skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple has an amusingly-worded bit about their CPU on their features page:

> MacBook Air weighs less than three pounds, but it’s a heavyweight where it counts. Intel Core 2 Duo processors get the work done fast. So you can be every bit as productive on MacBook Air — but in more places. Live-blog the event of the year straight from the convention floor. Perfect your sales-winning presentation from the airport terminal. Cite references down to a T from the library stacks. MacBook Air lets you do everything you need to do whenever and wherever it needs to be done.

Everything you need to do, such as writing, writing, and writing. Those examples seem like they would be more appropriate if Apple had chosen an Atom processor. They don't exactly instill me with 'heavyweight where it counts' confidence.
Ah -- you're right. I now see that the app sells for 99 cents.

To slightly rephrase: even without counting Apple's and LinkShare's cut, the developer would still need a 10% purchase rate just to break even (10 cents * 10 people = 1 purchase) (which is just as ridiculously high as a 20-30% conversion rate as far as I know).
Wow... why so many downvotes? Not that I care about karma.
I think your long rant is misdirected. The parent poster was talking about third party developers, not Microsoft employees.
You probably mean "tax haven", which is a rhetorical slight-of-hand to suggest that jurisdictions competing for attention via tax rates are somehow enticing people to sin. Competing via tax rates is just another way of enticing people to behave differently. Some people are under the impression that this happens only internationally. This is incorrect.

One of the healthiest features of the American experiment is a federal system where you have a broad spectrum of options in terms of tax rates versus social services. People (and companies) can, and do, pick legal regimes which optimize for the outcomes they find important. You may have heard people sort of like living in California, especially if they work for political subdivisions of it: that comes at a price -- you'll pay a gobsmacking amount of money in taxes relative to a similarly situated individual in Texas. (I managed to pay California several hundred dollars in taxes last year and I don't even live there. Yay, hotel tax.)

Competition among governments internationally is also healthy, for much the same reason. The market in tax and legal protection encourages governments to not just expropriate all the surplus from their wealth-creating constituents.
Are you implying that giving money to politicians to spend is the most socially responsible act possible?
there's a big difference between "appeal to the same kind of mind" and "you should study this subject to become a better programmer"

and yes, I do mean that being able to handle the social side of life (including politics) makes you a better programmer in the same way.

agreed that you want both.
Why Google has so much cash on its balance sheet
Yes, though you can also be non-edible by being out of the way.
I’m not sure whether that’s a lot or not. 244,237 or 2.89 percent sounds to me rather like a lot. You have to consider, though, that Google Street View was covered in prime time news and in all newspapers several days in a row, most of which gave rather detailed instructions on how you can opt-out. It would have been very hard to miss it.
> PS: If you disagree you can always leave and renounce citizenship.

I see this argument all the time: "If you don't like it, leave." While that's always an option, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that's the best option or even a reasonable one.

This is a democracy! You can affect change in your government. Get out there and vote, run for office. You don't have to just lie down and accept things the way they are.
(I do this stuff in my day job).

Leave aside the moral outrage and any sentence that has "should" in it. You're not being rigorous in your analysis.

Next, think of the tax code as a giant bucket of Lego pieces. Google - and many other multinationals (including very small startup tech companies of the type that spring from the loins of YC) - simply assemble the Lego pieces as they choose.

Looked at as a strictly engineering exercise? No big deal. Hire better engineers (people like me) and get better results (cooler tax-Lego structures).

OK, put on your moral outrage hats again. We are finished with the tax engineering. Let's move on to the social engineering. Because that is what we are talking about when we say "X _should_ pay more to support government functions.". Except for a few people we will have general consensus that a government is good and services need to be paid for. It's just a giant "Not out of my wallet!" game now. Sometimes logic, sometimes "Think of the children," sometimes whatever argument you can muster. All of these devices are used to deflect the tax collector's attention to someone else's wallet.

That is how I look at this topic. And from this perspective I derive two conclusions:

- if you don't like the way multinationals create their Lego structures, change what is in the bucket of Lego pieces. That is the job of Congress, not Google.

- if you plan to change the laws, expect the argument to devolve quickly to uninformed "think of the children" arguments because politics is purely that. No A/B testing is done. Statistical analysis is bent to prove a point, not looked at dispassionately to optimize decisions.

Two last points.

- Every dollar Google makes will eventually go out to employees, vendors, and the government. (At the moment they don't pay a dividend, so the shareholders do not get anything directly). A corporation is not some giant Jabba the Hutt that grows bigger to infinity. It is ultimately just a money collector and distributor.

