skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I buy something for $100, I would pay sales tax on it. But is that really it for purchases? Isn't the government collecting taxes at several other points as the good is being made and brought to market? Taxes on raw materials, on components making the product, taxes on shipping, etc.

All in all, if I buy something for $100, how much is the tax collected by the government (in addition to what is taken from my income leaving me this $100 to spend)? Is all of that taken into account in this report?
Good grief! She should take the female out of the question. Find a personable developer with a decade or two of experience, so that he has some perspective. Ask away. Most likely he would be willing to spend the necessary time to answer her questions. And follow the trail. If he is in corporate development, but she is interested in startups, ask him to recommend a friend. There are many paid paths from photoshop or page layout to hardcore developer. All it needs is intelligence and a willingness to work hard.

EDIT: So I posted before I read the article :-) If she wanted to be on the Sr. management track, she should have gone to a smaller company, where ability would have been recognized without being on the basketball team, or learn to play basketball. If you want to fasttrack, go where the track is fast.
$500 would have lasted me about 6-8 months when I was a kid...
Targetting Whatsapp and ping (chat) is a clever hack. A lot of my friends use it as a free alternative to texting, and i'll be sure to tell them to start using Notifo for that...As soon as it displays them as easily as whatapp does.*

I've found sending a message to twitter to be completely unintuitive though. I had to send something to 'twitter', typing it out without any sort of hint that I was doing it correctly. Then minutes later, I get a Notifo message that it tweeted. Which I just did myself, via the same device.

*it reads your phone's addressbook and displays all contacts that also have whatsapp, probably based on telephone number
Let's look at a couple factors:

1) Customer Acquisition Costs. I'd be surprised if NetFlix pays more than $20-30 per customer. Dating websites have a lot more competition and are probably closer to $50/customer.

2) Lifetime Value. Customers of dating websites are transient, there only for a matter of months. As such, their lifetime value is not particularly high (I'd guess something in the $150 neighborhood). Netflix customers have long lifetimes (I've been a customer since 2000, with no intention of quitting) which adds up to a LOT of value.

3) Customer Price Elasticity. Dating websites are catering to people who will spend many hundreds of dollars on dates in their pursuit of happiness. $30/mo is a drop in the bucket if it helps increase your odds of finding that somebody. Netflix charges between $10 and $30/mo, depending on your plan, which is comparable to the cost of a few premium channels on cable, which is a cost their customers are accustomed to paying.

4) Price as value. If Netflix is more expensive, it does nothing to help you, it just costs more. If Match.com is more expensive, then the people on the site are likely to treat it a bit more seriously, which can make it a better product for some.
This is how this page looks in IE6: http://i.imgur.com/PVT7u.png

Note I understand it's an experiment, just for curiosity
Gina Raimondo, Point Judith Capital, on Venture Capital & Women
They're motivated by future tips, and by the extra opportunities they'll get from forwarding your generous business to people they know. The incentive is your money.
If it takes two minutes to fill in the signup stuff, please keep it there.
Better yet, get them a library card. It will open up a whole new world, especially with inter-library loans, and is a whole lot less expensive. Really, it's like pouring gasoline on a fire :)
At 8:55 he talks about experimental method of grading students based more on game design. Everything students do gains experience points and as you level up you progress through the grades.
Are you thinking of Hulu? When does Netflix do pop-unders?
Yep, I was "homeschooled" from 4th through 8th grade. I don’t think the term “unschooled” really applied to me, but I was under minimal direction.

From what I can remember, I generally read the required textbooks, fill out the workbooks, and by mid December and was left to my own devices the rest of the time. I suspect things where slightly more structured than that, but my mother has a double doctorate in education and was more than willing to let me be most of the time.

I suspect the second half of the year was probably more productive, I generally watched MPT (Maryland Public Television) all day until cartoons started at 3pm. After that I would read books or do some computer programming. Toss in some trips to DC area museums / area historical sites and I learned a lot while having fun.

PS: The other option would have been to accelerate things and finish HS by 14 etc, but I don't think there is much value in that path. So, once a homeschooled child is ahead of the curve, letting them explore their interests seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Atlanta's got several great spaces that I've personally seen. We have 4 people working out of Ignition Alley daily, and have used both 151 Locust and Strongbox West as well.

If you're in Atlanta please stop by and check one out!

We have "co-workings wins" all the time.
I wrote a Scheme in Ruby that has macros last year: http://github.com/jcoglan/heist. It's an interpreter, not a compiler, and is extremely dynamic: all functions, macros, special forms are just treated as function calls by the parser. Macros are just a subtype of functions that accept and return syntax nodes before eval-ing the output, and this is done at runtime while running all your regular code.
Obama administration: "Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft"
I donno -- I know some people who bittorrent as default behavior. They tend to also pay for both netflix and a fast network link.

