skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's be realistic here: there are plenty of mathematical wizards who can't code themselves out of a paper bag, and there are plenty of computer scientists who can create brilliant, elegant, and perfectly optimized algorithms but couldn't create a complete, functioning, useful piece of software to save their lives.

There is some programmatic thinking in mathematics and there is some mathematical thinking in programming, but they are very distinct disciplines and skills.

It's easy for academically-oriented people to say "oh Python is just glue, web development is just calling apis, etc. etc." But this so-called 'gluing together' of libraries and apis actually presents seriously tricky algorithmic challenges all the time, just at a higher level. The reality is that seasoned CS phds often aren't any better at solving these problems effectively than a smart and creative 19 year old with a few years of python behind him/her. I don't say this to diminish the type of thinking SICP teaches--on the contrary, I think it's extremely important and cuts to the core of good programming. BUT I do think it's a mistake to assume that you can always better train yourself for this type of thinking by doing problem sets and theorizing versus ramming your head against messy real world problems with whatever Turing-complete language is at hand.
Here's one i've seen linked around a lot, but never used myself: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt

I personally prefer Ghostery because it tells me exactly what was blocked and when.
But typically, they are working there, not setting up a virtual office. If these super rich are working in the US, they should pay tax. If they are not working, why don't they deserve to be taxed?
> This allows the creator to benefit in the case they can't personally exploit their work.

I wanted to be succinct for the title, but I'm more getting at why people other than the creator can sell a patent. Selling is still beneficial to the owner, however, if the company sells it after that then how's the benefiting the owner?

> What if the patent is a joint creation, or created while working for a company, i.e. the company owns it?

This is more of a side note to me, although, it looks like patents expire after 20 years. At least that's a number I've seen cited a couple places since posting the question.

With that said, maybe the pharmaceutical process is something worth looking into? I know the timer starts on their patents as soon as they submit it which long before they can ever produce it, but the point is that they're able to pay for all the research and trials involved in making the drug. Maybe there's some analogy for other applications (e.g. software patents)?
Only if someone checks his pockets very thoroughly after each shift.
When you are working on your own startup, you don't see it as work. It's easy to "work" many hours, but it's enjoyable to a great extent.
Hyper-V is a hail mary play, in case EMC/VMWare does something really stupid to screw up a good thing.

VMWare is an enterprise product. How many big enterprises are using Hyper-V? (A: Zero, officially anyway)
My biggest problem with Gnome 3 (and the number one reason I abandoned it in favor of Xmonad, which I've come to like quite a lot), was that it breaks the UI concept of the modifier key.

Simply pressing and releasing the super key (with no other keypress in between) triggers a change of state (bringing up the "overview" or whatever it's called). The modifier key is such a basic interface concept that I struggle to imagine why they would go out of their way to break it -- any way I look at it, it's just monumentally idiotic. And best of all, I could find no way of disabling it.

Admittedly, they're not the first to do this. OpenOffice has done something similar for quite a while (pressing and releasing a modifier key brings up a menu); that was one of the many things about OO that pissed me off. Nevertheless, precedent is insufficient justification for such a thoroughly moronic change.

I've been wanting to rant about that for a while now, glad to get it off my chest. Thankfully, Xmonad is fantastic, so in a way I'm grateful to Gnome 3 for leading me to switch to it.
I wouldn't say that. Some people are really great at execution but can't think of an original idea if their life depended on it. Conversely, there are those brilliant creative people who can't make a scrambled egg.

Having a finished product like the iPhone as a horizon surely helped Android. But of course, that's not the whole story. Only Google managed to be inspired by the iPhone and launch a successful competitor. The rest of the industry was simply inspired.
I was very interested to see this. I have been working on a similar idea but without the github "centric-ness".

