skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes I did. There is a precise analogy between Social Security and Madoff's fund, the only difference is that Madoff's rope was a bit shorter because he doesn't have the power to force all working Americans to sign up.

But, just as Madoff eventually ran out of new investors and due to a market dip was unable to continue to pay out the fake proceeds, demographic trends will make the US Government unable to pay out the proceeds promised to all the people who pay payroll tax every paycheck.

Already, the government has cut social security benefits drastically. I'm not talking about harming the rich, these are working class people forced to invest 12.5% of their lifetime earnings into a scheme that has zero guarantees and a history of profligacy.

Note: If you look at income + payroll tax, we don't have nearly as progressive a system as you might imagine. That would perhaps be fine if there were actually a safety net being provided.
The U.S. Treasury stepped in to prop up the banks (i.e. the financial system) with the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP. This was essentially taxpayers loaning money to banks in trouble which were threatening to bring down the entire financial system, since no one else would, in exchange for ownership in the banks. The Federal Reserve is not the same thing as the Treasury.
Exclusive Mock First Look: RIM’s Playbook Prototype*
Yes. Fight The Man because they keep doing things. We must stop that kind of reckless behavior.
PAW Web Server for Android
Does anybody write C extensions like this anymore? Most of the time it's easier to use swig or cython. If it's really simple, you can also use ctypes.
Goodsie Lets You Create a Highly Customizable Online Storefront
My Safari Extension - Mindful Browsing
Don't jump on it yet, alpha capabilities aren't the only thing that it's missing. After some analysis it doesn't support color profiles - greyscale being the biggest factor here. About to upload a sample black and white image, and you'll see the issues there.
Did you email webmaster or postmaster @domain.com? What contact info is listed in their whois?
$25,000 Print Marketing Algorithm Challenge
Inventions Ease the Plight of Trapped Miners
This is exactly why I'll never buy another computer without an SSD. No other upgrade I've done in the last 10 years has benefited the overall feeling of responsiveness as much. I'd be very interested in seeing a blind taste test of an an Atom + SSD vs. i7 + 7200RPM HD. I bet most would pick the Atom as the faster machine for most common tasks.
It's hard to remember what all you've covered in your essays :) Thanks again.
You've just inspired me to mention my Safari Extension MindfulBrowsing - that does a similar thing. It's been up for a few weeks now, but I hadn't posted it here. Perhaps thanks to you, I don't need to do a chrome port now!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1745790
You really should just leave it alone. Unless you have a personal stake in seeing this fixed, there's just way too much "shoot the messenger" going on these days to do this safely. You don't have to be web-batman. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, if that's your thing. Just remember how often people thought batman was the bad guy.)

You already know that they have very little expertise when it comes to security, are you sure that you can explain to them whats wrong without sounding to them like an evil hacker who broke into their interwebs?
All the politicians in office right now were the highest voted, but that doesn't mean they are good. I didn't click on on the referenced link as I don't even want to know what was second worse.
Create an anonymous email account and launch an EECB (http://consumerist.com/2007/05/how-to-launch-an-executive-em...). If their tech staff isn't listening, maybe you can scare the upper level management to. Just be very, very anonymous with it-- a lot of companies seem to like the "cover our eyes and sue the guy who found it" approach to security holes.
H.264 and VP8 for still image coding: WebP?
Ask PG/HN: Questions about applying to YC
I have an idea I developed recently that I believe is fairly complicated. I would be able to implement only a prototype in the next few days before the deadline. I am in two minds - either I can apply to YC in this round with a prototype only and perhaps hurt my chances or I can apply in the next round with a reasonable "alpha" version of my idea and perhaps increase my chances.

What do you suggest?

