skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
YouTube has ads on videos. It's the same as a TV station airing a pirated DVD and selling the ads
Compromising Twitter's OAuth security system
Anyone know why there's such a big dip for 30yrs at $50K?
Europeans are more interested in science than sport
Wasn't it Rudolph Giuliani who did that multiple times during the 2008 presidential campaign?

Doing this as a gimmick doesn't work for me.
I'd be interested in a "true marginal tax rate" article relevant to the UK, if you know one.
>> You should tailor this for the iPad

Indeed. I'm probably never going to use a recipe app on my iPhone - its too small and hard to look at when I put it down on the table while my hands are dirty.

iPad, on the other hand, would be excellent.
In Germany the regulation to get money for maternity/paternity leave is such that the state pays 2/3 of the regular income for 12 months.

(12 months if only father or mother take the offer, or 14 months if both parents choose to, so e.g. the mother gets 2/3 of her pay for 10 months, father gets his 2/3 for 4 months. You also can double the time for half the money.)

Your employer, on the other hand, has to let you take unpaid leave for up to 3 years (I think, not precisely sure on that one) with a guarantee to continue your employment afterwards.

Chris - currently on paternity leave :-)
I'd argue that watching TV together and cooking together are entirely different things. Passively watching TV and never talking is awful. Cooking together should involve interacting, talking, asking questions, conversation, etc.
Well we do pay double per capita what Canada pays for healthcare, so it wouldn't surprise me at all.
No, it will not. I'm not sure what filing fees you are referring to. Your Schedule D with the SEC? There's not much else that needs to be filed. This can all be done in one 409A evaluation immediately after the financing.
TL;DR

Microsoft needs to stop assuming that people care enough to read paragraphs of marketing-speak. It's ludicrous that it took them 1500 words to say that they're a faster version of Flash and that they're not stepping on HTML5's toes.
Hmm, I'll think about that one too. Truth is, I just built it, so kind of a cobbler's shoes problem in that I've had little time to actually use it other than to run mongrel2.org with it. So far the people who are playing with it talk about how easy it is to work with and deploy one of the 10 programming language platforms using ZeroMQ.
Ah, the good old American spirit! It’s certainly a valid criticism of paternal leave in particular and welfare in general. It’s just that many Europeans simply don’t think that way. Many are ok with subsidizing other people.
I would pity whatever high-karma HN-member got assigned me when I was new. I suspect the relationship would have irritated both sides very quickly, likely leading to me not having gotten involved in the first place.

Now that I'm a relatively high-karma member, I'm quite sure that I wouldn't want to have such a responsibility. I spend quite a bit of time here, sure, but in bursts. You can't rely on me to respond to anything within a day. And that lag time is inappropriate for how the site works.
No, the 7'' displays. I don't have an iPad, but even the iPad seems quite small. I don't see the point in an even smaller tablet.
And Scribd doesn't charge you to read the documents. And for some of their videos, YouTube allows you to download them for a fee.

http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
One of the best ways to achieve a flexible work/home-life balance is to run a small business.

Can you imagine what it would mean to a small business with 3 employees if one of those employees goes on a 18-month paid break?

Not every business is a 10,000 employee omnicorp made up of fungible cogs.
Thanks. Let me know what you do and shoot me bug reports on anything you find.
Reminds me of "Veggie O's"

Ever see Daddy Daycare with Eddie Murphy? Carrots and Broccoli Cereal.

Enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7tjFE6QMcE&feature=relat...
I hope Red Hat is successful, as I don't want to see what tacky name they might come up with to replace it. (Like RHEL, which is pronounced "R Hell" even by people who like and use it.)
Which "it" are you referring to?
Good one, never thought about it. I'm too old to think in terms of room mates but you're absolutely right.
Yes, sorry. I wasn't thinking clear this morning.
Man, those percentages in the chart at the end are really whacky.

Someone making $75,000/year pays a higher % tax their entire life than someone making $200,000/year? Someone making $20,000/year (at 30) pays almost twice the % as someone making $50,000/year (at 30)?

