skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The deficit only appeared to be going down because GDP was distorted by a massive asset bubble, which just might have had something to do with the second (JGGTRA) cut bringing forward cuts in capital gains taxes that were supposed to be phased in slowly. And as I have observed elsewhere, doing absolutely nothing to trim its own spending.

Doubtless you also have a justification for things like $38,000 tax breaks on Hummers - http://www.seattlepi.com/local/104601_hummer17.shtml

Sure I can - the recession ended a year ago. More to the point, the spending isn't going down post-recession.

Right, because demand and thus growth are well known for immediately returning to their previous levels following a recession. And increasing your spending at the same time you cut taxes, using borrowed money, is fiscally responsible and doesn't have the slightest impact on future budgets.

You're claiming that the rich aren't paying enough. I'm pointing out that they're paying more than they did before.

a) No I'm not, I think everyone is going to have to pay some more taxes;

b) They're paying more in nominal terms because they have a greater share of national income. Let's consider an example.

I am rich, you are not. My income works out at $1,000/day, yours is more like $200/day. I pay, say, $400/day in taxes, you pay something like $50. We are more or less OK with that.

Then I fire you (and a lot of other people) and outsource your factory job to someone in Asia, who is willing to work for $20/day and pays no US income tax. You get another job, probably at a Walmart, that pays $100/day and now you only pay $10 of it in taxes, mostly payroll. My income has gone up to $2,000/day and I'm paying $700 of that in taxes (because the tax rate got cut a little bit, from 40% to 35%).

I think it's just terrible that I'm paying an extra $300 in taxes already and now Obama wants to put it up to a total of $800, which will leave me taking home only twice as much as I was before. You should feel sorry for me, because you are 80% better off than you were before: you used to pay $50 in taxes, but now you only pay $10, you freeloader. My taxes are 70 times higher than yours, and Obama wants to make it 80 times higher.

Stupid, right? But that entire last paragraph is technically true. It just invites you to forget, briefly, about the changes in how much we take home each day. If I'm feeling particularly lucky, I might try changing the subject to something else, and then reminding you of how little you earn so I can attribute the blame to Obama for that, too.
I'm hoping for some sort of follow function. Is that it?
Beware of cultural aspects
Cringely:  Google entering the payday loan business?
Open Letter from a concerned US Citizen to the rest of the world
I think you're confusing the time value of money with the cash value of time :)
ha nice one, but astley video is blocked.
"Moreover, it takes, on average, about 20 years for professors to attain tenure"

I'd be curious to see the source of that statistic, and what exactly it's including. For instance, is the PhD process part of those 20 years, as well as postdocs? Also, is there a difference for the sciences vs the humanities?
He didn't just stumble upon an overlooked dependency bug — the Debian maintainers intentionally broke their Ruby package years ago because of the legal problems they imagine to exist with using OpenSSL.

I don't think it's so out of bounds to compare Debian, the most copyright-license-obsessed distribution out there, to Microsoft.
Unfortunately, I have no idea what you are talking about. I don't see any plus signs.
Twitter, algorithms, crowdsourcing used to spot truthiness
This study (studies?) has been in the news a lot recently. It seems clear that how you respond to it depends on what role you believe the state should play in the redistribution of wealth. As a disclaimer, I'll say right now that I do not believe the state should play any role in redistributing wealth.

My suspicion is that this study has been presented and promoted as justification for increased taxation of the wealthy. Of course, increased taxation of upper quintiles won't actually change the distribution of wealth unless the government directly transfers the proceeds of increased taxation to those in the lower quintiles. But that won't happen. Instead, the increased taxes would be used to give those in the lower quintiles services that the government has decided they need (or to further subsidize corn farming or other friends of the party in power).

As a thought experiment, I wonder how many people would support a proposal to take the aggregate payroll of their local NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL franchise, and distribute it evenly among all of the players on the team roster. Not many, I suspect.
VCs are in it to make money, not just to help people realize their ambitions. For them it's better to push companies towards the explosive growth path, because it means a better payday for them. And in a place like silicon valley where promising startups staffed by the best engineers in the world rain from the sky like manna this sort of strategy is eminently feasible.

However, it's not necessarily the best strategy for the average startup, which may find itself destroyed as grist for the VC money mill.

Fortunately, there's a place for both "next big thing" companies as well as "next little thing" companies. And there's nothing wrong with doing bread-and-butter business helping entrepreneurs realize their dreams even if it doesn't result in gigadollars and news coverage on CNN.
Alas, if anything I ever wrote commanded criticism akin to that in comment #59 by voralex I think I could die happy.
Arrington's post says all the right things, but it does not contain the word "money". It's not a dirty or shameful word, and a discussion of a sale of a company that makes no reference to it is obviously incomplete.
So from the thread below it sounds like Oracle actually acquired Sun primarily for their customer base alone, a large pool of cashed up blue chips for Oracle's sales force to feast on. The engineering culture and aptitude at Sun would from this strategy just be considered overhead, thus the mass exodus of talent. So perishes a once mighty titan.

