to automate that stuff without even looking at what the package manager of the respective hosts has to say is a recipe for disaster.

Sure, your script may work today right after you tested it with two near identical RedHat hosts. I promise it will fail badly when you try to run it again 6 months from now. Or rather, it will probably run nearly fine, but bury some interesting surprises for you to find out about later...
> What total utter crap. Taxes is the price you pay for a civilized society, and the US has far less taxes that most western countries,

Actually, it doesn't. US tax revenue per-person is pretty much in the middle of western Europe.

Things look different because US GDP/person is higher and poor workers only pay for their retirement. (SS payouts are fairly progressive, so it's a good deal for the poor and sucks for those near the cap. The cap exists because we don't want rich people to care about SS and we don't want to pay $400k/year to Ross Perot. If you want to remove the cap, please tell us how you're going to deal with rich people caring about SS, which they will if benefits are capped, or if you're going to uncap the benefits as well.)
"Companies have also been pressed into serving as providers of health insurance. In a saner world, health insurance would be something that individuals buy for themselves and their families, just as they do with auto insurance. Now, adding to the insanity, there is ObamaCare."

Actually, in the saner world, companies don't have to worry about health insurance because it's provided by the government.
they seem to be getting pushed pretty hard on new android phones. i know that a big marketing point of the droid x is skype international calling.
Quoting myself from http://messymatters.com/buyrent again:

In fact, landlord profits are probably a very small part of the equation: on par with the cost of collecting your rent and arranging (not paying for) maintenance. We can check this by seeing how much property management companies charge. Casual web searching indicates it can range from 3% to 15% of rent. But that includes the cost of finding new tenants — the equivalent of which home-buyers pay in spades in realtor commissions (directly or indirectly). I think it's safe to say that at most a few percent or so of your rent is wasted in the sense of being profit for your landlord.

(Which is what you'd expect in a competitive market, as someone above pointed out.)
Ask HN: md5 + size = file UID?
Is md5 checksum plus the file's size is absolutely unique identifier for a file across the universe?
Inside a Wave: Epic Photography by Clark Little
What is business intelligence? Why should you care?
Sometimes finding ways to skirt those laws can be a more effective way of having them abolished.

Case in point, the province of Nova Scotia was one of the last places in North America to ban shopping on Sundays. An exception was made for stores under a certain square-footage. After unsuccessfully lobbying the government to overturn the ban, the major grocery stores started re-branding themselves as shopping malls and registering the deli, produce, fish market, etc. as separate businesses which fell under the square footage requirements. Soon after they started doing this, the government caved and overturned the law.

I don't see it as breaking the law so much as demonstrating that it can't effectively be enforced.
I doubt OSX has more overhead, if games run faster on linux than they should run at least as fast as windows on osx, with proper drivers.
I'd agree with you had they used a weasel-word like "virtually", but "essentially" seems appropriate in this case:

adverb: used to emphasize the basic, fundamental, or intrinsic nature of a person, thing, or situation

If you didn't actually iterate through every position - but rather a subset that provided equivalent coverage by eliminating symmetries - then you have, in essence, solved every position.
I've had three people send me money the first day early-bird registration opened for the event I'm running in November.

It's such a fantastic buzz having people send you money in exchange for product/service. Such a buzz.
> Perhaps if FICA weren't capped at ~$100K, we could reduce Sally's share of the burden?

Are you planning to uncap benefits? If you do, Ross Perot gets $400k/year. If you don't, rich people start caring about SS. Those are the reasons why Social Security advocates used to like the cap. Were they wrong?

FWIW, SS payouts are very progressive. Folks on the low end get a reasonable return on their contributions. Folks near/at the cap get a crappy deal. The rich ones don't care because of the cap.
facetime on windows though ?
Although reading the rest of the thread it sounds like your biggest problem is going to be Italian regulation & taxation.
America Goes Dark
Not on facebook, but there are tons on Twitter.
depends on what you're pitching. 10 deposits on a $5/mo service might not carry much weight to a VC. but 10 letters of intent on a more expensive b2b service is golden.
(I wrote the original link, and I'm one of Timetric's founders.)

Absolutely.

So if you're building a service around this, like what Timetric, or ManyEyes, or any of the other services which include social visualization; or you're supplying data on an industrial scale, like we do, or Bloomberg does, or SimpleGeo does...

...then we believe there's ethical responsibility to your users to let them editorialize and not, whether by omission or by commission, force a viewpoint upon them.

We need, as an industry, to talk about this stuff.
Elaborating on your point further: One of those "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" errors that a security dilettante (like me!... though I'm at least far enough to know about this) can easily make is to assume that because you're using encryption, you're done. You're secure! Hooray!

