skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I skipped out on Philly wage tax when I moved to Los Angeles... 6 years later and I've never heard anything of it. Maybe their enforcement has gotten better since then, but city taxes are typically a breeze to skip out on.

When I moved to LA I discovered the city tax code here, which gives you a bunch of reasonable exemptions, particularly if you make less than $100k gross you don't pay city business taxes. New businesses are also exempt their first year. And if you screw it up the city will actually have a friendly conversation with you about it and try to help. Can't picture that ever happening in Philly haha

But honestly, politicians have been telling people for years they are getting rid of the wage tax and it never happens. Its just a huge insult to the workers and small businesses that are trying to make the city a better place to live. There has to be a better way to restructure taxes in philly.
Summer of Startups: 10 Startups to Graduate from Finland’s 1st Startup School
Disclaimer: I'm the main coach of the program
You see the same effect here in Pittsburgh. Many companies have set up shop in Cranberry, just outside of Allegheny county.
> The inventors of the telephone thought it was a B2B technology, didn't really grasp that everyone was going to have a phone in their home and use it to talk to relatives

Much less in their pockets.

> Ebert gets X tweets per hour on average into my aggregated stream;

And those should be the ones re-tweeted most often.
Providing income for heirs is not unreasonable. Former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant did exactly that with his memoirs, which saved his family from poverty after his death [1].

That said, 70 years is still beyond excessive.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Memoirs_of_Ulysses_S._...
Pay no attention to that playful UI behind the Google Maps curtain
"Additionally the posts on HN are more likely to be negative"

What exactly do you mean? That people do not comment on here, ohh this is brilliant, we love you, you're our god, even if the guy said something obvious or something which isn't brilliant at all, or do you mean that here people write down their thoughts as they are not biased. I do not see why the latter would necessarily mean negative however? There are criticisms, but are reasonable criticisms something negative?

I think posts here are positive, even for the owner of the site, unless he takes it personally. You know, its just business :P
Yeah, I'm not sure 3.6.8 implements WebSockets.
If you're trying to capture police misdeeds on camera, then asking for the approval of the police, or announcing loudly to them that they are being recorded seems to miss the point. If anything, the police should have less of an expectation of privacy (in their job) than a normal person. We've armed them and given them the discretion to kill if necessary, why shouldn't we be able to heavily audit them to make sure that they aren't abusing that power?
I've done more or less what you suggest, I have comments 'off' on my blog but do follow the comments on the HN threads. I used to post whatever I had to say as a 'link less post' but people were complaining about reading light gray on dark gray.

I think that those that disagree with you are your best teachers though, what would you rather have, a hundred people going 'yes' or 3 that disagree with you and get a conversation going?
Harvard Finds Researcher 'Solely Responsible' for Misconduct
As far as I remember the wage tax applies to anyone who WORKS in Philly (W2's included) or at least it used to. So (as I recall) if you are employed at a company and go to the office in Philly, regardless of where you live you still needed to pay wage tax.

Its absolutely ridiculous, unenforceable and by some counts could be illegal. I know other municipalities in Pennsylvania had lawsuits filed regarding similar issues.

However because its so impossible to enforce you can basically tear up the letter if you live outside the city.
Am I the only one here who finds the dailywtf sometimes extremely depressing?!

Take the stories with a huge grain of salt. Many people have complained about their stories being hugely exaggerated before being published.

Alex Papadimoulis (the author of the website) has also admitted in an email that he often makes up new stories by embellishing old ones. The email used to be on the following link, but now you must ask the Programming Praxis author for a copy. http://programmingpraxis.com/2009/08/13/the-daily-wtf-malici...
Dealing with multiple screens and multiple languages
what's the new school thinking?
What is the difference between "teaching" and "educating"? These are perfect synonyms in my mental lexicon, so I can't really get the distinction you're trying to draw there.
Fame lotto?
To find out if you are one in a million and to advertise that fact if you are.
At this rate it'll be half a year before anyone wins! That could put a damper on traffic. How about just randomly picking someone each day?
Thanks for submitting my post...
The first blog mentioned doesn't even have ads, I really don't know how the blog author could've made money. It doesn't even have a donate button.

