skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While this is a general problem with Krugman, and not a problem specific to this column, people who disagree with higher rates of taxes on the rich would do so for the following reasons:

1) Efficiency concerns: decentralized allocation of capital versus political allocation of capital

2) Business cycle concerns: raising taxes in a recession was one of the things done during the Great Depression, and there's a reason it lasted 12 years.

3) Fairness concerns: The rich already give about half their income to government (depending on the state and the method by which they earn their income). How much is too much?

4) Revenue concerns: the income of the rich is highly volatile, and so is the revenue of a country that depends on heavily progressive taxation.

5) Long term economic growth concerns: Capital is more mobile than ever, and people will prefer to invest in countries with lower taxes, ceteris paribus.

6) The Laffer Curve: it has an inflection point.

I'm not saying the anti-taxers are right, but any honest commentator should acknowledge that some arguments exist on the other side. But in Krugman's world, people only disagree with him because of personality flaws (angry, selfish, myopic, stupid, etc.). I can't stand the man's smug self-righteousness which he keeps regardless of how mainstream or controversial his opinion on the topic at hand. The man sold his soul to democratic socialism a long time ago to the point he pretends that no other valid worldview exists.

I can't think of a single economics columnist who is more partisan or who treats his opponents with less regard.

In particular, this article scans like a college newspaper op-ed. It is a simple Rah Rah piece for his side. It could have been written by a campus Marxist group. "Look at the poor rich folks, struggling to pay for their private schools and limosines". Gosh Mr. Krugman, with such incisive commentary I can see why you got that Nobel.

And of course he forgets to mention that most rich people vote Democrat, so his entire argument that the rich are "angry" is questionable to start with.
Exactly. He sounds so incredibly human.
i lived the life for 8 years when i was young. everything tony says about cooking, and cooking education is 100% true.

i was far too broke to get into drugs, and thereby did the waitresses stay away too, so i have no entertaining stories of fevered cutting-board liasons. i do have many marginally interesting stories of burns, lacerations and unbelievably horrible working conditions for very little money.

interestingly, the experience has served me very well in the software business. i rarely complain about my chair, monitor, lighting, keyboard or anything else that isn't actively burning.
Hmm...

I got this for a friend of mine about a month ago when it was mentioned.

A couple of things:

They didn't call her every day, it was more random.

They should offer a way to pass-it-on (maybe they do and I just don't know?). That way my friend can go "HOLY CRAP THIS IS COOL!" and forward the reminder to one of her friends.
Personally, no, I love the shit out of sprawling twisting recursing sentences that end at the beginning and some where new simultaneously. Give me all the ambiguity, vagary and literary wankery that you can muster. Not to say my bookshelf is not equally full of horrible sci-fi that would get me laughed out of an english department for owning, let alone enjoying.

I responded the way I did because it was easy and snarky. The OP claimed to prefer the "straightforward" prose that the article lambasted, and then illustrated it with maybe the worst possible quote (for the purpose) out of the entire article. Combined with:

solipsistic, narcissistic - such as those quoted in the submission (the elimination pun; the parallel of temper and years.)

Led me to feel that 10ren has no idea what solipsistic, narcissitic or straightforward mean and in general no clue. So... I snarked.
That's an example of lock-in that makes absolutely no sense. Why would you do that with USB extension cords of all things? The only reason I can think of--it physically locks the cables together better so it doesn't pop open in the middle of the extension cord where it's difficult to reach and reattach.
Why I'm Still Learning Clojure
Thanks for the source on Zynga's connection to Zwinky. I knew there was some sort of connection, but my face got horribly red when I realized "wait, he's right--Zynga didn't make Zwinky."
This app is amazing! Will it support HN's OpenID login?
And since this CAPTCHA isn't secure at all, they'll remove the security element altogether, making it a more annoying version of a banner ad.
The banks seem to have plenty of money sitting in their coffers to loan out. I've never heard of a (healthy) bank- even smaller neighborhood banks- run into trouble because the wealthy aren't stashing all their cash into their checking accounts.

