skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do value investing, to learn that you really have to read a combination of theoretical (books about value investing) and practical (accounting, finance, investment valuation, excel modeling, books about different industries).

After that you need to put the two together and start valuing businesses. If you keep at it eventually you will pick up the right skills. Most people just read about the theory and dont focus enough on the practical stuff. Their analyses tend to be sub-par and unprofessional.

I spent a lot of time reverse engineering old investments by famous people or recent investments by hedge funds.

There was never one book that helped. I read a ton and tried to pick the best ideas from all of them. At school I regularly had about 10-12 books checked out in my name and would jump around, reading what really interested me.

The other day the founder of our fund took me out to lunch, he mentioned that he thinks Keynes offers the best introduction to the theory aspect of investing in Chapter 12 of his book General Theory of Employment Interest and Money. You can read about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
Cryptography: why modes matter, and why 'encrypted' is not always 'unreadable'
Active and Passive 1
No. It's primarily a way for registered iOS developers to send beta builds to their testers' devices wirelessly. The usual process required syncing via itunes.
If you are a C corporation, you get no pass-through. My consulting business is set up as a C corp, and my accountant makes sure that it earns no profit each year. This is mostly done by paying any excess as salary bonus. Corporate tax rate is too high to leave money there.

The C corp cost me a little more in terms of the deductions, but was a big win because when I set it up many years ago I put in the bylaws a medical provision such that any full-time employee would have health coverage (up to a limit) including health insurance premiums. This, due to the very high cost of health insurance, was a big win, as these are a business expense.

Were I to do it again, I would probably do LLC with the new way that health care is taken care of.

Thus, there is no issue like there is with the S-corp, because any money taken out of the corporation is done through payroll.
Ah, I see, thanks. That does sound handy!
Demand Media, the company behind Livestrong.com, is allegedly about to go public. Richard Rosenblatt and Lance Armstrong ('random people') have a larger stake in the company than the Livestrong Foundation (a charity) does. So, sure it'd be nice if a charity got the income, but that isn't the case here.

http://www.businessinsider.com/lance-armstrong-poised-to-mak...

http://www.cnbc.com/id/41155886
It's about the developers, not the users.
Try explaining that perspective to your spouse after you lose money in a 419 scam. "But honey, I didn't know that this Nigerian was a con-artist. I had to give him a chance!"
The video is from quite early version. Actually autocomplete (or code suggestion - I tend to use the terms interchangeably) is briefly visible when typing the name of method sayHello().

If you want to some more features in action you can check our other youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4FScB9Rwfc - close captioned with some comments on what's going on.

However you have good point that the video could be better - presentation is definitely something we need to work on.
Create a startup on AngelList
This can give to someone the idea of content specific search engines. Still use Google for generic search but a specialized search engine in various fields could be of interest. Imagine something like the let's say: the Java finder, the soccer finder, the physics finder, and the list can go on almost infinitely. At these times that technical people tend to complain about Google's spammy search they could find such search engines (not just indices) very handy
Groklaw is still very useful. I don't find the legal analysis itself all that useful, but it usually links to primary sources that I can analyze myself.

I'm not a lawyer, but when I got burned out on programming I took a break and went to law school with the intent of going into IP and corporate law. After the final year, I had one paper to complete for an IP seminar to get the degree, and intended to write it over the summer. However, I went back to my old programming job as a summer, found that my programming mojo was back and stayed, and never got around to finishing that paper!
8 Websites you Need to Stop Building
Java finally getting closures, method handles and traits in JDK 8
For those who might be looking for a desktop application, Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/ is an awesome FOSS ebook manager. Organizes, converts between formats, etc.
Where High Speed Internet Meets Smart Grid
Ruby Compendium[pdf]
The problem is in finding the good academic papers. For someone like me who is not affiliated with a university, the best papers are often behind paywalls.
I think implicit in that remark is "low value to most people." It may be "high value" to the scummy people who create it but I can't say their value is of much interest to me or anyone else trying to find useful information.
I downloaded those where I already know the technology well. That way, I hope to pick up a couple of neat tips and tricks every once in a while when I have a few minutes to read.
The alarm clock demo they showed was pretty cool. I could see paying a couple bucks to have that on my phone.
Yeah. I've seen more (good) articles about Javascript in the past year than any 2 years previous. I just don't see it.
Is This What The Future Of Video Advertising Looks Like?
"This week we show how, even when analysts agree that someone could be a match for a piece of DNA evidence, the statistical weight assigned to that match can vary enormously."

