skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you. However, there comes a time when you need to choose the "homeland" you pledge allegiance to. If you don't want to make that choice and stand by it, I can understand people would become suspicious in such situations. I m a dual citizen and I of course love the US and France (where I grew up) but if the two fell on different sides of any issue, I would at least stay 100% loyal to the US because I chose to make this my home and americans welcomed me warmly. If I felt differently, I would move back to France. Maybe that guy should have done so with Israel...
Already get those. There's folks who want to use redis, couchdb, just about anything that can store configurations.

I think the thing most existing sysadmins don't get is that this is written for people who have to manage mongrel2 servers in a modern way. It doesn't prevent you from doing your usual manual ssh work, but it's aimed at the future where people won't be doing that so much.

It's kind of sad, because I want sysadmins to learn to code so bad, and I even wrote a book so they could learn it, and have helped tons of them get better jobs, yet they still resist awesome features like this. They're really just holding themselves back by not realizing automation and code are their future.
Do I only get to use it once?
In the comments someone mentions BuyVM and their VM setups with 512MB RAM, 2 CPU cores, and 50GB space are just $6.00/mn. It seems to me that's a much better deal.

Has anyone else had experience with BuyVM? It seems really quite inexpensive.
I don't know, but it's worth pointing out that the US in 1890 was so different from the US of today as to make that an apples/oranges comparison. To draw some somewhat relevant comparisons: in the 1800s your children might very well be working in a mill to support the family, and there was no such thing as a weekend.
There are those people, and there are the people that don't know about the bad stuff. Actually, to be fair, there are also the people who know about the bad stuff but dont think lowering tax revenue is a good way to get them to stop doing the bad stuff. I think the first group of people might have a strange set of values (unless you mean that they don't think the net effect of what the government does with taxes is bad, in which case I agree with them), but it's still worth arguing about to convince the second and third groups.
More About Data Models
So if you are

A. Making over 250,000 a year

B. Not planning on spending additional income yourself, but instead planning to save that money for your children when you die.

C. Have opportunities to make (relatively) small incremental chunks of income.

D. Have the ability to sock away money at a 8% compounding rate.

It might not be worth your while to take on additional work. And this is entirely on Obama for letting the tax cuts to the $250K+ income families slip.
What shocked me about SICP was the persuasiveness of the introduction, even after years of programming. And it's much closer to the author's writing than the cut-n-dry O'Reilly stuff. I like it anyway :)
Exactly. With m2sh the regular small usage case is very easy, and you get tons of capabilities other servers don't have. It's not preventing you from working how you work now, just gives one more step.

But, for everyone else, and the future of operations, this kind of configuration storage is insanely useful. The idea that we could point mongrel2 at a redis store in the future and have the 1000s of servers some companies put out automatically update their configs in realtime is just sexy as hell.
Yet, here's an article, which presumably he got paid for. Perhaps the value in the article to him is more than what he got paid for? Or perhaps his premise is wrong. (Yeah. I'm calling a Harvard Economist wrong.)

Comparing the untaxed value + 8% over 30 years to the taxed value is a straw man. I could push that horizon out another 30 years, and the 'marginal rate' would get worse. I could shorten it and it would get better. It's a meaningless number. Also, no company pays a 35% tax on the returns to their stock, they pay 35% on taxable income. There's a huge difference. Unless he's planning on dying soon, (which he's not, because of compound interest assumptions) there's no way he can tell what the estate tax is going to be. It's a crapshoot.

Roughly, the marginal change of the rollback in taxes is going to be a couple percent, though he talks about the new percentages, not the old. The net marginal change is going to be tens of dollars. If that's enough to keep him from writing articles like this, bring it on.
Isn't the problem right now that people aren't spending money, though?

Banks have plenty of money to lend (see the TARP and the Fed throwing money at them). Companies have money to spend. Neither are doing anything because the economy isn't churning because people aren't spending their money. They either have no money to spend (the unemployed), or they are saving their money because they don't trust their company to not fire them/the government to not tax it away.

Today, what it seems we need is money going to people that would buy things from companies so the companies will hire people to make more of those things. And then more people can buy things from companies.

Once the economy is working again, then we can worry about rich people earning extra money and putting it in the banks for them to loan out.
That's not the logic I'm employing, though I see why you think it is. I'd rather point out that those 26 other countries do not appear to suffer a deficit of academics like Mankiw, despite a much stronger incentive for them not to take similar speaking engagements.

Of course, the bigger flaw with Mankiw's argument is that it evades the point of those taxes, which is that they buy things that our society has deemed worth having. It is not totally outside the bounds of reason to suggest that we'd have less entrepreneurship if every potential business owner had to worry about providing for 100% of their parents medical expenses.