After the IPO (and other secondary offerings), "the market" usually doesn't drive a corporation's funding. Companies can make some small out of money from releasing new stock, but not counting things like bond issuances (ie, borrowing from people or banks), they don't benefit from people playing the market.

That HDTV was probably built in China, not Japan. Even so, a lot of that money stays behind, in the distribution and retail channel. Someone's got to drive the trucks from the ports to the stores, for example.
I wonder if there are any examples of SproutCore being used in a decently progressively enhancing way. The last time I looked through, JavaScript disabled/unavailable view was an empty div.

Might be strange to pick up the lack of attention on progressive enhancement from a JavaScript library developer group, but take a look at what davglass is doing with YUI and node.js in terms of progressive enhancement (for example http://ajaxian.com/archives/progressive-enhancement-using-no... ). The ability to run the same javascript on the client and the server introduces a powerful new way to do progressive enhancement, this opens up possibilities of taking a very rich interactive application that works decently enough on a constrained platform/network (very much directly aimed at the Sprout Core "we do web applications not websites so we don't have to bother about non-javascript" philosophy at their original launch)

The ability to build upon what's already there is important. So a solid approach to progressive enhancment is necessary for any JavaScript library that wants to be anywhere near web developer mainstream.
Tough Interview Questions and the Answers Managers Want
It's not that aggravating to me personally--that just means I have three blades instead of five before I have to decide whether to try another razor or buy more cartridges for the same one. I hate wasting or throwing things away, so if I hate the razor completely I won't have to suffer through it for very long if it only comes with 2 more blades.

Really, I'd be happy if it just came with no extra blades at all.
So, after you're the "alpha dog," what happens? Do all the babes start liking you? Have you finally made it?

I realize that power has an effect on social relationships of every kind, but the these sorts of articles always strike me as addressing the symptoms of a problem (such as low self-confidence) rather than the problem itself. This is probably because the root of the problem is not a simple prescriptive fix. They also assume on some level that you should strive to have the upper hand in every encounter, which is unrealistic and off-putting. The need to be the "alpha dog" does nothing to abate feelings of insecurity, as you're still engaged in a constant cycle of judgment and one-upping others.

Why do we encourage people to remain in this cycle? Oh, right, we've all been told we have to be "alpha."

Whatever that means.
Maybe Google is afraid of Twitter's search potential?
It's for the Catalan language:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cat -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language

I think I need to take a look at the TLDs available, lately, because I know a lot have slipped under my radar.
NASA's Flickr photostream
You aren't getting it. The probability is 1/<number of options you present to the user>. If you show the user 100 images and ask them to select one, a bot will have a 1% probability to find the right one, but the user will tell you to get lost.

If you present 10 images (still a stretch), bots will have 10% success rate just answering randomly.

EDIT: Wait, from what I see you mean that the user will have to write "cat" or "dog" or whatever? That's better, yes. Communication, however, is hard, which is why me the GP didn't understand what you meant.
When girls are taught in high school how they, too, can cultivate glorious, full-bodied beards, we will see gender balance in the hacker community.
Fedora's Automated Bug Reporting Tool (abrt) uses this to automatically produce crash reports, which you can sanitize and approve to post in a central location for developers. I imagine that Ubuntu does something similar.
It seems like "ability to run JavaScript" is as much a core requirement of a browser as "ability to render HTML" at this point. Are users with JavaScript turned off really worth targeting?
You need to read that final sentence in context. It is part of a very carefully written passage in which Bourdain attempts to convey the following message:

Do not get addicted to drugs. You will fuck up your life.

to the audience that most needs to hear it without coming off as judgmental, or holier-than-thou, or hopelessly clueless and naive, or unaware of his own good fortune, and without angering the people -- many of whom he probably counts as friends -- for whom self-medicating with drugs and booze is the least fucked-up of a number of fucked-up alternatives.

