skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hitler and Goebbels forewarning us about the despicable means the US government uses to bring down whistle-blowers... Ummm...

I don't know whether Assange is framed or not. But bringing these two into the discussion seems a bit ridiculous. If Adolf and Joseph knew so much, maybe they could have won the war?! Or, at least, avoided declaring war on the US in 1941, when they had no reason to do so.
People do seem to like abusing attributes... A surprising number of systems seem to rely on embedding entire XML documents in attributes within other documents.
This dude had a pretty impressive run of self imposed isolation:

An Island to Oneself

http://www.janesoceania.com/suvarov_tom_neale/
According to one estimate pushed by the FBI in 2006, computer crime costs US businesses $67 billion a year. And identity fraud in the US allegedly hit $52.6Bn in 2004.

Even allowing for self-serving reporting (the FBI would obviously find it useful to inflate the threat of crime, if only to justify their budget requests), that's a lot of money being pumped down a rat-hole. Extrapolate it worldwide and the figures are horrendous — probably nearer to $300Bn a year. To put it in perspective, it's like the combined revenue (not profits; gross turnover) of Intel, Microsoft, Apple, and IBM — and probably a few left-overs like HP and Dell — being lost due to deliberate criminal activity.

I call bullshit. These numbers are, imho, just as made up as the RIAA's "losses to piracy" numbers. I don't believe them, not even for one second. The real numbers could be as far as 3 or 4 orders of magnitude smaller
Often bars will offer a free beer to the mayor, and I've seen a few restaurants that offer the foursquare mayor a free appetizer when they buy a meal.
Thanks for your comment.

In countries with lower cost of labour, reducing or removing taxes on software companies will lead to folks starting outsourcing and service related companies. Not entrepreneurial product based startups.

India is a prime example of this. Compared to the number of software developers in the country, the number of startups that pop up from India is very very low.

So from Chile's point of view, I think its a great pilot plan.
I still upvoted you for the last part of the post. I enjoy reading Adams's work, but he does do a fair amount of trolling.
Why Drinks Taste Better When Sipped Through A Straw
Divorce Mediation Tampa in US
Quicktampadivorce provide many other services that coincide with the divorce process such as QDRO Preparation, Business Appraisals, Forensic Accounting and an analysis of Alimony needs and ability to pay.
Python for most of my web development and network programming (at work)

JavaScript for clientside web and Adobe AIR apps (at work)

Actionscript 3 for Adobe AIR apps (at work)

Scheme (Racket) for fun

C for fun

PHP when I need to fix/modify/extend someone else's code
The truth is that most people sell when the market is getting killed and buy when the market is running up.

It is human nature to follow the crowd. Savvy investors can make several hundred % returns buying during crashes and bear markets.

The main keys to success: 1) Never use margin (market day-to-day is too unpredictable 2) Leverage with Options
3) Try to remove emotion from the investment
It depends on your circumstances. A million dollars is pretty hard for most people to get, but it's certainly going to be easier if you're moving in circles that are used to dealing with those type of numbers.

Consider the "easiest" way to get $20,000. If you live in the US in most places you can probably get it by working at McDonalds for a year. If you are from a rural area in a third world country it's like the million dollar question.

I think this is the philosophy behind flipping startups. If you can prove you can develop something good and useful, then $50M is basically chump change for a large corporation to acquire you. On the other hand, generating enough profit where you can pay yourself a million dollars a year is a very daunting task.
(I want to apologize. I am reading HN on an iPad. I decided to upvote this comment and instead fat-fingered it down, apparently to zero. Why do the voting arrows disappear after a vote is cast?)
Avoiding artificial gameplay restrictions
Marry a millionaire, avoid a prenup, then divorce them.

P.S. Replace 'easiest' with 'most efficient' and then you'll have a nice discussion.
I'm excited (as an owner of an agency) to see more and more high quality software in the SEO market.