That doesn't seem right.
That's a great idea. I wonder how many people are using Dropbox in this way, i.e. as a framework for sharing things with the server.
I complain about it all the time, but then again I'm not a employee and I see what I pay in taxes. Which is roughly double what employees "think" they pay in taxes. To use a swedish phrase, it's so "fiffigt ordnat" that half the taxes you pay doesn't show up on the income declaration.
I'm guessing they assume a 30-year old couple has purchased a house recently (large mortgage interest deduction), and has student loans still (student loan interest deduction up to 6K/year I think, which goes away after 80K or so. IANAA).

Between those two things, plus the general tax benefits of being married (and 50K not being that much for two people imho) give them a low tax rate.
wow, talk about administrative overhead) would actually effectively lower everyones tax burden by several percentage points.

??? Where is the savings? The IRS is a tiny fraction of US government spending.

Edit: IRS $12.15 billion in 2010, total federal expenditures $3.552 trillion. So it's 1/3 of 1% of the federal budget.
It's quite possible to generate recommendations solely from upvotes.
False Dichotomies in Convertible Note vs Equity Seed Rounds
With a parser that implements a grammar, you can prove that (a) it accepts every string that is valid as defined by the grammar and (b) it rejects every string that is invalid. The specifying of a grammar is relatively straight-forward (hopefully). Proving that an ad-hoc parser does (a) and (b) is nearly impossible.

Ad-hoc parsers can be shown to accept all "OK" strings that somebody used to test the parser and can be shown to reject all "not OK" strings that somebody used to test the parser.[1] "The problem with idiots (and black-hats) is that they are so ingenious." The only way to prove that an ad-hoc parser is truly correct is to run all possible strings through it, complete with a-priory knowledge of which strings are OK and which are to be rejected. This is an O(infinite) problem (i.e. the halting problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem).

Guessing intent is a wormhole: how close does the request need to be? What if you guess wrong?

The combination of ad-hoc parsers with guessing intent is a potent way to introduce security flaws in your program. In the case of a web server, the "attack surface" is the whole internet, i.e. there is a huge number of idiots and black-hats that could potentially attack your program.

[1] War story: in a previous life, the company decided they needed to have a custom code standards checker program (a result of a chain of four or five decisions, all of them really stupid, but that is a different war story). They contracted out the creation of the program, complete with a requirement that the contractee company write the test cases (fox in the hen house). The program was a POS (how did you know that was coming???).

When I looked at the test cases: they had one "positive" (i.e. catches a "bad" construct) test case and NO "negative" (i.e. does not have false positive) test cases. As a result, when run on real code, the "standards checking" program was actively sabotaging good code!
(Caveat: IANAL) He says in the article they're expecting a C&D from Hasbro, but I think the chances of that are less than they think. Games like "Words with Friends" and "Lexulous" haven't had many problems, and they are blatant rip offs with minor variations.
Well, it depends in part on what you include. The 26% I mentioned is for income taxes, payroll taxes, and (income-based) sales tax credits; but Canadians also have to pay a federal sales tax of 5% and provincial sales taxes (typically around 7-8%) on most purchases.

I believe the total tax burden ends up being fairly similar between the US and Canada -- while Canada spends far more (per capita) on social services and health care, the US spends a similarly larger amount on the military.
i added it

big miss, i feel badly about that
You are confusing marginal cost and total cost.

Swedish policy reduces the marginal cost of parental leave to the consumer - they are forced to pay for it whether they want it or not, so the marginal cost of leave is $0.0. This implies Swedes find paternity leave to be worth at least $0.01, and so paternity leave has a positive marginal cost/benefit ratio. That does not mean it has a positive cost/benefit ratio.

I'm sure Americans also value paternity leave at something higher than $0.01. However, most Americans seem to feel that 18 months of paternity leave is not worth 18 months of salary.