My one is called codefamous.com and has a similar tag idea to yours but I've gone a bit more flexible and allowed users to create tags and tag groups that they like and pinch them from each other's profiles. See my profile on it to give you an idea: http://codefamous.com/bcg

Yes everyone, I know I need the services of a designer and gravitar and auth api integration. It early days yet as I'v only just knocked her up over the last couple of weeks.

At the moment I'm just really interested in what tags and groups evolve.
+1. A lot of his examples have nothing to do with financial services.
I work 8am to sunset on weekends as a skydiving instructor. During the week I do remote stuff for a few companies for about 4-5 hours a day. I try take off 1 day a week.
When you bill per hour, its harder to reach that number. This is misleading because salaried employees and equity holders can easily work many hours, but hourly workers are limited by how many hours their employers will allow them to work (or by how many hours contractors can invoice their clients)
Ah, the "car approaching head-on" is the perspective of the immigrant.

Yup. That's the scenario exactly. And yes, braking hard is a better reaction. It makes life easier for the passer. The passing car probably came from behind you, and so there is likely a space. If there isn't, the car behind can see the whole scenario unfolding and has the opportunity to react. So all over it is much safer than swerving.

The only case it won't help is if the passing car is swerving, gets hit, and spins out. But in that case there is probably nothing you could do to avoid an accident.
It is not even clear that it is tax avoidance. In most situations the capital gains preference is meant to mitigate, and in fact only partially mitigates, income taxation at the corporate level.

Preferences for real estate and investment managers in the form of carried interest...well, that's another story.
Right! Nerds pride themselves on knowing how to find good deals.
Jacking up prices isn't the only potentially-negative consequence of driving its competitors out of business, nor is it a requirement to be considered anti-competitive. The history of Internet Explorer is an interesting illustration of both.
Still, at least it's an improvement on the system my university network imposed, which required pre-registration of your MAC address for your assigned room port. Any other MAC detected would immediately block the port at the switch level (and require a helpdesk call, and up to 3 days wait) to fix.

It taught me some useful things about the linux system init process, and where to stick the mac spoofing setup call though, so not a total loss
Actually, probably not. Some companies have already been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, sued, and settled. See eg [1]. I'd bet most companies have looked at that and decided not to do anything similar.

Note: I'm an actual quantcast employee, though I started after the aforementioned behavior. I'm not speaking for quantcast. (Seriously -- don't be a dbag and quote this as qc's position or anything. Because if you want qc's position ask our spokesperson.)

[1] http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/12/zombie-cookie-settlem...
Possible self-rectification

Elite keeps serfs ignorant by providing no economics education.

Voters fail to grasp debt situation.

US soft defaults, inflation etc.

Dollar loses preeminence, 50% of value, the unwarranted part.

Massive inflation affecting all imports, which is most of what people buy, since America makes very little.

Inflation acts as wealth tax, and transfers value from old to young. Many factories move (back) to US. More jobs. Less inequality.

So, I think the demand for dollars from overseas investors who want safety really hurts the US. You could do all this without the evaluation if you would start seeing China as a threat and get protectionist now. Autarchy, in fact.
This scheme is fine, provided that it's possible to easily maintain multiple identities, pseudonymous or not.
At the startup I work at, I average around 60 hours a week, with many weeks exceeding 70 hours a week. This is also usually done in a 5-6 day work week.

As a few people have mentioned, this number of hours is rather unsustainable, and I wind up burning out every 2 months or so for a week or two, where I put in a usual 40 hour week.
They're claiming 5 million in damages for using something that's cookie-like that doesn't respect their browser's cookie settings?
It isn't inconsistent to be opposed to patent trolls without being opposed to patents in general.
The books that are beloved by practitioners in a field are not always the best choice in terms of pedagogy. Clearly, these professors think that another book choice will help their students really grok the material. If they're successful, great. If they're not, they'll probably recognize it and supplement with other material or switch to another text. It's certainly possible to be a competent programmer without ever having read SICP in the same way that it's possible to learn linear algebra and calculus without ever having read Strang. My CS program didn't use SICP and I don't feel like I really missed anything of critical importance. There are other very competent authors writing other very good textbooks, after all. I was still exposed to Assembly, Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, Java, Scheme, Lisp, and Prolog in my program and learned core concepts of computer science such as asymptotic complexity, recurrence relations, Boolean logic, countability, Turing machines, finite automata, parsers, interpreters, threads, data structures, grammars, Backus-Naur form, etc.
This is cash that was taxed once in the foreign jurisdiction at whatever prevailing rate was in effect there. With the exception of the US, nearly all developed countries have territorial tax systems at which the rate on those foreign profits would be 0%.

