skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This really isn't the place or the time to debate most of these things, but I'll leave you with one last reply before this goes even further offtopic:

I'm not saying that I'm utilitarian. Its just that morality can be used as a tool to produce policy that has nothing to do with morals: see the invasion of Iraq, for example. I think we're actually agreeing here.

North Korea is nothing like an anarchist society, and "if you don't like it, move" is not an argument anyway.

In this case, I brought up something that's an implementation detail, because it's an easier segue into the topic. There are other things that are larger, such as the mentioned private property issue.
Until we can build a computer that understands English (not to mention every other language they offer autocomplete in) or convince everyone to stop searching for such things, I don't think it's possible for Google to filter out all the naughty/bad/copyright infringing suggestions.

My take on it is that they're doing their best to remove suggestions that are likely to cause them trouble, particularly the trouble they might be in if someone were to make a claim against them for inducing copyright infringement.

I wonder if they'd get any mileage out of changing the name? But I'm not sure if they could find something to make it clear that Google is saying that these searches are popular, not that these searches are endorsed by Google.
Don't miss the video at the bottom!
Astaire: The basic Sinatra DSL for your Rails 3 apps
After Dinner Project - Kindle Book Shopper
Over the holidays I toyed around with scratching an itch I've had with purchasing Kindle books from Amazon. It's just too hard to casual browse through the offerings. So I came up with a small chrome web app.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jaccigkfdmcemjkpencdmgkifgednjab

I'm mulling over taking it to the next level.

Thoughts, feedback and suggestions. And yea, I know the UI sucks. It would be first on the list.

The Problem I'm Trying To Solve: Can't browse the long tail of Amazon's Kindle book offerings quickly and easily.

I don't want to replace Amazon's shopping experience, just offer a complementary alternative.

It's currently running on an EC2 micro at 3 cents an hour so be gentle. Look at it cross eyed it'll probably fall over.
I think this is fantastic. Whether it is this $150k or the great number of startups that are getting huge funding early on, it all means one thing... it is GREAT for business and competition.

I've heard from quite a few people who say this is a negative thing and they say it defeats the idea of being a startup. My question is, why do you HAVE to start in a garage? Why do you HAVE to eat Ramen noodles for 2 years? At the end of the day, being a startup is about having a creative team and being innovative.

This is a great step forward and if it helps a few more teams create a killer product then we all win.
Whats wrong with it? Most projects that use it have used it for ages...
The classic front page only counts submissions (not votes), I believe.
One of the funnier things I've read in a long time. Thanks.
You only pay SS on your first 105k or so of income (indexed to inflation).
Medicare is for health coverage, and most countries give this to everyone, all the time, for nominal cost. Unless I'm missing something here.

Although, US public per capita health expenditure is about equal to other countries. It just happens that they get far far less for what they pay. [1]

[1] http://www.oecd.org/document/39/0,3746,en_2649_34111_3615779... - see health chart
Well, today you could be screwed on any device that can be used to make payments. This does not mean people will stop using a computer (or a smartphone) to pay for stuff. You can't stop technical progress by being paranoid.

Eventually all users will learn to protect themselves by limiting in some way the amount of money your smartphone can access per day or for a given transaction.
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/

...works for me in Chrome and Safari.
If I could, I would link tax paying to the National Lottery. The more tax you pay the bigger your chance of winning big.

It would make a refreshing change to see people queueing up on a Saturday night, desperate to pay their tax.
I somehow suspect Scoble has never been poor. There's nothing glamorous about it.
One huge problem with this is for people that have already built up savings based on taxed income -- mostly those in or near retirement. If we move over to consumption based, they are now going to live in a far worse tax environment then they planned for or that is fair (it's a kind of double-taxation to tax your income higher while earning income and then your consumption when you are mostly consuming, but not earning)

Not insurmountable, but it needs to be addressed, because it's a large voting block.

