skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The denominator should be tax receipts, not federal spending. Foreign countries and our Federal Reserve actually made large contributions this past year (both do every year we have a budget deficit and every year the money supply increase- this is most every year for the past few decades). This is not to suggest that Americans won't eventually pay for all of this year's expenditures, we eventually will. In the case of the Fed, consider their new money printing and subsequent spending to be a tax of everyone that holds dollars at the time of the printing/spending.
I'm probably unusually dense today, but I don't understand the "Can't I find out where you live by seeing your goo.gl links" part of that question. How do I get to see someone else's links?
Do you have any data to back that up?

The empirical evidence shows that, for example, NPR is more likely to interview a conservative economist about a story than a liberal. I think they go out of their way to defer to right-of-center politicians because they are so afraid of the perception that they're liberal.

In short, I think you're wrong.
You can define "welfare" however you like, but it doesn't change the reality that no politician -- on either side of the aisle -- is seriously proposing cuts to Social Security or Medicare. Old people comprise the base of both political parties.
The amount of information at my fingertips (literally) is mind boggling.

I used to read Worldbook encyclopedias when I was a kid (mostly at school). A set costs hundreds of dollars... and is eclipsed by Wikipedia + google.

I used to collect cast-off databooks (National Instruments, TI, Motorola, Intel, etc.), now all that information and more is only a google search away.

I used to buy ARRL Handbooks to learn about electronics and circuits. Now I mostly don't bother (just kidding, I still dabble in electronics, but gave up my Ham license many years ago - just wasn't interested in talking to random strangers). Hmmm, now I type text to random strangers and browse random strangers' blogs.

I used to subscribe to magazines (e.g. Byte, Dr. Dobbs) to learn about computers and software, now I run, read, and contribute to Open Source projects.

You know how you always forget the bad stuff and only remember the good stuff? Looking back, I remember a lot of cool things I did, but I kind of blank out how much effort it was to find the necessary information.

On the dark side, I waste a lot of time on the internet. One of our kids did a clay "diorama" of "this is my family." Someone else's kid had their family around a campfire. My kid had the family in the living room, me with a little clay laptop on my lap. Oh-oh.
If its such a burning desire, then you owe it yourself to quench it by trying it at least once (but definitely not half-hearted).

All you need to do is make sure that you have some savings for the family to survive and some more, if it doesn't work out and you need to get back on the job track.

Moreover, if you give it serious shot, give it all you got (obviously refering to non-financial stuff) and it still doesn't work out, all that learning could possibly even bump you to the 7 figure category later.

Good luck.
I feel smarter and more knowledgeable. I've had access to the web in my house off and on since I was 11 (25 now) and even when things dragged along via dial-up, I always felt like I had all kinds of info at my fingertips. I'd go to class in high school armed with all kinds of facts and background info on topics that the teachers (especially in history classes, for example) never would have/could have covered.

My parents were always all for dropping me and my bro off at the library, but something about finding out about stuff by going from link to link is just more fluid than walking out with a ton of books (some of which may not even be all current).

During college, I picked up Rails and all this open source stuff--the databases, servers, etc.--that I really wouldn't have gotten to in classes until my senior year. 'twas all made possible by going from link to link, blog to blog.

Overall, I'm just happy that whatever I want to know is always going to just be right there as long as I have some kind of internet connection. It's always been an advantage in my book.

Socially, I'm glad I can stay connected to whomever despite not physically being within a convenient distance of any of my really good friends. Despite Facebook and Twitter, iChat and Skype keep me connected and able to see friends from college who are allover the place. Seeing a friend react in real-time to some new shirt you bought, for example, really beats even just the telephone. It all makes the world smaller and a lot closer.