One thing I don't see it doing though is replacing agencies (as mentioned in the article); knowing what to do and doing it are two different things. Software has a place in both but can't do either completely.

It sounds from other comments here like you know that (you said agencies are your best customers)-so I'm curious: where did that turn of phrase come from? It sounds like something TC might say but they implied you said it...

As others have said, great job-especially as a lone co-founder. I'll go sign up for a beta invite now (look for Distilled).
Ask HN: What tools/programming languages do you recommend for kids?
What tools/programming languages do you recommend for initiating kids in development?

Particularly with i18n in PT/PT-BR.
Facebook's Awesome Promotion of Places - How to Get Features "In The River"
TeXample: TikZ and PGF Examples
Buy a lottery ticket!
Maybe if you're taping someone you might be able to catch something, but it's very difficult in my experience to catch a tell from a practiced liar live - a part of one of my hobbies involves catching people lying, so I've had a little experience.
The Power of GPU May Threaten the World’s Password Security System
>Isn't that just what Facebook did? Got one notable school to adopt it, and then used that as social proof of its value to expand?

No, it's not. You could social proof Facebook using Harvard students all you like and it still won't appeal to an old guy who lives in Australia. The key thing is that Facebook is only useful when you've got some friends using it. That's why it made sense to start with a big cluster of friends the founders were part of.
Web of Stories - Great creators talk about their lives
Why Doesn't the World Care About Pakistanis? Because they live in Pakistan.
> Does this mean you're against corporations being able to spend money on political campaigns?

Corps and unions spend money on political campaigns because of ROI. No law will stop that as long as there is ROI, as long as there is some benefit to owning politicians.

So, if you don't want them to do that, you need to take the R out of the system, you need to make it so that owning politicians isn't profitable.
Ask HN: What´s the most efficient way to make 1 million bucks?
Seriously, I am sure lots of HN´ers have found many ways to do this, but as with most things in life, there´s always a better away. Would like to see your thoughts/experience either from you or from someone you know.

Thanx
There's a website that has a list of tasks and how to do them in many many programming languages. I can't seem to find it; if someone knows which site I am talking about, can they link it here?
I think that number is a little sensationalist. What's the net present value of the obligations? My simplified calculation makes these assumptions:

1. Discount rate of 0.04.
2. Uniform payments of the entire $2 trillion over the next twenty years.

Under those assumptions the present value is only about $1.4 trillion over twenty years, or about $70 billion per year. A substantial sum, to be sure, but not compared to a number of other things we do. A higher discount rate around 6% decreases the yearly cost about 20%.
> I fail to see the distinction between looking for a job at bigco and ramping up for your own self-employment.

Applying for a job at several bigcos and smallcos can get you off unemployment much faster than a startup.
The Ten Roads to Riches by Ken Fisher
http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Roads-Riches-Wealthy-Investments/d...
Of the references you list, only the PageRank one has anything to do with the search algorithm. It's a great paper. The backrub paper (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html) is also great, and has been a personal inspiration, however that information pre-dates the founding of Google as a corporation, and the search algorithm been developed in complete secrecy for more than a decade since then.

There are more than 200 other signals used to determine relevance, and PageRank is only one of them (http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html). The others are completely secret as far as I can tell, and there's no indication what weight is given to PageRank now.

I'm not attributing malice to the secrecy, but there's no way to know what biases are embodied in the algorithm, and I think that's a serious concern.

I don't think it's unreasonable to claim that Google is as important as the press now as a source of public information. The biases of the press are very much a concern for society, so I think we should be equally concerned about the potential for bias in the search results.

As for Gruber, my guess is that he feels that the discourse in the tech press/blogosphere has demonized Apple heavily for the closed nature of the App store, whereas Google is praised for its 'openness' with much less examination of what that really means.

Personally I think that Gruber can be childish about this, but I think both companies deserve rational criticism.