We cannot have everything we want. At some point, the goal of having the "Happiest Possible Greg Mankiw" will have to give way to something like Wildland Fire Management.
Grover's On A Horse
The problem with the economy right now is not that there isn't enough money to fund corporations, it's that the average person isn't making enough regular income.
Using Git to Maintain Your Website
I only use a BuyVM VPS it to run a cheap (15 usd/yr) VPN that allows me to do things that usually are restricted to US IPs . I bought it as a replacement for another VPS I have, but I was too lazy so far to complete the setup, so I can't guarantee for it.

Their VPS boxes "come with the ability to run OpenVPN, PPTP, GRE and SIT tunnels by default".
I've had a harder time setting up the traffic forwarding than I did on a XEN box, but I'm not particularly good with VPN technologies...

In general, the whole process was pretty painless...
An interesting bonus: They have a pretty active IRC channel
It looks like this article didn't get nearly as much attention as the last one. I wonder if it's because the last one was up there on Sunday night?
The installation process looks slightly different, and there are some changes to the software centre, now with a proprietary section. It will be interesting to see what happens with the proprietary stuff.
Does anyone else find the entire premise flawed? If all he wanted to do was maximize the amount of income he's going to pass on to his children then he would be an investment banker, not a Harvard professor/author. Any bank would take him in an instant.

Trying to make it sound like $1000 is the only incentive in play here seems like a mild distortion at the very least.
How to get your Professors’ Attention — along with Coaching or Mentoring
Statistically, someone raised poor is far less likely to become more successful financially vs. someone raised wealthy. You may be an exception, but why is that so hard to comprehend? Personal drive is but one portion of following a path to success. Of course, personal drive comes from somewhere - were you born with it or did it grow in you from your various interpersonal relationships with family, friends, peers and mentors? What about those poor people who did not have the same personal drive growth from their family, friends, peers and mentors? Another aspect in the path to success, at least as valuable as personal growth, is luck. Luck to be born in a wealthy family. Luck to be born in an environment where experiences with family/friends/peers/mentors instills a strong sense of personal growth. Luck to meet someone who opens a door.
The Likeability Factor
Note that this is a companion essay to the one discussed extensively here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729501 .
2/3 of the people who responded to the poll on the site say it's accurate but I wonder what equipment they have on hand to let them know that what they believe to be the rate actually is.
The fundamental fallacy here is that people respond purely to monetary incentives for work. This may be true for Mr. Mankiw, but it is not a universal truth.
Numbers 1, 2 and 4 are very easy to satisfy. Several people have already posted lists of ideas that they and others maintain. I seem to recall Y-Combinator posting lists of the types of projects they wish to look at in the future too, so it would be worth searching for them. If you can't self host then .NET hosting is going to cost you around US$10 a month, although there are deals to be had - I think I pay $35 for 6 months of web and SQL Server hosting with a company that is passable for what I need it for. Unless you have a real passion to learn something new, I'd stick with the languages you now, it will be much quicker to get to where you need to go than if you learn a whole new language.

But the problem is in monetization. Firstly if you can get an idea from start to making money in 6 months (for example) then I don't think there is really a cap on what you can make, I can't see a reason why $400 per month would be all you would want to make, and if you make something that can make money you should always be able to find new users (an exception to that might be if you made something very specific to only a few people and had an easy way to market it - eg something 100 HN users might like and no one else).

But defining a web app that you can develop and easily make money is not easy. Most people's "idea lists" have lots of very interesting ideas, few of them I can ever imagine making a penny. My suggestion would be to look around you, you have a job, is any of the software you develop something you can clone and sell to other businesses (there are legal issues there, but you can often work around them and it depends where you are). Are there everyday tasks that people are using spreadsheets or Access DB's or paper to do that you could create a system for and charge $10 a month? Find an idea like that, spend 10, 20 or 50 dollars on Google Adwords pointing to a fake sales page and see if you have a market. Good luck.
It felt that way for me too... then on further reflection I think system-wide multi-touch support is a BIG deal. There may not be any applications taking advantage of it now, but I predict that in a few months this will give iPads and android tablets a run for the money.
He goes on and on about how to do a successful fork, but doesn't explain why this doesn't apply to Java, or why 'the moment' isn't a good time for a fork.

I suspect he is trying to say that there isn't a giant, perfect council ready to lead Java into freedom.

Well, there never will be, unless someone creates it. There's no reason why it couldn't be created right now.
I still don't understand the benefit (for the user) of the screencast format for programming tutorials vs plain old text and code snippets/screenshots. In some cases, the screencast might be helpful as a supplemental format, but otherwise I find them to be frustrating. For example, if I want to study some code for a longer duration than the author allows, I have to pause the screencast. But, of course, I often pause too late and have to scrub backwards and/or rewatch portions of the video to find that point again. With a text tutorial, I can follow at my own pace, quickly find where I left off, copy+paste code, etc.