This seems to be the author's opinion about what the article is about.
That's probably effective after all deductions, etc. 35% should be their marginal rate. So if the last $500k of income was converted into Steve's Salary their taxes should be dropping by 0.35*500k
Why Do You Think the Internet is Worth Saving?
-- Steve Martin.
When is knowledge more than mere facts? When it's taken for truth and lived.

The war between science and religion is only real for people who believe that science precludes a religious outlook, and vice versa. Science is about pattern recognition from observation. Religion is about living life from revealed or derived wisdom. Religion can be informed by science if it accepts science as part of wisdom. Science has obvious limitations to only what can be observed and explained or duplicated, and it can't get outside that box.

But if you take a fact and intend to spend your limited life pursuing it, it should be real. It should be the truth. You shouldn't be wasting your life working from faulty assumptions, because as far as we can observe (pace Hinduism), this one life is our only chance to do some damage.

Are there major differences in the life you live if you have a different set of facts? Do you have to decide? I would say yes for myself. But apathy like that of the editorialist will kill any amount of wisdom.
Why? That's easy: I made a deal with Randall Munrow and as a result I'm legally obligated to post links to XKCD comics all over the web!

Seriously though. I enjoy reading XKCD and the first thing I thought of when I read the title of the post was that comic. Sorry for offending your delicate sense of humor. ;)
Well done, that's very neat and useful! Thanks.
Are human beings wired to tweet?
Phys Review X: published by American Physical Society under Creative Commons 3.0
You should give proper attribution for your images.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tux.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tux_ecb.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tux_secure.jpg
this would be way better as a twitter list, so you could watch the stream and reach out to people who seem smart/interesting/"resonate with you"
For recent stuff in computer science this is somewhat less of a problem, because most people post PDFs of their own papers on their websites. Citeseer (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/) indexes and caches the self-hosted PDFs as well.
Agreed. Discoverability and accessibility are two big issues when it comes to academic papers.
Meet William James Sidis: The Smartest Guy Ever?
Not sure why the twitter account of a startup is better that it's URL.

Kinda sad that the only two startups I am listed for are things I founded, and didn't invest in.
Dungeons & Dragons ruled a threat to prison security
You know, this is exactly the same reasoning (prejudice on the basis of generalizing a correlation between a behaviour and a shared attribute) as exhibited by racists. In the same way as it is not fair to discriminate against black people on the basis of a higher relative proportion of criminal convictions, it is similarly not fair to discriminate on the basis of someone being a Nigerian in Nigeria on the basis of 419 scam incidence.

That's not to say it may not be effective, on average, in limiting losses. But effectiveness is something distinct from fairness.
There's a really good comment on there I'd like to quote:

"I'd only add that, from my own experience, it is more fruitful to avoid emulating the larger team mentalities when you're a single soul company. Specifically, don't aim for MVP, where your first version is this pale shade of your bigger plan. Instead, aim for MVB, or 'Minimum Viable Business'. Make that first version the whole enchilada. It forces you to think about small products that can be profitable on their own without additional effort, rather than always waiting for the next sign post. When you build up several profitable but small businesses, then you can choose which of those to evolve into a more ambitious version of itself. "

This is probably the biggest lesson I learned as well when I was trying to build a startup product on the side of freelancing for a living. When you are solo its infinitely more useful to build up a functional business with cashflow than work on something where you need to scale up to hit milestones before you make money.

When you need cash to pay your bills, it is very difficult to prioritize putting new effort into something that won't make money in the short term...
Go to the author's/university/lab website. You will usually find a pre-publication version or a closely related paper, months to years ahead of the actual publication. Some of the stuff you find isnt very good (too narrow, for example) but the signal to noise ratio is better than scanning lot of blogs.
The Culture of Shame, in the context of last week's "Tiger Mom" controversy
There are several ways around that; some depend on the field you are looking at.

At least for Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science the authors often have a working draft on their homepage. Alternatively, and in all fields, you can just write a letter or email to the author asking for an electronic copy.

Then you could befriend someone in a university---just ask around on HN, I am sure somebody will step forward and agree to download you articles from behind paywalls every once in a while. Or often just joining the library of your local university is good enough.
Some of those features are just some fancy libraries, or syntactic sugar that you can ignore, if you want to. They don't make the language itself more complicated.
Effective Habit Change
It does seem a little strange that the founders could complete acquisitions without even informing, let alone getting the approval of, the CEO. Is that normal in corporate governance?
From the article: "The company has encountered numerous difficulties in bringing the plane to market due to a new engineering strategy that uses composite materials and integrates production from several international sites."

