skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are only two things that a company can do with its profit:

1. Invest the proceeds back into the company.
2. Pay profits out to the shareholders.

That is it.

These days, companies tend to do more of #1 and less of #2 -- they define "investing the proceeds back into the company" as increasing the salaries / benefits of the company's top executives.

Historically, the US government foresaw this problem of too much power in the hands of too few people, both in the government itself, and in the private sector.

When the Federal Income Tax was originally implemented it stated that all businesses would be liable for taxes, and only the wealthiest people (read == the "moguls", back in the day) would be responsible for paying taxes (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2783480). Think about the underlying brilliance of this plan: income taxes are tiered, based on profit (the more you make, the more you pay). If a company was making excessive profit, it could do one of two things to "decrease" the tax burden: hire more people, or create a "market" for stocks that can reward the common Joe. The original income tax laws laid out would have allowed a company to pay someone $100K (in 2011 dollars) tax-free. However, that $100K, if kept as "profit" for the company would be subject to Corporate income tax.

(Q: Guess who voted NO on letting shareholders vote on executive compensation? (Jul 2009)) Hint - http://www.ontheissues.org/ ) (A: the speaker of the House).

When shareholders aren't allowed to regulate their "ownership" of a company (especially when it's just tiny percentage), they don't get a say on how those profits are used, and executive salaries continue to bloat. Those at the top whine, complain that they are the "job creators", and should not be subjected to such taxation. But this is exactly what is supposed to happen: their salaries would not be so high if the companies they controlled were not doing so well. If they're doing well, they should be either hiring more people (people with jobs would be less reliant on government assistance), OR gradually increasing the well-being of shareholders by paying out dividends to those who own only a tiny fraction of the company.

But, it's not working out like that. The checks and balances that the founding fathers put into place to prevent the notion of absolute power corrupting absolutely have become weighted down by the greed of a few.
One thing that is unfortunate about the public system. If you're poor and want high quality education for your kid, you have to live in an expensive neighborhood. Or pay for education twice. There's no way to sacrifice on location and put all your resources into education.

Its quite arbitrary to tie these two things together. Sort of like tying which restaurant you can patronize to the car you drive. Or what sporting event you can attend to the clothes you buy. Except way worse.
Indeed!

BTW, this issue with emoticons and parenthesis was also subject of an XKCD comic: http://www.xkcd.com/541/
I proposed doing that in 1999: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/1999-June/00... and in audio in 2000 http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2000-May/000... but I was far from the first; the early papers on this go back to the 1970s.

I believe that you can't get all the other signals to cancel out exactly at everybody else's receiver, but you can get the desired signal to interfere constructively and thus have a much higher amplitude.

The common name for this is "MIMO," multiple-input multiple-output. It's not clear from the article how "DIDO" differs from MIMO.

But I didn't account for reflection, refraction, and dispersion (!? what medium is dispersive for radio waves? That's gonna make it rough.).

HASAS (HydroAcoustic Signal Analysis System) is a piece of open-source software designed to do this for underwater passive sonar purposes.
> Let's face it, no matter how you view ads, if you think ads are bad then the only solution is for the government to start its own version of 'consumer reports' and to publish a simple list of products ranked according to attributes. Hardly a remotely practical or plausible solution.

That is an extremely black-and-white view of the world. I think ads are generally not useful, and the small use they do provide is vastly overwhelmed by their negative attributes. I fully support truth-in-advertising laws, but I would never go as far as your proposed solution. Poor, emotion-laden advertisements are really due to fundamental flaws in human psychology which will be there no matter what we do.
A possible cause of this could be that in large companies (with a few rungs of management), people think they need to sound impressive to be listened too. Thus they try and make the idea sell-able. This dumb's it down and you get the lowest-common-denominator stuff this article is talking about.
Not exactly -- does the Federal govt even keep a balance sheet that shows assets - liabilities?

How do you value the Federal assets? What's the going rate for a second hand air craft carrier?
This is disingenuous. Under this logic there's no such thing as a project that's more or less objectively interesting.

If 999 programmers decide to work on 999 basically identical Soduku solvers, and 1 programmer decides to hack up a novel object recognition system with OpenCV, and all 1000 guys are equally keen on their own projects, we'll just have to all agree that all thousand projects are equally interesting and call it a day.

I care because it's wasted effort that would be better spent elsewhere.
You can configure the 2nd pass to only be asked every X days, which would address the annoyance factor somewhat.
Maybe you couldn't resist because you're nostalgic? Read-only Perl went out with the 1990's, unless you're talking about golf (which FYI is done for the challenge of it - it's not for production).
The "paging channel" problem is already present in existing mobile radio systems. Solving it pretty much requires some form of TDMA — i.e. scheduled transmission — because only TDMA gives you the ability to actually power your radio off most of the time. Even Wi-Fi has features for this.
"I don't think it takes much to fix education; it's so broken that any young person today with an appreciation for gaming could probably figure out something better than what exists now."

