skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't paginate, it hides low-scoring comments and let you load them with AJAX. Pagination feels much worse than that, I basically never go to another page because I feel it's not worth it. However, I can't stop compulsively clicking on "load more comments", even when I know they're not worth it.
See, this points out something I've never understood. If you own an s-corp, you have to be careful about paying yourself too little and taking out too much profit, presumably due to the reduction in FICA withholdings.

So how does someone like Steve Jobs get away with making a $1 annual salary without being charged with tax evasion? It seems like he's found a way to avoid paying into the social security and workmen's comp system.

What am I missing? Is it only legal to dodge withholdings in a c-corp?
From http://www.google.com/press/funfacts.html :

The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank™,
and assigns an "importance" value to each page on the web and
gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that's
not why it's called PageRank. It's actually named after Google
co-founder Larry Page.

(Edited to remove the snark. Sorry, it's been a long day and it isn't over.)
My problem with the Quora hype is that its only in the TechCrunch echo chamber. Even relatively tech saavy people I know don't know Quora unless they read TechCrunch (and a LOT of very techincal people don't read TechCrunch). And I don't mean they know about it, just haven't used it. I mean they literally haven't heard of it before.

I've never been to Quora and this is somewhat surprising given the number of Google/Bing searches I do that take me a Yahoo Answers page or StackOverflow. I'm surprised I've never once even seen a Quora page on page 1 of a Bing/Google search I've done.

It's a weird very bimodal hype. I tend to agree with the author. Unless something drastically changes in the next 6-12 months, it will be a niche site with much less hype.
The site has Demand Media creating content for it. I would consider that low value content, I suppose others might call that spam.
EDIT 2: This issue has now been resolved. The reason you couldn't access this file was that read permissions for the user group "Everyone" were removed on this specific file. We'll endeavor to ensure this doesn't happen in the future.

-----------

We might have to put that one down to initial technical difficulties.

Not sure why you are getting access denied for that particular resource. May have to invalidate that object from CloudFront cache locations.

EDIT: We are using Amazon CloudFront to host the scripts.
You can't spoof an IP address and expect to get the traffic back.

They could use VPNs and proxies, and that would shift the focus from the third world to VPNs and proxies in the first world.

If those operators don't comply, you could have them IP filtered also. But also - we have better options for dealing with nasty traffic when the originating IP is in the first world.

It doesn't matter to them as they will find a way
around, precisely because their livelihood depends
on it.

That's no more true than it would be to say that having high levels of organised crime is inevitable because people's livelihoods depend on it. It may be true that it's inevitable that you'll have a little bit, but not that it will be universal.

On the other hand, the genuine users will be the one
who suffer.

True, but genuine users suffer from the current mess. There's a culture of nastiness about the internet. That wild west culture. I think it will be civilised one way or another. I'd rather do it through something like IP filters than watch the community migrate into gated communities like facebook.
I had to look that one up too. According to http://www.google.com/press/funfacts.html, it's actually named after Larry Page.

Of course, that could just be some Google humor. I would guess that PageRank is named for the obvious reason, but that it won out over other names for the connection to the co-founder.
Basic guide to using virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper
>"the big Internet companies and the innovative emerging web services work together to "succeed by making others succeed."

Given that the primary source of revenue for companies like Google and Facebook is the sale of advertising, its hard to see such cooperation fostering a shift towards a web which doesn't atempt to segment the market down to unique individuals. Online, it is far more common for B2C practices to be carried over into B2B, than for the B2B model to bubble down into B2C.
Update: Found another anomaly. Whois needs to be offline for performance reasons. We will refine it - but it should be 99.9% correct now.

It is 6 stages to grep, sed, diff, sort, uniq, and import the files into our whois db so it will be a couple of days potentially before I track the .01% down.
It would help a bit. At the moment there's no indication at all of who is running this thing.