Various parts of the plane are built in different countries and then reassembled in Seattle using new materials that have never been used in a commercial airplane. IIRC, the first few didn't fit together right (don't worry, none of them were meant for customers, they're test planes) and required a lot of in-the-factory engineering to complete. One lesson could be: don't outsource your core competency. Also keep in mind that it's not just simple assembly problems, but all the other production processes that are being developed at the same time (repair manuals, tooling, software, training, etc).
How does this make it to the front page? Gruber cuts and pastes a third party quote from Schmidt and this make HN top stories? Perhaps linking to a more complete article would be more beneficial. Say the interview where the quote was taken out of context:

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091007/live-from-new-york-...

The context is more along the lines of Schmidt was commenting on how Google was entering a buying phase again. They had a reputation of finding small start-ups that were interesting and absorbing them. He then points back to how some of these turned out to be big wins, like Android and Google Earth. Buying a startup for a couple million is peanuts to Google. I think they are more profitable by moving quickly on these "small" tech purchases than sitting and debating the logistics beforehand.
It only has my most recent investment. Probably should be a wiki.
This looks beautiful. What stack are you using? I'm thinking of building a similar site for another category of products and am wondering whether to roll my own in Rails or just go with Wordpress. Would love to hear any suggestions based on your experience.
How would you game a 22 percent national sales tax? (Other than buying things on the black market).
How Video Cards Work
If you really want to read a paper that is behind a paywall with an unreasonable download fee, you might try to find the university websites of the authors. They often make their papers available online from their "publications" webpage.

Alternatively, just emailing and asking the author for a pdf might work (if you're comfortable with that).

I really miss being a student and having wide access to all kinds of journals. The professional societies (like IEEE computer) do provide some access to some journals, but the coverage is so limited. One would have join all of them to get the same access that a university student has.
"Even though I haven't developed any project in Scala yet,"

I stopped reading there and started skimming, and nothing changed my mind back.

Many languages are cool until you actually have to support something you wrote on them. That's when you find out the real dirt on the language.
I disagree unless the payment you are making to yourself as distributions is fair compensation for services provided to the company. A company's purpose is to make a profit, and if you are distributing profit to yourself, then there is no reason to pay FICA on that income. The "fair market salary" is important because if you are forced to pay yourself arbitrarily more (like you suggested), it would be in the best interest of the person to instead hire someone to do his job for him (at fair market salary) and simply collect the profits. (In fact, this could be the long term goal: hire someone to manage the business and retire on the profits!)

If you'd like to know why it's "fair" for people to be allowed to pay income tax and not FICA tax on profit, then you need to look at the C corporation code. Under this system, the corporation pays a corporate income tax, and then can pay profits to its shareholders as dividends, which are then also subject to a second tax. You'll note that there is no payroll tax in this system. The purpose of an S-corporation is to avoid this "double taxation" for very small companies and instead use the personal income tax code, which may be (but is not necessarily) cheaper for the shareholder. This is not a loophole: it is by design.

It is also worth noting that just because the taxes are paid through the personal income tax code, that doesn't mean that person received that profit as a cash distribution. That money may very well be put to a different purpose, e.g. investing in the business in some way which is not yet tax deductible (like a large capital purchase), in the bank as float, or invested in some way.

In the case mentioned in the article, I certainly agree the owner was not paying himself enough by W-2 for his services, particularly if he was the sole employee and otherwise received that income as a cash distribution. He is obviously an experienced CPA who would be paid much more on the open market, and as a CPA, he should have known better.
A little late to the Amy Chua-bashing party, but it took me a while to get something "meta" written up. The article is less about education and more about cultural backgrounds. Not exactly computer stuff, but I thought some of the people here might enjoy reading this, given the number of thought-provoking articles I've read here.

Let the ruthless criticisms begin...
> What makes this a particularly easy rule of thumb to follow is that it's exactly what you would do anyways if you didn't know about the S-Corp loophole.

So if everyone is supposed to pretend it doesn't exist, why does it exist?
Connect your site to Facebook
CiteseerX is fantastic.

Once you find a good paper or two (and/or the academic literature's relevant buzzwords for your issue), you can span out through the citations for quite a while. "Introduction / Survey of ..." papers (e.g. http://archives.cs.iastate.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/02/04/0...) exist mainly for the bibliography. Also, when you find someone whose name keeps coming up, look for their faculty page, e.g. Andrew Appel's (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/).

For papers that don't have .pdf or .ps files cached on Citeseer (due to primary hosting behind the ACM's paywall) try searching on Google Scholar and clicking "X other versions". Typically, the ACM is the first result, but faculty pages have publicly visible copies.
You probably should have continued reading. Given the context I'm pretty sure that the author meant "Even though I hadn't...". See this quote a few lines later:

"Now, one year later, after writing 8622 lines of code in Scala"
I've seen something like this before - very interesting concept.