Also, we'd need a much better way to enforce it than we currently have. Taxes like these are trivial to dodge and hard to prove.
They use Brightcove. It's rock solid for me (in Belgium), and better video quality than the BBC feed.
I can share some experiences with you as I launched my site about 2 weeks ago. My co-founder is the tech guy and I take care of everything else, including the design. I am not a designer either, but when you don't have the dough to spend on hiring someone, you just have to suck it up, I suppose!
One thing we tried to avoid is empty page. For example, those footer links "privacy policy" "terms of service" etc. Most would think they are not essential, but our thought is that with them properly put there, your site just gives a more professional impression.
Then there is the blog. I found this is very common for new sites ... there is no way to go back to your main site from the blog. For us, it is very important as spending time on our main site is essential.
Since we have 2 persons sharing the work, it is a bit easier for us. So I would suggest you finding someone to take care of little things like these for you. Maybe a good friend?
> Drones are much cheaper in a more important respect - human lives.

Typically drones are used against targets that are human, I don't see the drones causing less loss of life.
Is there a good, more recent, benchmark?
The rich and their tax situation is really only part of the wider picture of how to govern an economy in a sustainable manner. It's my opinion that we need to take more of a systems approach, making use of lessons from cybernetics.

It's pretty obvious now that the economy is not like an ecosystem with multiple more or less autonomous agents acting independently, but is instead more like a machine where information flows are centralised and significant components of the system can act in concert.
Whoa. Calm down on the condescension, dude.

Am I a hacker? Dunno. I don't self-identify as one. Doing so is not that important to me.

Neither are lists and score-keeping on this particular site.
Well, did you watch my talk about pivoting from DLD? In that talk I outline how Mahalo's human-powered search vision got us to the top 400 sites, but that it wasn't growing and the users wanted more how to/instructional content.

We iterated, and mahalo is a top 200 site that also gets 1M+ views a day on YouTube. yes, 365M views of our 23k videos every year.

I do think your question "i should check Mahalo" is an EXCELLENT one. Human-powered search doesn't have that draw, but I think free instructional videos will.

If you wanted to speak Russian or make perfect grilled cheese or solve a video game you would do well to come to Mahalo.com.

Direct traffic is the real test of a sites worth... and we're very focused on growing that with high-quality instruction.

We have tons of money and tons of revenue... we can't go bankrupt if we can easily make a profit can we? :-)

Talk to me in one year and we'll be in the top 100 sites and have 100M+ views a month on YouTube. :-)
Ask HN: Is there a good recent benchmark pitting Flash against Javascript?
I was curious as to whether JS was faster or slower than Flash, what with all the work that's been going into JS recently.

Is there a decent benchmark out there comparing the two (across browsers, obviously)?
No, I approach the law as a given situation, as it currently stands in the land. A law degree tends to do that to you.

What I have said repeatedly, and what I have shown to be true by statute, is that source code is software for purposes of copyright and exemptions thereof. Your interpretation of those things is irrelevant. It's not because you think or feel that those are different, that they actually are. Additionally, the intent is not limited to what you claim, I have no idea why you would think so. It is a generic instrument to prevent unauthorized copying of works. Furthermore, the exceptions for personal use that do exist are explicitly declared not applicable to software and source code. So any 'non-commercial' angle one would take, simply does not hold when it comes to software.
I suppose you've never used 7zip ...
Katie Curic and Bryant Gumble don't know what the Internet is
> No loopholes, no games, no misallocation of resources for tax breaks.

Bonds, currency and commodities?
I would actually agree with this to some extend. The cool part is that YC started out as an experiment, and they are continuing to experiment and pushing the boundaries. If anything, this will give YC team more data and knowledge.

Another point is that YC startups have changed since the beginning. More and more teams are semi-established joining the program. To them, this is no doubt a great help.
Crazy PC case designs
Aristocracy is different from this. Generally, aristocracy is both hereditary and disconnected from actual wealth.