A repatriation holiday would be a huge (and poorly targeted, considering nearly the entire benefit inures to about 10-20 firms) giveaway, but it's only discussed in the first place because of our strange worldwide corporate tax system.
FlashBlock, too. Flash on Linux is a real problem for laptops. Just streaming NPR for a few minutes causes the CPU temperature to go from its normal idling 43 degrees Celsius to 60 degrees. Just streaming NPR (and nothing else).

As a result, I have to "echo level 7 > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan" which helps (temp drops to 55). I'm not even complaining about battery life -- I'm complaining about heat!
Not just Kissmetrics in the defendents:

Space Pencil, Inc. D/B/A KissMetrics, Babypips.com, Involver.com, Moo, Inc., Sitening, LLC., Shoedazzle.com Inc., 8tracks Inc., About.me, Friend.ly, Giga Omni Media Inc., Hasoffers.com, Kongregate Inc., Livemocha Inc., RocketTheme, LLC, Fitness Keeper, Inc., Seomoz, Inc., Sharecash, LLC., Slideshare.net, Spokeo, Inc., Spotify USA, Inc., Visual.ly, Conduit USA, FLite, Inc., Tangient, LLC, Etsy Inc, and iVilliage, Inc
I found this article poorly written and defended. I didn't find it HN worthy. It is basically an investment manager complaining that the wealthiest Americans are mostly in finance and don't pay enough taxes because most of their earnings are from capital gains. He makes a lot of presuppositions in his writing that he never defends. For example:

"I asked if her colleagues talked about or understood how much damage was created in the broader economy from their activities."

How does finance destroy the broader economy in general? Liquid functional capital markets are critical for a stable economy. Finance is only bad for the economy when incentives are structures so that government limits the downside.

"America's top corporations reported 31% profit growth and a 31% reduction in taxes, the latter due to profit outsourcing to low tax rate countries."

Outsourcing is not bad. He treats it like it is a dirty world. Companies should have work done where it is most efficient. Google comparative advantage.
"It wasn't the hard-working 99.5%"

Because the top .5% aren't hard working.

"In my view, the American dream of striking it rich is merely a well-marketed fantasy that keeps the bottom 99.5% hoping for better and prevents social and political instability. The odds of getting into that top 0.5% are very slim and the door is kept firmly shut by those within it."

By definition, the odds of getting into the top .5% have to be very slim because only .5% of the population can get in there.

Also, I should note that the lower 99.5% benefit from lower capital gains taxes when it comes to appreciation on their homes. Obviously, this hasn't been a benefit lately. But, this is important given that the home constitutes the biggest chunk of net worth for many families.
Buy cheap moncler coats
Moncler Coats Men is become more and more popular nowadays.Moncler not only a common jacket's brand,it also the symbol of people's life philosophy.
>Beautiful.

