skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am surprised how little focus is put on the legal and financial aspect of running a business there.

I see on one of the pages that the business income tax is 17% and individual income tax is progressive (up to 40%), VAT is 19%. Then you have some weird "general tax on payments abroad" that's 35%, "license fees" 30% and "advisory services" 30%, "interest on loans" 4%-35%.

In the double taxation paragraph, dividends are taxed at 15% so I guess these aren't one of those amounts where the 35% "general tax on payments abroad" applies. That is assuming they allow you to send dividends abroad.

I guess this isn't seen as important since a startup is mostly burning cash (ie. the $40.000 grant and some?) but it just seems odd to me to just move 1 year in Chile without understanding all these rules and more.
There are much less hackerspaces per city (usually 1) than office blocks per city.
I tend to use GPL for fairly pragmatic reasons. If I've written some software - typically voluntarily and without payment - and put it out there for others to use then I would rather that the code remain in the public domain where improvements can be made which benefit everyone, including the original author.
Imagine a "digital + physical" bundle that costs less than the digital alone, or a once yearly "archive" CD of the entire year's issues.

Apple's policy is here:

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/02/15appstore.html

The pertinent section: "However, Apple does require that if a publisher chooses to sell a digital subscription separately outside of the app, that same subscription offer must be made available, at the same price or less, to customers who wish to subscribe from within the app."

So, throw in a single letter once a year and you have physical + digital, and there is no issue with different pricing vs. App Store.
Who do you think puts up the money that pays the employees?
The verification system will be built into the Web service. To account for human error in the identification process, the system will be designed so multiple users are used verify identifications made by other users. Similar systems are used to ensure the accuracy of, for example, transcriptions through reCaptcha (http://www.google.com/recaptcha/digitizing), and reCaptcha is able to achieve 99.5% accuracy.
I asked this same question to a tech analyst at an investment bank I used to work for. He said the Internet was a big one, of course, but he also pointed to the music sales and said that Borders went heavy into that market at the height, whereas BN had largely stayed out of it. He said the music commitment was the big resource drain that put Borders at a huge disadvantage.
Two Pillars of AGI
I think, that Wikipedia should have "Donate to prevent deletion" button on every article ;)
Why Hollywood's looking a lot like Sillicon Valley these days
wow, that sounds like a really good idea. at least for things that i feel should stay on wikipedia. :)
I know this to be true because I'm in marketing and witness the results of different campaigns first hand.
When we run hack days we do simple things like check when the domain was registered, check if its indexed in Google and a few other things but what we also do is have at least two developers on the judging panel that can judge if someone has cheated or not... It does work both ways though, we almost lost a PayPal hack day last year because the judges believed we had worked on the product previously when we had genuinely built it from scratch in 24 hours.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHkKRO4Po_g is the video of our presentation btw :)
"key: function(){alert("Oh joy, someone used <em>eval!</em>");}"

That is not JSON. JSON is a rigidly specified serialization format as described at http://json.org , and exactly that. It is not merely "whatever some Javascript intepreter will accept", because that is a terrible data exchange format. Functions are not allowed in JSON.

Also you forgot to double-quote your key, which is required. In fact using single-quotes for keys in JSON is forbidden, even though Javascript permits it. But this is less important than claiming JSON can carry function definitions.

"XSLT can be modified to work on JSON, ..."

Anything can be made to work on anything. XML does have a large stack of standards that contains stuff that already is defined and exists, so you don't have to do the job of making the things that work; you just go grab a parser and an XSLT transformer, rather than writing it yourself. My personal favorite is namespaces, though nobody ever uses them correctly and consequently they're much less useful than I'd like. That's what it means to say XML does something when JSON does not; Turing complete languages can accomplish any task on either format, but you can't just go grab things for JSON as easily. You mention non-compliant libraries which absolutely is a big problem, but compliant libraries can be found.

This is correctable over time, certainly, but bear in mind that the very act of correcting JSON will turn it into the same monster that XML is, albeit perhaps a bit simpler. A JSON schema language will be the same pile of complicated stuff that the XML schema languages are. The problem is the complicated thing there, not the solution, and your solution may not be simpler than the problem. Some of the other "XML problems" are of the same nature; the problems with SOAP, for instance, have almost nothing to do with XML and everything to do with trying to be The Ultimate Solution to Everything Everywhere and consequently being a complicated pile of useless garbage.

Don't mistake me for an XML partisan. I say use JSON now unless you are actually dealing with marked-up text, in which case XML is superior. But if you're going to make good decisions about what to use, you need to understand both very well and the reasons behind that rule-of-thumb I give, not "XML bad, JSON good."
Yes, this is brilliant -- and could take care of Wikipedia's funding problems is one stroke.
I don't understand the include everything mindset, and I think I'm in the inclusionist camp. If you encourage other people to put data on Wikipedia, the value of the data drops to zero from an economic and reputation exploitation standpoint.