Edit: All that said, anyone who takes the time to teach others, regardless of the format, deserves a lot of credit.
The difference being that if everyone was driving an electric car, we the transition from coal to nuclear (or whatever) is just a 'simple' infrastructure change (similar to providing a bugfix to a library that many applications dynamically link against, rather than requiring app to need a recompile due to static linking).
> This is an average of roughly one thousand lines of code per month, which is pretty much the limit to how quickly I can write high quality "never need to look at this again because it will never break" code.

What's your secret for being sure it will never break? How often do you find yourself revisiting it anyway?
Got one (broke my contract with AT&T/iPhone3GS). Baked the Fascinate off against the Droid Incredible and the D2. The Galaxy/Fascinate's UI's response is iPhone-smooth. All of the other phones had little interaction lags even though they were running 2.2. It turns out that smoothness is a real concern for me (probably because I think it indicates something about full-stack performance), so I grabbed the Fascinate.

I was comparing my Fascinate to a friend's iPhone4 the other day and ... there wasn't much of a comparison... Build quality and screen on the iPhone4 are better; everything else is better on the Fascinate. I was kinda shocked that, after a short time using a fast Android phone, I couldn't conceive of wanting an iPhone; it seemed limited in its conception/functionality.

Definitely some hiccups with the phone, but I was all set to root it, delete BlockBuster, switch to LauncherPro, blah, blah, blah, and I'm not sure that I'll do any of that. Was concerned about the delay in getting 2.2; now, not so much. I'm not a huge GPS user, so haven't been bugged by the GPS issue.
"assuming you have a good product that the market wants"

Oh yeah, that ...
10 steps to more readable tests
My girlfriend works 4 days at as a pharmacist. Her income for working a fifth day puts her into a high tax bracket in British Columbia and results in her making dramatically less money for that day. So she uses that time to develop herself personally and work on side projects.

I wonder if a flat income tax could ever work. No more bitching and whining - everyone pays the same percentage of their income and that's the end of it.
> I forget where I read it, but apparently for most big budget games, a significant percentage of sales happen within the first 7 days of release.

pretty much any "blockbuster" sales chart shows this.

There are basically two behaviors in sales, especially in gaming: blockbusters, heavily front-loaded games where north of 50% of total sales can be made in the first week (if not the first weekend) and "games with legs" which just go on and on and on and on.

Most games lack the broad appeal to have legs (Nintendo games are a pretty common exception) and are thus very front-loaded.
A DHT-based key-value store with value-stored callback functions [pdf]
Why we really shouldn't keep the bush tax cuts for the wealthy
If the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy are extended, it means the U.S. must continue to borrow greater sums of money than it otherwise would have to, in order to pay for those extended tax cuts.

This is one area where Democrats and Republicans should agree. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy are simply not fiscally conservative.

The author expresses concern about the future for his children. Perhaps the author should consider that his children will have a higher tax/debt burden in the future if the U.S. keeps borrowing so much money.
Or pies?
So you meant "official" then. I actually don't mind your rebuttals and over throw attempt, I live for that kind of debate. You just tend to write one-liners that really have no meaning and provide nothing useful as feedback.

For example, the problem you describe of a lack of an official configuration exists not because of the storage mechanism but because you have a storage mechanism. If you use a VCS then you have the same problem since the stored version can be different from the actual version running on any one server.

That begs the question how what's on the server gets to be different from the "official" stored version, and in this case it's people. It's always people.

So, let's look at the two mechanisms and compare:

1. VCS and just a config file means you have no idea who changed that config file. It's not in the VCS remember? Post crash forensics are then difficult and you really only have a diff.

2. VCS, a config file, and a sqlite storage with commit logs (we have those, you can see who changed stuff) means you have diffs of the config file from the VCS, and logs from the sqlite database. Diff the config in the VCS just like before, and if someone is going in the super back door to run SQL behind the scenes (which I don't get), then you know they did it. If they use the tools then you have the commit log in the datbase. You've now got way more data than you did with just config files.

But, if I were to extrapolate your real complain it is probably this:

"When the server breaks, I can not run 'diff' on the sqlite3 database config and see what changed some jackass could run raw sql against it and I would never know. Can I please have a way of comparing a given database to what a config file would produce? Kind of a config delta?"

With that in mind, I present to you the m2sh diff command ticket:

http://mongrel2.org/tktview/9e57f999d5cf23d899858521260b104b...

Thanks man!
If that were true wouldn't he just do the extra work for free, then he can take his pick of the very best/interesting jobs that way. The government would take most of it in tax anyway as he points out. Of course the downside to the government is that it doesn't get all that tax revenue.