I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A simpler way to analyze this problem is noticing the f(n-3) term implies your function has to memorize up to 3 previous results. Then just use the coefficients from the formula to cycle the next result into memory. Using algebra and generating new coefficients as per the OP's solution is unnecessary.

function f(n)
if n<3 then return n end
local a, b, c = 0, 1, 2
for i=3,n do
a, b, c = b, c, c+2*b+3*a
end
return c
end
Be an Optimist Without Being a Fool
While I don't disagree with some of the claims made, other claims, especially those about the harm caused to the Plaintiffs and Class Members, are pretty amusing. They're claiming that it caused economic loss because it resulted in unauthorized use of bandwidth without payment and that it diminished the performance of their computers and internet connectivity.
It's also an issue of timing and deferral. Because one can offset short-term capital gains with capital losses, and individuals generally have absolute control over realization of capital gains, the effective rate on capital gains can effectively be zero or near-zero given sufficient liquidity, despite a statutory rate equal to the ordinary income rate.
"An effective duopoly of iOS and WP7 would be bad for consumers in the short term due to decreased competition, and even worse in the long term due to the effects of all mainstream mobile platforms being locked down."

I broadly agree with you on this count. However, I think that for us, the techie community, the fact that a majority of mobile platforms are locked might be an issue; for the average customer it is not.

"Not mutually exclusive."
Again agreed broadly but it can be argued that at the end of the day Google is a company chasing revenues (just like every other company) and not having to get involved in patent litigation is going to save "them" money. While the patent system might be broken, but as long as it's not fixed, Google has to play along (just like MSFT and AAPL). I just do not see how they can ever take the higher ground here, other than being miffed at missing the deal.

The true price of any commodity is not static, it is always dependent on competition/availability/demand etc. The patents might be worth 1 billion, but if Google offered in excess of 3 billion, they thought that it was worth the price "in the current environment". Also Google can claim that the patents were worth 1 billion, but they have a vested interest in portraying this as being the case. I am a little cynical of such claims.
Meanwhile, in reality:

Let me be clear, though: there is nothing wrong with playing a video in Flash. I mean that seriously, no sarcasm. What there’s something wrong with is requiring Flash Player to play video. That’s the whole point of the HTML5 <video> element: to enable web video without requiring the use of proprietary plugins.

And:

I have nothing against WebM. In fact, prior to this week’s announcement, I thought Chrome had the best HTML5 video policy of any browser: they supported all the relevant codecs. Supporting WebM and H.264 is better than supporting only one or the other, in my book. But if you’re only going to support one, I say support the one that is in wide use, with extensive wide-ranging support from camera makers, mobile playback devices, and online video services.

-- http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/practical_vs_idealistic

This aren't "completely opposite positions". This is consistent pragmatism. I believe you frame it as a contradiction because you see the issue primarily as an ideological one of open vs. closed, with the "open" nature of WebM trumping any utility of h.264. Not everybody sees it that way.
The super rich working in the US do pay tax on their income. You seem to be conflating many separate issues, so let me explain in detail how it works.

Sergei Brin pays taxes on his income to the US.

Google Ireland doesn't pay taxes to the US on income earned in Ireland until they transfer the money to the US. (They do, however, pay taxes to Ireland.)

A guy working at a diner in Ireland will, as far as I know, never pay taxes even if he does transfer money to the US.
Pass. If you think that the state of America's economy today in any way requires violent insurrection to "rectify" then you have either a bizarrely warped sense of reality or a very unusual set of ideals.
> For a truly innovative mobile UI, look at WP7 and Metro.

To each his own, I guess; I think metro is ugly and has lousy usability.
There are tax, liability, and business issues. Trust me it's a mess especially when you try to minimize the tax liability, you can do all sorts of crazy crap.
I'm pretty sure the other major search engines also use PageRank.
Let's think about secondary effects.

What percent of very wealthy Americans do you think would renounce their citizenship based on this? How much less investment capital would there be in the USA based on that?