For example, if you think there is value in having a comprehensive list of hacker spaces, set up a site that lists them and maintain it. You'll be known as the person who maintains that valuable resource, and since you homesteaded it, you can economically exploit it by putting ads on it, or taking signups. And no one else can take it down because of some kind requirements about its appropriateness for the internet.

I appreciate that every Star Trek episode is listed on Wikipedia, but it seemed more like a labor of love, more comprehensive, and more interesting (less sterile) when it was some backwater part of the internet where some hardcore fan personally maintained some massive compendium of Star Trek information. Now there is less of a reason, and requiries more dedication, to want to compete with Wikipedia's SEO authority. I mean, there are specialist sites like Star Trek wikis, LOtR wikis, and Wookipedia, but Wikipedia is comprehensive just enough to not want me seek more detailed info. (Nevermind that some of them have taken the economic exploitation to the extreme with the same shitty online gaming ad, we all know there is a sweet spot of the content:advertising ratio).

I mean who thought that Wikipedia would be the first place anyone would go for information on hacker spaces or information about a specific hacker space? It's a piggyback-on-Wikipedia's-SEO-only play.
Not if you take jQuery and compare it to XML library X, because that's the actual comparison. XPath == Sizzle, not jQuery - jQuery adds functions to manipulate what the selector returned, which the selector really has no business doing.
It reminds me of a story my dad told me. His secretary complained to him that "garbagemen make more than me." He suggested that she quit and get a job hauling garbage. Her answer? "No way, that's a dirty, disgusting job."
A part of programmers's job is to chose most appropriate tools to get the job done. It equally applies to hobbyists and professional programmers. However, licensing terms does not cause quality of tools and their documentation, it could only correlate to some extent.

The barrier you're talking about is research/learning cost. When you - for example - already have some knowledge of MS stack, unknown lands of GNU or Apple would even feel alien, so cost of using it would be higher. The opposite would be equally true. Just imagine an iPhone developer being offered to use MS stack, instead of Apple's one he's already used to.

Then, there're also personal tastes...
I tried to list all the projects and methods I know of that may be useful in achieving AGI, and arrange them in a way that makes some kind of sense. I only list what I consider to be the canonical or best examples in each category. This isn't meant to be anything super-special, but I couldn't find a list like it on the web. Feedback welcome. At the moment it's deficient in Computer Vision, and probably in Alife as well...
I was wondering why they were being selective on the people who could come to this. I really wanted to come and learn more about their API but it seems as though they were picking people who already built on it. Isn't the point of these events to get new people into the ecosystem?

To answer the question, yes people really do code and come up with solid apps at these events. Check out the music hackday apps that were built last weekend at the same space: http://wiki.musichackday.org/index.php?title=NYC_2011_Hacks
I think the Australia situation is actually worse, they don't even come close to competing on price, given their volumes aren't high enough compared to big US operations. So at the high prices stocking the long tail isn't very appealing at all now, you can usually get books from the book depository for a heap cheaper within a week, and that's before you factor in ebooks.
Why is inclusionism so bad? So what if we had a wikipedia article for every office building in Chicago or every Pokemon out there?
Just curious - how many actual improvements were made to your GPL'd software and how many of these in your opinion would have not been made public if the license was different (say, BSD)?
If I go to borders looking for a book on coding Wordpress, they may have one. Amazon has a dozen. With reviews. or any other code project. Borders has many computer books but on a specific language Amazon blows them away. About 3 years ago I saw a book at Boarders and liked it. It was 42.93 It seemed like allot. I don't remember what it was, PHP or something. I went home and checked Amazon. I could buy it used. I bought it and 4 others used for the same price as that one book at Boarders.
Thanks - I've been wanting to test IE9 but the lack of XP compatibility prevented me from using it on the only VM OS I have.

I'd love images which work on VMware or VirtualBox (or are at least have a license allowing conversion) for Mac users
Yes! I really wish there were more documentation projects elsewhere on the internet. I'd even contribute to more if they had some community-contribution process (whether through a wiki or other thing).

