skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And the tax code that, you know, taxed them while they were alive. It's not like their net worth is pre-tax, and if it was pre-tax, that it would stay that way when capital gains tax hits when an heir sells property, etc.
The physics and biology of the TSA's backscatter security scanners
He just needs a cfd expert, he's already got water
Yeah, exactly. I have not looked at the app described in the article, but daemontools is a set of programs that let you manage persistent processes. "supervise <directory>" will run a script called "run" in <directory>, restarting it if it fails. It also keeps status information around, so you can run "svstat <directory>" to check to status, "svc -d <directory>" to kill it, etc.

On top of that is svscan, which will look for service directories in a directory, and will start a supervise instance for each. It will also start a supervise instance for <directory>/log if it exists, piping the output of the supervised script to the logging process.

In this way, you just need to write a service that writes log messages to stdout, and it will handle log rotation and process management. It's really a nice system, although apparently rather unpopular. I guess it's more fun to write your own logging and daemonization code, rather than let a very small C program that has existed unchanged for 10 years do it. Or something.
Hi, can we please stop using the phrase "death tax"? It's called estate tax. Legally. Calling it a death tax does not change any of the underlying mechanics or reasons to support/oppose it.

Signed, George Orwell
I agree. It would be much clearer if you used a hover css property and put cursor: move;
Nature News:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101202/full/news.2010.645.ht...

[Edit] They are calling it a member of the Halomonadaceae, which means it is descended from the common ancestor of that group, and so does not represent a second, independant origin of life.
It's not a cause, sure. But I have never heard the word evolution defined to not apply to the process. Do you have a better reference I could read?
Ask HN: Should Groupon Sell?
or should they try to build something special on their own? I'm curious what HN thinks?
Does daemontools care anymore? I use "supervise ~/.dotfiles/service | readproctitle ............." to start my user-local services when I log in. Works like a charm.
If I started handing out dollar bills on a street corner, I'd have plenty of customers too. Why is YouTube so valuable? If there's a way to make real money on YouTube-style video, Google sure hasn't found it.

This profitless 'strategic' expansion at all costs mentality is exactly the management failure that's leads to stock price stagnation in mature tech companies like Microsoft and Google.
If Google can find five other friends willing to pay $2 Billion each, everyone wins.
Nice. It would be even nicer if it could intelligently handle deduplication. At the moment there are 6 World Cup news stories on the front page.
This looks like it's just a mockup/idea, but intriguing nonetheless. I thought about this approach. I wondered how well a suction system would work and it seems like a failure equals a broken robot.
I am not an accountant - but that scenario sounds more like a decrease in revenue rather than an increase in costs.
However, Steam doesn't take care of syncing your game profiles, saves, etc. That would be worth paying extra for IMO.
Made an app to upload and play your music library online through the browser. Not only that, but enabled one click library sharing between friends with an access link.

for example:
http://ymitrimusic.appspot.com/share/5ef46

You can login with your google account. The front end is based on the open source sound cloud player, and i've left some of the soundcloud functionality in for streaming.
I knew they couldn't keep their mouth shut.
If it didn't use DNA I'd be even more impressed.

It's great that they leaked it, though. My 9th graders' science class is going to tune in live, thanks to the leak. Good opportunity to make science seem timely and relevant to kids.
I've played around with Twilio and I'll second this statement 100%.

Now I just need to think of something to make that can take full advantage of their capabilities.
Phosphorus not required for life: arsenic-utilizing microbes discovered
Bacteria that incorporate arsenic into their DNA
1 year? Try to nail it in 2 months. Try to learn JSP/Servlets, Spring, Hibernate or Play! framework. Showcase something on GAE. Usually money chases talent, so give ur best at building skills.

Subscribe to: Punetech.com, pluggd.in, hackerstreet.in and look for jobs on http://sutrajobs.com and http://www.venturewoods.org/index.php/venturejobs/

This guy has given an excellent post on contributing to open source: http://shal.in/post/285909694/why-you-should-contribute-to-o...

P.S. Avoid being the 'polite Indian' described by jgrahamc by asking ppl to do ur work ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1886310 )

P.P.S: if you wish to get recruited for Infy, Cogni, Wipro you've come to the wrong forum
It's been a while since I installed daemontools. IIRC it created a bunch of root directories (e.g. /commands). There was also an OpenBSD port for runit already.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I work for a "global organization", and the people we hire in the US are just as incompetent as the people we hire in India. (We have good people in all the locations too, of course... but living in the US or UK or Canada does not mean you are going to do a good job.)

I love it when someone emails support and gets an answer like "plz read wiki"... and then you realize the person that wrote that is a white dude from Chicago that speaks no languages other than English. I can forgive lazy writing if English is not your first language. But if it's your only language, please spell please correctly and use "the" when appropriate. A complete sentence would also be nice.