If a friend said to me, can you talk at this conference, I'll pay you $1000, but really money is tight and then I say I'll only get $100 of it out anyway - then I'm just going to say wave the fee aren't I? Assuming I want to do it.

Or even just give the fee directly to charity? (at least in the U.K. this avoids tax)
If all he wanted to do was maximize the amount of income he's going to pass on to his children then he would be an investment banker, not a Harvard professor/author.

The question is whether he'll act at his present margin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_%28economics%29) , not whether he's spent his entire life trying to maximize one opportunity.

In any event, his bigger point is that a lot of service professionals in particular (think doctors, lawyers, consultants) will make decisions based in part on tax rates. For example, ten years years ago my parents routinely basically stopped working in mid November when they hit the top marginal tax rate essentially because the cost of work got too high (we do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, if you're curious: http://blog.seliger.com). A lot of people have a fair amount of discretion in the amount of work they do, and if you tax them a lot on the last 10 – 30% of income... they'll probably choose to consume less of it.

This is related to the backwards bending labor curve: http://www.amosweb.com/cgi-bin/awb_nav.pl?s=gls&c=dsp... .

I assume people have done research to examine how large these effects are in the real world, but I don't know of any off the top of my head. I would also guess that the effects change in the short- and long-term.
This is some of what I describe here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777371 . Thanks for another example of it.
I know you were joking but you're also right.

I go food shopping every week at about the same time. I email trip plans between friends and schedule them. I don't drive to work but certainly if I did that's an obviously predictable event.

Between synergy among the various google properties and good pattern-recognition in the google cars (or whatever) system itself I'd be surprised if predicted trips didn't hugely overwhelm explicitly-ordered ones.
I was on University Av. Essentially I got the impression that most people shy away from giving negative feedback in a face-to-face encounter - so as not to create social awkwardness. I also published at 5 question survey to 200 people asking the same questions I asked in person using http://askyourtargetmarket.com (lean startup bundle). The feedback from AYTM was overwhelmingly less positive.
Good contrast with the other reviews that were posted, he talks about things they didn't. He has an interesting opinion about how Ubuntu releases can't be as groundbreaking now that "normal people" are using it. Not sure what to think of that yet, I'll have to chew on it.

Thanks for posting :-D
If you have the 10.10 RC already, I'm pretty sure there's no "upgrade" to the final as if you were coming from 10.04 - the updates you've been applying along the way have put you there.
Douglas Coupland: A radical pessimist's guide to the next 10 years
Consumers in China, Brazil Discover Debt
Most of those other countries have pretty dismal mathematical output. Not only that, but the country with the best mathematical output of the ones you listed is the UK, which I think has the most "American" tax code. Whenever anyone produces a good mathematician, that mathematician seems to always come to the US. There's a reason Terrence Tao didn't stay in Australia. I'm not actually saying that this is because of our lower tax rate, I'm just pointing out what you likely already knew but disregarded to make a point.
That's how their version numbers work - 9.10 was released in October 09, 9.04 in April 09, etc.
there's something off about suggesting tenure is about teaching, or that universities are about students. Tenure is about, more than teaching style, research, and primarily, actual teaching is left to grad students and teacher's aides.
A flat income tax percentage would work if we could all pay a flat percentage for all our basic needs like food and living expenses.

For extra credit, explain why all of the above doesn't make sense.
The fact that 10% come from that page is a problem, not something to brag about.
But it's not any more sustainable than a good high-efficiency gasoline or diesel-only car.

It’s at the moment not any better or even worse than the best gas or diesel cars but I do think that it’s more sustainable. Cars with internal combustion engines will always have the same CO2 emissions. The day they leave the factory and twenty years from now. Electric cars are independent of any specific energy source and as a consequence have the CO2 emissions of the energy source they use. They are mostly coal or oil powered at the moment but it’s very much possible to turn them into nuclear powered cars in the future.

That’s why electric cars have the potential to be great.
How teenage poker prodigy Steven Silverman won, and lost, millions
How NASA engineered the Chilean miners' escape pod
There appear to still be serious issues with both the proprietary Nvidia and ATI drivers with Xorg 1.9 - kind of a shame. If you have an older Nvidia card, or an ATI card plus certain monitors, you're not going to be able to use the good drivers with 10.10 for awhile.
I'm not a tax expert but how are you sure that the tax burden for this income bracket is not _more_ in the United States? Sweden may have ~60% income tax but how much of the back-end tax finagling occurs in Sweden compared to the United States?

Again, it may very well be more than the claimed 90% tax rate. I also realize the professor has a vested interest (for several reasons) in knocking the tax cut expiration. But the United States tax system is complex beyond belief and I think any comparison with other countries is never simple.

Edit: Or higher than the 'real' tax rate if the professor is pushing the numbers in his favor (likely).
Lego Mindstorm NXT enlisted for shirt-folding