In particular, Wikipedia's an encyclopedia; that means it's a tertiary source, which means everything it includes should ideally be cited to secondary sources (books, journal articles, newspaper reports, etc.). There's lots of interesting information you could document that doesn't work in that tertiary-source manner, because the secondary sources don't yet exist. So a project to do original research/compilation/etc. in an area where its contributors are knowledgeable is great. Know Your Meme is actually a pretty good example of that. A hackerspace directory would also be useful. Something like http://www.killfromtheheart.com/, also great.
As long as it was easy to see who had donated how much to keep an article alive (still have puppet accounts though, I guess).
I think that kind of is the future of retail books, a relatively small selection of mainstream books which they can buy in bulk for cheap and they sell well.
"The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well."
—Philip Wadler, "The Essence of XML," presented at POPL 2003

And he knows what he was talking about—he was one of the people who worked on XQuery, after all.
Lisp Scheme Differences
Wikipedia doesn't have to be the definition of all human knowledge. There is a perfectly good wiki for documenting hackerspaces at http://hackerspaces.org just waiting for more information on every space past, present, and those still planning.
Time spent thinking without distractions, or playing with a ball, sure.

Time spent with "leisure Internet browsing," though?
Not so much.

Brainwaves slow down when watching TV compared to just sitting staring at the grass. Lolling around Gawker and Reddit isn't so different from watching TV for a lot of people.
It's up to 40k. There is also a schedule table which outlines what funds may be used for. A few things not accounted for is living expenses, food, medicine etc... (I could have read wrong, I'm not a lawyer). Now I believe that some incubators allow you to decide what you want to do with the cash, and place no restrictions on it. Then again, they ask for equity. My point is moving to Chile is a big deal, and you'll have expenses. It's cheaper than living in the US or Canada but not by THAAAAT much.

Another point required in the docs is you must incorporate and leave your base of operations in Chile.

The one big question I have is how is the talent pool If I setup shop in Chile? I don't want to outsource.
Ask HN: Why do I constantly unlearn the most useful lessons?
An example for a lesson i've paid very much learning is that problems disappear when enough light shines on them, meaning, focusing on problems instead of ignoring them makes them go away.

This is true for being overweight, having moneyproblems or relationship issues, all problems i have solved in the past just by focusing on them.

My problem is, i know this, but i still find myself stopping to check my bankaccount if i suspect that its negative, i still find myself convincing myself that my relationship will work better if i just show enough patience over the rough spots and i still catch myself thinking that gaining a little weight isn't something that deserves my attention.

How do i get myself not to fall into old habits/thought patterns over and over again?
Founders aren't usually given preferred stock. Preferred stock is for investors, and it gives them preference in liquidation events. It's to protect their investments, especially in the case of a bankruptcy where all assets are liquidated: the investors can pull out their money first.
The Haskell ones tend to produce a lot of code: but we plan ahead on what to work on, and turn up with small teams.

More info on how we do planning: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hackathon
I'm in favor of that, but only for stuff that has existing material to cite (does that count as inclusionism? it used to...).

If you create a new article about a random office building in Chicago, and you cite all the information in the article to architecture books, journal articles, newspaper articles, etc., and the result is more than one sentence, nobody will delete it, so that basically is the current policy.

But if you personally interview architects, dig through archives of blueprints, etc., to construct a new piece of historical research on a building that the existing historical literature doesn't document, Wikipedia isn't quite the right place to publish that. Either there should be a separate wiki dedicated to researching/documenting the history of Chicago, or you could write up your results, present them at a history conference, and then cite that paper once it's published.
المرأة والاسلام
منتدى الدين الأسلامي
As a Chicago native and presently being at school in Ann Arbor, MI, I can tell you that there are definitely opportunities in other cities.
If you like electronica, this is pretty good:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/EdBangerRecords

no vocals (or very little), never enough to distract.
You seem to have missed the part of their policy that says "We reserve the right to change our policy if you try to do an end run around our policies."

That's exactly how the current policy came to be: People like Amazon decided to give razors away (what's 30% of free?) and sell the blades on their own stores without giving Apple a cut.
That's not the problem. The problem is that there's no way they can compete with Amazon in the eclectic book market.

As I see it, Borders lost its volume business to Barnes and Noble, and then lost its eclectic book business to Amazon. Between those two companies, there just wasn't a niche for a semi-specialty bookstore.
Agreed. But isn't a language defined largely by what people are willing to do with it? XML has some wonky specifications that ultimately mean parsing XML is entirely indeterminate - external, over-http schemas, for instance. If every JSON parser in the world accepted single-quotes for keys, wouldn't that imply JSON supports single-quotes for keys? Would every subsequent parser that supported single-quoted keys be wrong for doing so? Same thing for namespaces: because people have abused them so horribly, they're almost useless.

XML libraries have been around for a long time. As have problems with XML libraries. Apparently it's not correctable over time, there's too much legacy to fight against.

---

>I say use JSON now unless you are actually dealing with marked-up text, in which case XML is superior.

