skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If your income fluctuates based on profit and the IRS deems that a dividend, then, you are charged at the dividend rate rather than the personal tax rate. That dividend tax rate is higher than your income rate until you hit $373k annual salary in 2011/2012, and yes, you would get hit for underpaying taxes.

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=101038,00....

Publication 535, mentioned further down under reasonable compensation talks further about how income is qualified.

Basically, if you pay yourself $8k/month, and in July have a really great month and pay yourself $40k, the IRS could determine that the $32k you gave yourself is a distribution of profit, and therefore a dividend. Even paying your taxes as if that was taken as a wage could end up being scrutinized by the IRS. If the IRS determines that your wage fluctuates as much as your profit does, and you're audited, you could have an issue.

Lets say you run a consulting company, pay yourself $5k/month, write an IPhone app, sell $200k, hand yourself $200k right there, it is possible that the IRS could take that view. The difference in taxes on $200k of income versus a dividend is 2% or $4000. If that is greater than 10% of the amount you owe at the end of the year, you could be subject to underpayment penalties of another few hundred. In the fictional $32k, the underpayment of tax would be $3200.

I'm not an accountant, but, if you run into any of these situations, you need to know when to talk with an accountant. Even thinking that you paid the proper tax is something best left to someone that does that for a living. And if you're going to find an accountant, do it in October.. give them your numbers for the current year and what you're projecting for the rest of the year and give them time. You still have room to maneuver a bit more than talking to him on March 14th when the forms are due March 15th. Tax planning is almost as important as tax filing.

Note: yes, I was audited due to the above situation - prior to having an accountant. Ironically, it was a contract with the Navy that did it - I thought, finally, I made this money, I am going to pay myself for all of the hard work I put into this and reward myself for the last two years of subsistance living. After all was said and done, the penalties and accountant fees were grossly disproportionate to the $2100 in underpaid taxes.
A few million dollar acquisition is so small, it's akin to a new hire or hardware purchase. Not worth debating with other members of management (provided you've all agreed to go out and make acquisitions).

(Written on Android, incidentally)
Context is everything.
While I agree that many scientific articles are worth reading, I think that it's almost impossible to read everything even in your field of interest. The point is to get the most interesting and important ones.

So I suggest reading what is called Review articles following the references if necessary.
Adder: Python with a Lisp
No, he is saying that knowledge on its own ('academic "knowing"'), separate from the experience, is insufficient.

This is straight from the school of thought that says any great truths have to be understood at the experiential level, not just the intellectual level. A pedestrian codification of this is the "Child has to learn it for themselves" statement when parents attempt to impart life wisdom on offspring but realise that in itself is not enough. They see, perhaps for the first time, the real difference between understanding and Understanding.

A more specific example is love. An observer studying the biological / physiological mechanisms involved, and immersing themselves in second-hand accounts of new romance could allow themselves to intellectually approximate human love, but experiencing it directly gives them a much deeper, experiental understanding than would otherwise be possible.

The case is no different when it comes to the meaning of life. The answer to that question cannot be extracted and written down as knowledge, and instead must be derived from the full life experiences of each individual seeking an answer. As the author states 'the essence of the question is about experience, not facts'.
This is the language I presented two years ago at the 2009 International Lisp Conference. It's finally ready for people to try out.

From the documentation:

Adder is a Lisp-1 which compiles to Python. It aims to integrate seamlessly into Python: every Adder function is a Python function, every Adder list is a Python list, etc.

Python-on-Lisp has been tried before; I think Adder has two advantages that previous attempts did not. The first is technical: Python's metaprogramming has gotten better in the past few years, which allows Adder to integrate more smoothly. The second is social: Clojure has prepared the ground for the notion of a Lisp that integrates into an existing language.

It has one bit of non-Lispy syntax: foo.bar.baz means exactly what it does in Python, and .bar.baz is a function, defined so that (.bar.baz foo) is identical to foo.bar.baz.
Quora's value comes from the quality of the people on it. There is very little that's exciting about them except the people they've been able to attract initially.

As the site grows, the density of interesting people will drop and the noise will increase, getting worse the more mainstream it gets. Eventually it will be a slow Yahoo answers.
Not to mention the dual class thing.
The Only Thing You Need To Do To Be Great At Networking (w Infographic)
he would have given him an incentive to stay

Clearly we don't know if he did. But what we do know is that guys like Adam, Paul Buchteit etc. just want to go do their own thing after a while. And we also know the tendency of founders to sell their co back to their original employer or a close competitor.
The opportunity for an academic graph
Or, if you have an iPhone (or iPad or iPod touch) running iOS 4.0+, you can try it out by becoming a beta tester for my app, [Split Decision](http://testflightapp.com/join/d9566ad38cbafb7444b0cf6c8b4aa0...).
The exact amount of Armstrong's equity is not known, but the offering is expected to put [Demand Media's] valuation at around $1 billion. More than a few investors think the stock will be a dog, but that won't necessarily prevent major backers from cashing in first.