Remember, many people technically sophisticated enough to do bittorrent are also smart enough to be lazy with their effort.

Didn't the strength of iTunes paid songs show that people's time is worth money?
Prices are always based on demand, not costs. So the difficulty of creating something is irrelevant to its price in the market.

If there is a perfect substitute for a good, competition might drive the price down. In a perfect market, the price of a perfect commodity will equal its cost (in theory), but in practice there are no perfect commodities-- not even toilet paper.
Not really. Jobs didn't set up a lobbying effort to get Facebook to change its mind. He doesn't appear to have even blinked. Instead, he just implemented his own social network.

What's happened here appears entirely consistent with Apple's worldview. They own iTunes and their (huge) slice of the online music sales channel. They're going to do things their way. They'll suffer or succeed accordingly.
Do you have case for using AGPL software in business. I really want to understand how it could be done.
Wow, I appreciate the advice. Thanks!
No, what does a media buy mean?
To be honest, I thought it would look much worse. I would say it is even acceptable if you design for a website with a tech-savvy audience.
But the best part is, this hasn't sunk in yet. So few people understand that the world has gotten to a stage where you can get a university-level education by yourself, based on what you feel like learning, from the comfort of your own home.

But you can't, at least not in the biological sciences, unless your home has an autoclave, ultracentrifuge, laminar flow hood, etc. Same could be said for civil engineering, chemistry, or any other discipline with a lab or field component.
Stronger program to clean and speed up the computer
Around tax time, thousands of smart people set up shop to "do your taxes". And all of us waste time and effort.

Make it automatic and flat, and we ALL get to go back to work. Much larger savings that the total IRS budget.
> though I still don't like how you can't copy and paste files with cmd+c/cmd+v in os x :)

You can remap the Command key to the physical Ctrl key on your keyboard if you want; this makes some muscle-memory actions a bit more smooth across platforms.

In general -- and I'm not sure what the official / historical word from Apple is -- I've always thought that the Command key came about because Apple wanted a different key for commands that the OS could intercept, without stepping on any pre-existing application level shortcuts that used Control.

It might have been cleaner had they just kept Command reserved for shortcuts going to the OS (cut/copy/paste, open/launch, window manipulation, bossing applications around) and told developers to use Ctrl shortcuts within their applications. But I'm not sure if that distinction would have been meaningful to most users.

The Apple HIG on Modifier Keys doesn't give much in the way of rationale for Command versus Control, except to say:

> Because the Control key is already used by some of the universal access features as well as in Cocoa text fields where Emacs-style key bindings are often used, it should be used as a modifier key only when necessary.
The accusation was that if you were an exceptionally heavy user of the service, they'd start taking 2 or 3 days to send your next movie after you returned one.

That said, I'm not sure what the threshold was, because I was a very heavy user during that time and I never hit the problem. As such, whatever the threshold was, it was high.
I agree. Same thing happened to me. Once I learned how nutrition and diseases are linked I started paying attention to what I ate. My wife reversed her type 2 diabetes entirely through nutrition as have thousands of others. I reversed years of severe food allergies. We know many people who have reversed heart disease and cancers through intensive nutritional therapies as well.
Apple's trouble with TV
William Faulkner claimed to have written "As I Lay Dying" in one draft over the course of 6 weeks.

He was almost certainly lying.
So, if I have a non-programming question about Linux, I need to check first all 4 sites before posting the goddam question to one of them.

Or even posting 1 question to 4 sites? Ha-ha.

Very clever.
If you like this concept, I recommend looking into the FairTax. It is a very well thought out attempt to replace all taxes with a single sales tax.

I am a fan, but even if you are not, the analysis of the situation in the papers at fairtax.org is quite robust and worth reading.
Really rich people have little or no income. The dodge comes in taking your jet, car, residence, living expenses etc as work expenses. While you OWN billions, your income may be thousands.
From the point of view of the user, I strongly subscribe to the school of thought that says build it working for everyone and enhance for the users that have better browsers. These buttons, as the post itself says at the end, are just not ready for production.
everything else goes into virtualenvs or user bin/pythonpath; python stuff is unfortunately too fragile to put everything in one place.
No, but that doesn't really matter to me. If netflix doesn't realize it's happening, maybe someone will notice my comment and do something about it.
Ah - I hadn't known that. Then they shouldn't have called it a "new technology" imho, if that's what they meant.
I find your comment confusing. Do you believe they should be trying to gut the Obama healthcare laws?
Try naming a single business that uses AGPL.

Claiming that AGPL is business friendly is pretty deceptive (i.e. it is business friendly provided that your business is not the sale of software or online services), but around here most people will see straight through the bullshit, chuckle a bit, and move on.

The short version that everyone here who actually runs a business will tell you is that GPL is fine for most situations, but you should avoid anything that has the AGPL license for the core of your business unless you really have no other option.
I agree with your comment, but it stings to think of myself as a "homeless" - these things tend not to work in Uruguay* (my home country), and even if they do, they're illegal anyways.