I'm more worried about Google than I am about Apple because their secrecy is about how public information is prioritized.

I do have similar concerns about how Apple prioritizes applications in the App Store, but for now that seems a lot less important than how Google prioritizes websites.
"endure a million dollars worth of pain"
They don't give you 40k cash, they have some sort of reimbursement plan. You also can't just go down there and give to yourself as a salary. Borderline scam.
Exactly what I was thinking. One of the first things that comes to mind when starting designing a new web service in my head is some minimal spoofing prevention. At least make them go to the effort of running a debugger.
I'm guessing it's some sort of storage, or perhaps sleeping area?
don't Agda, ATS, epigram and Coq programmers look down their noses at haskell
I didn't make it clear, but I didn't intend to compare the-best to the-best and say that games win. It's too new of an art form, really, just a couple decades vs around 100 years of movies (thousands if you include plays) vs thousands for books. But more immersive than, say, most of the books you had to read in school? Most definitely. More than a fair number of "good" books? I'd say so, though yes that'd significantly reduce the pool. Better than the best book? No. Though I've never found movies particularly immersive, so I do side with games there.

And, ultimately, at its most pared down, a game can be essentially identical to either a movie or a book, because there's an easy reduction to either (no feedback = movie, no feedback + no visual aside from text = book). That Ebert claims that something which can be either cannot be art like either must be hinging around the feedback, which is what many people get hooked on. He's basically saying that art can not react to you, or it ceases being art. To which I say "ignorant bullshit".
Kurzweil still doesn’t understand the brain
http://rosettacode.org/
interesting stuff. i tried meditation a while back and persisted for about a year. after which i had a sense of self which was previously lacking. i'm glad they're starting to verify this stuff with research.
Build something people want that can be run on autopilot...
if you avoid nitpicking details, you'll have nicer discussions too.
And they're all functions (or function groups), apart from the one or two that are command-line utilities.

At the end of the day, they're libraries. Small libraries? Sure, but still libraries.
When I was younger, I could never understand the purpose of stocks that don't give off dividends. I just could not wrap my head around the concept of buying something for the sole purpose of expecting it to increase in value. It still boggles my mind.
> Painting your roof,

Which color?

If you want heat, you should paint it black. If you want cool, you should paint it white.

Are you going to repaint it twice a year?
Flight, because it'd be fun.

I fear there's more practical aspects to invisibility though. Flying while invisible would be the best of both worlds, from a 'getting stuff done' (good or evil) standpoint, but your experiment says we can't have both.

The first poster here illustrated many of the pros of invisibility already - I won't repeat them all.

But I'd probably still prefer to fly, at least for a bit.
Well, I am not sure about the source of the 85% value. It's not true.

Going by facts: India has the fourth largest purchasing power parity (PPP) in the world.

I have been I India for 22 years and yes I agree, many people are poor there, but not to this extent as depicted in the photographs.
My first claim was rather weak: It was just from my own knowledge and experience with Swedish police and the lack of news regarding corruption with them involved. If a Google search says otherwise, then I must have missed those corruption-cases. Sorry!

> By the way, is it normal police procedure in Sweden to tell the world's media that some dude is wanted for rape within a few hours of the accusation?

I would suppose that the media would sniff out as much information as fast as possible regarding Assange, because of his position. Also Expressen claimed certain things other media channels couldn't. E.g. all Norwegian newspapers cited Expressen.se for the information, and whenever they tried to get a confirmation from the Swedish police, they only got things such as "I can confirm that he is indicted. But since this is a delicate matter, I can not comment on the investigation beyond that."
Does anyone else think posts like this are trite, vapid crap that doesn't belong on HN?

What could you possibly hope to learn from this thread?
If I knew an easy way to make a million bucks, I wouldn't tell you, I would just do it. Then I would scale up and replicate it 1000 times over.

I've spoken to a lot of people in the direct response industry who have made millions in simple, unglamorous businesses(like manufacturing a simple plastic thing in China and selling it via direct mail).