Now, "seamless product integration" can take place post-production, instead of having ad executives read through scripts.
Listing the twitter accounts instead of websites suck ... twitter is where you go to communicate not see what they do.
A Computer that is not selfhosting is almost a contradiction.
Hey can you provide some reference for the SSA benefit payments being "based on your latest 40 qrtrs."

I could only find this worksheet online:
http://ssa.gov/pubs/10070.html

And under "Estimating your Social Security retirement benefit" your payments appears to be based on your highest index earnings over 35 years.
As many have pointed out, this is not really analogous to robots.txt.

The first thing I imagined was a text file that said stuff like, "Don't read anything in the Features section. Also, don't try to use the admin login panel!"

But really, what this idea should be called is developers.txt.

I thought it was a silly idea, until someone else here talked about it providing a way of verifying work. Anyone can post a website with screen captures of other sites, and claim they worked on them. Even if the site does list a developer firm in the footer, as long as I worked there, I can claim to have worked on that site.

A developers.txt file like their example would make for a verifiable list of the people who actually worked on the site, in a way that does not add clutter to the actual content.

I know clients we work with probably don't want us putting all our names on their About page, but would have no problems with a developers.txt file that normal users are never going to see.
You mention two problems:
* Finding good papers
* Obtaining a copy of those good papers.

For finding good papers, use Citeseerx or Google scholar or Microsoft Academic Search. One popular metric is to look at the # citations :)
http -h http://theteafinder.com/teas/search | more

X-Powered-By: Phusion Passenger (mod_rails/mod_rack) 3.0.0
The usability of the command line
Port a Pyhton 2.x library to Python 3.x. Take PIL (Python image library) for example, this is a great image processing library that seems to stagnate in the 2.x world for a few years.

It will be fun and you will learn a lot.

If this seems too difficult, then take a good introductory book like "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" and implement by yourself all the include projects.
Way back machine gets way better (and now runs on OSS)
Hm, you missed my favorite addiction, cinnamon ;) Pretty cool otherwise!
Excellent question. As a developer, I suggest asking for everything. But some clients have asked this exact same question, and two things that have worked for me have been:

1. Agree on a %-age of the money as a 'hold back.' The client pays within a set period, e.g. 30 days, if there have been no problems or when all problems are resolved. I wouldn't agree to more than 10% hold-back, personally, but it isn't a big issue.

2. Agree that for each deliverable, there is a milestone for "accepted" where the client tests it on your development or acceptance system, and another for "deployed." There is a payment for each milestone. There could be other milestones leading up to "acceptance," of course, and there would be payments for each of these.
or:

wget -r -np -nd -A.mobi -erobots=off http://hewgill.com/~greg/stackoverflow/ebooks/

r = recursive

np = don't follow up to parent

nd = don't recreate directories locally

A = file extensions to dl

erobots = ignore robots, for some reason this site blocks wget

also, -i filename.txt will grab a list of urls for a file and download them, so no need for 'wget <url>'. adding -F will treat that local file as HTML and grab all the links out of it for download.
Sometimes less is more
Fair point, attributions modified.
$ time perl < /dev/null

real	0m0.033s
user	0m0.004s
sys	0m0.000s
$ time python < /dev/null

real	0m0.017s
user	0m0.004s
sys	0m0.012s
$ time perl < /dev/null

real	0m0.002s
user	0m0.004s
sys	0m0.000s
$ time python < /dev/null

real	0m0.017s
user	0m0.016s
sys	0m0.000s
$ time perl < /dev/null

real	0m0.002s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.004s
$ time python < /dev/null

real	0m0.017s
user	0m0.008s
sys	0m0.008s

That's interesting. The first time perl is a lot slower, but further runs are a lot faster, while python starts medium and stays there. I tested this on more than one computer and results followed the same pattern.
HIV is powered by RNA
Syyn Labs's League of Extraordinary Nerds
Great site, well done.
Now iterate!
I do not understand your inflammatory tone. The article is well documented and it goes into details that you do not find easily on the average post describing transitions from one language to another. There are so many people even here that choose work on a language for much less reasons than the ones described in the post.
1. Most Wordpress theme developers use popular Javascript libraries, so it wouldn't be too difficult to replace them with the original if you suspected something was amiss. The function wouldn't be a problem, if there wasn't any base64 code.
2. url() references should all be relative, in the same domain, so if it linked on the outside, I'd change it.

Most of the time I use a Wordpress theme as a starting point, rewriting some parts and looking over all of the code.

Also, mentioned above, securing the theme against injections and XSS is important.