Also, do you get people who "reapply" after getting rejected and if so, how many of them make it the second time?
Unless you stop trying to be someone else, and start trying to the best "you" you can be, you're not a novel opportunity.
Ask HN: If you were in charge of yahoo, what would you do?
Curious to hear what people would do, everyone is doubting Carol Bartz, probably rightly. What about an acquisition? Or change of CEO?
I'll just leave this here.

http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~nryan/demos/index.html

Anyone who thinks program complexity is judged solely on program size has never written a demo, or participated in a JAPH/Perl Golf competition.
Well, if it was a private company, let's posit it's set to go broke in 40 years, it'd be trading up for the next 39 years and 364 days.

RE: Your views on SS in general, is that a populist argument for stronger SS and a more progressive income tax?
Medical Practice Web Site Design
Medical Doctor Website Design | Health care web site design and development for physicians, medical practices, medical groups, medical centers, hospitals and other medical health care providers. BizMedical.com
Speed-Reading Techniques
Shout-out to pcardune, who came over from Divvyshot and did a lot of the hi-res stuff at Facebook. Other members of the photos team who were integral to this launch & are HN lurkers: beau, nroman, justinmitchell, makinde.

For the record: we didn't build the product with the goal of competing with Flickr.
Microsoft seeks non-Microsofty person to promote IE9 to non-Microsofty people.
I love this. A Microsoft job posting for an Internet Explorer evangelist. This was too good not to re-post. Some of my favorite excerpts include:<p>"You are someone with a strong background in web application development, and plentiful ideas about what we need to do in the community to change developers’ perceptions of Microsoft. You have boundless energy and enthusiasm, and you’re ready to take on a hostile audience and win them over using well-honed skills of persuasion."<p>"• Changing perceptions of Microsoft and spreading awareness within the standards-based web community;"<p>"Solid technical background and development experience with JavaScript, along with experience with UI AJAX frameworks such as jQuery, YUI, and scriptaculous and server frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and PHP;"<p>"• Unbridled enthusiasm for fostering a successful web developer community;"<p>Nice try, Microsoft. You may be trying to get right with God, but you'll never be right with me.
Actually, a lot of people do write them this way. When you take something you can write quickly and with no dependencies other than python, and instead pull in swig or cython - you now have two problems instead of one.

As the author shows, writing a python c extension is fundamentally easy which is why Python has such a huge ecosystem of them to begin with.
Failures in mobile space cost Steve Ballmer half his bonus
Load MS-Word or Powerpoint with a modestly-graphical document and get back to us.

Or hell, GMail. Or a similar Web 2.0 lagware abortion.
Will URL shorteners kill the Internet?
This is needlessly complicated. You can just use Cython and annotate the types, or, even better, use shedskin to compile your Python code, usually with no changes, to C++ and make a module out of it.

There are many options to speed up your Python code by ~50 times effortlessly. See my blog posts:

http://www.korokithakis.net/node/109

http://www.korokithakis.net/node/117
emacs Lisp still has that "bug."
My programming knowledge base is strongest with C++ and Python. I always start writing projects in Python. Then if psyco hasn't gotten me the performance in the (often very small) sections of code that do the heavy lifting a quick C++ extension is whipped up.

This method is so productive it always surprises me how quickly things get done!
> Changing perceptions of Microsoft and spreading awareness within the standards-based web community;

I believe this is the very definition of a lose-lose situation. Unless the IE9 team starts actually developing to web standards, not to mention allowing their browser to run on XP, IE9 is going to end up being IE6 part 2. Whoever takes this job is going to be ragged on by end users just as bad as the MS PR team on Reddit, and eventually fired in ignomy by MS for not doing what MS hired them to do.
On the other hand, the stats are kind of interesting.

http://goo.gl/info/9Ghq#day
Interesting that this pie chart shows Social Security's budget as about five percent more than DoD's while the components of military spending listed on the sample receipt total less than half of the Social Security spending.
You're correct but the Federal Reserve took actions on its own to try to make the banks solvent and directed the treasury on its course of action. The Federal Reserve ended up with a bunch of garbage on its balance sheet as a result of this activity.

We don't know to what extent because there is no full audit of the Federal Reserve's activities in this department (for our benefit of course).