Being a small South American country means large corporations often ignore you (it's cheaper than trying to cater to yet another mass of hungry legislators and tiny fiefdoms)

*that means I haven't actually tried Netflix itself despite it would be good for me, but I have tried similar services like Pandora and they aren't legally allowed here.
the problem is not efficiency, its relevancy. Say you have a result "hacker news". If its a pure prefix trie, this wont match the query "news", even though you probably want to return this as a suggestion. My hack around this would be to add both "hacker news" and "news" in the trie-Its still not perfect, since it wouldn't match "acker" or "ws" etc.
A VP-tree would be even better since it can do spell checking while you're at it: http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/blog/01164790008
It's more than that.

I'm a believer that you learn far more from failure than from success.

In an ideal world, I believe that people should fail a few times before their first success.

Having success early teaches you very little.
It's a fair question. Watching Stack Overflow's balkanization is a little worrisome. It raises the complexity of the product, which adds friction to the task of getting a question answered. It's easier to go to the wrong place than it is to have content re-classified.
Nailed It (Not): Our First Twitter Post, Circa 2006
http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001001.html
I think he should keep how it is. It's so simple.
It happens occasionally. I haven't used the same browser on the same computer every day for the past four years, and providing a matrix showing the pop-under-exploit-blocking capability of each one over that timeframe would be difficult.
The more detailed article is at: http://economist.com/node/16941775
In many ways the submission process is the way to check. However there is the one extra step of inserting a title and possibly tweaking it.

I suggest you paste the URL with random text as a title. If it shows up as a unique new submission then update the title immediately with the original. If further tweaking to the title is in order then follow-up again.

But yeah, its a pain when it happens but its not very high up on my list of grievances.

Given the choice of eliminating problems on this side it would be getting people to put "Ask HN: " in front of questions.
not bad... though that's the total cost, not the amount you pay, right? It's a big bill, almost the equivalent of rent. But if this is the case, then yeah, it's just money, so the equation doesn't change, just the parameters.

I have a buddy who was denied health insurance repeatedly until he got hired, so there's definitely a subgroup that has no choice but to keep the corporate job. I suppose you could also just buy insurance for the baby rather than get a family plan if you're denied but the child is healthy, though I've never heard of this.
Incentives vs. Results on the Web
He spoofed Twitter's first-party app on Android. If a spammer does the same, Twitter's only recourse is to revoke the key and make everyone download a new version of the app. This is a trivial way to cause a lot of damage for Twitter, and a lot of headaches for their users.
Do You Understand Job Control in Bash?
I read this statement quite differently: the sample size is small, so the author makes an extra effort to learn from the experiences of others that she views as role models (i.e., successful women in tech). Not everyone who seeks advice is by definition an acolyte. The approach of collecting as much potentially relevant data as possible, culling out what is helpful/inspiring etc., and using it to inform future actions seems like a sensible approach to me.
For the past several years I've observed netflix pop-unders at various points on www.reelviews.net, and possibly other sites. (see my comment about using a variety of different computers and browsers over that timeframe)
If you own "billions," you presumably own equity or debt (maybe some commodities, but it's not likely). If you own debt, you're paying taxes on the interest. If you own equity, the value of that equity is the net present value of future cash flows--meaning it's 'taxed' at the rate at which corporations are taxed.

In addition, spending a lot of money and then making it a 'work expense' still requires lots of income. You can't effectively write off your limo charges unless your income at least equals them.

And I don't know how common it is to treat a residence as a work expense. There's a home office tax deduction, but that is a common audit flag.
No issues here, Chromium 7.0.507.0 (57505) on Ubuntu 10.10a3
Like, the reality that if I stab someone the throat I am free to help myself to the contents of his pocket?

I'm not sure how useful that definition is. Plenty of people have correctly perceived reality far ahead of their peers and as a result reaped nothing but persecution.
They are overloaded in Gnome. I got caught out a few times when moving from Mac OS X where I was used to copy and pasting from the terminal having a combo that didn't clash with cancel.
== "robust"
One awesome feature of Ping is that if you set your profile activity to be visible only to approved followers, you can't see your own activity yourself since you can't follow yourself.

"The activity in this profile is private. If you would like to see more, request to follow"

Nice.

Oh and another one, if you go to "People", you get "You are not following anyone. Connect with Facebook, search for people..." Yet there is no visible way to actually connect with Facebook. There was a button last night, it's gone today.

Also, if you want to add artists to your Ping profile, they better sell their stuff on the iTunes store, otherwise they don't show up in search results.

So far every comment I've seen on the stuff artists are posting is spam--"Get a free iPhone from..." over and over.