Why so?
This is definitely true, and many people seem to assume that I'm either a grad student or working at a University and are surprised that I'm not.
It's more like "Miranda -> Too proprietary -> Haskell".
>Actually I don't think its technically "Turing Complete". it doesn't have unbounded tape. In fact any given ARM processor will have a fixed addressable limit. I can certainly compute a class of things in theory that the ARM processor can't compute. There are real HW considerations that you need make when you deal with an actual physical processor that don't exist in the theoretical model.

Obviously -- it is a finite state machine, but this doesn't mean any less that it is a theoretical model.

>But this is similar to a patent on a new wing design. You can say it is simply a mathematical model of airflow and such. But the pudding is the creation, not the mathematical model of the wing.

No -- the wing is a physical object. I can hold a wing in my hand. Conversely, a patent on a wing design does not mean that I cannot use that wing design in a computer simulation of an airfoil. But a patent on bzip does mean, supposedly, that I cannot run bzip on a virtual machine. In other words, the wing design is the point, here: you could patent a specific device for running bzip, but you cannot patent bzip on all computing devices. Which, I suppose, might help to explain my point.
> I recall a startup in the bay area that was doing something like that with WiFi access points to provide both range and better signal integrity

You may be thinking of Vivato, whose assets were acquired by Catcher.
> What's the going rate for a second hand air craft carrier?

Whatever an African dictator's willing to pay for it?
Solution to mail.app problem: either make the middle column bigger, or don't use it in full screen.
Tell HN: Memorial Service for Len Sassaman
A memorial service for Len Sassaman will be held in San Francisco, on
Saturday, July 30th, 2011, 2-5pm, at DNA Lounge (375 11th St, at Harrison).

An additional service will be held at DEF CON, on Friday evening, August 5th,
2011, in the Skytalks room. More information will be available at the con.

In lieu of flowers, donations are requested to eff.org, or jpfo.org
I suppose they could limit the warning to once per IP address (or set a cookie) and reset it whenever your forwarding settings change.
The government did not have the foresight to tax away the wealth of the wealth. They saw a way to collect money without a popular revolt and they went for it.

And they had to change the Constitution to do it. It seems the founders are the ones with the actual foresight. They knew that government tends to expand its power and consume more and more of the people's resources, so they tried to keep it small and restricted.
Accessing a deceased person's Gmail
New Sub-Reddit Finally Has Me Learning On The Site
I seriously doubt filesanywhere was unaware of drobox for the last 2 years. My guess is they were waiting for the opportune time to cash in.
> It didn't feel like I was talking to an alien who had no understanding of the problem with education today

Sounds like a bunch of haters insecure about their cognitive abilities. Questioning his humility is pretty low.
That wouldn't protect you in the scenario where someone had limited physical access to your machine.

Edit per the response:
I don't think this is a threat model that you would care about in theory, but it seems like a scenario that can come up fairly often in the real world. Especially in family or school settings, someone else will often have short durations of access to your machine. These people aren't often going to be technically literate enough to install key loggers or really mess up your machine, but they may well be able to quickly set up forwarding of your email to their account.
The interesting thing for me is that it returned a couple of Japanese results in the first page, with the characters "検索" highlighted. I've done a few Japanese searches from this computer before, which I guess is why it's giving me Japanese results, but I was surprised to see them translate search into Japanese and rank the results along with the English results.
And presumably those iso's can be DVDs of your favorite movies as well. Something for the netbook crowd.

I've had sticks which, when attached, show up as two devices, one is an optical drive with the disk of drivers already convieniently mounted in it :-) and the other the stick drives writable side. So the technology isn't particularly new of course but I like the notion of multiple ISO images on a stick and an easy way to select them.
That's only practical in the short term. The courts already have too much power - there's no reason to give them more.
> They weren't horrible, mind you. Just middle-of-the-distribution-curve kids, with the inevitable psychopath or two. I don't think privatization is going to filter that out.

Why not? That's exactly what privatization would do. All you need to do is identify the average kids and psychopaths, give them a chance to redeem themselves, and if they don't, unceremoniously kick them out.
+1 for more projects. You also might try refactoring projects you already have, it's a good learning process.

I found projecteuler.net to be a really good source for tough programming/math problems. If you want a never-ending supply of puzzles, that's a good place to go. When I was first learning Python, my classmate & I challenged eachother to see who could do problems 1-50 first. (It took us about a month-- we were also working full time and taking night classes. My classmate finished his 50th a few hours after me.)
Dogpile was the top result for me just now.
I've been using Opera for about 11 years now. When I started, there was nothing that was better. Even with that huge advertisement widget. It still is extremely competitive, if not leading in most things. For casual browsing it is unmatched.