We do own the "Red Roof Inn" though so that's cool I guess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE3oiKuU8UI
I'm very suspicious of the LISP-Machine nostalgia. I bet once it had grown up to support TCP/IP and firewalls and FireFox and Skype and 3D cards with weird drivers and Win32 compatibility and antivirus software and multiple users with loads of ACL systems and Adobe Reader and Flash and so on, it wouldn't be half as wonderous.
Side Comment: When I see articles like this I feel like its the hayday of digg all over again. And what I really see is "30 ways to list anything to get traffic".
>3. Quit Subvocalizing.

I haven't done this since 4th grade. I'm always surprised when I find another person that still "reads out loud" in their head.
A prototype is enough for us.

We often accept people who reapply. The best known is probably Drew Houston of Dropbox. There were at least two in the most recent batch: FanVibe and PagerDuty. For the PagerDuty guys it was the fourth time they'd applied.
> it scales linearly with the number of direct connections established

Yes, assuming that the overlay algorithm actually establishes direct connections with a small number of peers. That's the way most overlays are designed because they need to reduce the cost of establishing a connection. By way of contrast, I recently worked on a gossip algorithm for producing uniformly distributed peer samples with no warmup time. This algorithm doesnt maintain an adjacency graph at all. Instead it sends a single udp datagram to a different peer at every tick (100 ms for the test system). Its a really simple algorithm that provides stronger guarantees than any existing peer sampling service but replace each datagram with a NAT traversal and the overhead kills it.
And you forgot charging them up on a dremel
That was my main reason for doing it. I was wanted to see what kind of interest it generated without having to wait for analytics to update.
I love how short and simple the tokeniser is:

def tokenize(s):
"Convert a string into a list of tokens."
return s.replace('(',' ( ').replace(')',' ) ').split()
Keep an eye out for Nuitka...

http://kayhayen24x7.homelinux.org/blog/2010/09/nuitka-releas...
These are great when you're worried about performant code:

http://docs.python.org/library/profile.html
http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSpeed/PerformanceTips
Nearby Friends launches new notification service for Facebook Places
>So imagine: You want to stick to Python because it’s so fast to develop in but need the performance of C/C++. Let me introduce you to C extensions in Python.

Let me introduce you to Cython.
Free, high-quality legal docs to get your startup started
Funny how you mention 3D cards and the Web - both were extensively prototyped on Lisp Machines. As was just about everything even vaguely worth using in modern computing.

As for "Win32 compatibility, antivirus software, Adobe Reader and Flash" - let's bolt oxcart compatibility onto your car and see how well it handles on the freeway.
The Chrome extension reverse-engineered the API from the Google toolbar, it wasn't officially released.
I notice my UI hanging all the damn time. VMWare, there's a company that loves a good laggy UI, firewall vendors and web browser companies do too, so does Adobe, explorer, Vista screen grabbing utility, iTunes, iPhoto...

Almost anything which uses a network connection more than SSH or FTP, especially anything with remote procedure calls such as WMI. Anything that invokes a virtual machine such as a Java or .Net program, PowerShell is particularly bad.

You haven't noticed your UI hanging? What do you use - a Chrome, a terminal and vim?
Click on the link up top, and staring at you in the face we have this text:

All goo.gl URLs and click analytics are public and can be shared by anyone.
I'm somewhat puzzled how a designer could, when confronted with the task of creating a real-life product with real-life constraints, do so with compelling results if they had not already spent time thinking about assorted what-ifs involving various self-imposed constraints.

Are there good designers (and for that matter, good developers) who do not spend time sketching out assorted concept whatevers to play with ideas and stretch their imagination?