- the particular game they are playing in fact acts as a net revenue transfer mechanism from the US Treasury to the Irish government. I will have to find the article that describes this so clearly. I'm on my phone right now in downtown LA about to give a speech in a few minutes. I'll be back. (Heh. What a disappointment he turned out to be for California).
What kind of package size are we talking here? I see MacRuby is 30MB, surely the whole thing isnot required.
Perhaps the infrastructure would have been built, but I think you'd be surprised at the amount of basic fundamental research the government does that enables the infrastructure. Most corporations don't do what the US Feds call "R06" research, meaning there is no current application for the results. Pure research, others might call it.

My current field, public health, is an example. The US Gov't spends billions into research that doesn't lead to tangible products or services. But without it, we wouldn't know that cigarettes are bad, or that heart disease is correlated with red meat consumption.

There are lots of non-infrastructure advantages that exist only because the government has tax money.
A bunch of trees is not necessarily a forest.
Maybe it could be an optional install, like rosetta is on snow leopard.
The people who are nuts are the one's that don't have any other aspirations than a paycheck. You sir, are not.

As I see it you have a few options:

1. Create something meaningful, on your own, and publish it. Having some applications even when they do not generate revenue, can act as your experience. It will certainly help in marketing yourself.

2. Consider starting in another role in a software company, like Quality Assurance, then try to moving into a developer role for the company.
Universities have great connections. How about serving some of the under served communities first?
tl;dr? He explicitly mentions "defer"
Microsoft has done a lot of harm in the last 20 years. They succeeded through a strategy of continually expanding into new areas (operating systems, office software, web browsers, email, programming languages, etc) and producing products that often worked poorly and only with the rest of their platform. They succeeded at this for a time, creating a monstrous shambling behemoth of software that was powered entirely by its own momentum. But it wasn't very good, and everyone knew it.

I assume that others, like me, were very frustrated during that time. We knew this wasn't the right way. Software folks tend to see the world through software eyes, and we know that an incompatible proprietary mess only comes back to haunt you. But what could we do? They had the money and the influence. To misquote PG, we bought it with misgivings. We made our sites work with IE, we made our code compile under VC++, we gave our servers and clients special_microsoft_spec_exception flags. And we bitched on Slashdot and spelled Microsoft with a dollar sign and dreamed of a day when we wouldn't have to deal with it anymore.

Well, now we don't. Apple's eating Microsoft's lunch from the hardware up, while Google chows on it from the web down. They have way too much money to fail fast, or maybe to even fail at all. But they have to play ball now. Why do programmers hate Microsoft? Justice, I suppose. They certainly didn't treat us well when they were in charge. Programmers have long memories.
I second this suggestion to work with Compass/SASS. I use SASS and HAML together.

Avoid the desire to work with one of popular grid frameworks like Blueprint or 960.gs unless you are sure that your project really needs something like that.
My appologies for accidental down vote instead of up vote. :(
There are actually a number of server side JS runtimes, but node.js (or nodejs or NodeJS, the naming is semi-inconsistent) has the most buzz/momentum.

I'm confident that you'll see a number of frameworks/libraries that can take advantage of JS running both client and server sdie in time for JSConf in April. The most public has been Yahoo's YUI team, with Dav Glass putting the effort into getting yui3 running in node.

Dav did a video presentation on yui3 in node:

http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/09/29/video-glass-node/

IMO the most useful example/demo in the talk is screen scraping digg:

http://github.com/davglass/nodejs-yui3/blob/master/examples/...

He also provides examples of various yahoo widgets getting rendered as static html, which I think is also in that github repo, but I can't find his demo online.

I'm also working on putting a bunch of pieces together that would allow an app to be client/server agnostic but I've been "working on it" for months now in the background and I'm not finished so I'll just wait until I'm done to talk about it.
These homes are just for staff/professors. It would be lovely if the student residencies have access to high speed broadband as well. :-)
This guy is a total lamer!
If your kids don't understand why you need to ignore them and focus on yourself, it's probably time to get new ones.
I'd say racist jokes (and the dead baby ones also found on that page) tend to be considered more offensive than most other categories. I'm trying to think of gay jokes more offensive than the ones posted in there and am coming up short.
I had a distinct Randroid phase where I thought it was almost a moral obligation to avoid taxation. Now things are fuzzier for me.

I make a truly decent wage. Not an earth-shattering one but a wage that beat the hell out of anything my mom made while I was growing up. I am a very fortunate man.

Heinlein wrote a thing about freedom:

"In terms of morals there is no such thing as a ‘state.’ Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free, because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything that I do."

In my case, I find taxation to be tolerable. It finances things like education for people with fewer advantages than I have right now. Ideally, a much bigger proportion of my taxes would go there. It also finances stupid things, like the TSA and DHS, and that's unfortunate. It financed military adventure in Iraq, which I find repugnant.