The only way I'd trust something like this is if someone stood to take a major blow to their reputation if it failed. Google, Amazon, AOL would be fine. A company that made a living doing high profile operations work (like http://omniti.com/ ) would be OK. An anonymous web page doesn't cut it.
I call BS on this. A large portion of those users are probably using AOL more out of comfort than from being misinformed. Change their routine and they would likely be lost.
A S-corp owner must take what the IRS deems to be a "reasonable salary" based on the overall profit of the company, and must pay self employment taxes (FICA, Medicare, etc.) on that amount.

The IRS does not give out much guidance on the definition of "reasonable salary" but has provided guidance on what is /not/ reasonable.

In this case the IRS evaluated the company's return and decided that his salary was less that reasonable and as such they went after him and got him to pay more tax.

This rule does not apply to C Corporations.
Ask HN: How to credibly demonstrate self-taught skills/knowledge?
HN - first post here.

I've read a lot of posts here about a Do It Yourself MBA or (more recently) teaching yourself Financial Engineering. While the real prize is the knowledge itself, how do you credibly demonstrate this self-taught knowledge/skill to potential employers? I don't imagine that I can just put it on my resume and have an employer believe me.

For some professions, like programming, simply working on a project or two would suffice. There exists ample opportunity for signaling. Perhaps there's some analogue for an MBA or MFE?
pg doesn't seem to be interested in doing that. I created a script (http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-for-...) and sent him something to cut and paste in order to add it to HN. Would have been minimal effort but apparently not going to happen.
Do you still need a co-founder?
My money is on a p2p iTunes. Spotify would be unlikely, as you need to keep the files to be able to seed them, so they'd have to come from somewhere if nobody ever stored them on their drives. An iTunes equivalent that also broadcasts would be far more viable.
As a non-web developer (I'm a lawyer) I learned long ago that there is a financial point at which the balance of power switches from me to the client.

When the client owes me a trivial amount of money I can afford to walk away from the job if I want to. If the client owes me a lot of money, now I am shackled to that client (and the job) because I am chasing my own money.

The key is to never let the client owe you too much. For me this number is about $2,500.

The way I solve this problem is

(1) by getting a substantial amount of money up front; if I get ANY guff from the prospective client when I ask for money, I know how I will be treated for the rest of the project and I may choose to back off at that point.

(2) watch the invoicing very carefully and if they are slow in paying, stop work until they pay. Mr. Pavlov's ideas are in action here: the client is rewarded for slow pay by halting of work with a message "Hey you owe money."
It looks like all real information about what the service does is under the blog.. From what I can gather, it allows you to manage beta/prebeta (free) access to the apps you are currently developing for iOS.
I think your massively overstating the importance of a name to the success of a company. Unless a name is straight up awful and suggests something unpleasant - it won't have an impact on the success/failure of a company.

People thought google was pretty stupid. The word Microsoft doesn't really mean anything. IBM is relatively meaningless, ditto for HP. All of those companies are massively successful because of the products they built. That's really the only thing that matters.
You seem to assume we only use our terminal to interact with a shell.
You really can't "cheat" with a C-corp. Your company's income is going to first be subject to corporate income taxes (30 to 35%). Then if you pay dividends, that is also taxed.

In other words, trying to skirt payroll taxes with a C-corp is going to end up with you paying more taxes than doing no hack. Hence, why the IRS rule only applies to S-corps which pass on their income and are not subject to corporate taxes.

Steve jobs effectively pays a 45% federal tax rate on income (35% corp on apple's income and then 15% long term cap gains on any shares he sells) -- so the IRS really doesn't care.
Social Security/Medicare/Workers comp get no money on passthrough from a c-corp either - c-corps pay taxes on profit, whereas s-corps pass any profit through to be taxed on individual returns of shareholders.

What would bother the IRS is that capital gains distributions are taxed at a different, lower rate than standard income, so taking distributions instead of income could reduce the total amount owed to the IRS.