Often, while working on a less than thrilling project, I'll come across some chunk of code that works and solves an immediate problem, but gets me wondering if there's some other way to accomplish the same thing. Often, this sort of thing gets tagged as "too clever" coding, and often that's exactly what it is. But these exercises lead to a better understanding of how to use this or that language, or how to think about this or that problem, so that later on, when I'm solving a real problem, I have more ideas to draw from.
First, they (and thus their interests) are well-represented in the ranks of people who make laws

This is the most understated assertion I've seen in while, congratulations. I would actually say that the legal profession in the US is the most extreme example of regulatory capture that has ever been seen.
Krugman and Ryan never discussed matters of substance. The public fight I was referring to was bickering over whether Ryan specifically asked the right agency for a forecast. Stuff like this:

Krugman: "...Ryan could have gotten JCT to do a 10-year estimate; [...] he chose not to get that 10-year estimate. "

McCardle: "...I contacted Ryan's staff, who were happy to clarify that yes, they asked the JCT to do a forecast, and JCT said no."

As I said, nothing of substance. Just Krugman dishonestly attempting to paint Ryan as a liar (I believe "flim flam man" was the term he used).

On substantive matters, if you look at Table 1 of the CBO's score of Ryan's roadmap, you see that Ryan clearly proposes cutting medicare by just under 40% by 2040 (and even more drastic cuts after that).

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10851/01-27-Ryan-Roadmap...
Ask HN: How Much Spam is Acceptable? - A Spam Report Card
After seeing an announcement on Digg today about how they are working on their homepage spam problem (among other problems) I started thinking that perhaps Digg and I have different opinions of what is an "acceptable" amount of spam. (Link: http://about.digg.com/blog/yea-we-know-about-top-news-spam-and-some-good-news-too)

Then I realized that I still love twitter despite the large amounts of spam that exists there and tried to think of a social network or tool that didn't have it's users' experience negatively affected by spam significantly. After contemplating this for a while I thought I might make a list and grade the different social networks/tools that I use on a regular basis and see how others might grade them as well.

twitter: D+
Facebook: A-
Reddit: A
Digg: D-
Skype: B+
outlook: B-
Gmail: C+
I don't think this is right, I think they've done a straight percentage for each item, but your FICA contributions should cap at about 15K for SS and Medicare because it is approx 15% of the first ~$100K (for 2009) and you don't pay anything beyond that. Medicaid while part of FICA doesn't have a cap on earnings (its around 2.5%). If you tell this page that you've paid 100K in taxes, it says that you've paid $30K total to FICA.

Now, part of the way Obama was proposing to pay for health care reform was to kill the cap on the earnings that are subject FICA taxes - without any additional benefit. This would fundamentally change SS from an insurance scheme to a wealth redistribution scheme.

(for those of you outside the US. FICA is an umbrella term for Social Security and Medicare)
Are there faster ways of getting HTML into a page on other browsers? As far as I know, innerHTML is always the fastest in any browser. I agree its not as safe though.
How the FCC paved the way for the next generation of wireless innovations
Wow, this looks so much easier than writing a PHP extension!
Ah - thank you, I will try my best to apply in this round!:)
I'd argue that Opzi is actually better off describing themselves that way than trying to explain what they are without references to existing things. Yes, sure, explaining yourself by comparison to existing things raises questions. No one would claim you're done explaining at that point. But you're now only those questions away from being done. Whereas if you give people a long description that attempts to convey all the nuances of what you're doing, you just lose them entirely. Especially in a noisy environment like a conference where lots of other startups are presenting.

In an algorithm for calculating answers by successive approximations, it's fine if the initial approximation is bad, so long as the process converges rapidly.
How to Measure the Wisdom of a Crowd
So what's the difference then? Slumming it in Bermuda vs. Boracay for holiday?

I think it is great when the high profile guy takes one for the team, but do we really need to know? We all know Windows mobile ain't doing so hot now, but it is better for MS that they've spent time in the space learning lessons.
No 1 : Get a TiVo
No 2 : see number 1

Recording shows and watching them in batches in your own time has an astounding affect on productivity. You don't watch any advertising, which has many benefits, including not being hooked into any new shows. Just this alone will give you back hours a week, because, right now, it's likely you're spending 2-3 hours a week just watching advertisements.

It also allows you to watch TV when you feel like it. Unlike the way the author tries to pretend you're going to stretch, exercise or write letters while watching TV, most of us do it to just relax and do nothing. But the important thing is to slot that time in to when you want to relax, instead of when the TV producers decide they want you to watch something.