None of them made their money by making posts like this one.

If you insist on getting an answer:
The best way to make 1 million bucks is to offer some business $1 million worth of value. Or 1 million consumers $1 of value.
The way this is usually done is exploiting inefficiencies in the market/arbitrage.
Computer Literacy was amazing. Cody's in Berkeley on Telegraph?

On balance, Border's stocks every one of its stores with a reasonable selection, even Borders stores in pretty podunky half-suburb, half-agricultural areas.
After selling his company to Yahoo for $5.9 billion in Yahoo stock, Mark Cuban personally architected a hedge of his enormous wealth with synthetic indexes, taking a $20 million cut for six months of protection before he could hedge the actual Yahoo shares.

Compare this to John Z. Rigos, who sold his dotcom for $42 million and walked away with $8 million of stock. Between the day of the sale until the day when he could legally sell his shares, the stock tanked, and Mr. Rigos was left with virtually nothing. Mr. Cuban came from a poor Jewish family; Mr. Rigos from a poor Greek family. Same story, two outcomes...

Today Mr. Cuban's net worth is more than $2 billion. I'd say he knows more than "little to nothing" about the market.
> I can't imagine how C++ standardization efforts could possibly correlate in any way with industry adoption. The two things are completely orthogonal.

I don't think they're orthogonal: standardization efforts don't happen until you have significant industry adoption of technology X from several vendors and they (and/or their customers) decide it'd better if their implementations could interoperate. Why do you think they're completely orthogonal?

It's possible, of course, that the C++0x (C++1x?) standardization round is taking place on the peak or the decreasing side of C++ adoption (due to the increased complexity of C++, users finding benefits to non-C++ languages, movement into areas where C++ doesn't help much, etc.). But I don't think that's the case; perhaps we're on a plateau of C++ adoption, if anything.
> [A peep hole] is [a disruptive product] if you're a door-to-door salesperson

Geoff Moore's theories apply to disruptive or discontinuous products that force customers to make a significant change in behavior. A peep hole may force door-to-door salespeople to make significant changes in behavior, but the customer doesn't make a significant change in behavior. The "disruption" or "discontinuity" refers to the changes in behavior of the consumer.
When I was working in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the Waorani people, who had only recently been contacted, believed only other Waorani were human beings. This created several difficult situations because they saw nothing wrong with attacking and in some cases killing "non-humans" they came in contact with. My understanding is that many other native people in the Amazon used to share a similar view of their own unique human-ness
I sympathise, but I note that that wasn't the first thing foursquare did, and they've made a very popular service out of it, whereas you (I assume) and I have not.

When we don't have the resources to do absolutely everything perfectly, how do we decide what to spend our time on, to what standard - and what to let slide?
Agile people still don't get it
I came here to post about the same quote from the article, it just made me a little sick.

Even if his patents are ridiculous, they are there to either deter competition or destroy it.
A 7 year old?
I use Foursquare but I rarely check in while I'm at a place. Or even right after I'm there. I MIGHT check in before I get there, if I'm bored or am waiting. But I usually check in at the end of the night or next morning. I know this doesn't help me meet up with people who might happen to be in the area, but none of my friends in DC use Foursquare. More useful has been seeing my friends who leave Google Latitude on by default.

So basically I would hate it if they enforced stricter checkins, unless they could find a way to let bars, restaurants, etc. verify checkins through a quick scanner or something.
I love the idea too... even if we don't win it feels good to know a lot of work was done for many organizations that need it.
> I'm of the opinion that you can only truly despise XML if you've tried to write a parser for it yourself.