It's not about one feature; it's the completeness of the whole browser. Things that you'd expect in Firefox/Chrome in extensions are built in here. It's still as fast as Chrome to the user, never mind silly benchmarks. Give it a spin some time.
Coming soon to a courtroom near you: RIAA has Opera shut down as an "illegal filesharing program".
oh ok didn't sound like it, you never know with the Apple cultists around here
But... are there any committed WP7 fanatics? Really? not anywhere near 10%, I'd bet.
What's a typical gross margin for apparel sold online?
Famines are almost universally caused by political failures rather than by actual food shortages. For example we have seen wars where the combatants routinely confiscated food from civilians and prevented delivery of relief supplies. Or misguided governments have imposed price controls which acted as a disincentive to increase production. If you don't have a free market then obviously shortages can persist a long time.
Oh god - this will end up saving me $100 in under a year, just in raw cost of CD-R and DVD-R. What a great product! If they'd just stick with a proper key-ring; those damn things break all the time, I think I'm on my second or third USB-drive, just this year because it's broken.
I find originalism to be the only reasonable way to interpret the document. If the constitution doesn't say what you want it to say, then change it. Once you start changing the meaning of the words you defeat the purpose of having a written constitution.
$1,000,000,000,000 platinum coin
If they had physical access to your machine you have more things to worry about.
I know you're just trying to make a point, but the value of an aircraft carrier is most likely infinitesimal compared to the value of land the Federal government owns. I think the Feds are probably in the black, though not in liquid assets.
akeefer. I find it arrogant when someone assumes that disagreement means that the other person just don't understand. Ok. That aside. Let me go back to the actual issues here as I see them.

You seem to be arguing that writing software is basically a creative process which is the same as producing literature and music but software is fundamentally different in that it goes beyond aesthetics. Software is not normally used to produce an expression / statement about life / culture or someone's emotional state etc but is used to process data in such a way as to have a functional and measureable impact.

Here's a question for you. Your competitor has patented a "solution" which basically the same as yours and is now sueing you for infringement how would copyright and / or trade secrets help?"?

Here's another question. Why is a software patent special? As opposed to one based on expression of a solution to a problem in terms of, say, electronic circuitry?

Let's say that your wish is granted and software patents are made illegally but hardware patents are still legal how would we stop companies like Apple and HTC "gaming" the system by tying the software to physical devices so that they become hardware patents?

I'm not sure I have all the answers but making software patents a special case just feels wrong and is likely to have so many legal loopholes as to be worthless ?

The patent system as currently practiced is broken. That much is clear. It was supposed to be about promoting innovation and the spread of knowledge. Instead it seems to really be about granting monopolies. But until the law is changed companies have to apply for patents if only to protect themselves against attack.

We need fundamental changes to the patent system which applies to ALL patents.
How Tech Companies Are Interconnected (Chart)
I think one's opinion of the final solution in the article boils down to if you would prefer to raise (or throw) an exception if there desired value is not found (i.e. like in Java when a file is not found), or you would rather return an error value (i.e. NULL in C from fopen etc).

This is just creating a specific proxy object to return a more specialised error condition rather than just returning nil and making the user of the function guess at what could have gone wrong.

I could see this sort of proxy object mechanism being extended so that you could add retrying mechanisms to the code.
The logic here is that your opinion on the value of the Hurd isn't objective and that there's no accounting for taste. The Hurd authors know the fruits of their labor far better than you do. If they don't consider their effort wasted and are happy with their results, what are you upset about? If programmers like working on things you don't like, that's their own business.
Good point about equals, I'm just thinking in a tight render loop (like in a game engine or something equally as sensitive) even with the diff hash codes you are dropping through to a char-to-char comparison IN the off chance that your two strings are the same length.

I'll be the first to admit those are pretty slim odds, but it's always fun to dig up these little performance things hidden in the JVM and store them away for later use in some interesting project.

Nice decompile with the enums... no idea what's with the array either; another hidden gem to at least be aware of.

This is alot like when autoboxing came out. New Java people thought int i and Integer ii were the same when used in different settings, not realizing that under the covers Integer.valueOf(i) and ii.intValue() are getting generated.

It's great if valueOf is returning a cached value (-127 to 128) but beyond that you are just object-creating all over the place.

Working on SJXP (xml parser layer that sits ontop of Pull Parser to make it like XPath, but super fast) I did some HPROF and found my use of path hashcode lookups in a Map<Integer, String> was generating millions of Objects.

So I moved to an Integer cache that holds the Integer object generated from the hashCode() and re-uses it as needed.