Gotta love the internet...!
Your Personalized Income Tax Receipt (another version)
Nice idea, so I put something up at: http://www.yourtaxreceipt.com
Haven't added the calculator yet, trying to garner from the feedback about how to be more accurate in reporting (given the feelings about the npr depiction).
It is my understanding that severity of punishment is not strongly correlated with reduced incidence of the behavior being punished. Consistency of punishment is strongly correlated. That is, a minor punishment consistently applied is far more effective at controlling behavior than a severe punishment inconsistently applied.
Having spent an unpleasantly large part of my life enmeshed in it, I strongly disagree with the last statement "with really good application software on top of it."

Otherwise, spot-on.
Is QWiki just reading Wikipedia w/ Animoto-style presentations?
I looked at the demo video on http://www.qwiki.com/ and was impressed by their rendition of "Alvin and the Chipmunks" and "Chris Sacca." However, it turns out that both were verbatim from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_and_the_Chipmunks and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Sacca
Mongrel 2 benchmarking Easter eggs
I, too, have found this to be the general case.

I speculate that this is because they consider MySQL to be the archetype RDBMS. I have yet to run into such depth of misconception from those who work with Postgres.
It was compounded by a hot day and being inside a backpack. The problem I was having at the time was a hard lockup of the system on sleep maybe 30-40% of the time due to the ATI graphics driver. My best guess is once the machine hard locked ACPI was unavailable to auto-shutdown the machine once the CPU passed its threshold so it ran until the battery died instead.
One argument against it is that it wouldn't be very democratic. If I have 10K in taxes and you have 5K in taxes, who has the more votes?
You could definitely take it too far and enter that territory, yes.

I'm saying the difference between "Build me a house by next week" and "Build me a house large enough for four people with a garage and laundry facilities. If we're missing those things, we won't be competitive."

Especially outside of technical realms, it's nauseatingly common for requests to go under-specified, leading to a bunch of wasted work once everyone circles back and realizes "Oh, forgot to tell you about..."
Like what? Junk with referral IDs?
Google Street View Gallery
Treasury Reaps Billions as It Sells Citi Shares
And therefore not that interesting to read about on a news site. You don't see that many articles about factoring quadratic equations, either.
We are some lucky apes.

The internet is like buzz lightyear and books are like woody.

This generation needs LEGOs and camping trips.
I decided to read S. 3804 to understand the technical implications therein, and I am not a lawyer, but here was my basic understanding:

If a website's primary purpose is copyright infringement or counterfeiting, and if your domain was registered domestically, then the Attorney General can take it away. If your domain name was registered non-domestically, the following will happen:

- Domestic ISPs will be required to DNS blacklist your domain name.

- Domestic payment processing and advertising companies will be forbidden from doing business with you.

Again, IANAL, so if someone else has a more insightful reading please let me know. I couldn't find a lay explanation anywhere.
A love hate relationship with the Gnu/Linux desktop
will you really be able to give your startup the attention it deserves? I'm taking a shot in the dark here but you must not like must risk :)?
Wholesale plastic bowls for my business
Those elderly white men have families do they not? Maybe the family should take care of old white men instead?

Or better yet, invest in technology so they rejuvenate old people to the point that they can enter the workforce and earn their living for the rest of their life(presumably several centuries).
The most bizarre aspect of law school is that students take on enormous debts even though they don't actually learn how to practice law. It isn't the sign of a healthy market when there are a huge number of people who can't afford representation and a huge group of unemployed lawyers.
The entire premise is wrong because there is nothing to compare the survey data to.

"44% of enterprise users questioned had never heard of NoSQL and an additional 17% had no interest. So why are 61% of enterprise users either ignorant about or uninterested in NoSQL?"

Is 61% high or low compared non-enterprise users? Maybe 61% of all users are either ignorant or uninterested.

Unrelated, if you're in IT and are unaware of NoSQL databases you kind of suck at your job. Not saying you have to use them, but you should at least know they exist when the tech news is saturated with them.
Quick Q - did u email to 3rd way? NPR?
Xerces isn't bad http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-j/
and you never want to look back and say I should-a could-a would-a right?
OK. Obviously, I haven't paid the needed attention.
Or sending them an AwesomenessReminder :-)
Disagree. It's everywhere in tech news sources. If you read any tech news on a regular basis you can't possibly be unaware. Part of being a professional is keeping on top of new products/solutions in the field, even if they aren't immediately useful.
Long live the internet!

