skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There isn't a "large" Democratic majority in Congress. The Senate is basically evenly split. The House has 35 more Democrats than Republicans, out of 435. They have only been in office since 2007. They are ~50-55 members short of a veto-proof majority.

Democrats have tried mightily with what they have. Bush vetoed [via Wikipedia]:

1. July 19, 2006: Vetoed H.R. 810, Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005, a bill to ease restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Override attempt failed in House, 235-193 (286 needed).

2. May 1, 2007: Vetoed H.R. 1591, U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Care, Katrina Recovery, and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act, 2007. Override attempt failed in House, 222-203 (284 needed). A later version of the bill that excluded certain aspects of the initial legislation that the President disapproved of, H.R. 2206, was enacted as Pub.L. 110-28 with the President's approval.

3. June 20, 2007: Vetoed S. 5, Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2007.

4. October 3, 2007: Vetoed H.R. 976, Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2007 ("SCHIP"). Override attempt failed in House, 273-156 (286 votes needed).

5. November 2, 2007: Vetoed H.R. 1495, Water Resources Development Act of 2007. Overridden by House, 361-54 (277 votes needed). Overridden by Senate, 79-14 (62 needed), and enacted as Pub.L. 110-114 over President's veto.

6. November 13, 2007: Vetoed H.R. 3043, Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2008. Override attempt failed in House, 277-141 (279 votes needed).

7. December 12, 2007: Vetoed H.R. 3963, Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2007.[18] Override attempt failed in House, 260-152 (275 votes needed).

8. December 28, 2007: Pocket Vetoed H.R. 1585, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008[19]. A later version of the bill that changed a minor provision of which the President disapproved was quickly passed by Congress (H.R. 4986) and was enacted with the President's approval as Pub.L. 110-181 on 28 January 2008.

9. March 8, 2008: Vetoed H.R. 2082, Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008.[20][21] Override attempt failed in House, 225-188.

10. May 21, 2008: Vetoed H.R. 2419, 2007 U.S. Farm Bill.[22][23] Overridden by House, 316-108 (283 votes needed). Overridden by Senate, 82-13 (64 votes needed). Enacted as Pub.L. 110-234 over the President's veto. Due to a clerical error, this act was repealed by Pub.L. 110-246.

11. 18 June 2008: Vetoed H.R. 6421, 2007 U.S. Farm Bill, re-passed by Congress to correct a clerical error in HR 2419.[24] Overridden by House, 317-109 (284 votes required). Overridden by Senate, 80-14 (63 votes needed). Enacted as Pub.L. 110-246 over the President's veto.

12. July 15, 2008: Vetoed H.R. 6331, Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act.[25] Overriden by House, 383-41 (283 votes required.) Overriden by Senate, 70-26 (64 votes required). Enacted as Pub.L. 110-275 over the President's veto.
There is the same tax here in the United States. There was this one Subway Franchise that gave a free sandwich to each employee per shift. IRS was going to charge tax for that to each employee but the franchise owner decided to pay the taxes for all of the employees for that benefit, then he had to charge them .25c (next to free) for the sandwiches in the future so the employees could avoid the tax on the so called "benefit".
People should just be like Gordon Ramsay with his attitude toward food critiques; he kicks them all out of his restaurants.
probably a good tip for any startup
It cannot be overstated how much people freakin' love charts.

The more you add the more you'll sell. I don't care what your product is, you should figure out a way to usefully add a graph or a chart.
So do the record companies. There's a debate show here (Australia) that hosted a piracy/music industry. Some record industry rep explained that the industry wasn't thrilled about digital (even if people pay) because it cannot sustain on 'singles alone.' He seemed fairly confident that there cannot be any change of standard until they're confident that the new the change is sustainable.

It's one thing complain that their rights are being trampled by piracy. IE they have a right to 'sell' their work. But a right to sell albums is a little far fetched.
GvR speaks on the future of App Engine: DjangoCon 2008
What would be the strangest thing?
US Gov seizes Fannie and Freddie
Democratic People's Republic of North Korea - Official Web Site
Ask HN: Secret military technology as groundbreaking as the tank and airplane were  
Reporter Bob Woodward (whose reporting led to Nixon's resignation)
claims that the US military has a new secret technique that's so
revolutionary that it's on par with the tank and the airplane.

Here's the relevant quote from his interview with Scott Pelley
on 60 Minutes last night:

Woodward: This is very sensitive and very top secret, but there
are secret operational capabilities that have been developed by the
military to locate, target, and kill leaders [in Iraq].

Pelley: What is this? Some kind of surveillance, some kind of
targeted way of taking out just the ... leadership?

Woodward: ... It is the stuff of which military novels are written.

Pelley: Do you mean to say that this special capability is
such an advance in military technique and technology that
it reminds you of the advent of the tank and the airplane?

