skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your first line is a truism that your main argument doesn't support, and your third paragraph is an appeal to "common sense" that isn't supported by data.

Ignoring those, your argument boils down to your opinion that voting has no impact on wealth or stability. That cannot be true, at least not unless you subscribe to a deterministic world view, surely?
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Glad to see that dried meat sales went up.

edit:
I'm also quite impressed with reddit's professionalism. It also appears that reddit is back to being reddit. The digg users have been assimilated.
I don't think Twitter can ever really replace RSS/ATOM.

I have a handful of sites I follow (as in really read every update) and Opera having integrated RSS I get a nice reminder popup whenever there's an update. For me Twitter wouldn't work for this as the amount of incoming messages on Twitter is usually to large and it would be distracting.

To be honest I don't really see any problems in the RSS system. I don't really see why enforcing a data format or enforcing limits makes it more usable? I kinda like getting comics delivered straight to my browser's RSS feeds and being able to read blog posts directly in there as well.

Now Twitter would make for an exceptional social RSS where I could find one-of articles related to my interests. Which I guess seems kinda similar to FriendFeed (which I've never used since no one I find interesting is on there) or Hacker News (but without the discussion and a slightly different topic selection).

The main problem I have is that people keep insisting on posting completely uninteresting tweets (such as what they're doing) or using it as a conversation tool. This kind of noise tends to drown its use as a social RSS feed for me.
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80% of Winter 2010 .... so the ones that have made it a few months.
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The AGPL (like the GPL) does not allow adding more restrictions. You do not need any further license to use AGPL licensed code in a commercial product, you just have to abide by the license terms of the AGPL.

I assume the 10gen commercial license allows you avoid having to provide source code for your product to your users. (but the mongodb website isn't clear about that).
Have a look at the reasons for homelessness here: http://england.shelter.org.uk/housing_issues/tackling_homele...

Assuming that their homelessness isn't caused by a relationship breakup (unless there's a _very_ interesting story re. the pregnancy) then it seems likely that one or both is crazy, a drug addict, or an ex-convict.

If I were you, I'd invite them to dinner with your wife, at your expense, at a venue of your choice that _isn't_ your home. Do _not_ give them _any_ more personal information until you and your wife have spoken with them, figured out why they're homeless, and decided what if any assistance you want to render.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't help them, just that you ought to be aware that their problems are likely to be a _lot_ deeper than lack of housing, and far from fixable by you.
Not that I disagree with the conclusion of the article, but I bet you can come up with an equally impressive set of stats showing the Republican party coming out ahead. If the article wasn't so one sided it would have been stronger.
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Hrm. I was hoping that such a device would perform better.

Yeah, I was hoping someone would link something. In this case, I didn't really know what I was looking for. What do you call a doohickey that does that sort of thing?
Long time recurring biller here.

KISS.

If a customer cancels their account they have access to the end of the rebill cycle. This is what 99% of them will expect (they've already paid after all), and it is more money in the bank for you, it averages out to 1/2 a month of turnover that you throw away on every users retention.

The few users that bitch loudly enough or that have really good reasons to want their money back can always be refunded.

Do a 5 or 10 day trial next to your instant monthly rebill. This will significantly increase the conversion rate for your higher priced product and it will attract a few people that would otherwise not buy in.

Make the monthly one the default, and price the 5 or 10 day trial at half your monthly rate to make it look good.

A/B test your pricing! (see http://jacquesmattheij.com/Double+your+price+%28and+no,+I%27... ) just to make sure you're not leaving money on the table.

Get yourself an IPSP that is in it for the long haul.
The BIGGEST secret to groupon's success is....being able to convince store owners to give REAL, REAL good coupons!

That is the OVERWHELMING value of groupon--which is why I question their longterm strategy. Store owners will at some point figure out that they can give the same type of super-awesome coupon online and get similar value as groupon provides only in this case they don't need to give 50-60% of the revenue to groupon.

Groupon is basically made possible due to the spread of crappy coupons in the past decade. When coupons originated, all coupons rocked. I remember as a kid in India, when a coupon appeared in a paper, it was rare and the paper would sell out. Literally sell out! All because it had a coupon. And by definition, a coupon meant real savings--not 10 cents off your dinner.
"A second might matter tremendously to an engineer... that's kind of a silly way of thinking about it."

I remember a study done by Google that showed that by shaving off something like 1 second from their load times, they were able to increase the number searches people did substantially, which for Google = millions of dollars in extra revenue from ad clicks. Seconds still matter.
I suppose Bill Gates was responsible for the death of Princess Di as well? Britney Spears 3rd album too. Not to mention Hanson and Take That. And all those Hugh Grant films. Sooo bad.