But I digress.
I launched http://www.hackerlunch.com

It basically lets you meetup with other hackers. You post lunch plans and let others join in.

Its very buggy (I am not a coder, and I don't think I'll manage to become one) and at this point has a rather ugly interface (ironically I'm a web designer). I worked on this for two days and released it, which is a big deal for me since this is the first time I actually launched something.

I haven't received much feedback from the HN community, which is a bit discouraging, but I plan to keep working on this.

In the immediate next release, I will make it a bit more stable and improve the interface (new design: http://i.imgur.com/KOaA8.jpg). And after that, if I get any positive feedback, I'll add features like adding more personal (links to you social network profiles), filter by location, etc.

If anyone has any feedback on the site, the current version or the future plans, please share.
Memory Booth: A Collection of Old Photos and Letters
... and then you get a regression test, so that bug never happens again. And the regression test is easy to write, since all of your code is already testable, you have all the testing infrastructure in place, etc.
It works great on the iPhone - didn't think twice about scrolling and was quickly impressed
Same here. Except that I bought a house.

Even my similar submission to HN about the status of the apps launched didn't go so well (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1955031) :)

But, as I said there, I'll keep working on this.
I was thinking the same thing, that 500 clicks was an awfully small sample size, and that I needed to collect more data. But I could go broke trying to get to a meaningful N. :-)
Why is this interesting at all if it is not an independent origin of life?
Some aspects of grammar are important, but it's important to reflect on the purpose of its study: The ability to construct a sentence that's cogent, clear and understandable both in writing and while speaking.

Some things are simply not important to know as a native speaker but still manage to get taught in English classes. A couple of examples:

1. The different between "that" and "which" (e.g. The curtains that/which cover the windows). Either way is perfectly clear and rigid adherence to a correct "rule" is just language fascism.

2. Terminology for many things that are specific to grammar are also pretty useless. Words like 'participle', 'split-infinitive', and 'gerund' (I literally had to look that up to remember it) are basically useless. Specifically from the test are phrases which obviously have been taught within the class, but don't have any real meaning outside of the concept it's teaching: "Parts of Speech" and "Define Case".

Grammar is only important insomuch as you can write and speak intelligently and coherently. Construction beyond that belongs in a linguistics class specifically focused on the mechanics of language.
I would pay $5,000, perhaps more, to never clean my bathroom again and always have a clean bathroom. My budget is a little bigger for a hobby project. I figure $10,000 - $20,000 for me to prototype something, that's including failures, etc. over 2-3 years. I have no idea how much motors cost, but I'm getting the idea that they are pricey.

Edit: if it's more than this it's not a deal breaker, I just have to rope someone else in, spread things out over more years or something more creative.
Why would we expect anything other than silence? The universe is big, but time is long.

The chances of two active technological species overlapping in time is pretty low. I'd expect to find a lot of ruins and artifacts out there.
This isn't a question of "should we collect this tax or not" in isolation. Any tax in isolation would be nice not to have.

The question is, given a need to raise revenue, does it make more sense to tax large inheritances after the first few million, or to abolish that tax and correspondingly raise taxes on someone else. Deficits are just deferred taxes. (and if you say cut spending -- fine, different discussion. Once we balance the budget we can debate which taxes to cut.)
It's not that simple; you have to take into account the customers who would not have purchased at $100 but did at $50. Failing to account for price sensitivity is a major elementary economic mistake.

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_Cha...
Don't most Lispers argue that just knowing Lisp makes you a better programmer whether you use it or not? Perhaps a better measure of how great Lisp is would be to examine the proportion of programmers who know Lisp and submitted a top ranking entry.
Noted (on my own corkboard!). Will come soon.
Actually, for some games, Steam will do that too! I don't know when the released it, but if you look in your Steam Library, if the game has a little cloud icon next to it, your saved games and other settings will be shared between computers. Right now on my screen, COD2, Torchlight, Dawn of War II, and a few others all do this.

If you go to the Steam menu -> Settings -> Downloads+Cloud, then check the box for enabling steam sync for games that support it.
It is already: see http://matrix.itasoftware.com/.
Sir Maurice Wilkes - A UK Computer Pioneer Remembered
Calling it a death tax does not change any of the underlying mechanics

Yes.

or reasons to support/oppose it.

Obviously, no :-)

That's why you're calling for people to stop using this emotionally loaded and inaccurate phrase. Calling it something it's not absolutely changes the reasons to oppose it, which is why we also have phrases like "Death Panels" and "Baby Killers" to describe Canada's (obviously horrific) health care system.
When the iPad Is the Only Computer Your Employees Need
Phosphorous is used by all previously known life in a number of ways, including as part of the DNA backbone. If there's something that uses something else, it's a big deal.
I launched the beta of http://babble.ly

A Twilio powered free disposable link generator for phone numbers. The goal is to enable users to be contacted by phone on the internet, quickly, easily and privately.