Ended up dropping the overhead (CPU and memory) of the library below everything in native XPP to where it adds almost no overhead.

Anyway -- thanks for diving deep with me on that, we have two new tricks up our sleeves ;)
If it can print redstone, then it can print a 8bit CPU
Your contrived chain of analogies ends in a total strawman. I think you intended the last item on your list to be pure software, but it's not. It's just an electronic version of the first item.

No one is arguing that a complete electronic timer should not be patentable. The argument is whether the software alone should be patentable.

The software by itself is NOT a timer. The timer's software is only the idea of the timer; it is the instructions, the observation of which allow the physical timer to function. There must still be a physical timer -- an assembly of physical parts that follows programmed instructions to provide a function. That entire assembly is what should be patented.

The bare idea of the timer -- the steps that the timer takes while it's working, should not be patentable. That's what the article is proposing. Nowhere in your analogies is bare software addressed.
How about you just don't go to websites that use this? That's like me saying I hate Level 3 and I never want my web traffic to go through them, is there a way I can make sure my data packets never peer with a Level 3 connection?

You should worry more about your ISP than Google trying to make the web faster.
Side note: With results-as-you-type now being the default even from the Google front page, isn't "I'm feeling lucky" a totally vestigial button at this point?
Pos收款机
Exactly. You can pass Maybe objects in Ruby as a convention, but the extra layers of indirection probably aren't buying you much. There is no way to enforce the contract.
Agreed -- I also think 2 years in software is would be considered sufficient time to have a technological advantage over your competition. Maybe even 3 years.

But I think it's currently 11 or something like that isn't it?

In 11 years I'll probably be half robot... that seems like a long time.
Your last statement is indeed the phenomenon I was intending to describe.

However access to the internet (and tools) has gone to the wealthy and educated first, who tend to have higher IQ (as measurable by most tests) than the poor and uneducated. Hence adoption of new browser technology is often among the cognitive elite (for access reasons) and penetration toward the masses (average IQ) depends on the overall appeal and not just a small fad among those with early access.
http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

Definitely worth buying his video series that accompanies the book (which is free online).

then:

http://railscasts.com/
(start with the early ones and work forward - I found these great to do at the end of a day)

Although I'd certainly also recommend the books that glasner mentioned, particularly "The Rails Way" by Obie Fernandez (although, from experience, it will freak you out a bit as a beginner if you try to read it cover to cover...)

Finally, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby-on-rails - there won't be many questions you'll have initially that haven't already been the subject of a great answer (or indeed multiple great answers).
Spaces and Expose are in Mission Control. Enter Mission Control and drag an application to the top of the screen.
Apple Now Has More Cash Than The U.S. Government
Somehow, I don't think Apple is in the sights of the liberals who hate corporations.
True. Alternatively, given they know how often a person checks their email, they could show the warning for some multiple of that time (with a lower limit e.g. show for at least 1 week).
oops, I must have misread it, my bad.
This post is a follow-up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2747106. The author of http://quoteinvestigator.com does a really good job of tracking these things down.
Incidentally, I saw this message while viewing the help page:

"Update your browser!

Gmail runs faster on new web browsers. Upgrade your browser for free to get the latest speed and security updates. Update your browser"

Nice to see when I'm using Google's Android OS on my Droid 2.
You mention LessWrong, very nice; then you know they were forced: any time you deploy the Dark Arts to manipulate someone's behavior, you undermine their free will. "Choice" wasn't part of it, or at least not the largest part.
To make an OS think a USB stick is a USB optical drive, it's already been done for years in China

http://baike.baidu.com/view/628264.htm

You can make a USB stick like three virtual devices, a USB-HDD, USB-CDROM and a USB-ZIP.

It's all about firmware and USB stick chip. Many made-in-China USB sticks support this out of the box
there's no particularly interesting ideas in it

I sorta agree.

I particularly would like to see operating systems implemented using JIT compilation and software isolation. Managed code running safely on the ring0 of the processor.

Microsoft Singularity started this but I'd like to see the open source people trying something like that! I really think we need processor/architecture independency if we really want to achieve freedom.
Too short an article. That particular quote was called out and discussed here when the Khan Academy article was discussed previously.

It's a certain mindset that thinks this way. It reminds me of another discussion here where some people and a supporting article (http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs...) argued that it is unfair that some students have previous experience programming when they enter a CS program, therefore classes should be done in obscure (and thus pretty useless) languages that no one has heard of, in order to equally handicap everyone.
It's 17 years.

The 2-year software patent wouldn't fix other problems, such as the impossibility of determining novelty or nonobviousness in a field as varied and active as software. It's not wise to give the patent office an impossible job, when case law is largely based on presumption of validity.