Woodward: Yeah.

Quoted from the 60 Minutes video starting at 7 minutes 55 seconds:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/04/60minutes/main4415771.shtml

I'd like to ask the readers here what they think this groundbreaking
technology might be? I'll start off with these two guesses which
might be feasible today:

(1) facial recognition by satellite or high-flying aircraft

(2) wholesale tracking and transcription of all cell phone calls
Really interesting!!
yep images are super important. it's the best way to associate people to comments.

there's this site I just discovered this week: dipity.com
it looks like the best way to share lots of information on the web right now. surely, wiht sites like this one, the internet could become a very intense social place, for dating and even work, teaming up with peers. when you see time lines that people made themselves, I think you can see their personnality, interests, but also culture and ideology very fast.

Maybe the web will provide us with even better social interfaces than what nature gave us: talking, body langage, clothes and fashion, and talking about your musical preferences etc. all this and much more could take place on the web I think! let's make it happen :DD
well for now dipity.com looks pretty exciting add me there I'm "smoothboom" and I just made a time line about memetics.
If this is true, it's a perfect way for the oppressive North Korean government to stay in power forever while foisting KJI doubles on us every time one of them dies.
And what about the tens of thousands of ASP.net developers who depend on ad revenue to pay the bills for Visual Studio and Windows Servers?

Say what you will about Microsoft, but they depend on armies of developers who depend on ads. As such, do not expect them to produce an ad blocker. It would be nothing short of a developer relations disaster.
On OSX I use an app called MailPlane to manage all my gmail accounts(hosts and gmail). Not sure about the other accounts though. Maybe Thunderbird?
Both democracy and demand curves are means, not ends.
For server specs it really depends on technologies you're using. Java, PHP, Rails, etc. Each will need a different amount of resources. It's probably easiest to get an entry level container from a place like Joyent and scale up as you need it.
If people just start hacking and using a system in larger numbers, it'll grow.

If being the magic word...

The world is so ripe for the next big language to be Scheme.

Why do you say that? Scheme is not new. Something radical would have to happen to make it popular out of nowhere.
Totally agree on the growth mindset.

"Live like you were going to die tomorrow.

Learn like you were going to live forever."
Here in .au its structured so that 99.9% of the time its just the same from a revenue perspective to the government as if they had paid the tax and used after tax (income) dollars.

So in that case, a sandwich of .25 would be seen as a fringe benefit as its well below the retail price (I think some discounting is allowed, but its only like 10% without attracting FBT).
First experience with ESR?

Check out the cathedral and the bazaar.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...
(3) an exaggeration of massive proportions by Woodward and/or his sources
The author seems to be confused about that chart and Tufte.
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Google map a cellphone knowing its MAC address
Actually, you seem to disagree with Jonathan. From TFA:

As we had predicted, the students with a growth mind-set felt that learning was a more important goal in school than getting good grades. In addition, they held hard work in high regard, believing that the more you labored at something, the better you would become at it. They understood that even geniuses have to work hard for their great accomplishments. Confronted by a setback such as a disappointing test grade, students with a growth mind-set said they would study harder or try a different strategy for mastering the material.

The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were concerned about looking smart with little regard for learning. They had negative views of effort, believing that having to work hard at something was a sign of low ability. They thought that a person with talent or intelligence did not need to work hard to do well. Attributing a bad grade to their own lack of ability, those with a fixed mind-set said that they would study less in the future, try never to take that subject again and consider cheating on future tests.
Yeah, anytime I see "RoR", my eyes narrow.
Tracking people by their shadows :)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1052250/Could...
This reminds me of a thesis I once read titled "The Mythos of Engineering Culture", that claims engineers "procrastinate to introduce challenge, uncertainty, and risk into engineering work."

http://www-plan.cs.colorado.edu/pltools/pubs/Leonardi.pdf
Interesting article, but it seems to me that this is one of those instances where science takes nature farther than it might go on its own. I can't see that these tests prove anything other than that we can induce a reaction between prions from one animal brain protein from another. I don't believe that this alone can be used as a predictor of real life occurrences. There are a lot of things that we can force to occur in a test tube that would never occur by themselves.
i think that this article was woefully misguided. not that it's easy to write about something as subjective as music (in the WSJ no less) but i think some key ideas were left out.

first and foremost, the article only discussed the sales of famous, high-volume-selling artists. neither they nor i have the data to verify this, but i would be willing to bet that the distribution of album sales across all bands has flattened out significantly since itunes came about. i like itunes because i can find new artists on it through recommendations, search, podcasts... and if i sample an album's tracks and find it to be all good, i do buy all of it. but otherwise... why should i pay for tracks that i don't want to listen to? if an artist is arguing that the album is designed to be heard as a whole, then by all means, prove it.