In the UK, JK Rowling, even though she is richer than the Queen, is not an aristocrat. She is, in fact, upper middle class. Someone who's born into the aristocracy, even if they're not especially wealthy, is an aristocrat.
Title needs a colon or a comma after "New HN users." It looks like a story about how new HN users do not overlook the "Lists" feature.
Over the holidays I toyed around with scratching an itch I've had with purchasing Kindle books from Amazon. It's just too hard to casual browse through the offerings. So I came up with a small chrome web app.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jaccigkfdmcemjkpen...

I'm mulling over taking it to the next level. Thoughts, feedback and suggestions. And yea, I know the UI sucks. It would be first on the list.

The Problem I'm Trying To Solve: Can't browse the long tail of Amazon's Kindle book offerings quickly and easily. I don't want to replace Amazon's shopping experience, just offer a complementary alternative.

It's currently running on an EC2 micro at 3 cents an hour so be gentle. Look at it cross eyed it'll probably fall over.
Works great for me in the US. I've been watching it off and on the last couple days from different locations and different ISPs.
This may sound cynical, but people like to hear a point of view they agree with. By being less partisan Al Jazeera is pissing 100% of the people off some of the time.
Maybe the reason these lists are not easily discovered is because they are taxing the server pretty heavily. It took quite a while to return the "leaders" list the first time I ran it, but it wasn't as bad the second time.
Call for creation of standardized protocol for talking to extraterrestrials
A person making $20,000 pays the same US federal payroll tax rate as a person making $100,000 (7.65% in 2010, 5.65% in 2011)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the federal payroll tax was about 15%. Your employer is only allowed to list 7.65% on your pay stub/W2, but that's a different thing.
Except with wealth you can pay a local lawyer to plead it to a non-moving violation, a ludicrously inflated "court cost", and a "donation" to the local law enforcement retirement fund. (Kirksville Missouri, I'm looking at you.)

The wealthy can opt for a "pay X now" instead of "Y over time where Y>X" option. Wealth buys you a discount.
They beat Perl 6, then.
Amid Digital Blackout, Anonymous Mass-Faxes WikiLeaks Cables To Egypt
Agreed, and one part of the Java / C# comparison is that C# also gives type-checking at run time.
You're misreading directly blocked to mean something else, what you want it to mean, general disruption.

Directly blocking the objectionable activity would be something like blocking a disputed eviction, or preventing the deployment of people/resources that are necessary to enforce a bad law. The disruption actually stops or reverses the objectionable activity, for the duration it can be maintained. That's targeted, and far more understandable as a (possibly) principled, non-hypocritical tactic.

Disrupting other things, because you hope to break your opponents with discomfort inflicted through uncivil means, is what crosses the line, a line beyond simply 'law'.
One of the reasons fairly wealthy people can't retire early is that a major medical event in their family could wipe them out financially. 65 is the standard retirement age in the U.S. for a very good reason - after 65, you are covered under Medicare. Even then, Medicare only covers 80%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)
Unoptimized Flash vs unoptimized Canvas: the benchmark.
Quibble: "Game theory" refers to scenarios like prisoner's dilemma and so forth, not to gameplay mechanics.
Retirees are the people in the worst situation but it can be helped a little by not collecting taxes on the IRAs and refunding the tax on the Roth IRAs.

A sales tax my be slightly harder to collect but there will be a lot less people to collect it from. As the IRS, I'd rather deal with a few million merchants than hundreds of millions people.
I would have an emotional reaction from seeing that sight but I wouldn't call it "refreshing".
Mea Culpa - you're absolutely right on the valuation side. I think that the majority of value in a YC investment is not in the actual cash, though. And in some ways, this provides a side-by-side comparison of the difference between a 'pure money' investor and a true 'value added' investor should be getting.

Given how (YC) entrepreneur-friendly this is, there must be a whole lot of soul-searching going on at VCs and other angels now : Somehow, the private equity space just got an index investor.
The amount of agriculture seemed least surprising to me, those were actually the photos that looked most familiar. Agriculture is everywhere whenever I look out of the window of a train in Germany and fields with crops look the same no matter where you are on the planet.