At least they should've made a set of rules if a blog applies for being taxed.
This was phenomenal!
It does randomly pick someone each day... with 1/1,000,000 probability.
Suggest renaming to are you 1 in 1,000 or so at current traffic rates.
Uhh, this will be over tonight unless they put a captcha on this...
But then the name would not be accurate.
Once you have submit, you can refresh the page. This won't regenerate a number but increase the loser or number count. I guess it's a bug because once some one will win, the guy could just keep refreshing and increase the count of Win by a lot... and for the moment it's pretty easy to increment the count of loss just by refreshing the wrong value.
By the Late John Brockman
There are billions of women on this planet.

One drop of sperm contains hundreds of millions of spermatozoa.

So the answer is no. I am not one in a million. I am much less likely than that.

Not that it makes me special in any kind of way, it's not as if I was the only one.
Hey thanks for the suggestion; I actually didn't think of that :)
I am currently one in 7 billion if you want to be precise, but for that website to work you'd have to have enough traffic to make someone a winner every now and then. At the current traffic rates that's going to be too long between winners to make it work. Most likely 30 days from now that homepage will look the same as it does today.

So take it down a few orders of magnitude, reserve the other domains and build it up from there, switch to higher magnitude domains as appropriate.

I can see a slight problem with botnet herders gaming the system too.
I am just referring to a general trend that I have noticed in submitted articles, after comparing HN comments with on-site comments for the past year or so.

On HN you are more likely to see nitpicks or deconstructions of the article, even criticisms of the person who wrote the article. Also the best way to get upvotes is often to criticize the article submitted and point out a flaw.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing... I'm just sharing my observations.
On the Way Down: The Erosion of America's Middle Class
Five entrepreneurial lessons in 54 hours: Startup Weekend DC 2010
Building the game layer on top of the world
Lessons from Leaders: How JBoss did it
Inkling: interactive textbooks on the iPad.
Four textbooks available so far: http://www.inkling.com/about

Having used Raven's biology text, which is a good textbook but would've tremendously benefited from something like this because of how much data you need to retain for biology, this makes me pretty excited for THE FUTURE.
How do you know that the birthrate of startups is expanding? I was expecting to see numbers and graphs.
Pretty far off topic, but: How on earth can you eliminate the need for installation? Do browsers have some new ability these days to automatically run remote code?
E text editor version 2 released
I'm 1 in 1,000,000 but your page didn't work for me! It must be broken.
Four textbooks available so far: http://www.inkling.com/about

Having used Raven's biology text, which is a good textbook but would've tremendously benefited from something like this because of how much data you need to retain for biology, this makes me pretty excited for THE FUTURE.
I was not.. and I don't think I ever will be :(
Well, if you look at western terrorist organizations (e.g. Weather Underground, Red Army Faction, Baader-Meinhof) they recruited many members from wealthy Western nations, very few if any being Mualims. People everywhere (especially young people) are often susceptible to recruitment by charismatic leaders with extremist rhetoric. This is especially true when there is highly visible injustice to be exploited.
Day in the life of a Galois intern
The real problem with economics and human psychology is not so much that humans are irrational Though they often are, they are actually less so in economic contexts than in most others. I think the bigger problem is that classical economics has a rather limited view of "rationality". Just because something doesn't give an immediate or narrowly quantifiable return does not necessarily make it irrational in any reasonable sense.
Times Roman is so very hard to read on the internet :(
I kind of like the high number and how long it will take to find a "winner". Allows whoever wins to spread word about something they want (hopefully something clever) and it will be there for a while. The website would lose its meaning if the winner changed every day.
It's sadder than that actually:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491503

and

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=losethos

freaky:

http://www.losethos.com/code/MultiProc.html
To be honest, I don't think I (or a majority of people) could learn theory without help. Math and theoretical CS are pretty hard. I can't count the number of times that I've had questions that only a TA could answer for me. To be fair, there are resources now like mathoverflow, but I've found having a knowledgeable human you can have a lengthy discussion with is invaluable.
Just get a clue what WiMAX is, even Mongolia got it in 2005.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deployed_WiMAX_networks
I got a kick out of this.