secondly, again although it's the WSJ, i don't think it would have been too audacious to admit that perhaps half of those full albums aren't worth buying, and that popular music was going through a bubble thanks to the dominance of cd-based albums as the only medium around. to me, online music piracy emerged as a reaction to this. i imagine that fileswapping services still have a healthy user base, but the emergence of itunes from nothing to the dominant player in 5 years indicates to me that people are willing to pay for music, when they feel like they're actually getting something for their dollar. purely anecdotally, everyone i know who was a one-time "pirate" has switched to itunes/rhapsody. not because we're hugely wealthy, but perhaps because we're discovering more great artists this way, and feel inclined to give them some dollars to help them keep making music.
Seems like an odd idea to me, but what do I know?

They need to have the option to speed up the rate at which the text is displayed. It was going way too slow for me and I was getting bored waiting for the next line to show up.
ok thx guys, refer to point no 2, I understand about how hard we have to determine the specification.

I just wondering, for example : how do we know how far MySQL can handle concurrent query, and how much time ffmpeg need to transcode a single movie and how many request nginx can handle a request, I already googling for those kind of information, but not enough information on internet. Could you guys give me some clue or reference? any site has been discuss those problem? tomshardware (I don't think so)?

thx in advance.
But if you closed the window to do some real work... then what?
Is there any reason why a successor to Kim Jong-Il could not take this place if he actually did pass away? It's not like the populace of North Korea is just waiting for him to die so that they can revolt. Or that the communist party would have to worry about losing power in an election to choose a new ruler.

The only reason I can see for North Korea to enact such a ruse would be to maintain the guise of a strong North Korean leader to the rest of the world while they groom a successor. I can't see many internal reasons why they would need to act in such a manner.
I'm afraid you're the one who's missing the point. People in the 1920's weren't so used to eating something and making diseases go away. Diseases were accepted as a fact of life (or rather death), and if you had told someone around that time that within a few decades they'd be able to swallow a little pill and cure most of the deadliest diseases of that time, they'd have laughed at your face and considered you a hopeless optimist.

Imagine someone came up to you today and suggested that in 20 years' time you can get a jab that will protect you from cancer, aids, degenerative diseases, heart disease, cholesterol problems, baldness, and erectile dysfunction all at once - you'd laugh at them and call them a spammer. Yet the biotech and nanotech revolutions are just around the corner and who knows, they might bring just that, though anyone who believes that they will is indeed very optimistic.

AI researchers might be working on sub-problems, but who's to say that they won't stumble on a bigger solution while working on those sub problems? And, again, you're missing the point even more by failing to see that AI is not the only path to a singularity. Enhancing human intelligence can be just as effective. If we create "trans-humans" who are vastly more intelligent than we are, we still get a singularity. We can do that biologically, cybernetically... etc.
I took at look at scRUBYt, looked nice, but I ended up just using hpricot - fast, and pretty easy.
I would just have one screen with the site with firebug open, and grab the xpath expressions from it, slap them in a ruby string and then put in place holders for the parameters.

Only minutes of work.
Yeah, the chart he refers to wasn't Tufte's own it is Minard's presented by Tufte.
Known and the Unknown - Types of Acne
There are many types of acne that affect people and I am sure that lot of people out there who are like me ignorant about various types of acne that affect them. Let us take a quick look at some of the types of acne that commonly affect us.
PG books free to a good home
I have an extra copy of ANSI CL and On Lisp. Free to a good home. Tell me why you want them in the comments in 25 words or less. Best story wins. I reserve the right to decide, but I'll be strongly inclined to go with the story with the most upvotes :-) (I'm not going to strictly enforce the 25 word limit, so if you really feel the need to write more feel free. But don't get too wordy. It's just a pair of books after all.)
Too many wise people have told me that I don't know beautiful code until I know Lisp. I definitely don't know Lisp, and I want to know beautiful code.
http://www.metafilter.com/58583/Youre-so-smart-you-probably-...

Similar story by same author with some interesting comments from the blue.
You don't chew with the ruler, you just hit things with it. A pen or pencil invites you to chew it because of it's shape. But a ruler is flat, it really is not a good feeling. Much better is either to spin the ruler or hit things...
Speaker Bureau
Ad trade group opposes Yahoo-Google search deal
The Association of National Advertisers announced Sunday it sent a letter to the head of the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice, citing its opposition to the controversial Yahoo-Google search advertising deal.
Kunstler - Virtual is No Refuge From the Real
I shudder to think of the prize for guessing right.
The title of the submission seems wrong to me.

Reading the article, I understand that you can obtain the approximate location of a WiFi router knowing its MAC address. It doesn't sound as worrying as getting the position of a cell phone though. The number of cases where you know someone's router's MAC address but not where they live seem very limited to me. Or at least, if you know someone's MAC address, there are plenty of other ways to find out where they live, including asking or following them. (non-tech old school ways)

Am I missing something?