The harm in forcing Americans to pay for it (regardless of whether they want it) is that they find the money more valuable. Forcing people to trade something of higher value for something of lesser value is harmful. I'd similarly be harmed if you forced me to trade my Thinkpad for a netbook or my Nexus 1 for an iPhone.
Microsoft continues to long pre-announce their products - the first US widgets are November? - which implies they're going to continue to under-deliver on their execution, to detract from the work of all the bright people over there, to follow the everything-is-named-Windows branding, and to generally disappoint their customers.

This RTM on the same day where Jobs announced two iOS releases within the same range when WP7 products are expected.

And what else Apple and Android or HP (with WebOS) might or will deploy before the Microsoft partners ship products built from this Microsoft RTM announcement?

Time to start managing their customer expectations down, as is their inexplicable wont?
Flipping a House | Snipsly
Depends on your attitude to individualism I guess. A society where you trample all over each other for monetary gain at the expense of everything else is not one that personally appeals to me.
From what I have seen: the risk of starting a company is very low. No matter what happens, you're not going to starve or be homeless or be ill with no health cover.

But on the other hand: it's difficult to start a company (in the sense that there is a lot of bureacracy to negotiate) and the incentive to succeed is also lower (partly because the risk is lower, and partly because the tax system is punitive of anyone who breaks from the herd).
It's kind of cheating to not even include a lexer/parser.
IPod touch 4 with Retina display, HD video recording, iOS 4.1 for $229 and up
Sort of like the government helping people who live in disaster-prone regions of the country. Why should they get special help when they already proven they didn't take proper precautions?
SS is 12.4% and it stops at ~120k / year.
I'm a firm believer that if it ain't broke don't fix it. If you've got multiple sites working with Apache and you know how to keep that going smooth, then stick with that. Especially if you're doing small to medium sites in say PHP. PHP and Apache are kind of the king and queen of the realm.

What Mongrel2 has over Apache is it's ability to run async jssockets, HTTP long poll style work, and regular HTTP at the same time. If you hit an application where you want to do some async socket type stuff, that's when you should look at Mongrel2.

Of course, that's not all it does, but if you already love your Apache and it's crazy config file format and weirdo 1995 style syntax, then Mongrel2's only addition is the extra protocols.
As someone who has a lot of Swedish friends and has spent a lot of time there, I can't imagine that this could possibly be true.

First of all, every Swedish person I know seems to already have a higher standard of living than the American with an equivalent job in almost all aspects. Add to this the fact that the entirety of Sweden itself is maintained to a higher standard; consistently pure/clean water, well-maintained roads, clean parks, well-maintained public services, etc. I wonder how well the textbook definition of "standard of living" corresponds with real life. I think that einarvollset's point about actually having to spend time in Sweden to understand the quality of life is valid here.

Also, you're missing much of the point of the reasons that Swedish men choose not to initially take the leave. Your claim assumes that it's all economic, whereas the article cites that it is more likely a cultural aspect related to traditional thoughts about masculinity that discouraged them to take the leave. It's yet to be seen, but I'm pretty confident that if you gradually take away the bonus after 25 years, the numbers are likely to remain the same.
This is only the same thing that bit.ly and the other URL shorteners can do. And it is only on the twitter web interface which I'd imagine only a small number of user actually visit. I'm an active user but it's so long between my visits to the twitter site that they've usually added a new feature or changed the design!
This is a nice write-up of the available sensible trie implementations - thanks Bhavin!

One thing I'd add is that if you aren't exploiting the ordered nature of the keys within a trie - i.e. if your keys have no underlying substructure or you aren't doing linear scans through the key space - then you don't want a trie at all and you'd be better off with a hash table.

A hash table will be faster and use less memory if your keys are unstructured (imagine for a minute choosing random integers for your keys - then mod N is a good hash function for those keys, so it is obvious a hash table will work well for them, whereas a trie will waste space trying to find common prefixes between random keys.)