We are lucky to have had a taste of life without the internet and to be among the few who care to influence it's future.
Stonebraker makes a point of saying that the lack of standards in NoSQL system prevents their adoption. While there are standards surrounding SQL most SQL databases do not adhere to the standards. They have connection semantics and syntax that are at times mutually exclusive. Drupal 7 has a dynamic query builder specifically to take care of this (see this podcast for more info http://www.lullabot.com/podcasts/drupal-voices-24-larry-garf...). But for most organizations, it's not like they can simply switch from one database system to another without a fair amount of work.
No, I would believe Google recompressed a whole ton of JPEGs as a test. Not the most scientific test of a codec, but as a Web company they are interested in improving image serving more than image authoring.

As for the recompression, you can losslessly squeeze a JPEG by at least 15% (e.g. StuffIt came out with this a few years back, claiming higher numbers but mainly at low bitrates I think). In the lossy camp, H264's intra-frame encoding significantly outdoes both JPEG and JPEG2000.

WebP is probably similar to H264 intra. As for recompression vs. straight compression, this probably has little effect to the extent JPEG and WebP are "compatible", e.g. both being block-based transforms. It would be unfair, on the other hand, to run a very different codec after JPEG and compare it to WebP after JPEG, because the other codec might be working hard to encode the JPEG artifacts.
Interest on the National Debt: $287.03
Principle on the National Debt: ???
Design, Designer & Designing – Redefined
And I cannot disagree more. I often catch myself telling my friends that I couldn’t pick up their call because I was working on a project. But really, I was not.
Have they explained their reasons for not backing JPEG-XR instead? This seems to be a step back from JPEG-XR:

- No alpha support

- Not lossless support (Useful for the alpha channel, and could encourage more cameras to support lossless images)

- No HDR support

JPEG-XR also allows different regions of the image to be encoded independently. See wikipedia for more features: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XR

I have no idea what the patent landscape for JPEG-XR is, but I'd be disappointed if we replaced JPEG and didn't get some of these features.

The lack of alpha support in JPEG is especially a pain for web developers. PNG does not do photos well.
Every time I read code from Norvig, programming seems so simple and powerful, and I wonder how it is I spend such effort getting such meager results.
I've heard the argument that this is an effort to get some kind of "middle ground" before. The problem is there can be no middle ground here - only the illusion of one. Either law enforcement has the right to do X or they don't - if they are allowed to require a backdoor on skype, how could they not be allowed to require a backdoor anywhere?

The real scenario would be legislation justified with the argument "we want unlimited legal power but we promise to use it just a little" - and this kind of promise always turns out to be bogus.
There's a conversion tool available for WebP now: http://code.google.com/speed/webp/download.html
So they want a guaranteed 5% conversion rate and it costs them $2M per year for 2M users.

Let's be generous and assume 10% are active users -- their costs are $10/active user/year.

We can see why no one has bought this business.

And I have no idea what they're spending $2M/year on.
Taxpayers should be able to choose where their taxes go. Like when you file your tax return, check some boxes. If you like paying for renewable energy, great. If you like funding the war, your choice.
Haha, you really think apple would put two ports on their devices?
Léo Apotheker Named CEO and President of HP
Yes - and I have now for the past year, though it was a little different.

My advice is to find something you can do when you start your company that will make the year off worthwhile even if you get $0 in revenue - I've taught myself web design, iPhone programming, Facebook app development, Drupal, content organization, etc.