My point? No point really, just adding to the existing rubbish on this thread.
"You can bet for most non-US people that 'diaspora' reminds them of some sort of persecution their people have faced."

I like it for that reason. Edgy, accurate, and with the potential to repurpose/reframe the word in the minds of many.

That kind of persecution also tends to cause the persecuted to bond even more strongly and proudly with their cultural identity, so the connotations are not all bad.
Sure looks like there's a strong correlation here, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Debt_Trend.svg

Err, or maybe not? Even more important, the President doesn't control the budget, congress does. What's the correlation between the budget deficit and the party in congressional control?

We'd be a lot better off if political discussions were founded on substance and reason rather than on silly half-backed "statistics" used to score lame partisan points.
@gojomo thanks that looks really useful.
@willvarfar - yeah, that's a bit beyond even my liberal bleeding heart.

Homelessness has always been this background hum, but specific "how do you get a bed" questions have not been something I have ever asked before. It's surprising me.
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I wonder what would have happened if Caesar had had access to modern problem solving tools.

After all, if he could come up with something that directly leads to recursion what would he have done on the algorithm front given a mechanism more suited to the development of more complex algorithms? Regular language only gets you so far in that respect.
By definition everything in a LLC is muddled in with your personal finances. That's why it's a "pass-thru entity". For tax purposes, they really are one and the same.
The method I described would only have the same amount of traffic as an RSS feed as it would just be updating headlines.

I guess it just depends on use. I never got into using an rss reader but follow a bunch of projects/people/companies on twitter and can quickly browse their updates, and follow a shortened link. I like the portability of twitter over different platforms too.

Just suits how I work.
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Congratulations! Finally you are going to marry your love. And your appearance on your big day is so important that you are still looking back and forth to search your dream dress?
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I love the new image search, and find the image popout quite useful when I want to see a image in more detail without the jarring experience of actually going to the page, and not having to click next again to see more images. I don't hover around images unless i want to see detail, i press down on my keyboard to see more.
Same in Japan. 6-7 years ago a law was passed that all posted prices must have the sales tax figured in. I think it makes things much clearer to know exactly what you're paying.

Also, something of interest, I have a lot of friends who come over here to Japan and complain at how expensive food is in restaurants. What I noticed is that while the price on the menu is much more expensive than in the States, your final cost is pretty comparative.

US Cocos: ($20 + 10% tax) + 15% tip = $25.30

JP Cocos: ($25 incl. tax, no tip) = $25
If revenue took precedence over user experience for Google in the past, Google would be very different today.
Perhaps friend lists
It is kind of sad to see what has happened to Digg. It uses to be a simple site with a simple purpose and an elegant design. They have now morph it into a hybrid of some sort.
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I setup an LLC for my side projects and consulting a couple years ago. Since then, it has evolved into my consultancy that I now do full-time (in fact, my latest creation, LeadNuke, is a "product of Alfa Jango, LLC", and may be spun off if I decide to take any investment for it).

Forming an LLC really is not very difficult, and it's good practice to get started early if you plan on going full-time at some point. More importantly, the clarity boundaries it provides to your business expenses and taxes is worth the effort alone.

Single-person LLCs are legit and can protect your personal liability IF you run it like a legit company. People who form single-person LLCs have a tendency to get lazy with record-keeping and procedures. Don't fall into this trap. If someone sues you, and the judge looks over your records and says, "Yeah, but you didn't do anything differently than if you hadn't formed an LLC," personal liability protection is gone. This means, setup a separate business bank account for ALL business income/expenses, sign ALL contracts with your business name, make sure clients address checks and issue your 1099s to your business name, etc.

Concerning insurance, I wouldn't bother unless you're working on a project that has the potential to lose a lot of money if you do something wrong. If you work on an ecommerce application for a company that will be doing $50k or more sales a month through it, perhaps insurance starts looking like a good idea (god forbid you accidentally leave their merchant account in test mode when you deploy, and no one catches it for a week).

If you do get insurance, what you actually want is called Errors and Omissions insurance (liability insurance is for if you have a physical office and you want to protect against your equipment if there's a fire, or if a client visits and slips and breaks their arm). If you get E&O insurance, be sure to shop around, many of the big insurance companies won't do it for you, because of how new and unknown the web-based software industry is, so you might have to go with a smaller local insurance company to work out some policy that fits your needs.

