skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a lot of loaded language in that report, and I got the feeling that the reporter should have taken an economics class before doing it. It was like watching a ignorant economics student get lectured about reality and she not wanting to accept any of it.

So, instead of pulling down a bunch of theory from the shelf and going over it, I'll just point out the obvious flaw: she believes that the country "owns" all the businesses inside of it and that by the companies acting in their own best interest, somehow they are cheating the rest of us. Most folks who have really thought about this realize that everybody acts in their own self interest and that government's role is to set things up so they grow and that a reasonable amount of money can be harvested to help fund things. At times it sounded to me like she wanted the country to be a prison: set up shop here and you can never go abroad. Paying a tax lawyer to make the best moves for your company was cheating. Etc.

I am deeply troubled that people are using mental models of business that look at businesses like the corner shopkeeper when business doesn't work like that anymore. Business is increasingly location-independent. Ranting about how unfair all of this is? It's not going to change that fact. It's 2011. I can live in Aruba, have corporate offices in Switzerland, have officers scattered around the world, make things in a dozen countries, market on the net, and sell in a hundred countries. You're using a mental model that doesn't match up to reality. You'll never make progress like that.

Never once did she mention that the United States double-taxes income where no other country in the world does - a critical part of the entire discussion. That omission alone should tell you how well-researched and thoughtful the piece was.
"Eventually, by connecting many such chips, Dharmendra Modha of IBM Research Almaden, in San Jose, California, hopes to build a shoebox-sized supercomputer with 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses"

and for comparison:

"the ultra-efficient human brain is estimated to have 100 billion neurons and at least 100 trillion synapses"

This is amazing. IBM is actually reaching towards the old dream of creating a computer that is as powerful as the human brain. I'm aware that hardware alone doesn't do it, but still damn impressive.
Very interesting...thanks!
Amazing patience.
That doesn't make sense. Either they need workers, or they don't. If they need them, why should they refuse to take them on if they don't fulfill some outlandish specification? Unless the job REALLY is that complicated.

But otherwise if a worker makes the more money, why not go for it?
I doubt the complexity of the brain can be reduced to cycles and the speed at which it performs each cycle. Also, I can't imagine that every operation performed by the brain would be performed at the same speed, so getting sound from the vibrations in your ear to wherever it begins to be interpreted might be much faster than the processes that would trigger memories from such sounds (or any other type of input, be it touch, smell, taste, visual…
I'm sorry I can't. I'm not into the details of Javascript (yet) and know nothing about JSLint.
are stock options enriching early startup employees a pyramid scheme?
It's completely unusable on an iPhone.
fixed transaction fees? you've just crippled your entire operation from day one. your currency will never rise beyond a value where the transaction fees make sense.
Appstatics: An iOS app to follow your iPhone, iPad and Mac app rankings
You're doing fine. Just don't panic about downvotes so loudly -- that's one thing that is considered bad form, if I remember correctly.
Don't bother. Just another piece of utter idiocy on the new spam-filled hacker news.
Denial of service by malicious pool owners is not an issue AFAIK. Pool owners are encouraged to package outstanding transactions in a mined block to claim the associated transaction fees. The only reason a pool owner would deny service is if the transaction has no fee -- which is generally spam.

The real problem with bitcoin if anything is transaction scaling. With each transaction broadcast and saved by every node, it's questionable if the network could (or would be willing) to tolerate the load equal to, say, the Visa network.

du -hs .bitcoin/
870M .bitcoin/
Why We Start Indexing from 0 in Computer Science
Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries Have Married
First time I read it I got that many parents do not like it that their kids are learning evolution (they probably want them to learn creationism instead) when instead they should be worrying that their kids are not learning enough math. I re-read it again and I still think that's what he meant.
I tried to have a twitter handle released recently and no, they don't process individual requests anymore unless you have a trademark or other legal title.
Haskell allocates 1KB (which is also much larger than the allocation required for a typical callback registration in event-based programming) initially, but grows the stack in chunks of 4KB.

These small chunks come at a cost, too. The GHC runtime needs to copy around the edges of the stack at the chunk boundaries, and stack use becomes slightly more expensive.
Israel Radio is hacked by Egyptian hacker ~ THN
This is such US-centric thinking.

Foreign companies never even started in the US, so there is no question of them "leaving" or "paying their fair share". If US companies are going to be competitive, they have to get out. Otherwise, investors will just choose non-US companies. It's better to set up overseas to begin with, and save the trouble.

Same thing with the US taxing citizens living abroad (unlike other countries). And so the IRS sticks its nose into every single financial transaction in the world in order to get money it doesn't deserve.