I also finished the 2nd Edition of Beginning Hibernate 3 for Apress, got engaged, and ran 15 marathons or ultramarathons in 2010, so even if this startup turns south, I'm really happy with the way the year is going.
That convention drives me batty. So much time wasted when trying to copy-and-paste those URLs.
Ask PG: what's YC's / PG's opinion of the lean startup / bootstrapping movement?
Obviously you're not opposed to venture funding, but do you see it as a requirement? Are there YC startups that have chosen to eschew or severely minimize post-YC funding in favor of growing based on revenue and profits? Or does YC both select for and encourage raising larger amounts of funding?
I don't mind that Stonebraker has a conflict of interest. He's marketing, I get it. I do mind that ACM has given him the platform to do it. Any other ACM publication would consider it incredibly unethical to publish articles with such clear conflicts.
Would be nice, but what happens when you contribute to a government program? Nothing. Your money is far too small to have any effect and you will likely receive a particular service whether you personally contribute or not. With a business, you get what you pay for. Fast.
I am not sure why people downvote the comment.

I am merely suggesting that we should return the care of elderly to the families, who are in better position to know what their elders need.

I am also suggesting that people should invest in anti-aging research so that social security would be entirely unnecessary.
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Google Maps uses it. Thank goodness.
AOL is a very different company since Tim Armstrong took over (March 2009). He has a genuine vision for what AOL will become, and the acquisitions since he took over are all about getting there.

It's not clear yet if his strategy is going to work out, but like Arrington said when he announced the takeover - everyone knows what he's trying to do.
If an administration ran with this as their only platform, they would probably get my vote. It's brilliant.
Geez, touchy subject I guess.
So? It gets information from curated sources. The important part is how it reads and displays the information. That's their "experience."

The computer voice they have sounds pretty natural, is that part of the OS or part of their service?
Venture Capital Outside of Silicon Valley
Flickr is pretty horrible as a photo site. It's full of garbage, the options of browsing quality content are very limited.

Try to get the highest rated photos of the last week/month/year, for example.
Knowing your colleagues' salaries
Piezoelectric tendrils gathering energy from ever flowing water. I like that.
Thanks for a more complete view of the topic.
HP Names SAP Ex-Chief as Its New CEO
Germany Closes Book on World War I With Final Reparations Payment
I remember trying to understand DDE, then trying to understand OLE. I thought it was great, being able to use these technologies, and thinking about its potential. "Wow, I can write programs that other programs can interface with!"

Then COM came out, then I thought "Okay, I'll try to learn about that one of these days." That never happened, of course. When ActiveX came out, that's when I realized the futility of trying to keep up.

Nowadays, I experience the same futility with (take your pic) (a) flavor-of-the-month languages (b) JS frameworks (c) web APIs (d) mobile platforms.
Norvig's interpreter is pretty solid, but another fellow did it recently as well: http://fogus.me/fun/lithp/
Medical services for the poor (medicaid) are comparatively minor, but you wouldn't know it, given how much emphasis the Republicans place on the question of the "welfare state".

I'm not sure I'd describe medicaid as "comparatively minor". Medicare is $390B, medicaid $247B ($290B including the state contributions). I guess the threshold for expenses that don't matter must bet somewhere between $290B and $390B.

http://usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html#usgs30210

(Use the dropdown to select year=2008, the last year for which full data is available.)

[edit: curious why I'm being downmodded. Is posting the actual numbers so detrimental to the conversation?

edit 2: put in the federal-only numbers, thanks jbooth for pointing that out. ]
As the sometime user of an Underwood manual typewriter, I have to say that I haven't hit cursor lag on a word processor since the days of WordPerfect 6.0, fourteen years ago. I should add that my typing speed was never really challenging the Underwoods, either, though.
Google Expands Paid Android Apps to 20 More Countries
It likely depends on what kind of B2B service you are promoting, the size of the companies you are targeting, and how deeply your service needs to integrate with the target customers' existing software systems. In my experience marketing to businesses via the same channels that work well for consumer web products is no easy task.

Give serious consideration to making a real effort to discover, meet, interview, get to know, perhaps even partner with a talented salesperson with great personal and/or professional connections in the industry you're trying to reach.