(I'm not an accountant - if someone could verify or refute this, that would be nice)
IBM and HP both mean something...
Add my down-vote for this new feature. I've always suspected PG kept the HN interface simple so we, as hackers, would implement our own hacks on top of it. I'm just to busy. Ultimately it's PG's to do with as he wishes, and I'm not going to knock success.
Sizzle would be a nice addition: http://sizzlejs.com/
My reason for using Perl is to escape from OOP. All of the modern mainstream programming languages, C++, Java, C#, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, etc are all strongly OOP.

On the other hand, Perl is very much a procedural langauge. Besides Perl code that is written in a procedural style, many Perl modules are written in C which is a strictly procedural language.

There is Moose for OOP stuff, but that is just added onto the language as an afterthought, and many libraries don't use it so we can at least say that Perl is less OOP then all of the other mainstream languages.

I don't know what it is, I just hate OOP. It seems absolutely revolting to me, so I stuck with procedural languages. Now I have found something I like even better: functional programming, so now I use languages like Lisp and Haskell.

As for Python, the only good features in that language: lambda, map, reduce, and filter were added by a Lisp hacker. Everything else in the language is inefficient scripting crap.
Good question. So far, we are only hosting tiny files (almost everything is well under 10kb).

Given the how cheap CloudFront works out to be for files of that size, we can support quite a lot of growth, even if we have to incur the expense personally.

We do plan to monetize it at some stage. Some ideas are premium accounts that mash all of your resources together and host them for you.
More like 75 hours due to the government and their infernal taxes.
I don't see what the problem is.

After a while, we'll all get used to clicking through the pages of comments. If you're not interested enough in conversations surrounding an article - you won't.
Give him 6 more hours...
Movements, like you describe, are left up to the application you're interacting with. This is not a job for a terminal!

The terminal just needs to communicate the keys pressed.
Small businesses are somewhat notorious for aggressively interpreting the tax code in one's favor, largely because they have a variety of options for doing so not available to the W-2 employee. The game theory sort of incentivizes it, too: heads you save 100% of the taxes at issue, tails you have to pay the taxes at issue and (if you had any sort of a good faith case) only interest at a below-market rate on them... and the coin is known to flip tails only a few percentage points of the time, due to how infrequent audits are.

This is complicated by the fact that, if the tax code were a spec, it would have some requirements which were contradictory and very many interactions whose behavior was totally undefined.

For example, BCC has a fairly similar issue: if the profits are earned income received for the value of my services as an engineer/etc, then they're subject to a generous exclusion since I was physically in Japan when I earned them (foreign earned income exemption, form 2555). If they're unearned income -- that is, if the business is generating profits above the fair market value of the time I am investing -- then they are not subject to that exclusion and I owe the IRS a few thousand extra. On a separate axis, they may not be attributable to the business at all, but as a result of sale of real property, depending on whether the computer software counts as personal property or not, which apparently turns on the degree of support/customization I offer and the mood of the examining IRS clerk. If they aren't attributable to the business and are a sale of real property, then they are excludable, as long as the transaction is not sourced to the United States. Sales of real property are sourced where the transaction physically takes place... but the IRS literally has no opinion on where that is for sales of downloadable software. (I asked. They said "Write up your reasoning with your tax form. If we don't bill you, you're good.") If they are not real property, they may be a sale of computer licenses, which are arguably a source of royalties, which could be subject to a US/Japan tax treaty provision which overrides some of these rules but not others.

The above is not tax advice. Don't even ask about the Japanese side -- I have a few more weeks to figure that mind-meltingness yet.
You can talk about your own products and services, and disparage others’; in other words, it is a spammers’ paradise.

Same argument was used against Wikipedia back in the day.
Domestic use of aerial drones by law enforcement
Erm, your irony is a touch opaque. What do you really think?
I really like the advice about asking your employees to keep a manual where answers are kept. Way better than trying to start with some sort of comprehensive statement of principles.
Here's a link about the app that doesn't ask for all of your personal information.