Note: Not asking for a value judgment ("good riddance if they do!" - not productive). Just your estimate as to what percent of wealthy Americans would give up their citizenship and how much less investment capital would result. It's an important detail to consider.
There is a rather breathless presumption that underlies many of the comments to this article, and it is this: that the only way to learn anything thoroughly is to learn it from the inside out: to start from first principles and gradually pile up complexity and abstraction. There is something very compelling about this approach, probably because it purports to model the mind after nature. Just like complex phenomena in nature is built up of smaller, fundamental particles, so too understanding will be built up from atomic units. But stop and think for a moment: how many things in life are really learned that way? Isn't it more often the case that you hack around and only later come to understand what it was that you were doing? I think the fact that it is so intuitively compelling disguises the fact that this conception of learning is really quite bizarre and implausible.
I am sure that there was no innovation at all in the phone hardware space in the past 40 years before the palmpilot, iPhone, Droid and iPad devices. Right? If only those devices came out in the 80s, we could have had 40G instead of just 4G now!
True enough. I have not unsubscribe yet but I've stopped reading it for over a month now. Poor signal:noise ratio and people seems to fight over getting 5 Funny.

Now I read HN and Reddit's daily top.
Master Roshi destroyed 1 back during the world MA tournament.
Linus isn't the target audience for Gnome 3.

Enough said, let's move on.
Having a click-through example.com/deals page which sets a hidden field or drops a cookie could avoid some of the Sad Missed Deal approach.

Then again, it immediately informs your potential customers of all your available deals, without the hassle of searching around, so they're more likely to find some way of optimising their payment downwards. You could (pseudo-)randomly display certain deals, or set rate/quantity caps ("Buy quickly, only 50 coupons remain!")
to deal with that.

By providing visibility on all your deals, the customer feels more satisfied knowing they got the best possible deal, and you limit the proliferation of all those annoying voucher search sites (and cart abandonment when none of those 3-year old $5 off codes work).
Let's first try to understand what is implied by your question. Is it that unless an idea is patented it does not qualify as innovation and in that case if someone else copies it, it becomes acceptable?
So the argument for differential taxation of income versus capital gains is to incentive investment. However, I'm not sure investment needs to be incentivized right now. There is a ton of private capital floating around right now looking for productive investments in the US, and they just don't exist. So the money goes overseas, or into elaborate, questionable financial instruments.
There is academic research that confirms the injustice hypothesis:

http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/mike.shor/research/Promo/Eco...
Why does everyone on HN seem to be so anti-advertisements? I read of people willing to pay money out of their own pocket just to use services that would otherwise be free and ad-supported.

I don't disable ads, mostly because many sites I visit frequently integrate the ads into the design quite well, and without them the pages look too sparse. I also don't like the idea of a program filtering what I can and can't see on a page.
Why on earth not? What's so bad about starting at a high level of abstraction and then progressively peeling the abstraction away to get to the core concepts?
If the amount of radium were sufficient to be dangerous, they would have detected it when they raided. Beryllium is another matter, I suppose, but it's possible that the amount of beryllium was also safe.
A topic earlier showed that 26 of the ACM Turing Award winners had degrees in mathematics

The field of computer science didn't exist when they went to college. They invented it, hence the awards.
Programming the XPERIA Play GPU
and Jews.

EDIT: I want to emphasize that I AM Jewish, and that the above was meant as a joke. I grew up in a religious household and if you're too sensitive to something like the above comment, then make sure to stay away from shows like "Curb Your Enthusiasm".
I checked 80+, but it depends on how you define work. A lot of work is sitting around in an all-night diner drinking coffee and drawing on napkins. It ain't such a bad thing, and is probably less stressful than playing a first person shooter.
I got up to exercise 1.18 in Haskell, and didn't have any problems with it. I knew very little haskell when I did it; I know less now.

Doing the exercises in both Scheme and Haskell was a fun exercise; I should go back to it at some point. https://github.com/llimllib/personal_code/blob/master/haskel...

edit: the excercise the author is talking about is 1.11; my answer starts on line 51. The haskell is pretty!
Saying of Android's UI that 'it's mostly a pale imitation of iOS' makes me wonder if you have ever actually used an Android device. The UI is similar but beyond the notification system you noted as being different (vastly different, much improved, and what iOS 5's notification system seems to be based off of) the app drawer and management of the home screen goes far beyond iOS's pile of apps.