Still, will be interesting to see what happens with the seeds flung off from this tempest.
It is a perpetual arms race.
Former Airmen to Government: Come Clean on UFOs
HP's Todd Bradley slips 'PalmPad' tablet name during analyst call
Featuring the website me and my coworkers just launched today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1736952
Gild Turns Hunting For A Tech Job Into A Game
Wow, this really isn't very black and white...

I suppose it's like having some treatment for cancer that is ugly and grueling. Then discovering an elegant cure.

The cure, however, has some mind-manipulating exploit that is only known to you.

What do you do?

Cure people from unnecessary suffering of cancer? Or avoid giving people a vulnerability, unknown to everyone else?
> Half the population will be paid above average, half below, obviously.

It depends on the distribution. I would assume it's not exactly symmetrical.
IOS 4.2 Beta 2 Now Available to iPhone and iPad Developers
Interesting results. I think atheists/Jewish people perform best because these are the two groups most likely to encounter defensive conversations on the subject of religion? I know I learned a lot more about other religions and the concept of religion in general after becoming atheist, probably incentivised by increased likelihood of debate.
He mentions their "endless tech problems". Never noticed that.
People who are serious about their privacy or who really have something to hide don't use Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Yahoo services in the first place.
What Twitter Learns from All Those Tweets
They're on WordPress VIP. I don't know why they would have endless tech problems seeing that they're hosted on the largest WordPress system.

EDIT: Yes, I know that WordPress VIP does go down, but that's WordPress.com's problem, not TechCrunch's.
Deploy a rich communications app in 3 minutes with Ruby, Heroku, and Tropo
Key quote from the article... "their strategy seems to have revolved around buying second-tier applications and frittering away those startups’ talent and userbases."
aside from #6, this is great in general career advice across sectors...not just YC advice.
"So "hate" is not too strong a word, I think, for how nonacademics feel about us."

Only in the sense that "hate" is not too strong a word for how New Englanders feel about the New York Yankees: the hate is valid for the duration of conversation over beers or one call to the sports talk station. I think about "professors", oh, five minutes a month if I'm preoccupied with higher education.
What’s the most commonly used framework for web development and why?
I've recently come across a problem that might be a problem for now, but can be a problem later, and that is choosing the right web development framework for a website project. I'm sure this happened to many of others out there, too.<p>I want to incorporate the framework so that the development is more efficient, easy to maintain, easy to scale, have full control in what you want to do and not too limited by the constraints of the framworkable, separation between front-end interface, business logic and data retrieval (i guess more dyanmic).<p>So first of all, i would like ask what is the most commonly used framework out there? and what is the advantage of using it over others?<p>and what about ASP.NET MVC, Ruby On Rails and Yii? and any input on these three framework? Thanks.
I'm a web/logo designer, and here's why this is wrong:

First off it's trying to apply the rules that dictate one medium to another. While certain basic principles often transverse mediums, this does not. They're trying to state that what works for blending colors in an art medium will work for trying to convey information on a content delivery medium. Remember though that in impressionist paintings the focus is on the lighting and the brush strokes, generally with an ordinary subject matter - or rather, the focus wasn't on the information, but on how it was presented. This is almost entirely opposite to what the web brings to the table - the focus is on the information, with the presentation being a way to best show that information. If you focus on the design over the content, you'll end up with a pretty site, but one that isn't functional. As programmers and hackers, all of you should know how well that ends up.

Also though, keep in mind that Monet was one painter out of millions using one style out of thousands. What about ink and wash paintings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_and_wash_painting)? Their entire focus is on the subtle and effective use of absolute black. Remember that there is no universal dos or donts in design, just guidelines. Saying you should "never use black" (or any color for that matter) is like saying you should never use X tool in your arsenal. You should never purposefully limit your tools, rather you should learn how to effectively use all the tools you have. Given the right conditions, even a goto statement can be the correct choice.
1997 Royal Navy Field Gun Competition
Take the quiz here: http://features.pewforum.org/quiz/us-religious-knowledge/
Does HN really have to go down the same path as reddit and digg? I was hoping it wouldn't happen.
I've found that reddit/digg have become, whats the word, an echo chamber for those with left-wing views. I'm here for the tech news, not that stuff.
TC downtime on Wordpress VIP: http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/10/wordpress-gives-us-the-vip-...
Even if it didn't mean disclosing the sale price. It's strange that MA doesn't talk at all about money—seems like it's his character to be blunt. Perhaps it (ironically) reveals more than he'd like to.
Funny -- I have been working for an hourly rate the past year or so, having been salaried for all my jobs previously. Being paid by the hour really opened my eyes to the "cost" of almost everything else I do. Why, just responding to this post "cost" me a couple of dollars....
Tsunami Continues to Rip Through VC Industry
App Makers in China Struggle on Home Turf
That's some pretty impressive use of ellipsis there.
Doesn't that support pg's argument vs. Arrington's?
If you're on the internet, you're not being paranoid enough.