If you are accessing completely randomly, then the cache utilisation will be similar between a good trie and a hash table. If you are accessing some things more than others, then you should use a move-to-front hash table to be competitive.
I believe he's talking about compliance with income tax regulations on the non-governmental side. Accountants, tax prep, etc.
You stole my comment! :-)

Anyway, answer is here: http://www.journalsleep.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=27894

And to save everyone from clicking on that link: "were followed-up for 14 years (men)", "mortality rate was 21% for men"
The name of the game is flexibility.

Configure your web server in any language you want (so long as it has sqlite bindings).

Serve your web pages from any back-end you want (so long as it has zeromq).

Has it turns out, zeromq and sqlite are low barriers to entry for any language.

You're right though, in that you can do all of this with apache, if you're willing to write the right config generator and install (or create) mod_*. Mongrel2 just makes it easy.

edit: Also, what zed said :)
It's true that building an economic model that builds on a growing population is a bad idea. And it it's arguable that building one based on a population that stays the same size is bad, too.

That doesn't change the fact that Sweden has many such programs, and it's the fifth most rapidly shrinking nation. A shrinking population makes any social program where a bulk of the money is spent on the elderly i.e. health insurance or social security is going to take a severe economic hit. The Swedes think that by offering incentives like this one, they can help preserve some of their other programs.
Now you are using the "uncreated creator" argument of Aristotle, who proved that there must be, at the back of all creation, one unmoved mover, one uncreated creator, etc.
I moved from a job in Canada to a job in the USA with a similar salary in the US. The deductions from my paycheck were noticeably higher. Sales tax was slightly lower.
Bespin is now Mozilla Skywriter, moves to GitHub
I could probably have gotten private health insurance. However, it's very expensive once you no longer get it through a large institution with bargaining power,...

It's only 2% more expensive for you than for your former employer (for 18 months).

http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/faqs/faq_consumer_cobra.HTML
The intractability of parallel programming
Agree with other posters. If you do not work for a sizable private or public employer, health insurance can be costly. I have a fairly good deal with the health savings account I have - about 150 / mo and 1200 per annum deductible - for a PPO plan with very good preventive, major medical, and prescription drug coverage.

On the other comment, yes there are some parts in the U.S. that are very poor off, especially in parts of the older cities and in rural areas. My parents just returned from a visit to a very high per capita income European country and were somewhat surprised with how clean and orderly and relatively well off all of the cities / towns they visited were.
Mongrel2 specializes. This means way less cruft. It should also be much more performant in this role than Apache [citation needed], because Apache has sooooo much other stuff.
"What's needed are apps tied to real business models that have real ROI. And,companies should build apps with their eyes open about what they should realistically expect to accomplish with what they develop. Having an app for an app's sake is not enough."

That pretty much summarizes the entire story
Isn't all this analysis premature?

I haven't followed the story closely (not being a user of Digg, and barely visiting Reddit), but since Digg's change happened a week ago, I think there's bound to be a lot of fluctuations before we see who's "really" winning.
> with arguably less to show for it

We have lots of roads...
There's no pipelining, there's keep-alives though. It turns out pipelining is really bad for servers that talk to backend applications because it allows clients to a large number of requests to be handled and then close the connection. The server could have then sent all the requests to backends or needs to buffer them. In that case, even though the client has closed the connection, the server(s) still need to process all the requests.

In fact, there's been discussions on the httpbis list to downplay or remove HTTP pipelining since it's ambiguous and causes performance headaches.
Empire Avenue: The online influence stock exchange
I wonder what happens if the family has multiple kids. Say, one every 1.5 years...
It's the use of the word "scrabble" that's the problem.
On Ubuntu, the new version of Chrome mentioned in the article moves the close/minimize buttons to the left side if you have it configured that way in metacity.
I'm one of these self-taught guys so my advice is of course going to be to learn it on your own. It takes about 6 months to a year to become pretty proficient in one of the popular web frameworks out there, and along the way you will meet a lot of talented developers - perhaps even future co-founders, who are going to be a lot more willing to work with a hacker/business person rather than just a business person. It's not that you need to become a rockstar developer, you just need to know what it's all about and be able to contribute (and perhaps eventually become a rockstar one day).
The reason debates like these are tiresome is that we all have different opinions on what "society" should pay for, and what the individual should pay for. There are very legitimate reasons to have differing points of view, so it's not like there is An Answer out there. So things go around and around and around.