I've heard that argument before. How, precisely, is it superior? It's denser than would be doable in my example, but is denser better? A lot of the arguments around both languages revolve around human vs computer readability. Is <em>text</em> more computer-readable than {#:"em", $:"text"} ? A bit more human-readable, yes, but I'll take "text" over either as often as I can.
That sounds a lot like House MD :D
He seems to solve all of his diagnostical problems when thinking of a different / abstract thing, and approaching problem from a completely different angle. Nice idea, worth experimenting with
Yes, Evil. I think you missed what he did. He bought a book at B&N, then moments later ordered the same book from Amazon for slightly less. When the order from Amazon arrived, he returned the B&N purchase.
Recovery is possible with RIPLinuX
Do you people realize Amazon takes a 70% cut on Kindle subscriptions?
They should probably just rename them something else.
If you want to be part of Wikipedia, anyone can and should go and start helping out.

Deletionism doesn't exactly encourage people from these groups to come help out. That, and the endless politics/bureaucracy have kept me from bothering to edit. Why make a change when it will likely be reverted?
Verify against a repository, simplest way, just require everyone to provide you access to their svn/git/whatever log.
Many of these are not even predictions, and most are badly sourced and out of context. E.g. the guy who foresaw no further progress for engines of war in 84 CE was definitely right for the next few hundred years.

But one quotation that I'm really taking issue with is the one about Sir Walter Scott dismissing public gas lighting. Far from that, Scott was actually a dedicated promoter of gas lighting in its early years, as evidenced by his tenure as the First Chairman of the Edinburgh Gas Street Lighting Company:

http://www.scotlandmag.com/magazine/issue30/12007614.html

But when was a little bit of historical research an obstacle in the way of feeling good at the expense of people who lived hundreds of years ago?
Time spent with "leisure Internet browsing," though? Not so much.

It's not for everyone, but for me, "leisure Internet browsing" (and leisure creation) over the past 15 years has been step 1 of most of my successes.

If I'd been focused on my "work" more, I probably wouldn't have started blogging in 1999 or even known what it was. Blogging has brought me a book deal, a large share of my income, and many other things since then. I probably wouldn't have come across Rails in 2004 and had some early successes there. I wouldn't have been tuned into the great stuff discussed on HN about e-mail newsletters, which I've now turned into a success for myself too. The list is endless.

I try not to spend too long just noodling around the Internet, but I do quite a bit of it because I can see what an investment it is. By keeping an eye on what people are into, what other people are making, and what memes are catching on, I can absorb those ideas and produce catchier things of my own. It saddens me when I meet smart people at meetups who don't spend enough time casually browsing and who have no idea what's "going on" at the moment or what opportunities there are opening up..

Again, this might only be beneficial because I work entirely for myself. If I were working a 9 to 5 in an office, it probably wouldn't make sense.
Applied Chemistry | Futility Closet
Second that. Check out his Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Great framing, great idea...but in the end, no, Proust was not a neuroscientist, and the same goes for most else Lehrer has to say.

The whole premise of this piece doesn't make sense to me - coffee, whatever else is in Redbull - provide energy, not focus. That energy can be used to focus on something you don't want to focus upon. You also can let your mind wander at the frenetic pace stimulants like coffee, ADHD meds and others facilitate. So back to the beginning - Jonah Lehrer is very good at nicely framing a point that he isn't actually making.
A) Get burned badly enough that letting things slide "just a little" becomes a personal Taboo.

B) Surround yourself with folks who have a problem-solving orientation and are not content with "good enough". This is much harder to accomplish than A is. Such people are often social outcasts and annoying to put up with. I guess that could lead to:

C) create your own personal subculture where such annoying, socially unacceptable traits are acceptable and where there are rubrics for how to smooth things when someone says/does all those annoying things (like points out your shortcomings). This seems to be something I have accomplished with my adult sons and it's wonderful.

Peace and good luck.
There's only one SwellJoe in the entire world. Shall I add myself to WikiPedia?
http://mashable.com/2011/02/14/qualcomm-snapdragon-2011/#

Quad core is inevitable, it's just a question of when. They say 2012 for the chips in that article; but not when for devices using it. Dual core devices are scheduled early this year.

They also mention 2.5GHz - the big issue is power usage. I guess you you can turn off 3, and underclock when not needed.
Its not surprising. We make extensive use of Python. Its great.

I get so busy doing so many things that I often don't develop for months at a time. This used to be a problem when I used C. With Python its a non-issue.
I share your frustration. I think many of the trendier companies have a tendency for it to end up being networking and also about being seen at so-and-so's hackathon. It's a 'scene' for many ppl who wanna be 'hackers' but really are not.

My biggest pet-peeve at hackathons are those who turn up with full working hacks they did prior. Nothing wrong with that but please have the courtesy to not enter them into the competition against the poor smuck (like me) who only had the last 12 hours to pull their hack together.
I think the point was: you wouldn't have said that if you had kids.