Wow, demand valued at 1 billion? WTF?
How does HN A/B Test?
ipredator happened.
The arguments the gang "expert" made about similarities between D&D player organization and gang organization would apply equally well to many organized religions, such as Catholicism. I wonder if a prison could get away with banning that?
I'm not Derek, but as a remote-working team member for a business that has many other remote-working team members, this is a similar problem I've been trying to solve by encouraging use of a private twitter-like network through Status.net (free) or Yammer (paid).

It provides that ambient awareness of what coworkers are up to / thinking about, gives you an easy way of soliciting helpful but non-essential feedback without adding to email overload, and allows for realtime information sharing. It's potentially a good substitute for in-office community when that's not an option.
given/when isn't a switch statement. given and when are two separate constructs that happen to work well together for switch-statement-style purposes.

given temporarily sets the topic($_) to an expression. when smart-matches against topic and executes some code (followed by an implicit "next") if the match is successful.

given can be used without when and vice-versa.

given is useful for situations where you need to perform several operations on the result of an expression but don't want to name it, or in some cases, for when you want to emphasize an operation instead of the operand. For example, instead of 'say (some-long-complicated-expression.with-lots-of-calls-and-operators).perl', 'say .perl given the-expression'.

when can be used in given, but it can also be used in CATCH blocks (where $_ is set to the exception), or in for loops or other blocks where you are taking $_ as a parameter.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about this.

Make of it what you will. The article speaks for itself.
Ask YC: Review my startup, twtquiz
It's available at http://twtquiz.com

To put it short, it's an application where people on Twitter can quiz on topics in real-time. The platform is set entirely on Twitter and is considered a fun yet addictive approach.

I would love to hear your feedback and response on my project.
Unfortunately, my GPA got hit pretty hard in college because of some choices I made (attempted to double major in fairly difficult fields). While I'm certainly confident in my ability to score well on the GMAT/GRE and perhaps generate a couple of interesting items on my resume, I fear that my GPA would be enough to keep me from getting in. So, this is my way of asking how to get accredited without going to an accredited school.
Just a quick comment after playing with this. I like it. The team doesn't seem to have any delusions about this being a primary code editor but it's good for those quick fixes and ideas. As such I went through the process of grabbing a source file off a client's site, making a couple quick changes, and pushing it back up. While I wouldn't want to do it all day it was far less painful than that process has the right to be on a mobile phone. It's a keeper for me.
Per the IRS:

> The federal government does not recognize an LLC as a classification for federal tax purposes. An LLC business entity must file as a corporation, partnership or sole proprietorship tax return.

As for your suggestion that all pass-through income is W-2 income - that would never work. It implies that all business "profits" were paid to its shareholders (that's what payroll / W-2 income is). A cash distribution to its owner is not the only thing a company chooses to do with its profits!
The biggest issue I've found with angels and especially super angels is that their fingers are in so many pies, that very often they're already fingering the same (or a very similar) type of pie that you're offering. You'd want to know exactly what they have a stake in before making an approach, yet often that information is hard to find (or purposely concealed.)

Overlapping feature sets. Conflicts of interest. Picking the winners. Contrived rejections. Leaks. Angelgates. Portfolio loading. Brain picking.

Buyer beware in my view.
enter the URL of the book in here and select your output format:

http://www.docspal.com/

(Edit: wow, that was terrible. Not one of the converts worked out properly. apologies if, like me, you downloaded them all)
eh, I find the isolated quote interesting and relevant in light of the recent CEO change (surely the reason it was posted).
Posterous is really not too well known outside of tech circle. Even for people who know and use it, more will think of it as a blog rather than "email to blog". To understand your product, people need to learn what is Posterous first. Its best to avoid such association in marketing.
Indeed. There's several people at HN (myself included) that work within a University's network that wouldn't mind helping you access papers.
Surely the founders have some leeway when it comes to purchases of this scale.
Greylisting only affects the first time a sender/receiver pair sends you a message, and then only every 31 days if they haven't refreshed the 'seen timer'.

As far as emails I receive, 99% are from people I've corresponded with and sometimes when I'm on the phone and they say, I just sent you my contact information, it is a little disconcerting the first time to have to wait 5-10 minutes.

I know spammers have my email address. I don't want to have to waste the time looking through the spam folder any more than I have to. The way it is now, I have a high probability that every email in my inbox is an actionable email, and I'm not stuck shuffling through a junk folder.

But, you do have a very good point regarding one of the downfalls from greylisting.
Apple has given developers this capability in since iOS4 came out.