Being able to turn oil to plastic and back, that is true recycling...instead of converting plastic bottles into Old Navy fleeces (decycling).
So it's pointless. Thank you for confirming that.
See the FAQ. It is unable to tell if a form submitted by JavaScript is in fact submitted securely, so it warns.
There’s no cookie so I assume you’re restricting it to one entry per day based on IP. Could somebody ruin the whole thing by flooding the server with requests with spoofed IP addresses?
Outbound: €50 000

Return: €10 000 000
Ask HN: Presenting or explaining past illness in a job application
Hello. Throwaway profile here.

What's the best way to present a period of illness in job applications?

During my Batchelors degree I was horribly unwell. I was in and out of hospital with some life threatening stuff, and scraped my degree with very poor grades. I worked for a few years, quit to do a Masters degree, did that rather well, and am now applying for jobs again.

I like to be upfront about things, but I also don't like scaring people off. In five years or so I can probably leave any mention of grades off my resume, but at this point it would just look suspicious.
Computer Gamers Tackle Protein Folding
I looked into this and I don't think there's a bug -- you're just watching the actual loser count increasing.
The Internet possesses and endless and continual discussion about a million topics.

A blog post is the author's prompt to gain focus in the ongoing (and evergoing) discussion to a particular topic, and relative to the author's given position.

It's like a button sewn into the conversation fabric. It's also part of the fabric and it has a little more gravity than a comment thread.
Virtual Business and Business Potential World Using SEO
I hate to be that guy but are there any screenshots?
I periodically start from scratch asking "what do I want?" and building up to how to achieve that best. Usually it points me to keep on truckin' but sometimes not so much, and I need a change.
No high school diploma.
Nope. I am 1 in 7,000,000,000
This kind of work fascinates psychologists, economists and managers because it raises the possibility that productivity in the workplace can be manipulated by clever management rather than by expensive financial incentives.

In my experience, I've had the best luck simply being clear and consistent about assignments and desired expectations (from both the manager and the worker end). For instance, in regards to this experiment on Mechanical Turk, I would probably include in the description that each photo should have around 10-15 tags if that was the level of categorization that I wanted.
I have my own uniqueness detection heuristic. The short answer is yes, but then I'll invalidate the win and add a CAPTCHA.
Flagged for misleading headline editorializing.
The same thing does happen in America, but local political pressures and interest groups often get in the way. Philadelphia is notoriously a single party town with a crony government that had no incentive to actually improve the town.
The New World of Infrastructure Apps
I ran across an interesting piece which looks at history and the impact of copyright law. It contrasts England and Germany and looks at growth and publishing during the industrial revolution.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,...
Open source at Burning Man (from GaiaGPS/andrewljohnson)
There's no per-IP restriction that I could see. I tried 4 different browsers on the same machine and each was able to try.

I tried with new browser sessions, with HTTP cookies and Flash cookies cleared all to no avail.

I even tried: curl -d "" http://www.areyou1in1000000.com/

There's either some really good or really bad duplicate entry prevention going on.
fb connect video game trailers

?
MCLIDE: A New Lisp IDE for Mac.
Please decide on Python interpreter packages maintainership - Debian Bug report
There's either some really good or really bad duplicate entry prevention going on.

Probably IP + User Agent.
This is a groundbreaking implementation of a cutting edge NoSQL storage system! What is it doing on the Daily WTF? Some incompetent tech team in NYC or somewhere should be congratulating themselves for installing it.
This isn't 'How to Think Like A Computer Scientist', but rather 'Introducing Programming with Python'.