My paraphrase accomplishes none of these things, which is why Bourdain is Bourdain and I'm just a drive-by commenter on HN who cooks only as a hobby.
I was a keen astronomer as a kid, and later almost did my PhD in cosmology. So I know my way around the sky. Later I used to climb mountains. I was walking into the Himalya one time, in Nepal, sitting around drinking beers and observing the sky. It was the clearest sky I'd ever seen. There was so much stuff visible. So much, it made distinguishing the constellations harder than usual. Jupiter was in the sky that night and I have always told the story that it is the only time I've seen its moons with my naked eye.

I've never questioned that until now. But frankly that wasn't the most memorable part of the night, I didn't realise it was a rarity. If ever there was a time when you could use the word awesome that was it.

So, yup, I certainly believe it's possible. Just wish I had the eyes I had then.
Until you ask, well why do people use long tail search terms? Might it be because the "head terms" do not offer them what they wanted.

Unless, long tail search terms really are something of a waste of time for the user and the head term can offer them just what they wanted anyway, but the user was ignorant of that.
Ah, somehow I missed the date the article was written. Apologies to Mr. Pincus for making it seem like he was an a priori hypocrite.

Still, I find it a little ironic that he would later say things like, "I did every horrible thing in the book to get the revenues" -- paraphrasing since I don't recall the exact quote.

As far as the charity split is concerned, I agree 50% isn't bad in most cases. However, I imagine margins are essentially zip for Zynga in this case, whereas most charities that take a cut of donations do have high operating costs.
Does this letter really capture the attitude towards ethics at HBS? Any alumni/student care to elaborate?
This is a pretty thin "article". His arguments seem to boil down to:

- Code quality: patio11 says the code is awful

- Architecture: the author had a "vision" of what it would be, didn't match his expectations

- Bikesheds: the author thinks they should have build upon XMPP and CouchDB instead of OStatus+their own sauce and Mongo. Also tosses in random snark about Rails for good measure.

Better we just link to patio11's code quality critiques again, which was actually actionable, rather than this kind of nonsense.

Unrelated to the article itself, at least half of the author's "Top 10" articles in the sidebar are "things that will (or have) failed", and most of the article titles read like linkbait.
Only half of the people is arrogant.

The other half is condescending.
> But they need distribution, and they got that through Pincus

Point conceded, I didn't know about that.

> You really can not compare the two.

A fair comparison isn't far out of reach - Shazam (red) only donates 20% of its iPhone app sales. My point isn't about these specific deals, it's that charity-share deals aren't uncommon and a 50% share is above industry standard.

And for what it's worth, Zynga did spike their contributions to 100% after the earthquake hit. Through the sales of items in Farmville, they raised over $1.5M for earthquake relief, more than most NGOs, private companies, and countries.
Add a Stylish Audio Player to your Blog Without using Plugins
Stop Using the Go Button for Search
Ask HN: Is the statement "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere" always factual?
Of course there is the song, and a wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Five_O%27Clock_Somewhere

But, what if it is 14:02 in Mumbai? And what about our whole notion of time being a good deal fabricated? Does "somewhere" include other universes, and would 5 o'clock in another universe be included in somewhere? Could somewhere also include a black hole in our universe where what we might call 5 o'clock exists even though it is 8:49 in Toulouse?

Is or isn't this statement (often) factually incorrect?
McDonald's Actual Foursquare Test Numbers: 2,865 Check-Ins
Super salmon or 'Frankenfish'? FDA to decide
PBworks will discontinue support for OpenID on September 27, 2010
Gruber linked to a developer who doubled the iPhone 4's framerate (to 45 FPS) with a simple optimization: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/09/20/not-so-fast

Looks like the improved version erases just the previous frame's ball, instead of clearing the whole canvas (just my best interpretation -- I'm not familiar with the canvas API).