Though that's a good reminder :) Thanks for pointing it out!
India Launches Project to ID 1.2 Billion People
This is sad. Founded by a computer scientist, DE Shaw is perhaps the most tech-focused among hedge funds.

I once had a very challenging technical job interview there. Several interviewers had PhD in Computer Science.
Discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1734788
Here's the outcome that I see happening:

The general public won't notice/know about a difference; the people who use encryption and those who have something to hide will switch to something that doesn't have a back door, thus defeating the entire purpose of the law; and black hats everywhere will smile like it's Christmas morning.
Nooo! You're spoiling it for everyone who hasn't seen it yet!
Yes, PHL/BOS/CHI/SEA/NYC/BLT/XYZ does Web startups
I got 12 out of 15 correct, trying not to take too long figuring out the answers.
I always noticed massive slowdowns loading all their JS rubbish when I load their page, but I agree; I've never seen their site down that I recall.
I'd guess they are starting the clock at high school graduation.
Just like a technical firm needs to iterate on the products and infrastructures. A trading firm needs to iterate on the algorithms and infrastructures to stay competitive.

Market changes constantly. Many trading algorithms are essentially market-data driven and need to adapt to the market or lose.
I can't speak as to whether or not it would be a good idea for -dbg packages to run unit tests, but their nominal purpose is that they contain extra symbols to allow for debugging.

http://wiki.debian.org/DebugPackage
It depends on your karma actually. I'm not sure how much you need to get it, but I have it with my karma.
Thank god chrome lets me disable future alert messages...
I got 14. The last one was a stumper!
It's described as "questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions" but it's basically a quiz about Christianity, containing questions that even Christians may miss unless they paid attention in history class, with a couple of very basic questions about other religions thrown in.

For example, "Which one of these preachers participated in the period of religious activity known as the First Great Awakening?" and a question asking whether Catholics believe communion wafers and wine become the body and blood of Christ or just symbolize the body and blood of Christ, versus, "In which religion are Vishnu and Shiva central figures?" and a question basically asking which religion observes Ramadan.
I don't have the stats, but anecdotally I can report that that time emphatically does not include the PhD process, and almost certainly doesn't include post-doc time. There is probably a big difference between the sciences and the humanities here- my guess is that it's longer for humanities than sciences, but I could easily be wrong about that.
I got 93%, but I really don't see the value of this survey. It was a set of meta religious questions more than religious questions. If you choose Religion as a Jeopardy topic, these are the kind of questions I would expect.
IIRC, it takes 200 karma to get a downvote button.
Wow, nice! I got #15 wrong too, along with 4, and 6.
Oh, just Google's search. If I want to find something I previously read I Google it now instead of sifting through crufty, old, poorly organized and needlessly hierarchical bookmarks. Tagged bookmarks would help there I guess (like Delicious) but then you have to tag everything...
Those prices aren't even that good. Flagged.
I use it because it runs on Linux. Also, I happen to not mind it
It'd definitely put a new bent on up or down voting comments. I'm using it to blow away the comments.
Very good points. Every time I go to www.airbnb.com, I'm always struck by the extremely high quality of the photos on their home page. It's a small thing that definitely goes a long way in getting people excited to use the site. When I see a beautiful photo of a beautiful home, I want to stay there.
On entrepreneurship, double-downs and exits
Add to this:

More diverse economy: If you're doing anything that involves selling to companies instead of individuals (and a substantial portion of YC companies, for instance, do), cities like Philly or Boston already host broad groups of big companies, and whole constellations of smaller companies that work with them, all of whom have IT shops of varying degrees of sophistication, which creates a myriad of opportunities for selling into real companies.
Sure, but there are already a number of machines you can do that with. I'm sure there is some reason to do this, but I can't think of many good ones.
5 Reasons Why The World Could Use More Gordon Gekko’s Right Now
I've got 1920x1200 + 2*1600x1200 pixels. Maximizing even on one of my "small" monitors would be a waste. Also, wide layouts are hard to read.

I'm also always doing several things at once, so I'll tend to fill up one browser window with tabs related to one topic, then launch off on another tangent and fill more browser windows with more tabs. And that's just on one of my 9 virtual desktops. So having only one browser window visible makes it hard to keep track of what window has what information.

My usage pattern is not typical.
As the co-editor of a competing blog with similar scale, let me just say this: the tech headaches are endless. There's so much crap we deal with behind the scenes that you just don't see on Mashable.com or TechCrunch.com.