The US government should just stop being so greedy and entitled.
I always imagined the point of replicating the brain with microchips is to see if any emergent behavior (read: learning) is observed, not to improve the performance of any existing process.
In the UK: agricultural workers either get minimum wage or are exploited migrant workers getting illegally low wages and illegal working conditions. People who look after the elderly are "care assistants" not nurses they are unskilled workers at minimum wage. The amount of abuse in the care industry (as well as the high churn rate) suggests that a substantial number of those workers do not get much satisfaction from 'contributing to humanity'.

1000 yen per hour is about £7.90; the UK minimum wage is £5.93 ((if you're over 21) but there are some tax breaks and benefits available to some low paid workers). There are plenty of jobs at that minimum wage, and many of those jobs will be as dull as checking gaskets.
My guess is that people with low skills will still find work but not as much (part-time) and consequently their pay will be lower. However, if robots are doing all the work then production becomes cheaper which means products become cheaper which again means that people can buy more with less money. So in reality people will not become poorer. The economic level will stay the same or probably increase. The purchase power will probably increase. Question is, what do you do with all that extra time?

Well, this is only one scenario of the things that can happen.
To people who make big datasets available:

Please provide a sample of the dataset, so people don't just download the whole lot (costing you bandwidth), then realize they don't have the ability to do anything with it.
I think this is horrible.

1. Apple has a history of not spending a ton of money on acquisitions. That isn't to say they might not (I'm holding my breathe on buying Google or Facebook although that is also unlikely).

2. iCloud is not the same as AWS. Apple has not expressed any intentions of going into the hosting business and it certainly doesn't support what they do or what iCloud is designed for. The backend might be good structure but the business models are sooooo different, I'm surprise this was even mentioned (albeit I'll admit that AWS is a solid business).

3. The argument of Apple gaining digital content as a plus is wrong. Apple had numerous opportunities in the past to buy out Music companies and record labels and probably entertainment and production studios as well (even Pixar and Disney which Jobs is part of) but didn't. Apple doesn't need to "own" the content for them to reign as king. Didn't happened then, less likely to happen now.

4. Bezos is great, but he's no Jobs. He understand even less about hardware (only experience being Kindle) or desktop applications. Apple's core business is primarily desktop applications and heavy on hardware. Bezos would be a bad fit when you consider this.
Libya Registry & Telecom websites hacked by Electr0n
I prefer a variant of that. You can specify more than one place (that is, first choice, second choice, etc.) with a comma-separated list. I do this:

" Vim 7.3, now with persistent undo
set undofile
set undodir=$HOME/.vim_undo,/tmp

That way, if I've remembered to create a .vim_undo folder, they go there (best option). Otherwise, /tmp. (You can do the same thing when specifying places for swap and backup files.)

As the comment suggests, the undo feature is only 7.3 or better.
I think the complexity in controlling it is due to the fact that the whole craft is rotating (where's the front..?). If you want to remove that complexity, you need to add a lot more than just another wing and add a number of mechanical parts that can fail. As it is right now, the whole complexity is the software (which should be safely stored).

In addition, this design lends itself to small sizes in a great way. Shrink the center parts/electronics/, shrink the single wing and you get a very, very compact tool. Another wing nearly doubles the length of the whole thing.
turn off javascript (I didn't even know it was a slide deck, I have js off (NotScripts extension) in Chrome).

To be fair to Russ, it is his slidedeck from doing his talk, not a publication. It was only the 2nd IWP9, we've got a bit better since then :)
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/02/freedom-to-be...
I'm not the editor for that site so it's not my job. Not sure why I get downvoted for pointing out the horrible writing.
"Almost everybody is in Ireland," Sullivan said. "All the pharmaceutical companies, all the high tech companies. You're stupid if you're not in Ireland," he replied.

And this is why it doesn't change These big companies are telling everyone, the US public, the Irish public, the Irish government that the low tax rate works. The goal of the low Irish corportion tax is exactly this. Create job in Ireland, bring companies to Ireland.

(Ireland is currently almost bankrupt and needs an IMF/ECB loan. Everything is on the budgetry chopping board, income tax, vat, new property taxes, reductions in capital spending, reducing number of teachers per student, delaying the age at which children start school. Everything. Except the 12.5% corporate tax rate, the government parties (a centre left and centre right) view it as that important.)
I once had a lecturer who asked us which particular school of thought on -foo- we were - to which we responded that we were pragmatists - if it works, it works. He denounced us as boring.
Also don't miss http://www.learningwebgl.com for more advanced tutorials.
SOME VITAL TIPS ABOUT CAR TRANSPORT
Whenever the issue of depression comes up, I always see at least a few comments that have the "just snap out of it" line, which doesn't help anyone and is a terrible thing to say.
It is a two sided issue. As I am browsing the web I have referers disabled in the browser to protect my privacy. But at the same time I heavily on seeing where people came from to find my hobbyist website. It motivates me and I would not have discovered communities of like minded people.
I've never heard of any well-known economist arguing labor and capital are the same; got any reference?