Or had to work with any of the utterly terrible xml dialects out there, which represents about 90% of them first and foremost xslt and xsd. Or had to deal with the various bugs in parsers, or with most people's (and software's) complete and utter inability to correctly deal with xml namespaces.
i don't think a parallel to this mans situation can go very far.

we aren't reluctant to make contact with aliens the way he is reluctant to contact us. we wouldn't appreciate being "preserved" the way indigenous tribes would prefer to perpetuate their traditions.

assuming aliens capable of contacting are us out there, i think the likeliest explanation for the fermi paradox is complete disinterest. their relation to us is more like our relation to inanimate matter than our relation to this fellow human.
Inhert it.
Googling reveals 750 attendees:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eU-e6C9...

No idea how many applied, of course. Given the HN audience, it could have been thousands.
At least in economic theory, a company does not give out dividends if it believes that it can get a better return on its cash (in terms of profit) than the investor can in the overall market.

But, companies must eventually give out dividends. There's a certain point at which the company's cash hoard gets so large that investors become unhappy (see Microsoft).
Ask HN: What would you change about Python for scientific computing
I'm working on scientific / technical computing in Python and having been thinking about what the ideal technical computing language might look like, geared towards scientists not programmers. A lot of technical computing is simply library support (e.g., scypy and numpy), but some language level features are helpful.

I'd be interested in what HNers wish Python had (and didn't have) at the language level. My preliminary list is as follows:

* Matrix and data.frame type in core, similar to numpy or R.

* IEEE 754 floating point behavior. 1/0 = Inf, -1/0 = -Inf, 0/0 = NaN, etc. This is how numpy (matlab, R) works.

* Elementwise and objectwise matrix operators (PEP 225)

* Coroutines (PEP 380, PEP 3152 extending python with yield from) to enable better language level async programming and things like agent based models.

* Better access to expression trees or a unified way to push computation to GPU, database, etc. Perhaps something like linq and expressions trees support rather than Python's list comprehensions. LINQ is becoming unifying for Dryad map/reduce module, PLINQ, data access, and reactive programming (Rx). I'm less sure about the best model here...

Others?
> Except politicians also like their pensions so they will never vote them away.

They'll switch to defined contribution with lots of contribution.

Note that the typical career path for politicians involves other govt jobs, not "in office forever". (State universities are a favorite place to end up. CA has lots of boards and commissions.)

> Why are pensions anything more than a minimum survival payout I would like to know? They should set a maximum cap of $10k per year per person if taxpayers have to pay it.

That's unreasonable, but defined contribution isn't. That's pay-as-you go, so there's no liability.
Counter-Example to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem Found
Gold is a speculative device. Humans hold the future value one might hope to trade the gold for.
I don't think this article is informative at all.
ADHD-Inattentive (or ADD)is primarily a frontal lobe condition.

I'm not convinced that meditation alone will boost attention. Meditation tends to boost alpha activity in the brain, but that only has limited advantage in attention.

Alpha boosting activities would help more with addictions.
Which means, for the first time since its discovery, Neptune is about to return to the same position in space that it occupied the day it was discovered. And what date will that be?

It will return to the same position within its orbit relative to the sun, but surely not the "same position in space"? (The solar system has moved a little further around in its orbit within the Milky Way too.)

I'm aware I'm questioning a qualified astrophysicist here - something I am not - so I'll blindly assume it's something to do with default frames of reference until corrected otherwise ;-)
Remember when being a geek meant something?
Previous discussion, 6 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1604148
XML isn't bad in and of itself. It's just a powerful, neutral format. The problem with XML is that it allows so much abuse.

I had to interface with a government system at some point. They shipped us a whole schema of custom elements such as "IsShipment" (for example) which extended bool to allow extra options. All this was clearly documented in the schema comments "You can use 'true', 'false', 'sortof', and 'mostly'." So we go to validate the data.... and it doesn't validate. Against their schema. Because they didn't extend bool, they just said they did in the comments. When we got back in touch with them, we realized that they had no clue that the stuff not in comments mattered. As far as they knew, XML was just text, and they had clearly specified how it was to be interpreted (in English).