It’s unlikely that you actually know anyone or are related to anyone working in agriculture in Germany (only two percent of the labor force are working in agriculture compared to 36 percent in North Korea) but I don’t think that the area used by agriculture has gone down in Germany. We still need all that food, it’s just that we have become super-efficent when it comes to farming it. Very few people can today farm huge swaths of land when they have the right infrastructure.
Those who can't blog, comment.
Ok - if your system is ever enacted, I'm cutting my work hours back by 50% or more.

I'm also hoping that not everyone does this, because if everyone did, there would be far less than $90k/person floating around. But that won't happen, right?

It means that today, humans create enough wealth annually so that every two-parent household on the planet could live like the American middle class.

This assumes that the total cost of providing the same middle-class resources to everyone in the world is equal to the present marginal cost of doing so.
PG:

To measure any possible decline I created an alternative
version of the frontpage that only counted the votes of
users who signed up in the first year.

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073513)
"reversing the North to South flow of information"
I do consider myself a hacker, but don't feel any urge to explore the nooks and crannies of this site. I've downloaded and skimmed the Arc code for it, but don't feel any urge to check out all the links. I do fix my car (and my washing machine) but don't have an urge to modify them.

Partly it's a "time in the day" problem, and partly a lack of generalization. I'm more interested in learning the structure of things than the specifics of any particular implementation. I guess some people, including you, put equal emphasis on both.

ps. It's odd that you ask if those who down-vote are "lashing out" but presume that those who up-vote agree with you. I voted for this, not out of agreement, but because it's a valid viewpoint, well-expressed, a starting point for discussion, and the sort of post I want to encourage.
If you work for the post office or are a teacher, for example, your pension adjusts for inflation. Other govt jobs are similar?

So, inflating out of the problem won't help here.
I don't think it's cynical at all - you see the same thing in the tech world when people try and do an objective comparison of two competing technologies, the comments that get the most hate are the ones trying to take a balanced view.
Apple Iphone 4G 32GB | Post your free classified ads
Interesting lawsuit against allegedly bogus online dating site
You need to reach a certain threshold before you can use Top Colors. I think it maybe 500 karma points, but don't take my word for that.

When you do get the feature, you can go to settings and enter a hexadecimal entry for topcolor. The banner on every page of HN (except in Add Comment) will then change from the default orange to the color you specified.
I've used, mainly for development purposes, all major operating system of today (Windows, Linux and Mac). I have to say that any of them can be used for doing your work.

You can have a Unix like environment on Windows or on Apple, and you can have nice GUIs on Linux.

The debate is basically based on ones tastes. But you can not say that Microsoft is irrelevant, it could be of no use to you personally, but in the end if you work on software development it will matter.

I can agree with you that Windows Phone 7 is a disaster, but Office 2010, Windows 7 are success stories.
CSS Grid Builder
The best way of taxing the rich is producing luxury goods. The fact that you can buy food, transport, housing, clothing at a magnitude or two (or more) higher cost is a sort of volontary tax. When you buy a $1000 bottle of champagne instead of drinking water, a large part of that money takes a pretty short path to pay the wages of people that never would buy the same bottle themselves. And would maybe be out of a job if they didn't take a small part in producing that bottle of champagne. So the fact that luxury goods exist is a sort of tax that spreads the wealth of the people that choose to afford it.
I presume you are right, but this doesn't inspire confidence in the system. Of course it's not the same trial: if you have a weak effect, it's better to modify a superficial variable and start the trial again. Why try to climb out of the hole when you can roll the dice again? Do this 20 times and you might stumble on something statistically significant. From a 'true science' perspective, the right thing to do is to carry the trial through to conclusion and publish the negative results. But it's hard to make a living doing this.
This is 17 years old. 17 years ago a lot of people didn't know about the Internet. The title is also misleading because it's in the present tense. Can you change it to: "In 1994, ... didn't know what the Internet was"
Indeed, this is the 21st century, where 2/3 of adult Americans have a broadband internet connection at home.
AFAIK they are now owned by a sheikh from Qatar not a bunch of dictators. Granted a sheikh is not a democratically elected person but it's a bit far from being a dictator too.
There is sort of a perception that they are - in part - a mouthpiece for Al Quaida and other hardline Islamist groups.