I'm not sure why you ask me for a reference for a claim I didn't make. I claimed that labor and capital are substitutes as inputs to production. I also claimed that an inferior or more expensive substitute may go unused when a better alternative becomes available.

Do you disagree with any of these claims?
wordpress's rewrite mechanism is a mess and it doesn't help that the person in charge doesn't seem to care.

the most wanted permalink structure causes serious performance issues and extremely useful options are missing.

the rewrite rules are stored as a huge serialized array in a database field which can grow to several megabytes. configuration is only available for posts, the permalink of category archives don't confirm to the permalink of posts in the categories. and unused rewrite rules are stored - even those belonging to features that can be explicitly turned off.

a much better solution would be to store THE permalink of every entity as a fixed string and if any component changes, just add / move the old permalink to the post meta table to support redirects and whatnot.

as far as i can tell, all of this could be done with the current plugin api.
The top 10 SEO myths
Or the massive variation in transliteration from non-latin alphabets.

Not to mention, the vast majority of Chinese students I met at uni would pick an easily pronounceable "English" name. I bet that's not on their passport.
It opened 2 seconds ago and youre already angry at early adopters ?
If you are having trouble finding staff than you are by definition not paying market rates. If $20/hr gets you crap, then you need to raise your rates. This is capitalism, people don't owe you their labour for what you consider good money.
Hanging With Hackers: Inside Germany's Great 'Geek' Convention
The points listed in that post are all perks if apple would actually buy twitter, but it doesn't explain why would apple want to buy twitter in the first place.
It sounds like the Irish government is behaving quite responsibly.

Many other governments would be tempted to try to take a bigger piece of the pie from their corporations in order to get reelected, not realizing that they might be killing the goose that laid the golden egg. It sounds like the Irish have their collective heads on straight.
Facebook 'penetrated' by UK hacker
use channels, you can make them block so the first loop will wait for logger to finish the logging if you like

do {
source = <- sources // read a source from the sources channel
if source
data = read(source)
process <- data // send it to the process channel
else
process <- nil
} while source

fn processor {
do {
data = <- process
result = process(data)
results <- result
} while data
}

fn writer {
do {
data = <- results
msg = write(data)
log <- msg
} while data
}

fn logger {
do {
msg = <- log
if msg
print msg
} while msg
}
Ask HN: Cactus or Jekyll?
I've already used Jekyll and I'm fine with it, but reading http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/08/Jekyll-amazon-s3.html I've found a different static site generator called Cactus.

What do you think about this choice?
This reminds me of the chapter about "The Cosmic Joke"[1] from a Tibetan Buddhism book[2].

"[speaking about ego] We set up a background, a foundation from which we can go on and on to infinity. This is what is called samsara, the continuous vicious cycle of confirmation of existence. One confirmation needs another confirmation needs another…

The attempt to confirm our solidity is very painful. Constantly we find ourselves suddenly slipping off the edge of a floor which had appeared to extend endlessly. Then we must attempt to save ourselves from death by immediately building an extension to the floor in order to make it appear endless again. We think we are safe on our seemingly solid floor, but then we slip off again and have to build another extension. We do not realize that the whole process is unnecessary, that we do not need a floor to stand on, that we have been building all these floors on the ground level. There was never any danger of falling or need for support. In fact, our occupation of extending the floor to secure our ground is a big joke, the biggest joke of all, a cosmic joke."

[1] The chapter is fully available here: http://www3.telus.net/public/sarlo/Ytrungpa.htm.

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Freedom-Meditation-Shambhala-Libr...
I remap my Caps lock key to escape. That's one of the first things I do in a new machine.
The problem is, we've reached the unique point in our history where one major war can be the end of all wars. With so many nuclear armed countries it is a really bad idea of thinking about another major war. One major war could start a chain reaction that could easily send us back to the stone age, if we even make it. So much for progress.

The thing is that all countries eventually collapse just like all things eventually collapse. Remember, stars die too. I could easily make the claim that a lot of countries destroy themselves in a time of war. The loser of a war doesn't always rises from the ashes.

A nation probably has a timespan that it can be alive. Eventually it will just die and a new one will be formed.

Finally, correlation is not causation. Just because the two seem to show up together doesn't mean that one causes the other. It is an interesting idea though.
Sincerely, I don't think I could ever leave Gmail -- given, at least, its current competitors.
Can anyone recommend any resources for getting started with Scheme?
A couple of other discussions on similar articles in the last few days:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898229

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899299
I remember hearing a story about how bits of the BCL were written in Britain and originally used "Colour", but they were made to change it to standardise upon american english across the BCL.
Well, does Twitter's success show the importance of it, or does the success of all those other sites show that it isn't actually important?
Care to present any evidence. Because what you say about posts moving down sounds not as an evidence to me...