EDIT: This link details what's going on here:

One important optimization rule to follow is to reuse as many pixels as possible between frames. What I mean by that is the fewer pixels that need to be processed each frame, the faster your program will run. A good example of this is when erasing pixels with the clearRect(x,y,w,h)method, it is very beneficial to clear and redraw only the pixels that have changed and not, for instance, a full screen 1920x1280 sized canvas. Unlike the Flash Player’s redraw regions, this management of "dirty rectangles" needs to be done manually for canvas. [http://www.kontain.com/fi/entries/94636/]

Apparently Flash Player optimizes the reuse of pixels automatically, and MobileSafari does not.
Would sproutcore still play nice in a development cycle if I only wanted to use it for a nice shopping cart implementation, but use adhoc javascript everywhere else on a website? The last time I looked at it, it seemed to only excel if you needed to implement one giant js application.
seems that the switch allows them to funnel people into the head terms, away from the long tail, which would improve their cache performance, saving money (which was briefly mentioned in the article, too).
Not if the well-commented blog entry is 99% viagra comments.
There are other causes of JavaScript not being run in a browser than a visitor turning JavaScript off. A mobile phone running off a flaky 3G network is still a common issue outside of Silicon Valley.

The ability to support your intended audience is still an important factor in building websites.
From HN guidelines:

If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it.
That's what I thought initially - but I kept on reading. Chapter 5 details exactly this scenario, albeit as a "more radical" "longer-term" option.
By the way the performance increase you're seeing with the PyInvoker (from your gist) is most likely because it doesn't have prefetch_count enabled.

Celery enables this so a single worker doesn't suck in a million messages at a time, and to balance the work load between available resources. As noted previously it can be disabled.

Btw, octobot looks great, maybe we can share ideas.
There is also a lot of childish fucking around and casual piss-taking that doesn't happen among Lispers.

Maybe not anymore, but that stuff used to happen very regularly on comp.lang.lisp during the years I paid attention to it (2003ish through 2006ish, maybe).
It's more subtle than that. The MySQL people never really understood relational databases or the way they were used. Back in the 90s, their documentation was full of explanations about why you didn't need foreign keys (too slow) or transactions (do it in your application if you need it) etc etc etc. They "grew up" a bit as the years went by and grudgingly added a few of these features in as an afterthought.

But if you need a single-user database there's SQLite and if you need a free serious RDBMS there's Postgres. There's really no ecological niche for MySQL. It only hangs on because sites like Slashdot use it (and if you have thousands of reads for every write, and do only very simple queries, it is adequate).
Dude, you may not buy it all you want - I just watched hour worth of cartoons from YouTube with my daghter so I don't care.
SQLWitch: A minimalist SQL generator for Python 2.5+ on top of MySQLdb
If you think that is bad imagine how much Nike paid for just three words. (just do it)

Volume is a poor measurement of effort and value when it comes to design (and coding for that matter).
No, My is Monty's own nickname.
Twitter search might be useful to track breaking news, conferences or celebrity gossip, but I wouldn't count on it to find something remotely useful.

I don't even claim that low signal-to-noise ratio is to blame here. I believe it's rather the length limit, it's obvious that the more content you have, the better index you can build for a given document.

PS. Google has its own real-time search, crawling primarily Twitter updates.
http://bit.ly/9PUpaf
Startup service for apartment hunters
Earlier this year I wrote a fan letter to Daniel D. McCracken, crediting him for inspiring me:

---

Some time in the mid-to-late-60s when I was a high school kiddie, I discovered to my dismay that I had succeeded in cleaning out my local public library of all its science fiction titles. I noticed an old-at-the-time volume, Wiener's "Cybernetics", and thought the title had a nice technical computer-y ring to it. Nevermind that I'd never seen a computer outside of NASA documentary films and didn't stand a ghost of a chance of ever meeting one.