EDIT: I should clarify that in Michigan, forming an LLC is incredibly easy. I'm not sure about California, if that's where you are.
Individual cost-benefit analysis. Gaining a reputation as someone with a temper, creating chilling effects in your business associations. And potentially killing the company over a lawsuit. A quarter million isn't spare change to a medium sized company like techcrunch and lawsuits loooove to inflate. As my business law prof said, start with the end in mind, and if they don't have deep pockets, there isn't much benefit to suing. Plus with the iPad and the inevitable torrent me-toos from everybody else, the crunchpad wasn't going to get much.
Fortunately Google Instant has Google Classic built in. You just have to type in a search term and then hit RETURN. I use it this way most of the time out of habit.

Personally I think Google Instant is great, and this guy's design suggestions for making it more readable pretty much gut it.

But hey, I'm an engineer, so I like efficiency.
I know what you mean. I cleaned out my sofa and found 5000 yen worth of 100 and 500 yen coins.

My friend had a 500 yen coin bank, which when full held over 50,000. It was not a large coin bank.
3.3 billion over a decade... What a niggardly sum. Makes the U.S. look SO generous by comparison!
From a glance, his deficit and job growth assessments are likely sensitive to definitions -- what's the first year that counts for an administration? was Ford part of the Nixon administration? etc. -- and assumptions about lag effects. (Were the 70s a hangover from the 60s boom? The 00s from the 90s? How much of a ding should Obama, GWB, Reagan get for 09-10, 01-02, 81-82? Does Vietnam belong to Kennedy, Johnson, or Nixon?)

The reasoning about state-by-state indicators and presidential-party preferences is very bogus; you couldn't turn 'red' states into 'blue' states by adopting blue-state policy preferences; for one thing, the red states can't afford them! (Some of those preferences are luxuries purchased with wealth, rather than the original causes of wealth.)

Also consider the following: richer people lean Republican, but richer states lean Democrat. People with high school diplomas are more Republican than those without... but states with higher levels of high-school graduation are more Democratic. Same with undergraduate degrees.

These counterintuitive results for the aggregates are all examples of Simpson's Paradox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
Yeah, and another one I like (that's probably not new by now) is ThinkGeek. The beauty of this is probably how drastically different they all are :)
> YOu don't need a license or anything, just Windows and their free Virtual PC software.

Last time I checked, running "just Windows" requires "a license or something".
your argument boils down to your opinion that voting has no impact on wealth or stability

No. I'm not arguing that there is no causation. I'm arguing that the correlations noted by the author are not evidence of causation.
nah, coins aren't needed.

cash is in general, but not coins.
> What's the correlation between the budget deficit and the party in congressional control?

None. Because the factor is actually the interaction between executive and legislative. When republicans have both seats, they have marching orders and follow them to the letter leading to rubberstamping of whatever the other seat wants and budget deficit increases.

When democrats control both seats, pretty much the same historically (might have changed with the Obama administration because Obama's house shows a distinct lack of balls and dem congresspeople haven't found their spine in the 15 years they've been looking for them).

Rep+Dem and Dem+Rep theoretically lead to the same thing, which is the necessity for "bipartisanship" (== exchanging favors actually), limiting the excesses of either side (Clinton admin).

Except now you have to get the current behavioral factors:

* Democrat congresspeople haven't had a spine in 15 years at least (since Reps got congress back in 1994), when faced with the GWB administration they mostly did nothing, from half cowardice and half political calculation (the GWB admin was not getting any better, letting it sink 2 more years and shifting any and all blame to the first 6 years would ensure a sweep in 2008)

* Republicans have gone completely batshit insane, they're practicing scorched-earth politics and since ~2007 they're not just pandering to the most insane side of their base, they're pandering solely to it. This voyage started with the Southern Strategy, Reagan's rhetorics gave it a sharp acceleration, GWB and 9/11 propelled into orbit and after 2007 finally got outside of sanity's gravitational well.
His argument is not that voting has no impact on wealth or stability, it's that you can't deconvolve voting's impact on wealth from wealth's impact on voting.

One could imagine a scenario where a Party X state had vastly impoverished natural resources compared to the typical Party Y state. It's conceivable that typical Party Y policies would have a worse outcome than typical Party X ones in that particular state, even if states that implement Party Y policies tend to have better outcomes overall. It's furthermore conceivable that even states that implement Party Y policies could do better if they had instead implemented Party X ones.