Tutorial: http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2010/12/apple-best-kept-s...
given and when are actually separate constructs, useful individually. given sets the topic ($_) to its argument for the scope of the block, and when smartmatches its argument against the topic (in most cases, mostly when it looks like the argument is a single value). This means that you can use when in any construct with $_ set. The other common place I use this is with iteration.

for (@hosts) {
when (@special) {
...
}
when (/primary/) {
...
}
when (/standby/) {
...
}
default {
...
}
}

As well, when uses a value-based comparison called 'smartmatch', so it's more than a simple equality test like switch/case in C. Smartmatching a scalar against a hash tests for 'exists $hash{$_}'. Smartmatching a scalar against an array does a grep, returning all the items in the array that smartmatch against the value. Smartmatching an array against an array does a recursive smartmatch against pairs of array values. You can also customize smartmatch behaviour for your own classes, by overriding the ~~ operator.

Check the 'perlsyn' man page for the full set of smartmatch behaviours for core types.

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html#Smart-matching-in-detai...
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html#Switch-statements

I hope this answered your question.
Maybe. Maybe not.

This may be the perfect solution for product demonstrations where the consumer is in the research-phase of a product purchase where that product has a variety of noticeable configuration choices, but I feel that the vast majority of advertisement-consumption will remain a passive act.
(Disclosure from the outset: I work at HeyStaks, the startup ref'ed by Paul)

There's a few different takes on what "social search" means, the most popular being that described by others here, where the results you see are influenced by the activities of your direct friends on FB / Tw / etc.

However, my friends can't help me when i'm looking for darkroom tips or information on how to tune a banjo, or even what hotel to stay in, except where they happen to have stayed in the city i'm going to. The thing is, when i'm looking for information, ideally i'll get someone with expert knowledge to help but I don't mind if I know the person or not, I just want to find cool pages relevant to my interests.

We've tried to take an open view of what HeyStaks is, by facilitating friends planning a trip, or work colleagues collaborating on a project, or hobbyists sharing information over the long term, all to have somewhere to create a shared resource that enables them to collaborate on their shared search topic.

The idea is, you create a "search stak" on any topic, narrow or broad, short- or long-term and invite others to join it. You can make it public so anyone can join, or private so you can control membership. As stak members search on Google, Bing or Yahoo! with our browser (Firefox, Chrome fast approacing) app or mobile (iPhone, Android on the way!) app installed, the pages they think are relevant to the stak topic can be stored anonymously and recommended to others for similar searches in the future.

I think over the coming months and years the true nature of what "social search" is will emerge more fully, for now there are multiple takes on it and it may well stay that way, but what we're shooting for is an environment where search effort on the major engines is captured for later reuse, enabling fully collaborative, anonymous social search.

Maurice Coyle
VP Product Development
HeyStaks - Web search. shared.
Cinnamon can be found under 'Herbs'. Perhaps you expected it to be under 'Flavors'?
What are the questions entrepreneurs should be asking VCs?
Too many questions. Maybe you can break them in stages?
Couple of thoughts off the cuff:

1. Make the text size larger. I know I can ^+ but the people using your site may not. Many of them will be over the age of fifty and you want them to really enjoy using the site.

2. Give me more information at a glance. Maybe a symbol or icon for "improved digestion" etc. Sometimes I don't want to just filter on health benefits, because I don't want to close off options, but I still do want to see neat little green icons.

3. Social proof. This one doesn't belong in a MVP, but eventually you will want people to be able to rate teas. Make sure that this doesn't require a login.
You're very right. Lesson learned!
Well if you look at the interview, the next question is about large purchases and that those require review. I.E. These two items were very small when they were bought, Youtube (the example given) wasn't and requires evaluation to make sure it will pay off.

Pulling this quote out of context is trying to make it look like Schmidt wasn't in the know. When in reality at the time these were bought they were very tiny, and only grew into the "power-houses" they are now under Google's tenure.
Who is Mark Bao? Meet the 18-year old entrepreneur behind Threewords.me
Sounds kind of cool!
What do you think would be the best way to go about this?
Lots of people not understanding what this is. Perhaps you could put up a help page.
How to win the big SEO gamble for high SERP?
"...you owe FICA on your compensation". Exactly. I want to be taxed (and get the same breaks) as my corporate client employees. Business writes off all possibly related equipment, as do I. I try to write off everything a C-corp would for employees, but it is much more difficult for us (and very time-consuming even trying to be IRS-compliant).