I understand that this is newly released software, but seriously.
Right, it happens when I visit other sites on a the web with a browser that doesn't block pop-unders. I'll see a big red ad with the word "Netflix" on it.
> phone's addressbook and displays all contacts that also have whatsapp, probably based on telephone number

We've been chatting internally about such an onboarding process.

> I've found sending a message to twitter to be completely unintuitive though

It's more of a proof-of-concept for anyone to built bots. We'll be updating the API documentation for that and opening the doors. We know that the twitter bot implementation definitely hacky and not quite sure why anyone would use it over a full-blown twitter client. Other proof-of-concept bots: dicebot (send "help" or hi), notifo (send "temp sf" or help), jill (not run by us, not sure if still up), et cetera

Thanks for the feedback!
I suspect you're vastly overestimating the hassle in using Bittorrent. But it is true that most people don't want to bother learning even the simplest things.
They had strong government protections. Smaller ratings agencies like Egan-Jones have a much better record--but they lack the same legal advantages.
Tip to remember rotating credit card rewards
Sync your fantasy leagues to see player availability in each league.
>Note that US GDP is also significantly higher.

Maybe I am missing something, but this should mean that the US can afford to do more. No?

>No, military spending doesn't account for the difference.

I didn't say anything about military spending. Where is that coming from?
Perhaps not advertised as much as gasoline, but at least in NB and NS, the displayed price on alcohol includes all sales taxes, but that's the only other thing I can think of.
This should be interesting...
Once you fork, you can never merge!
Solve email overload without Google's Priority
Perfect example there where "server" + "administration", or heck even "server" alone, in the text is sufficient to classify the question. Add additional terms and classification gets more and more discrete.

Tags are necessary for photos. I don't see how text is the same problem at all.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but it's not a minor difference: Linux is a kernel, Ubuntu is a distribution.
Turn it into a DAG with bubble up.
She could also learn about tech, which she seems to think that women seeking management positions in tech companies should not have to do.

(At least one tech company also thought they could hire a non-techie woman as CEO. Hopefully the rest of us can learn from HP's mistake.)
> not quite sure why anyone would use it over a full-blown twitter client.

I use notifo + push.ly to receive message when someone mentions me. As I have a 3G, switching over to the twitter app is slow and cumbersome, so replying-in-notifo is a good usecase :)
I will certainly admit to having no stats - although your blog post, a more informed source than myself, states that poor americans will experience significantly worse care than in sweden. My other experience is anecdotal - I've known a fair number of swedes, and they've all been satisfied with their healthcare, while people in the US have serious issues with being underinsured and having legitimate claims denied on technicalities.

Finally, there's the simple fact that the system in the US obviously encourages high prices. In the insurance-based model, there's little disincentive to performing as much work, necessary or not, as possible.
Well there ya go. ;) We enabled URL schemes in this version so that means we can add a "Notifo" app addition to Push.ly if someone wants to use that as their primary so when they tap a pushly notification it can switch to the convo tab and make a new msg with the twitter bot/msg already filled out ready for reply

P.S. - I got notifo'd of your reply, both on my iphone and OS X with our desktop app haha
It's obvious on it's face that it's possible to "spoof the Twitter Android app". You'd need something a lot more interesting than OAuth to prevent that. What's his point?

What this article is really about is distaste over a policy decision Twitter appears to have made, which is that they may revoke consumer secrets for applications that end up associated with scam apps. We can argue over the merits of that decision ad nauseam, but I'll short circuit it (again) by pointing out that Twitter would have had the exact same problem without OAuth; they'd simply be attacking it in an ad hoc way instead of with OAuth.

I have two huge problems with this article:

* It sensationalizes an issue that isn't about security, but rather is about developer-friendliness. Of course, since (as far as I can tell) no major Twitter app has been disrupted by this unfriendliness, this story wouldn't have had legs without the scary security spin they gave it.

* It throws the baby out with the bathwater on OAuth, which again simply isn't intended to be a universal authentication protocol for native apps. Near as I can tell, everything Twitter's doing makes perfect sense for web apps, which I'm guessing are still far and away (by usage) the most-used customers of Twitter's API.
I'm willing to entertain the argument, though I'm not familiar with any arguments that airlines are inherently unprofitable without using force on someone.
It can if you buy DVRs that can run Bittorrent internally and decode a variety of codecs. Not to mention just using your computer to host the files and pass through such a device or PS3/Xbox directly to the television. Or just hooking up the computer to the TV, but of course then there is the hassle of setting it up to be convenient to control from your couch. Wireless mouse is often enough.

Again, it's not hard. But there is a small learning curve. Netflix and competitors have to keep making it easier and easier, since alternative sources will also keep getting easier to use.
1 Simple Way to Give Your Headings Some Flavor
Really, though, it's hard to find credible reasons why companies would fund fundamental (say) physics research, isn't it? The benefits of such research are often felt decades down the line.