I'd love feedback!
I'm the developer of Bitly News.

One thing I'd like to add to the site is automatic categorization of links, like on Google News. If anyone has suggestions on how to accomplish that, please comment.

I'm also struggling with intermittent 502 proxy errors on the server where Apache has problems proxying to news.arc on localhost.
" The structure of the tax code did."

Then the decision of the Republicans to structure the tax code so that the kids of billionaires get tax-free windfall income has cost other taxpayers billions.
The idea and the execution are inextricably linked even in the academic case. The ideas that your academic friends are protecting have value because they, with a reputation for execution, have decided to focus on them. I have some ideas on string theory which are precisely worthless, no matter how correct they may turn out to be.
Sure, but I did it because the OP did it. Also, there's a good chance that Orwell would have just as much of a problem with "estate tax" as with "death tax", "estate tax" being the choice of people with an agenda after all.
Doesn't work with some character sets. I just entered:

これは、いくつかの日本です

Then went away and came back, and all the characters had turned to question marks.
It is amusing with our app, we launched 'Can I afford it now?' http://caniafforditnow.com and when we showed it to friends, everyone got excited and started telling us how we could monetize it and how they might use it but they never actually went and used it.

We think it has potential and it is just a matter of finding motivated users and will push in that direction but we shall see....

If you have ideas, please share or email me
We have the relationships with the merchants, the users don't. We take a small cut of each sale.
Google Apps for Education: A Gradebook
> The chances of two active technological species overlapping in time is pretty low.

There are some pretty big assumptions about how long a technological species lasts in that statement.
Can't get that to work on Chrome, Mac, 7.0
You mean something like this?
http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/ov_cloud.php

It was introduced to Left 4 Dead late 2008. I'm not sure how widely it's used at this point.

In settings you can enable it at the bottom of the Downloads + Cloud tab.
I found the APL papers interesting, too. Unfortunately, without the corresponding source code available, it is--at least for me--increasingly difficult to make sense of the APL papers and I am not sure/convinced this has anything to do with changed nomenclature. (For example, AFAIR, I don't really see inline caching in the description of "A Software High Performance Interpreter" by Saal and Weiss 1974.)
I would add that the price point of the Groupon is also important.

$20 for $40 worth of good-ass Mediterranean food is a great deal, but every time I've used one of my three groupons, my date and I have managed to spend something like $60 on the night. So what sounds like a huge margin hit is often smaller.

Despite my math background, my behavior is driven by the idea that "I've only used 90% of the groupon amount. Let's have dessert!" So I never spend less than the groupon's value, and instead always spend more.
Reversed Aging Almost A Reality
I think I did really well for the Launch an App Month.

I launched http://sleepyti.me as a "weekend project" at the very beginning of November. It's a simple site designed to help users figure out the best time to go to sleep in order to wake up refreshed.

I have been working steadily on improving the user experience thanks to really helpful feedback that I've gotten from HN and reddit users (thanks!). The site is currently "profitable" from the standpoint that the money I'm scrapping together from ads pays for its share of the (cheapest) Linode plan I have.

I consider Sleepyti.me to be a success (not bad for a guy who doesn't know web design!), and I'm looking forward to building bigger, better and hopefully more monetizable projects in the future.
Most legit iPad case yet - with keyboard
It's too bad the site doesn't use high resolution textures for the iPhone 4. The site looks far sharper on my Macbook.
RTZ: The Ultimate Tester
Bert introduces Chip to his new tester to help solve his circuit problems.
Effectively a dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1958292

There are other submissions as well:

http://searchyc.com/submissions/spacelog?sort=by_date
RIM buys TAT, BlackBerry UI in danger of becoming awesome -- Engadget
Bert introduces Chip to his new tester to help solve his circuit problems.
I was recently thinking something like this would make a great iOS app. Start a story with a stranger or friend, and you have to hand-off at a certain word count or time.

Spectators can read and vote on stories in real time. Winners get a book deal, maybe have some celebrity authors, etc.
I think you started off with a good idea: major players beginning to ignore litigation might improve the situation. But I think that would be more likely to come from judges throwing out cases than defendants not showing up for court, for reasons that eli stated. You also kinda lost me at the word "corrupt," because you took on a sensationalist tone. I think that "corrupt" and "in need of reform" are not the same problem. The patent system was designed with noble intentions. Its major fault (IMHO) is that it hasn't kept up with technology.
Re: categorization, would this solve your problem?

http://www.kosmix.com/corp/developer
Almost, almost ready. Just putting on the final touches and planning on launching in 2 weeks.
Sell, before their personal bubble bursts.
Sure, so long as you're willing to accept that "unbiased" will only mean "pointing out when everyone else's biases come into play*. :D
For that amount of money, I'd go ahead and sell. I'd then look for new projects to move into.
I didn't reach my goal, but that's because I'm taking a break from most side projects to finish my grad school application, which unfortunately takes precedence due to hard deadlines. :/
One thing you have to understand about Google is that they're a technology company at their core, unlike Microsoft and Apple which have turned into product companies. Google is very much focused on creating the best technology, which they then apply in support of their single source of revenue right now, which is advertising.