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=124435950933...
To be honest, though, you already had 98% of the delegation problem solved. The biggest hurdle isn't telling employees "here's what we stand for, I trust you to make decisions according to our philosophy". The biggest hurdle is to actually find people you can trust with it. It sounds like you already had a team of competent, skilled people whom you just micromanaged, and then realised they were competent enough to act on their own and let them.

This is trivial compared to actually finding such people (at least for me, I guess).
You know, this isn't a problem specific to the new system. It's always been better, karma-gaining wise, to reply to a high-scoring comment, instead of adding a brand new reply. This just makes that (annoying) behavior even more impactful.
"There should be a domain name lookup service that combines a thesaurus, misspeller, and translator"

http://twitter.com/#!/savant/status/24226152759431168

Where do you get the Verisign's list? I was looking around for this when I tweeted that.
Every time I see "Gandhi" spelled as "Ghandi", I die a little inside.

(And, just to be clear, it was NPR who got it wrong, not the poster above.)
Hosted and minified: http://ajax.cdnjs.com/ajax/libs/sizzle/1.4.4/sizzle.min.js
if you not happy giving out the info that any app requires, then maybe you shouldn't be putting your info on FB in the first place?
When slashdot changed their discussions to use javascript to control the display sorting/loading, it resulted in non-js users needing to use extra clicks to sort their daily reading.

Lately slashdot has removed the option to sort their discussion without javascript. I stopped visiting the site since I couldn't get as much out of reading their discussion with their default sorting of the discussion. (js isn't great on phone browser.)
Indeed, it's the same company behind eHow.com and other SEO spam. I'm frankly a bit surprised that Lance Armstrong's organization would partner with such a company.

Here's an excellent Wired article about Demand Media:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/
I checked out this site the moment it got linked on Twitter, but I haven’t been able to connect to it still. I asked on Twitter, and it seems quite a few people are having issues connecting to it:

http://twitter.com/#!/search/%40KuraFire

For a CDN, having a home page not work for so many people is a serious problem. If it just recently had its DNS changed, then it shouldn’t have been announced, period. If not that, this connectivity is even more concerning.

I’m really excited about seeing dedicated JS CDNs for things like Modernizr (which I lead/run), but a CDN that has such a troublesome start will need to prove itself a couple times over before I can consider it seriously. Mainly, this kind of start doesn’t inspire confidence that the people running it know every little thing there is to know about hosting and DNS. The fact that one of the three examples in this thread, linked by who appears to be the creator of the site, doesn’t actually work, makes me even more concerned.

I’m all for seeing Modernizr and other JS scripts on a CDN, but the CDN should work for that, so I hope that this one gets its act together real soon. Whatever the cause, being largely unavailable for a lot of people in a lot of different countries is obviously unacceptable as a CDN resource—even if it may be only temporary.
Can someone explain why given/when is better than switch/case?

From the examples in the link, I don't see an essential difference or benefit to the developer.
Meaning =/= easy to say and pronounce.

Apple
Dell
Yahoo
Microsoft
Google
Facebook
Myspace

None of these really mean anything, but they're all easy to say and spell. Quora, not so much. Considering that word of mouth is the single most important "marketing method", I think it's relevant at some level.
Becoming a successful blogger on it? Writing and publishing a book on it? Showing your skills while volunteering for an NGO / organisation that needs/validates your skills? Offering to work for somebody for free for a while? Just some ideas.