Note that the 'hack' and the explanation are interesting. Just not as worrying as presented IMHO.
Most people don't care. Most people see adverts as a good way to keep the internet free.

It's only a very small proportion of people who like to block adverts and leech pages.

"With Microsoft controlling the browser, they could conceivably release an ad blocker in IE8 and turn it on by default. Google would be in serious trouble very fast."

Any ad blocker is at best maybe 50% effective. Most ads get through. You just don't realize they are ads.

It might take google... an hour at most to get past the ad blocker if ms did such a thing.
Law prof warns against coming ISP privacy apocalypse
But is it legal for a 3rd party to scan in your newspaper, remove the ads, then print it out and sell it to you?

That is a more accurate analogy. It's stealing and depriving the publisher of their income.

In any event, getting past adblockers is really really simple. It always will be, and if you think an adblocker can block anywhere near all adverts, you should go read up on how things work.
sharks with laser beams attached to their heads?
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- Jython
- Jython
>>> from __future__ import GIL
Traceback (most recent call last):
(no code object) at line 0
File "", line 0
SyntaxError: Never going to happen!
- Jython
I don't have a camera, but I can tell you what it looks like.

I don't have a "room". I have a futon in a shared office room in the house I live in, some homemade bookshelves (read wood, eyelet screws and twine), and a laptop. In this same room there is also a silkscreening station.
UK: Rival genetic tests have different results
My desk looks like this:

http://disk.jrock.us/bingo/public/random/desk.jpg

Basically monitor + model m + tea == happiness.
Hmmm, hasn't this been posted on HN before?
I have 4 things I need to check:

1. My personal MobileMe account

2. My master gmail account that has mailed forwarded from:

a. My work Gmail
b. My web-contact Gmail (also for signups and throwaway)
c. My former personal Gmail that I'm replacing with MobileMe

3. My Yahoo Mail accounts only for PayPal/Ebay because of the ability to use folders

I use Fluid to capsulize the Gmail windows and I have never ever bothered with Thunderbird or Outlook.

Gmail's IMAP forwarding is always pretty fast for me. I then just change the mailfrom to the email it was forwarded from and I haven't logged into those separate Gmail accounts since last year.

My one gripe is just that there's not enough colors for the tags.

My calendar setup is Gcal but I'm trying to get it synced to iCal. I've been using BusySync on Mac for the past 20 days and will be paying for it because it essentially solves the headache of syncing both ways so that my iPhone is always updated but I can manage it on my computer.
The founding fathers didn't have anything in common with the average citizen either - if anything, they were relatively more wealthy than politicians today.
Scoble fan here.

I don't know how much pageviews these startups would get without Scoble telling that they suck.

Scoble started conversation. Many agreed the thesis, many don't, everybady CHECKED. It is like mini DEMO for these companies. How this could be bad for them?
The Closures are Coming
Not Clinton. She married someone who did, and then won one election based on name recognition.
Odd; I suppose I'm of neither of those mindsets particularly. I studied when I was bad at something, but I didn't study, and in fact specifically underachieved, when I already was sure (through practical usage) of my own knowledge in the subject. I suppose I'm of the growth mindset, but just really lazy.
Request Haiku:

I just want On Lisp,
to improve my coding style
with advanced techniques
How to make your user interface CRAP
Iraq has so little coastline, they're probably using landsharks.
I'll write a pair of reviews plus an additional article about LISP itself on bytepawn.com
Facial recognition by satellite is probably impossible. The Rayleigh formula states :

angular resolution = (1.22 * wavelength) / diameter of lens.

Now I don't know what altitude a spy satellite is at, so let's say 100 miles == 160,000 metres. Let's also say that you need a resolution of 1cm in order to recognize a face (probably you actually need better than that). Wavelength of light, to make the maths easy, 5x10^-7m.

tclsh[1]% / [* 1.22 5e-07] [atan [/ 0.01 160000]]
9.760000000000012

So that's a 10m lens, assuming you could make an optically perfect lens that big and get it into orbit. If you wanted a 1mm resolution, you would need a 100m lens. And you would probably want the entire spectrum of visible light. And I've probably guessed the altitude way too low as well...

Oh, and your subject would need to be looking straight up at the moment your satellite passed overhead on a perfectly clear day :-)
Is TV Bad for Kids? The Economist's View
http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html
Which demonstrates that wealth isn't the problem per se.
How does a pen invite you to chew it? I just spin it around in my fingers, it's much more relaxing.
The startup sequence is really interesting...
I used to have a lisp as a child, and I think receiving the book would be my final moment of triumph. 25 words, no?