So although YouTube does not generate revenue, perhaps that was never the goal. Perhaps YouTube provided them the opportunity to strengthen their technology that supports advertising. This can be said about many Google ventures right now including Android, Google Voice, and more. These other projects are unlikely to generate significant revenue in and of themselves, but so long as they draw people to the Google platform and the technology enhances their ability to generate more revenue for their core advertising, I think the company considers them a win.
The incredible growth of supercomputing performance, 1995 – 2010
Choose your news source for this story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962894 - go.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962893 - nytimes.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962846 - nature.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962696 - longislandpress.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962386 - gizmodo.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962200 - gizmodo.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962110 - google.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1957823 - skymania.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953228 - kottke.org
I was planning to launch http://getbizen.com in November. In some ways it is a success. The site it up, I can accept new customers, there is a product (a BI dashboard for franchisees).

However, I got a little sidetracked because I had fundraising opportunities pop up. I ended up spending more time in the last two weeks of November talking to investors than I did talking to customers. I don't know that I should say that I was "sidetracked" because I am responding to investor inquiries, not seeking out potential investors.

My goal was to launch the app and have a paying customer. Instead the app is ready for customers, and I have customer interest, but I did not meet that goal. I was using the HN November push as a way to try and accelerate the execution of a business I had already started working on (in September).

I am not going to claim success in Launch an App Month, but it was great for me and I have been killing it all month. Now I am going to do "Close the funding December" so that I can get back to building the business. I am really excited by this opportunity.
Question: If I were a "BizDev" guy and wanted to create a website that has similar functionalities as, say, Groupon or PayPal (I understand they're different), what languages would be best to learn?

I would suspect some front-end GUI paired with a back-end database system would be needed, but what languages specifically would be best?

As an entrepreneur with a degree in Mech. Eng. and Entrp., and I have done programming in MATLAB, some VBA, and some HTML. So I understand the logic behind programs, but don't necessarily know all the languages.

Any and all suggestions are most welcomed!
"Who should I thank?"
Looks like a neat idea, but can you please add a Terms of Service page, even if it's just a brief one? That might set folks a bit more at ease for posting their TODOs and reminders.
Less than 3%.
There are HTML comments in the JavaScript at the bottom of the source, sandwiched in between the GA tracking code and some Google optimizer stuff. I didn't get any JS errors, so is that legal? Are the comments stripped before the text content of the script element is processed? If so that's pretty wild! Never knew that was possible.
Youtube makes Google loads of money. Sure it uses about $500 million worth of bandwidth a year, but Google pays nothing for that bandwidth because of peering agreements -- Google owns lots of fiber, which is a sunk cost. So the $240 million in revenue is pretty much all gravy.

source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/youtube-bandwidth/
The API Market is Taking a Big Shape
I think that selling at a $6B valuation makes complete sense.

It seems to me that if 40-50% off coupons were the magic key to retail success, they'd have been discovered by retailers already.

Groupon's coupons have already been getting worse... more of the "Get $50 worth of x for $25" which is not all that compelling if the overall purchase will be $100+.

Groupon has done a brilliant job of marketing, but I don't think it's sustainable as is. Groupon clearly has a superb sales team and genius marketing, but if I were an investor I'd want to cash out now, even at a $1B valuation.
This would probably be my solution as well. Although not nearly as sexy (or fun to create) of a solution as a robot, it would sanitize quite well.
It's taxing estates, not deaths. Every other tax is named after what it taxes. Income tax, sales tax, gasoline tax.. get the picture?

And that person with an agenda was Teddy Roosevelt who implemented it almost 100 years ago, back in simpler times when the lying in politics was mostly about people's mothers' moralities and lineages.
I wonder what he felt like when only a few years later he was obsolete.
Credit Card Processing Paralysis
I've built web sites and apps before, but my current project is the first time i'll actually be charging my customers. I've done tons of research on credit card processing. My major requirement is no upfront cost (i'm OK paying more per transaction). I'll probably end up going with Paypal website payments pro, which isn't free, but is at least low commitment, and has the API i need.

But basically i'm suffering from paralysis, because of the responsibility of charing a stranger's credit card, and/or making a commitment to a credit card processor. Any other developers care to share their experience/advice with a Credit Card Processing Virgin?
Didn't launch, But the idea is well under development.
It was a month long project, but with life and a gf sometimes its hard to get things done.

It will get done.