But of course it's not that simple. You have to consider your entire attack surface, and when dealing with a government that doesn't care if it disappears you for no good reason, there's one hell of an attack surface here. (Note: I neither know nor for the purposes of this post care if Iran is that cavalier, what matters is the existence of governments that are, somewhere, sometime, which I consider pretty likely.) They don't have to prove you've sent subversive stuff behind that encryption. They don't even have to prove you're using the subversive software. They just have to suspect it. Even if we assume the encrypted stuff is perfect, what other tells are there? Characteristic ports? Characteristic communication patterns? Characteristic headers? And even quick solutions to those problems, "oh, we make it look like HTTPS" can have problems of their own, ad infinitum. Are you doing HTTPS to sites that obviously don't serve a website? Are you trying to fake a website in a way easy to characterize? What will you do when the ISP straight-out bans websites on your home computer, making it impossible to mask your traffic that way? (And how suspicious is it for two home users to hit each other's "websites" every few seconds, anyhow?)

These are all issues that a government won't have a problem answering, and there are yet more that they won't have trouble answering. The hostiles here have it easier because their threshold for deciding they have enough information to act is very low. The only way anybody should feel even remotely confident about this is if it is reviewed. (Whereupon it'll probably be discovered to be impossible, IMHO, but that's for reviewers to figure out.)
Is md5 checksum plus the file's size is absolutely unique identifier for a file across the universe?

No. Use SHA256.
Interactive Map of US Investors
Well, not really, considering that Friis and Zennstrom sold it to ebay at a very high valuation and then managed to get paid again when they found out they missed a bunch of core tech.

If they had ipo'd a decade earlier they might not have made as much as they did.
With earnings of about $500 million in the first half of 2010, and 44% growth since last year, isn't a $100M IPO really, really conservative?

Does this mean the stocks will jump sky high the second it's on the market?
Meet Gmane's sister Gwene (RSS/ATOM-NNTP)
Your new co-worker may be a robot
Say the home-buyer can just barely afford the mortgage payments and their renting alter ego can just barely afford rent. Then necessarily the renter is getting a much nicer place. Holding the niceness of the place constant, the renter will indeed have extra money to invest just like the home-buyer is gradually building equity (investing) in the house.

Rent ratios are actually often such that the above is even more extreme: buying a house cost more per month even if you pay only the interest on your mortgage (which is equivalent to renting: building no equity in the actual house).
No, for the same reason you can't fit n+1 pigeons in n holes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle
Ask HN: Who's hiring for contract work? August version
I'm available for contract work. development in html5, java, python, django, javascript, dojo, postgres, mysql, linux admin.
paid for by ...
I am not Russian but I lived in the Soviet Union, and I think your impression is a different than mine. From what I remember, being an engineer on such a project was a very prestigious job. It came with many perks that others didn't have.

> It's surprisingly easy to meet a budget in a totalitarian state...

That is true, but not because engineers are working in a Gulag. It is because of how a central-planning economy works.

Now of course you can argue that the whole country was one big Gulag and there is truth to that, but engineers working on these submarines probably were much, much better off than peasants in some corner of Siberia...
> good arguments to help me claim my fair share.

There is no such thing as a fair share.

You're bringing something to the table. So are other people. The deal doesn't have to take place and it can take place with different people, so the question is "what does it take to make a deal".
You don't have to guess if you read my response. That said, I believe the same goes for women. The biological push is towards sex; children are a result (sometimes) of the sex. (You can argue about variance of intensity or frequency of desire among males and females, of course. I'm not sure what I think about all that, though my instinct is to say that a lot of the variance is cultural rather than biological. But that's neither here nor there, at the moment.)

Here's a way to play with this claim. Imagine you have a person (male or female) in the right age range. Would giving the person a child to care for by itself remove or diminish the person's desire for sex? I'm not so sure. (Note, I'm not talking about exhaustion due to taking care of a child - a clear side-effect, nor about the biological changes that occur after childbirth.)

Again, I'm thinking about this issue myself, but I don't think it's cut-and-dried male/female, as you imply.
There's always the middle ground:

If the number is blocked - a truly unknown number - send them to voicemail. Most marketers won't leave a voicemail - they'll just hang up.

I voicemail-screen every call I get from numbers that aren't in my address book. 99/100 times, blocked number calls don't even leave a voicemail.
No, it isn't.

MD5 gives 16 bytes of output, so consider all possible 17 byte files and their MD5 checksums. On average, each checksum will be shared by 256 17 byte files.

If you're worried about MD5 collisions between files, adding the file size isn't going to do much to help. Better to use SHA1 or some other algorithm in addition to MD5. E.g. 16 bytes of MD5 + 20 bytes of SHA1 = 36 bytes total output.
They have your number so you can tell them to include it in their sms when they are sending it to you. Or better yet their own number. Your spamfilter might let such messages through. Or at least name or something. Anyway you they have to provide some details about themselves in sms so you can know who contacts you.

Thinking further voicebot to filter out call spam also would be nice. ;-)