It's a good introductory text for learning Python. However programming is a very small part of Computer Science.

http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/computer_science_major.PNG
Screenshots:

http://mclide.in-progress.com/tour?id=wgns1

It runs Lisps, both local on the same box, or remote; it's the IDE that's Mac, the Lisp can run on any OS.
Any game with such an eligibility criteria is pretty much unstable. Winning would come down to seeing how well you could skirt the criteria, since "dumb but not too dumb" is inherently fuzzy.
Linux Group Tests - Part 1
Reddit memes go on reddit.
As I understand it the wage tax was sort of a punishment/band aid for white flight in the 70's and 80's, when companies workers started moving to the suburbs but working in the city, right? The resulting backfire - new business completely moving out of the city - apparently didn't drive much of a point home. I guess it does put money in the bank - at the expense of completely alienating the tax base...

So much of government in Philly is entrenched in a very defeatist / corrupt attitude that hangs like a dark cloud over everything. Honestly sometimes I think what Philly really needs is to have some fresh thinking imported from outside the city.
I did not see a link for the code.
I think when this finally hits a court of note that it will be smacked down pretty hard. Courts have already found, for instance, that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy during a traffic stop for the person being stopped.

The issue already hit the SJC (Commonwealth v. Hyde has indicated in lambda's link) and they ruled for the officer.
I work from home, and when my family does not interrupt me (as they are wont to do), I am able to get much more done. I think there's a caveat to the first lesson, though: you can get lots of work done in a short period of time if you're not interrupted, but it is hard to keep up a steady pace, working long days, for more than a few days at a time when you're doing creative work.
Check out the Effect engine: http://www.effectgames.com/effect. It's been discussed here on HN previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=986196
Thinking Freemium? The perils of decision anchoring
what i need is auto update please!
I'm very late to this thread, but I think this suggests perhaps the biggest problem that Facebook has:

Because the act of 'defriending' someone has such strong negative social connotations, it will continue to be very uncommon, and as a result the number of friends any given user has is increasing monotonically. I've had Facebook for years, and by friend count has steadily increased and is now nearing 900. The users who only have 100 friends now will eventually be in the unmanageable and uncomfortable position of having 1000 friends, and by that point I won't be surprised if my count is approaching 1500.

Facebook certainly seems to want everyone to have as many friends as possible (note the friend suggestion features), so it's only a matter of time before everyone is presenting themselves to such a large auditorium.
Yep. I was pleasantly surprised that after I had made it through the initial rounds of Windows Update, I had an Intel icon in my systray.

Of course, the fact that my Broadcom wireless NIC was supported out of the box was also nice.
Apple rejecting apps that require user registration first?
I haven't read the GraphLab paper in detail, but note that Google itself developed a new framework called Pregel for doing graph-based data processing that doesn't fit MapReduce well. They have a paper on it at SIGMOD 2010. So there is definitely a need for things other than Hadoop/MR.
Helen: "Everyone's special, Dash."

Dash: "Which is another way of saying no one is."
That was pretty funny. They could have done a lot of other creepy things, rather than the same clip over and over.
Here's a slightly older one that looks very interesting as well, and has been on my list of things to try: http://tommysmind.com/
Is this inspired by the GET concept in 4chan? http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/4chan_GET_Encyclopedia
I just stumbled upon an interesting marketing exercise
If the website gets over a million uniques a day, there will be a new winner every day.
Where is the iBody appstore?
It looks like it distils the oil which would mean that it is purified. It also would mean that the machine needs to cleaned regularly.
Just because Skype replicates most of the functionality of a phone, it's not required that we import the bad parts from the phone.