(disclaimer, I'm taking the university route myself)
Will 'while' be replaced with 'aslongas' ?
Frankly, I agree. The thrust of my comment was more on backing up the assertion that treating Nigerians this way is actually unjust, immoral; not that it doesn't make business sense, or that it's a relatively small slice of the larger pie, etc.
Having changed this 256 colors seem to work in Vim with the exception of the background color. I presume this is something to do with the default "white on black" theme that iTerm2 is using?
Well yes, I do think that unavailable domains can be sometimes useful, that's why I said separate into 2 columns.
Clickable Link
<a href='www.microangels.in> http://www.microangels.in </a>
I just saw Qwiki for the first time today and watched the Natalie Portman qwiki at http://www.qwiki.com/q/#Natalie_Portman and you can count me in as a fan.

The clone (viewable at http://banksytheluckystiff.github.com/fqwiki/) definitely does not compare. It's like comparing the first version of Yahoo to today's Google... and Qwiki hasn't even started to improve their product yet.

Obviously the author doesn't care for the qwiki format but they are being short sighted. It could be quiet useful, especially as it improves over time in areas of giving you options in how much depth you want, the voice synthesizer, etc, by providing just enough info in a pleasurable format.

What I do hate about qwiki is their name. It associates them with wiki's/wikipedia in my mind (without knowing what it is) and it personally is a major turn-off.
> over really disruptive ones like CloudFlare

CloudFare provides a great value, but how is it 'disruptive'? Seems like that word is becoming utterly meaningless. Being better at something than your competitors just makes you a good competitor it doesn't make you disruptive. Let's only call something 'disruptive' if it's destroyed an entire industry. P2P disrupted the music industry. Google and Wikipedia disrupted the local library.

Just being a new startup with a flashy website doesn't make you automatically 'disruptive' whether you're Qwiki or CloudFlare.
The hype cycle is a beautiful thing when you are on the receiving end. Unfortunately many worthy projects and concepts never get that opportunity.
Also a pain for browsing on the iPad.
“Science advances funeral by funeral”: Quotations on obstacles to enquiry
Effing the Ineffable
If you aren't able to sustain the site at some point in the future, there would be major downtime and broken scripts across sites. That is the reason why people would trust google or other more trustworthy sites for hosting their main js files, or prefer to do it themselves
Not only low-scoring, you can choose sorting method yourself. Still, you're right that paginated comments are appended on the page rather than loaded as a new view.

My emphasis was on the fact that the number of loaded by default comments is rather high, making pagination necessary only on the very top commented stories, whereas on HN, as it is now, even quite noncontroversial entries' discussion threads are strongly chunked.
why? both spellings are pretty close to the same pronunciation.
Thanks for the feedback KuraFire!

We did stuff up the launch of this service. We should have thoroughly vetted DNS propagation before we launched. We plan to learn from this, and will ensure anything we do in the future has much more rigorous testing.

Please accept our humble apologies.

We're working on resolving current issues as we speak.
This is disingenuous for several reasons.

1) They just received $8 million in funding to further develop their product. I.e. That money hasn't been spent making it a better product yet.

2) A few hundred lines of markup does not a product make. What about servers, security, user accounts, marketing, documentation, etc?

3) Polishing a product so it looks nice and has very few bugs is a huge amount of work. If he made a slick, bug-free clone I would be impressed.

3.5) ...especially with an automated system like this. It is easy to create something that automatically generates a shoddy result. It can be fiendishly hard to automatically generate something useful often enough for people to rely on you.
Could we get msutache?
https://github.com/janl/mustache.js/
If you're referring to the actual process of installing apps over-the-air, see this article explaining it: http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2010/12/apple-best-kept-s...
Hi,

1. Our translator is currently switched off. We might add a checkbox to update it. Renualdo? We switched it off because we used google translate, and then cleaned the output (i.e., kill aux, des, della, etc). We are in the process of getting an offline translation kit together though for another project, so that can be added instead in a month or two.

2. We applied through verisign's website and faxed (no kidding - we faxed) our company info. We have a fully registered limited liability (plc) company so it was not too hard. It took about three weeks though to get access.

3. We have thesaurus (clearly) but that is only the start of the fun... and the mispeller is on the list of things to add, after domain hacks. ;)