Also what you say about the pyramid schemes doesn't present evidence.

I'm not saying that YC is absolutely innocent, but it is unless proven otherwise.
What about basic arithmetic? (e.g. 1 + 1 = 2) This was obviously being used correctly for thousands of years before Whitehead and Russell came along and actually constructed a formal proof that starting with much more fundamental axioms and mechanical rules of inference you could indeed show that 1 + 1 = 2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica

Of course, this formality hasn't added anything to the practical application of arithmetic but thinking about structures in this way did eventually lead to some pretty interesting results in mathematical logic.
It depends on how you want to process it. It's not always that you want to apply complex operations on the whole data set. You may want to process only certain subset of it.
Why numbering should start at zero (EWD 831) (HTML version)
DHCPv6 kills Win7, Microsoft "won't fix"
The Short and Illustrious History of Twitter #Hashtags — Tech News and Analysis
So the HN community ignored this post?

Says a lot.
I would strongly suggest learning more about the Irish financial crisis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932011_Irish_financi...

http://www.amazon.com/Ship-Fools-Stupidity-Corruption-Celtic...

There were staggering levels of corruption and mismanagement both in the Irish government and within the Irish financial industry.

I don't think you can look at the corporate tax rate independently from all of the other utterly crazy things that were going on there.
Libya Registry & Telecom Websites Defaced by Electr0n - Insecure Stuff
Try any Ruby project with installation instructions. I was also clueless at first, but found it very easy to deploy a Ruby project.
EDIT: The comment to which I replied got deleted, but I've retrieved it from my history so I can still make my reply:

Sounds like a bunch of crap.

Has this post been moderated? Can any moderators
comment?

Why is the article
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908850
on the front-page, and this article is not on the
first four pages at all?

They were both posted 1 hour ago, and this article
has more votes then the other article?

Seems random to me.

In my experience as a non-privileged user, it's not random. If average, ordinary, everyday readers of HN decide that an article or item is inappropriate for HN then they can, and will, flag it. The ranking of the item is penalized by flags. Thus if average, ordinary, everyday readers of HN decide an article or item is inappropriate, either by being spam, troll, off-topic or content-free, it will sink, often quite quickly.

I've seen it happen to items about YC companies, I've seen it happen to items about non-YC companies, I've seen it happen to items that can and should be of deep interest to any decent human being. Such items sank rapidly because the community decided they were off-topic, or content-free.

This person just seems both to have a specific interest, and a non-understanding of how things work.
Agreed. I wrote a similar technique to overcoming UDID deprecation this morning but the powers that control HN saw fit to ignore it ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908381 ).

My approach is MUCH SIMPLER it doesn't even need MAC addresses are a project under GitHub.
Just generate a GUID which is as unique as what this author suggests.
They may be right about keeping the corporate tax rate steady, as partly evidenced by the fact that nearly every other large EU country wants Ireland to raise the corporate tax rate.

But the reason the country is in its current state is precisely because the politicians DIDN'T have their heads on straight. They were pointed directly at the gravy train. The Celtic Tiger was IMHO just one big bubble that the Irish didn't see coming until it was way too late.

(Disclaimer: I only lived in Ireland for the last 3.5 years but had many Irish friends there who had been through it all.)
yup, I'm the author of the library and use nano quite frequently for small edits.

nano has no executable parts so this is perfectly ok.
Regarding 3: The US also has a bunch of tax breaks and loopholes which most other countries do not have, leaving the _effective_ tax rate about the same as other industrialized countries.

Which leads to US companies as being the best in how to avoid paying taxes. That's how GE managed to pay no US corporate taxes last year on $5.1 billion of US profit. (Rather, 7.4 percent but those are stored overseas and won't be taxed until "repatriated." And odds are they are holding out for another tax holiday where they can repatriate for free.)
I agree with your view of what the realities are. But I don't see why should applaud them: What happens if a country like Switzerland or Singapore has a sustainable competitive advantage over the USA or Germany, that simply cannot be overcome? They can achieve some efficiencies by "freeloading" that bigger countries cannot match, for example Switzerland doesn't train enough doctors at their own universities but relies heavily on hiring doctors from Germany.

If companies cannot compete, in the long term they goe bankrupt and disappear. But how would a country disappear? It's not like every citizen could simply move somewhere else.

Also the correlation/causality is not entirely clear to me. Possibly countries are more succesful, because they have lower taxes. But at some point it could also be true that only countries that are already succesful are able to lower their rax rates so much.
Ireland won't be getting any EU bailout money without raising its corporate tax rate. It'll be convenient for the Irish politicians because they'll get to shift blame onto the other Member States.
Serious question; What's the difference between price fixing and tax harmonisation?