But I want to live in a society where you're not screwed based on the number you draw in the ovarian lottery. Where you can be taught useful skills to make the most of the opportunities you find. Where you don't have to pay for this privilege – until later, when you pay taxes. I'm not aware of any scalable solution to this that doesn't involve taxation of my earnings.

So I tolerate the imperfect because it's what I've got. Until there's a better way to ensure that the next generation isn't screwed by bad luck, I can't avoid that taxes are how I can do my part for the moment.

Meanwhile, Google is free to break or bend the rules, too. If they share my values on this subject, I'd hope they'd do their part in some other way. But that's up to them.
Yes definitely some issues with measuring page load time this way. It is useful data to get started with. The web timing API will make this data much better, but it's still early (it's in IE9 and some early developer builds of chrome and firefox). Once this API is more widely deployed, this is the right way to measure performance as it allows you to take into account navigation time as well as rendering time.

Google Webmaster Tools does indeed give you a good perspective on performance. I believe this data comes from the google toolbar (can someone confirm this?). My problem with the data reported by webmaster tools is that it's an average. It doesn't tell me what the _worst_ page load time of the _best_ page load time my users are experiencing.

As a shameless plug, you can also check out our own tools from yottaa: http://www.yottaa.com that give you a bunch of detailed information about your websites performance. I think tools like these complement the approach detailed in the post.
Linux 2.6.36 is out
+1. This is similar to the major reason I despise the band U2 (besides their awful music): they bitch and moan about helping poor children in Africa. They even recently complained that the British gov't doesn't send enough money to impoverished countries. But they have a major tax haven set up that deprives the gov't of tax revenue.

You just need to be consistent. Google has gotten a lot of benefits out of their "Do No Evil" motto; in my mind, they are held to a higher standard than GE or IBM.
FBI fires back at report critical of complex computer project
How is that at all relevant?

If I steal a couch from a furniture store, I don't get to defend myself in court by saying I bought a table from them.
The Greatest Tech Battles of All Time
Focus: the age of distraction
> "It's a fallacy to focus solely on the desirable components of government spending."

Without going into what proportion of spending might directly benefit Google, I do agree with you. Return on tax revenue is nowhere close to 1:1 nor is it being spent optimally.

But Google does not decide how that money is allotted. They can't say "I'm only paying 25% because I only approve of 25% of expenditures." When they limit their exposure to 25% of what it might be (paying 4% instead of 20%) they're still cutting the desirable spending to 25% of its budget.

So they're still strangling those things they benefit from.

And if the giants generations before Google had done the same, one wonders whether the component technologies and projects and research that Google built from would have been part of the lucky 25% of spending that survived inevitable cuts?
>At the time this started I checked, and I looked, and nowhere could I find any way to read or convert these files without paying for a new version of Word.

You should have looked and checked harder. Word Viewer was always free.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=...

>View, print and copy Word documents, even if you don't have Word installed.
Cool! There are a bunch of external monitoring services that are worth checking out in addition to this..

- http://www.yottaa.com (shameless plug for my own company)
- http://www.webpagetest.org
- http://www.zoompf.com
- http://www.showslow.com
They didn't have any gloves in the earliest incarnations of MMA, and fighters would almost never hit each other in the head. The thin MMA gloves they have now do very little to protect the recipient of a blow, but a great deal to protect the knuckles of the striker from the effects of punching someone in the head. The crowds want to see a little bit of that blood.
Aequor - antibiofilm/antifouling
Aequor has a big story to tell and hope that our biotech startup fits into your portfolio.

In 2002, Aequor's co-founder, Cynthia Burzell, discovered 17 novel marine microbes that produce chemical compounds that are non-toxic and highly effective to impede biofilm and fouling formation, replacing many of the toxic biocides used in industry and medicine that are threatening animal and plant life and are being banned internationally. Demand is rising so fast for non-toxic alternatives, that Aequor's business model is to license its patents on the remarkable chemical compounds to market leaders in the target sectors (marine paint, water engineering, agriculture/aquaculture, cleantech energy, medicine) and has already signed agreements for prototype development with market leaders in the first 3 target sectors. The vertical and horizontal markets for Aequor's additives for sprays, washes, paints and coatings aggregate to well over $100B annually. Competitors' products are either ineffective or cost-prohibitive.<p>Aequor's burn rate is low. It highly-experienced Senior Management and a distinguished Board of Scientific and Business Advisors are paid in sweat equity. Aequor raised $250,000 family and grant funding and seeks strategic partners and future licensees. Funding for environmental protection and FDA registrations -- a pre-requisite for market launch -- could cost over $5 million over 3 years; $10 million over 7 years. Our pro forma financials project breakeven by Year 4, with profits by Year 5, based on revenues from only one licensee in the antifouling marine paint market.<p>For more information, please visit our website: www.aequorinc.com.
You're the human Fabric (http://docs.fabfile.org/0.9.2/)!