I went cold turkey on TV for 5 years and gradually let it back into my life, TiVo makes it watchable under your own control. Still not as good as having no TV, but in a household sometimes you don't get to make that choice.
This isn't about what startups are, merely how they describe what they are.
Not even that. His salary is rounding error compared to his net worth.
Hubble's Best Photos
Help Pay My Bills: A HN Experiment
390B + 240B is over 20% of the total 2008 budget. I guess we have different definitions of "minor."
Even With Facebook Integration, Ping Will Still Be A Disaster
If Social Security were a private company it would be considered a pyramid scheme and shut down. Imagine someone published a Fidelity internal memo to Wikileaks stating that all shareholders under age 40 were required to keep investing 12.5% of their salary every month, could not sell, and would receive a negative return upon reaching retirement age. It's so fafetched it's laughable.

I don't have a problem with the government requiring a 12.5% retirement fund outlay from workers. It's paternalistic but probably pragmatic. I do think it should be an investment based program rather than a pyramid scheme, and I do think workers should be guaranteed at least the rate of return of a very conservative market investment (such as a precious metal or a certificate of deposit would yield).

The original genius behind Social Security was that it was not a welfare program, it was sold as an investment program. However the books were cooked from day 1 because it achieved that only due to very skewed demographics (far more young workers than old workers/retirees), just as Madoff's fund was able to pay out returns only on the basis of having far more new investors than investors expecting returns.

So I'm opposed to the regressive nature of the Social Security tax mainly because the program is broken and thus it's only a regressive tax and not an investment program. Obama ran on a campaign promise of turning social security into a welfare program which simply means preventing the program from going bankrupt by deciding that only those who are deemed poor get the funds promised them.

Imagine if Madoff had tried to avoid jail by saying that he'd refund the money of all the poor people who invested with him. That's equally laughable.

Sadly, turning it into a welfare program is probably the most pragmatic approach, but if we're going to do that we should immediately do away with the payroll tax and allow the scheme to end so that those who don't aspire to be poor can start investing their 12.5% into an actual IRA. It would be fine with me if income tax rates had to rise a bit to cover the cost of Soc Sec as welfare.
Wish the Gov't would push this money out as dividends to shareholders
There are several techniques, some of them are:

* Show in a frame on the company's server

* Sends JavaScript code that retrieves the message from the server

* Sends an ActiveX / Java / Flash client that displays the message from the server and resists attempts to copy/paste

* Sends the file with DRM, and a client that would enforce the DRM rules

Being that the website uses flash on its first page, I would hazard a guess that a Flash client is involved. I don't like to login to these sites with credentials from other sites, especially if I only want a bit of information.

By the way the idea isn't new by any stretch of the word. http://readnotify.com have been at it for years.

[edited for formatting]
Ask PG/HN: Founder Combination
In the application process essay you discuss figuring out what the combination of founders are (e.g. two hackers, one business one hacker, two hackers one business...different stages of their careers) and you have seen about 20 or 30 different founder combinations.

Of the companies that have gone through the program or those HN'ers out there who are working on or have worked on ideas, what combinations have you had and how has it worked for your project?

Is there an ideal combination or does it depend too much on the type of startup?
"Gullibility is the principal cause of bubbles."
Do you have any questions for us?
mouse wheel doesn't work (using noscript), but pg up/down does, go figure.
Yes, you're correct. The Fed I believe was forced to purchase many of the toxic securities directly. Many people don't understand just how severe and dire the situation was. One thing I'm not quite clear about is what happens at the individual home level with some of those securities. For each of the mortgages sent up to Wall St., who is the legal owner of it? I read somewhere that many of these mortgages were sitting in boxes in warehouses somewhere. If you've signed to repay a loan to a lender, how can those terms be enforced when rights to the loan are divvied up as securities?
It's still the 'viral' one for me. Home page asks for the email, then gives me http://fork.ly/6KYLWf .
I'd prefer it went to paying down a little of the national debt.