The flaw in this article isn't political, it's statistical.

edit: anonymized parties in the second paragraph.
The other alternative is that he may have been talking about getting Facebook's data with its users' authorization.
I found the article a good read and would have found it somewhat convincing, if it wasn't on a page loaded with everything from a giant photograph to different horizontal bars to all rainbow colors at the bottom, directly under a pink bar.
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This is not true. A pass-through entity simply means that the LLC does not pay taxes. It does however keep separate records and submits separate tax forms than you do personally.

It goes like this:

LLC files form 1065
Form 1065 includes income / expenses of the LLC
Attached to form 1065 is a form K1 for each member
Form K1 includes the (net profit/loss * member's % ownership) + guaranteed payments (like a salary)

You file form 1040
Attached to form 1040 is your copy of the K1, which gets treated as additional income
You may also attach your personal business expenses [1]
You pay taxes on this ammount

Your LLC then mails in the 1065 + K1s. Then you send in your 1040 + K1s + the taxes you owe personally.

So you see, LLCs file tax forms completely separately, it's only the check you have to write to the government that's "pass-through".

[1] Your personal business expenses are expenses that came out of your personal account for a business expense, so like a reimbursable expense. This gets reported on your personal taxes rather than the company's separate business expenses that came out of the company account. In general, just try not to do this if you can help it, as it just makes things more confusing.
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Duck Duck Go is on my mind a lot these days :) Too much probably, but I think it actually embodies the future of search, for some fair sized percentage of the search market.

Right now they're at 0.035% of the market according to my estimates, that's only two doublings away from eclipsing altavista on it's way down.

DDG will be 'just what some people need', but not the general public, that's googles game. So to attack a giant like google you need to go the lilliputs way, many small search engines like DDG probably stand a better chance at nipping away at a giant like google than a single head-on competitor ever would.

Search engines are profitable at ridiculously low levels of traffic (I ran a toy one for a year), if there are good enough tools to tie a bunch of them together and allow keyword sales. This will also mitigate the costs of combating click fraud.

Another thing that could be done between such micro search engines is sharing spam lists.
your post would be prob fit better at Reddit or similar kind of site. where's the hacker/entrepreneur/geek/intellectual angle to this?
Lol. If you are German, pronouncing this is no problem at all. I guess this will hold for a lot more languages, except maybe the English ;-)
The 'quiz' barely convinced me:
* It's Congress that has shaped public policy in the United States for most of the post-FDR period, not the administration in the White House.

* Does public policy have tangible, next-day consequences? For example, is the population suddenly healthier, now that the vaunted Health Insurance reform has passed?
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I've helped people in the past, still help people today, but my method has changed a lot over the year due to lessons learned.

Don't make anybody that you help a permanent fixture in your life (or vv) and help people only in such a way that it enables them to help themselves.

This is a lot more work than just giving money or stuff, but it will go a long way towards mitigating some or all of the problems that other strategies might land you in.

Great move of the couple to sit 'opposite the Ritz' by the way, where else to meet people like you.
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Haha oddly enough I thought it was a Steve Ballmer quote - I had to do a double check.
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That's for super-power-users, maybe in 5 years for advanced users. If you attempt to do this with either unsupported browser or on unsupported website your browser will act very non-userfriendly, like by opening dropped file. Because of this it would be foolish and dangerous to even inform the vast majority of users of this feature.

From my observation their UI is just copied Facebook UI. And my issue with this is not lack of originality. Rather it's the fact that people will now compare Diaspora functionality with that of Facebook. Furthermore anything working differently will lead to frustration, as certain behaviors are expected.
remember that air France jet that crashed in to the ocean a while ago and how much trouble they had to go through to even just find the thing in spite of having a pretty good idea where it went down ?

Now imagine the same thing without a good idea of where it went down. The ocean is a pretty big place. Maybe some debris will wash up on a shore somewhere, but that might very well be half the world away from the crash site.
What Digg must do to survive.
They don't seem to be publicizing it, but there's a live version up at a subdomain of joindiaspora.com, which people are sharing on diaspora's facebook page. Won't link here because of the concerns above and because it's creaking under the load already.
maybe because some key positions powered by ex-MSFT staffs?
Will the wave of users coming from Digg be useful participants?

Will there be any paid gaming of Reddit?

Will Reddit turn into a sewer as it grows, as did Digg?
I wonder what the relation is between this story and the upcoming Dehli Commonwealth Games. I'm sure there's an element of "putting up a front", in a similar way to China spray painting their grass green and building walls around their poor for the Olympics.
You have a pregnant wife and are giving random people on the street that are probably not what they seem personal information (people are far too free with information and it's not all that hard to get more once you have some)? Are you insane?