Again, payroll tax savings (on the income/distribution differential) does not usually add up to that much money.
Hindi doesn't even use the same alphabet. So there is nothing that looks like Gandhi or Ghandi in Hindi at all. The equivalent translations are the same for both spellings.
In my experience, investors are pretty up-front about potential conflicts, and anything you'd possibly share with them isn't going to hurt your business. If you want to raise money, paranoia about angels isn't the way to go about it.
Creating Passionate Users: Attenuation and the suck threshold
The tax structure S-Corp owners are taking advantage of is the one that governs investment income. These people are deliberately reclassifying their compensation as return on the investment of having started a business.
haha, good one. I should, right after I send out the emails with account details.
In my so-called expert opinion, only communities focused around particular topics get enough traction to be useful. The "let's talk about everything!" solution is just varying paths to the wide world of Yahoo Answers.

That said, Quora could end up being a slightly better Yahoo Answers which is actually a net plus for the world, considering the sad and depressing state of Yahoo Answers.
Makes sense. Especially after reading this article here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2122614
That would be a 'english isnt my main language and i got tenses mixed up' sentence.
About newport beach houses of the Orange County Real Estate
Tiny Code Tips: a Twitter stream for beginning programmers, by Zed Shaw
Facebook Questions is permanently in beta though -- http://facebook.com/questions has said "rolling out in the next few weeks" for the last 4 months.
Your "evidence" is anecdotal. Compare this to an answer like this on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/How-can-I-prevent-share....

There are things I'd rather ask about on HN, and the same applies to Quora.
Does she have some personal thing with Florian? Half the article is about him and has nothing to do with copyright law.
Leads to the question: if Singer and his fellow players just got a little more "serious" about playing DnD, to the point where they could argue it constituted a religion, would they then be allowed to play?
It would be interesting to hear about your experience with ShareASale.
A Surfeit of Internet - We Have Met The Enemy by Daniel Akst
Why take (waste) your time talking to an investor if they've already invested in something the same or very similar?

Open question: which investors have websites, as linked from their twitter accounts, that display all their investments?

Does Y Combinator?
From the guidelines:

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You should work with http://steepster.com.

I'm friends with those guys if you want an intro. Just shoot me an email.
What exactly is the complaint here? I'm not convinced after reading this and looking around WebRupee's site that Vodafone is doing anything wrong (legally or ethically) here.

The Apache 2 license is probably unsuitable (or at least non-ideal) for use on a font to begin with, but if you look past that, which part of the license have they violated?
I'm missing the option to select teas by vendor. However, listing vendors would make it clear to users how few vendors are included in the search results. The database seems to consist of less than twenty vendors, and I'm missing well-known brands like Yogi Tea and Zhi.

I understand that the idea is to earn through affiliate links, but you'll get more users if you also include some well-known brands that aren't necessarily Share-a-sale partners.
I don't know anything more about this book, but some of the 5 "good internet emotions" listed by Halford (the reviewer) sound an awful lot like things I feel on HN:

"A satisfaction from having read through the carefully cultivated list of Web sites you visit daily, which keep you informed and awaken you to astonishing things worth knowing, and which you never would have known without the Internet."

"A feeling of amazement that there is so much good writing and design in the world, much of which happens to be available on the Internet, plus a general amazement at human inventiveness."

Has anyone read the actual book?
The biggest problem you have to watch out for is that good friends aren't always good coworkers. And the fact that someone is a good friend can cause people to purposely overlook things that might make them a bad fit.

So that said, I personally would be hesitant to hire someone solely because they're someone else's friend.
1. I really like the design. Simple and elegant, no clutter.
2. I keep looking for a search box because you branded it as a "Tea Search Engine", but it's more like a directory. I'd either call it a directory or add a search box. Let me know if you need help with the search function.
Whenever I read about the guts of video hardware or 3-d game programming it always amazes me that this kind of stuff even exists. It's so complex!
I like most of these questions but am not sure about #1:

"Is this a core investment or something in which you have interest but would walk away from if things get difficult?"

Isn't this something you would know based on who the firm has invested in before? How can you get more specific than that?
Yet another half-baked implentation of concept. Why in the world closures are limited to the SAM use case is beyond me. It's erasure all over again -- building a "general" purpose feature suited to one pratical use. It's no wonder that Java has lost its position as the platform on which to innovate and develop new projects. I wish Oracle would be willing to break backwards compatibility in JDK8, and deliver an truly innovative and exciting product. Guess I can wish for a visit from the Tooth Fairy too.

* I make my comments as a Java veteran, and fan of the platform.
It's almost like someone took Gherkin (the Cucumber BDD parser) and got it working inline

Almost but not quite. given/when originates from perl6 and has been in the spec from at least 2006 and probably a lot earlier [1]. Its also been part of perl5 since 5.10 (2007) [2].

I believe both of these predate Cucumber/Gherkin.

refs:

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20061011073242/http://perlcabal.o...

[2] http://perldoc.perl.org/perl5100delta.html#Switch-and-Smart-...