Here are a couple posts that you might find useful:

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/09/sean-murphy-on-the-first-1-6-enterprise-customers.html

http://www.walkersands.com/Comm_Selling_to_CIOs.htm
Google is testing an arrow next to trusted queries
If you think about it, medical doctors face almost exactly the same problem. I think medicine has handled things a little better by creating a system of referrals and domain experts and by training specialized workers (nurses and paramedics) with clearly defined roles that do a large part of the work under supervision at lesser cost.

Legal 'nurses' (paralegals with specialized training in certain areas of law) might help things immensely.

Doctors have a PR advantage though. Most people think of doctors as highly scrupulous individuals and give them the benefit of the doubt. The way some lawyers (and whole branches of legal practice) have conducted themselves have lead to a bit of a PR problem. A law practice has the (often unjustified) whiff of dishonesty and underhanded dealing to it, not unlike used car salesman. People just expect to be overcharged and undeserved and are more than eager to cry foul whenever they don't get the outcome they desire. This makes lawyers extra (perhaps over-) careful. This will probably need to be fixed as part of the solution.

Medicine has set up an exceptional system to distribute expertise efficiently and to diffuse and insure against its outsized liability that the law profession might do well to investigate.
Indeed. I’d have to say this form of laziness is a benefit. Even the extra cost in firewire controller chips helped to doom it outside of pro use.
Facebook's as much as a fad as photo-sharing, sending people messages and joining a discussion forum. Zuck originally said he wanted the relationships on it to reflect real life. The only thing faddish about it, is people's willingness to share their lives on it, and that's what Zuck wants to change, he wants sharing and exposing oneself to be normal, after all, for him it's all lulz. It's the over-exposing that is a fad as people start to want privacy.

When it first came out, I thought this is just like a friggin Xoops installation customized for college students (but custom built, and carefully sold to the right people). Also, a lot of Web 2.0 ideas were just like Xoops CMS modules (or WP plugins) but scaled out and adapted for mass website usage. The Facebook platform is just like Xoops module deployment that users can customize for themselves rather than the webmaster.

Theoretically, the only thing that could take out Facebook or come close, would be some type of cross-language, cross-server middleware layer, that webmasters could use that would simplify and improve web development, and give broad social, ecommerce, presence and whatever other features are, or will start to be in common. FB is in the best position to do that, and that's what I expect to see going forward: it'll have to create standards and protocols (an open source FB server?) and release those into the community.
Your personalized tax receipt
It has USB, power out, serial control, audio, video out, and remove features. Probably some others I can't think of off the top of my head. This means it's doing a lot more than just USB.

There are a lot of products like FM tuners and other aftermarket offerings that are only possible via the dock connector. A USB connection would require the dongles to be much more complicated and work a lot closer to the hardware.

PS If you made all the Audio digital over USB you'd need more complex hardware. You want to have the cheapest headsets and output cables to get the audio and video out of the machine. That means old fashioned analog audio/video. It's all in one connector so you can "dock" it with simply one connection.
OpenDNS secures $4.5M to protect users from phishing scams
Looks like it is too late to edit my own comment. There are indeed two bunches of patents: Apple's (bytecode interpreter) have expired, but Microsoft's (ClearType's subpixel rendering method) have not.
The cost of format conversion can be made very low by having it done automatically by the web server. It'll just take some time for the software to do that.
I'm not sure how race got involved.

Many people agree with you that people should take care of themselves, and that Social Security and Medicare should be, at most, a safety net for people who would otherwise be old folks on the streets without healthcare. Such a policy is usually referred to as "means testing" retirement benefits.

Eliminating government retirement benefits altogether will never happen because no one likes seeing 70 year-olds suffering in poverty, but they don't dislike it enough to ameliorate the problem directly via charity. Humans are weird like that.
Well, there are rumors of the DP-able iPad 2.

Yes, that type of DP.