I'd use your service if it was reasonably priced (and I hadn't invested a lot of time into automating this myself).

The fact that I have taken the time to automate this workflow totally gives your idea merit though.

Make a nice interface where I can select the most common options and allow me to save it for future use. Also make me add a public key, and send me a confirmation email containing an entry for .ssh/config when it's all up and running.
Continuation Passing Style Revisited, Part One
How do you keep up interest in a programming project?
Ignore the age. In 10 more years you'll be 10 years older no matter what. You could be a world-class programmer and product designer at that point. Or you could be wishing you had started 10 years earlier. I seriously doubt you'll have starved to death by then unless you make some destructive life choices... I could come up with plenty of examples of people who didn't start their life's work until 33 (and much older)- but it's irrelevant- a distraction at best.

Having said that, I think we have an innate tendency to... acclimatize as we get older. We start to expect that things should come easier. You'll need to counter that if you continue this path. Expect it to be very hard- on the learning side and the self-marketing side and the delivering value to your employer or own business...- and deal with that reality instead of assuming that the difficulty is somehow related to your age or self confidence or how long it took before you got whatever degree etc. etc. Step up.
Hey, nobody's saying that businesses that don't operate in America and consume American gov't services should pay taxes. Airbus probably doesn't pay much in American taxes, and I'm not upset about it.

But if a corporation has a significant presence here and is consuming an american-educated work force, american highway spending, american police spending, american state dept actions to ensure supply of various things (the oil industry would grind to a halt without the cloak and dagger stuff)..

then they pull an accounting hack and we're supposed to believe 98% of their operation is in the Cayman Islands? We're getting ripped off. You don't like taxes, I get it. How do you like the idea that you're paying higher taxes (or taking on more gov't debt) because other people are bilking the system?
We have a new 800 pound gorilla intent on screwing us over. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cq?d=v1&s=AAPL,MSFT
Imagine Cup student winner visits the White House
Basic VPS (on stable provider) + nginx + php-fpm + eaccelerator, barely noticing any kind of traffic spikes (handled SlashDot, HN, HabraHabr, Reddit, Delicious, many others).

Of course it depends on how intensive your app is, but for moderately loaded site - this combination is more than enough. For ex. I've tested Wordpress with this configuration - it can handle nearly 70 mil. hits per day (including into this number hits to images, so probably around 10 mil. actual visitors).

Wouldn't recommend for real-time upgrade (during spike). For real-time go for this: http://gist.github.com/638751 (if load average > 5 - sorry, exit). Crude, cruel, but helped me survive being unexpectedly TechCrunch'd on Apache (didn't know about nginx at the time), then you can finally edit your files, go for caching of nearly everything.
In the short term, people get divorces and bail all the time do they not?

In the long term, I made a commitment to myself by procreating, that I would take care of the resulting child. My own honor, which feels good to uphold, keeps me with the child.
But reading, browsing, and writing is probably what most people spend their time doing on a computer.

"Transcode video formats while sitting in a cafe" doesn't exactly have the same ring.
No, you're not nuts at all. Fellow 30-something here, you should run with it, if it's what you want to do. Like with start ups, persistence is key.

As other people have said, put some stuff up to showcase what you're capable of. If you work on a side project that you can demonstrate to people and possibly get some revenue (or at least public recognition) from it'll help improve your personal brand, which in turn will make it easier for you to get hired, providing the jobs are around in your area.
Battery-operated stoves have been available for years: smaller than this stove; the batteries are definitely lighter than that 'power generator'.

This stove is neither small nor light, and doesn't solve the fuel problem any better than existing stoves. At least for short-term (week or less) camping. Batteries for a fan will last for hours.

In addition the demo video cut away when lighting the dang thing- I wanted to know how fast it came up to speed! I guess I'll never know.
Encrypting Facebook UIDs
It is sad really, because Microsoft is years ahead of any other company in the way they treat developers. If you havent used Visual Studio you wont understand that.

You are obviously not referring to Visual Studio 2005 here. It is a half-baked unstable mess, that I still have to use every day. It's the Vista of IDEs.

Microsoft also has a tendency to release frameworks before they are stable, or well thought through. They do usually get things right after a few versions, but the unfortunate people who build and maintain software built on the original idea are left stranded.
As mattmaroon just said, American football players will sacrifice themselves (i.e. tolerate the pain) for the game.
Don't blame the player, blame the game.

Tax loopholes should be closed in law, Google and other corporations have a responsibility to their shareholders - why shouldn't they act within the law to save money?

I remember seeing a fun flow-chart of the IKEA tax avoidance scheme. Didn't have as amusing names as those used in this article though :)