A week later I closed the cover, contemplating what I'd read. There was something attractive there, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it, and I looked around for other computer-y titles. Sadly, there were none to be had. Shrug.

Next summer my parents moved to another city, giving me access to a new public library to plunder. That's when I found your Fortran guide; I tore through it, fascinated at the clarity with which you could program one of those storied beasts. I wrote a fair number of programs at home, curled up on the sofa under the lamp by the side table, thoroughly desk-checking and pretend-executing them. Couldn't run a single one, for I had no access to a computing system, but I was hooked solidly.

I got my Mom to drop me off in downtown Orlando so I could see what other computer titles there were at the big library. I came home with Weiss' Lisp 1.5 Primer. Wow that's different, I remember thinking.

My physics teacher had a handful of books on his shelf, including Fink's "Computers and the Human Mind", which was a fun read, and Adler's "Thinking Machines", which was also nontechnical but still exciting.

A brand-new state university was in its second year of operation in Fall of 1969, and offered one of the few computer science degrees that could be had in the US at the time. Best of all it was in my back yard, and there was little doubt that I'd do computer science.

40 years later here I am, still doing this stuff and still loving it.

In a substantial way, it's your doing. Thank you for that Fortran book, the first book I ever picked up that really fired me up, that told me that THIS is what I want to do.
I don't have extensive experience with either (just some toys and experiments really) but Mojo just feels so much cleaner. If you read the front page it talks about how it's 'fresh code' by people with experience working on Catalyst itself -- IMO it really comes across: no cruft, lean-clear docs (granted a bit sparse last time I looked), a whole bunch of 'out of the box' niceties that are all over the 'blogosphere' these days (JSON, REST, async IO, etc). I'd definitely recommending just giving them both a spin for a toy project and see how they sit with you.
Why would they release non-optimized? Fail fast?

H.264 is probably hard indeed, but with right command line optimizations doable.
What we're missing from that quote is context. Also, it appears to have worked for Mr. Pincus and not for his competitors, obviously he did something a little different.
Nope, I don't think it's unfair that the people who earn more pay more. In fact, I'm for it. However, what I'm against is even a small group not paying for it. This "small" group right now is nearly half of the population.

The argument for regressive taxes is also poor. Come to New Hampshire where there is no sales tax or W-2 income tax. The air is clean, the mountains well hiked and the people friendly. Take a look at the state's finances too. The regressive taxes there are on inheritance, dividends, investment income and a few things else I can't remember. That hits the rich far more than the poor.
Yes, but if you're targeting mobile devices, you can load them a different set of javascript that would be lighter load on the network. I think it's kind of pointless to use something like Unobtrusive Javascript support because if you're one of those users with javascript disabled, we probably wouldn't want you as our target audience anyway.
Yeah. I found out that if I deposit 30k in a 12% growth account I'll have $2m by 65.
I work for a small startup with retirement plan. I just move 10% of my monthly income into a Roth.

The harder question now is what to invest the Roth in? CDs are terrible, T-bills would require like a 5 year investment to see decent return... index funds? I'm stumped here and my old CDs are about to come up soon.
InDinero’s Jessica Mah: This Is A 20-30 Year Company
My husband and I both have IRAs (don't quality for ROTH) with ShareBuilder, into which we put very little money monthly. I recently started working at a company with 401K matching and do the full match on that.
How come there's a "thank you" for a Los Angeles map, but I don't see it on the site?
yes! i've been rolling my raises into a 401k. it has grown surprisingly, but i've been doing to good thing and not looking at it unless i have to :D
I can't tell if you are not entirely sober or way too philosophical, but I think you are confusing timekeeping (as a socially agreed convention for referring to time) and time the physical quantity (the fourth dimension if you prefer).

I very much suspect the song refers to the former.
As would I, as "pushing the data onto the client and using it from there" is by far my biggest issue with Silverlight. I was surprised to see a framework that specialized in doing this.