Not completely different from, say, Fox and the Republican party.
I think that's it odd that RiderOfGiraffes is even referring to particular people upvoting/downvoting him in his comment. But maybe that's just me...
> Congestion charges have become very popular and successful in London

Popular and successful with who, exactly? I don't know a single person that likes it. Traffic was reduced for a few years but now it's just as bad as ever. And the cost of public transport continually rises above inflation. At least they recently shrank the chargable area.

So what has it done, exactly, except raise income for the city and raise prices for businesses on the border and those who need vehicles to function?
I feel like the web is such a chaotic mess of technologies...we need some sort of universal language in the future. I hope HTML5 will deliver that although I doubt it. I remember reading a blog from Joe Hewitt talking about how he would love to see objective-c for creating web apps (like cappuccino, but tied in with the backend as well). Should be interesting to see what happens
I think that's indeed what OP meant, but there's also:

def abs(x):
return x

... where adding the 'if' seems appropriate :)
There's an alternate feed available from livestation in both SD and HD editions. http://www.livestation.com/channels/3-al_jazeera_english

And a RealPlayer live stream, which (as much as RealPlayer sucks) may be a better choice than Flash. But it's pretty low-def: http://europe.real.com/smil/aljazeera_us_lo.ram
Whether it's a hereditary or mercantile aristocracy, it's still an aristocracy. A hereditary aristocracy would be worse, certainly, but that doesn't mean a mercantile aristocracy would not be very, very bad.
Didn't mean to shoot the messenger :) I'm seeing a lot of lamenting when there's every reason to be excited.
Isn't it the server that makes the copy? You don't have anything, so how could you be copying it?
And not without a reason, they have a sizeable amount of ex BBC people in their staff.
It's surprising just how good a new source Al Jazeera is.

I wish my cable operator let me subscribe to Al Jazeera in lieu of CNN.
Jasmine, pick up a good book on web design/development. The pay is better and a lot more engaging. I'm currently letting go of my web design/development company (because I'm now running a startup), so if you need some initial clients feel free to email me!
First, payroll taxes cost twice as much as that.

Second, payroll taxes are capped; you stop paying them after ~100k.

Third, your overall point is bankrupt. Regardless of what particular bucket of money their taxes are paid into, working people at all income levels are stung by our tax rates, which are in turn lower than virtually every other western industrialized nation. It is simply not the case that the working class has no skin in the game.
"Is that not a critical part of being a hacker?"

Possibly, but I guess most of us don't have the time to explore everything in our environment to that level. Note that this may be an age thing - 20 years ago I would obsessively explore and customize things like X window managers, editors and my Lisp environment. Now I find myself increasingly going with the defaults unless something really annoys me as, to be frank, life is too short and I have better things to be doing.
That article is just about Hypervitaminosis D, other harmful effects are possible (depending on the individual) when supplementing at high levels like 10,000 IU/day.
Thanks, that's a good idea maybe I will.
What percentage of startups are in YC, though? So what if small angels are forced to invest in non-YC startups--YC openly admits they reject a lot of promising teams. And if receiving too much investment is bad for the startups that are in YC, then those small angels are bound to have an advantage.
Hey, I'm not disagreeing with you. Only saying that your example is not actually applicable, because it's nothing to do with having seen the EULA. It's all about intent.
Little Known Hacker News (2008)
Living more comfortably while doing a startup is a great thing though. Better food = better brainpower. It may not sound as good on paper but the end result will be the same if not better.