But I assure you, I've had my share of late nights dealing with technology issues.
Personally, I agree that if you can find someone willing to sell you crack, and you want to buy it, you should be able to do so without facing jailtime.

However, this doesn't mean that I would feel okay about selling you crack myself, or that I think highly of people who are willing to sell you crack.

One can agree that something is undesirable or even evil without thinking it should be illegal, and yeah, personally, I think that both encouraging another person to use a highly addictive substance and profiting from usurious loans are "evil" acts, even though I don't think either one should be illegal.
Two-Way Instapaper Sync for Windows and Your E-book Reader
But then you don't get sub-pixel anti-aliasing, and on the very monitor where you do most of your reading.
This should be integrated in Adblock. Adding filters by blasting the ads you don't like actually sounds fun.
You are allowed into the US for business on the visa-waiver or the B1 visa (which is easy to get and is the default for non visa-waiver countries I think). But you can't _work_ there. It's a subtle distinction, and I suspect it relies on how the immigration official is feeling that day. Meetings, conferences, meeting investors, networking, etc, are all OK.

Doing the job you normally do isn't allowed, but it seems like it's pretty obvious that people do that.
Css Hover Toolbar : Free CSS Menu Maker
It is flagrantly unlikely that this law would outlaw OpenSSH or GPG, or in any way change the way normal people use OpenSSH or GPG. I say "unlikely", a hedging word, which you did not use, because nobody knows what this proposal actually contains, because it hasn't been disclosed yet.

The probability that the federal government could outlaw OpenSSH is epsilon. You can don the tinfoil hat and argue anything, but the reality is that the government cannot outlaw or even substantially influence the IT practices of all five hundred of the Fortune 500.

So, at the risk of sounding like Vizzini, clearly, the objective here can't simply be to outlaw cryptography, because that is an untenable proposition. What is substantially more likely is that the DoJ wants RIM and Skype to build CALEA-style systems so that BBM's and Skype calls don't constitute an immediate exemption from all wiretaps. Call it the "criminals should not be secure from wiretaps by default" proposition.

Before you geek out about how you could (say) use OpenSSH to build a non-wiretappable voice network, remember that the people writing and arguing for these proposals are not geeks, and they do not care.
Gripe wants to build a business around your Twitter complaints
Completely agree that Vancouver could use more technical founders, but we do have plenty of "technical people", and you're right, lots are in the gaming industry. (the compass engine and dimerocker founders came from there)

It's hard to find "technical people" who are in a position to take the financial risk of starting a company. We're working hard (and I mean hard) to fix that by making more money available to them. Bootup's minimum criteria is, and has been for some time, that at least one co-founder has to be highly technical, but preferably both. But ideally, balanced in that the other would be heavy on design and user experience, HTML5/CSS.
Any company where tech people are the equivalent of high tech janitors is going to have endless tech problems. Smart nerdy types won't want to work there, and the company won't want to put enough resources into a cost center.

There's a good lesson in there about only working at places where you contribute to income.
What you're describing here is the notion of activity systems! Michael Porter describes the concept in detail in the article "What is Strategy," Harvard Business Review. The crux of the idea is that the strategic position of a product hinges on a system of activities across a range of areas, from marketing, to product development, to distribution. Activity systems are a source of sustainable competitive advantage because a competitor can imitate one or two activities, but often not the entire system. In other words, a competitor (e.g., RIM) can imitate Apple's hardware or its software, but this is not sufficient. To really compete with Apple, a competitor would need to imitate (and supersede) Apple on a number of fronts: hardware, software, marketing/branding, distribution, logistics, etc. Needless to say, this is quite a challenge!

One of the most stark examples is Southwest Airlines. Scheduled passenger air transportation is a highly transparent industry due to the heavy regulation by the U.S. DOT and the FAA. Despite the fact that competitors know the precise activities that Southwest Airline's performs, they have been generally unable to imitate and compete. And there have been a number of attempts by both legacy and start-up carriers.
"Law" is [theoretically] a consensus on "fairness". If we all went around killing each other based on our personal views, well that just wouldn't be very fair, now would it?
"Tim asked me how things were going at TechCrunch. I told him I was exhausted after five years but that a recent move to Seattle made it easier to balance my life."

Translation: Dear California FTB, my move had absolutely nothing to do with tax avoidance on a cash windfall and I really am a Washington resident. I had NO idea we were being acquired when I made the move 4 months ago... I'm as surprised as you are. Seriously. For reals.

Teasing aside, Mike's built an impressive media business from scratch over the last 5 years. It's been fun to watch, and I'm sincerely happy for him. If you're reading, Mike - congratulations!
New-Twitter proportions
With due respect, HN is not meant to be a source of tech news. From the site guidelines:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Regardless of one's religious views, this article appears to be exemplary of "intellectual curiosity" since that is what's needed to venture outside of, and learn more about religions other than one's own.