Even in the US, the coworkers will have to pay for things like public schools and things of that ilk. Less direct, perhaps, but still part of their taxes.
Thanks. Do you know of any detailed discussions of the pros and cons?
A JS Toolkit For Plugin-Free Browser Game Dev?
I've held and used a couple of the earlier WP7 models.

The UI looks odd, but it worked really well for me and I stopped noticing that initial awkward look almost immediately. I had no trouble at all navigating around, even though I was unfamiliar with where I should be going. It may have even been more discoverable and intuitive than my first iPhone experience.

That said, unless there's some phenomenal hardware that's yet to be announced, I don't see myself trading my iPhone 4 in for a WP7. It's a gigantic leap forward from WinMo 6.5 though.
Your wish is my Excel-jockey command. Now with graphs:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/02/new-trends-in-startup-in...
Seventy paid (salaried) employees?
Ah, that makes sense. Is that 120k/year for couples or just singles?
Which in turn is so low compared to many other countries in Northern Europe.
Doesn't work for me.. They must be detecting that and redirecting.
NetFlix: America's Most Underestimated Company
AB Multivariate Testing using Google Website Optimizer [video]
> Colonizing Mars is a different story, but we should begin terraforming ASAP

I would prefer to have a more thorough understanding of the Martian environment before we start dumping extremophiles on it. Besides, we want to understand how the organisms we throw at it will change the environment before we throw them in.

Darwin's experiment would have provoked a very hostile reaction today.
I pay 120$ a year for someone else to do my taxes, I make ~80k per year. So add 1/6 of 1% so we are now up to 1/2 of 1%. Anyway, there is going to be a cost to administering any tax so while simplifying things may save money it's never going to zero.

PS: I could see a simplified tax code saving people 20 billion a year, but good luck implementing that.

Edit: For example, CC transaction fees cost more than current transition costs, so a sales tax would have higher compliance costs.
SS and FICA are very regressive. It's interesting that the lowest rates roughly correspond with the median income - as if the rates were tailored to get the lowest rates to the majority of the voters, while screwing (relatively) much smaller groups at the ends of the scale.
What a staggeringly horrid web site, and content-free article. Pop-ups, ads all over the place, sign-in boxes, and an article in a slot-sized window.

tl;dr: security attacks continue to evolve, and targeted attacks are tough(er) to detect and deal with, and there are folks that successfully target Google and other security-savvy organizations via combinations of social engineering and process flaws and targeted and zero-day flaws.
there are also a huge number of free apps that simply should not be counted, and that would push the average return-on-app much higher.
But you are US-based, aren't you? That's one kind of pedigree.
There's plenty of 10" Android tablets being displayed at IFA currently e.g. Archos 101, Toshiba Folio 100, Viewsonic ViewPad 10 etc. (Dell is supposed to do a Streak in 7 and 10 inch sizes too)

I've not seen any substantially bigger than the iPad (which is just under 10") yet, but it wouldn't surprise me.
thanks, that makes perfect sense. No, I don't love apache's crazy config file format, but I don't update the config often and it's mostly copy and paste when I need to add something new. It's rails with passenger which is pretty easy.

I'll definitely check out the async stuff, that is compelling!
Haha. Yeah, Scrabb.ly is just about the closest you can get to Scrabble. I seem to recall Scrabulous getting sued out of existence for much less.

But you're right, once we change the name, url, and drop the Scrabble references, I think it should be fine going forward.
There are several who are from Alaska, who are probably there occasionally. I don't know of any others currently working out of Alaska.
Yes. But the more important thing is the non-negligible possibility of losing coverage completely due to job loss.