I guess the difference is really whether you consider Skype an IM that's also a phone, or a phone that has IM. You're in the last camp, Arrington (and myself, for that matter) is in the first.
http://www.ryanholiday.net/the-imaginary-audience/

Schopenhauer had a name for this empty talk, he called it “fencing in the mirror.” It’s more common than you think. Consider all the times you’ve seen some blogger apologize for not posting recently – profusely addressing some concern that likely was never expressed. Or the Twitter updates to 38 followers, half of which are bots or uncaring companies. More realistically, maybe you’ve read too much into looks from a table of girls at a restaurant (a type I evolutionary error). Maybe you like like to roll down the windows in your car, turn up the stereo and know that everyone is just so impressed by your classic taste.

This isn't really directed a Leo since he does actually have an audience, but people obviously aren't hanging off of his every utterance. The same goes for all of us (for the most part) and our comments here, haha.
If someone in a position to fully establish TCP connections with spoofed IPs wanted to ruin something, I'd think they'd find something a lot more interesting to do...
I'm not entirely in disagreement - but I dislike the idea of it becoming ettiquette. Me pressing call is the bit where I check if you're available.

Part of the problem is that it's not always simple to silence a Skype call (like you could a phone) if you're busy. But then you also have the option, unlike a phone, of marking yourself as busy.

That last bit is, for me, the better innovation :)

(BTW constantly asking permission is a common grip of mine; "can I ask a question?" is one of the most annoying things in the world :))
It is too late to edit my above comment but I should point out that there is a typo there. That should be:

tar -c *.cpp -f something.tar
Rate My App Idea/Landing Page:  Kardly.com
Heisenmail.com would be a great name for it
On a semi-related note I have a friend of mine who offers to show her breasts if the guys watching will give eachother a "low two", which means they need to touch their bare asses together on camera. Then she clicks next.
Why don't we start by defining what is meant by "hard"?

Essentially worthless article without that information. Are you working as hard as you can? Is what you consider hard considered hard by everyone?
Emacs org-mode: http://orgmode.org/
Why People Initially Suck at Programming
Very good video. I don't think I've ever heard anyone reference these things as 'Game Dynamics' instead of 'Game Mechanics'. The phrase grew on me as I watched the video though.

I also liked his ending quote: The last decade was the decade of social, this next decade is the decade of Games

TED link - http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_t...
Finally! I've been hoping this would happen. About a year or so ago Leo's podcasts became all about Twitter. Twitter this, twitter that, people on twitter, followers, yadda yadda. It got so tiring for those of us who really couldn't care less.

I'm glad Leo has seen the light.
I Agree. A library you use might not align 100% with the type of game that you are developing, slowing you down, especially if you target mobile.

The game I have built with web technology, Orbium (http://jsway.se/m/), I choose to use no libraries, the HTML5 stuff that already exist in the browser is already very powerful and easy to use.
Your question is spot on.

Bookmarklets.
But isn't the cost of living in Chile markedly lower? So that $40,000 is potentially stretched a lot further.

Also its a grant, not an investment. So you basically get free $40k in living and startup expenses taken care of for free. If they're seeking to give this to recent grads with low salary expectations to begin with, I'd say its a fantastic opportunity. What is there to lose?
I wonder if the increasing number of projects that use the "Clojure" name to market themselves (really having little in common with Clojure) is reason for worry or a sign of Clojure's success?
Why? Because, according to the Fraternal Order of Police, "at some point, we have to put some faith and trust in our authority figures."[1]

[1] http://reason.com/archives/2010/08/09/police-officers-dont-c...
The Galois tech talks are definitely worth attending if you're in Portland and interested in CS-y stuff (especially, but far from limited to, FP/Haskell). Unfortunately my new job makes it impossible for me.
Or understand what it does.

I learned yesterday that a closure is a function that's saved in a variable with out being effected by the context its run in, just the context it was saved in.
The original "Copyright Clause" from the US Constitution:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

I think we've strayed a bit far off the mark.
Why would my ego be satiated by possible beings who have no interest in me?

I mean, it sure doesn't work with girls.