skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Well, sure, and they provide services to residents with those taxes, just like the cities do.

So their taxes go to pay for services only they use, and my taxes go to services that we all use. How is that fair?

> They pay for the freeways with gas and income taxes.

That's just an example. They spend half of their day in the city every weekday, they are going to end up utilizing some services that are paid for by municipal taxes sooner or later. It's simply ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Unless of course suburbanites aren't allowed to walk on the sidewalk or visit city parks where you live.

> On Friday night they come into the city and drop more money in bars and restaurants, and part of that money makes its way into city coffers.

Ahh, the old boost the economy/trickle down theory. I would rather they just pay taxes to the city, frankly. The money that possibly makes its way into city coffers is much less than it would be if they just paid taxes directly to the city.

> In any event, it's not the suburbs that come out ahead tax-wise. It's the rural areas.

This simply serves to demonstrate our point. Nobody is arguing otherwise, rural areas are definitely subsidized more than urban or suburban areas.

However, the same issues that cause rural areas to be so unequally subsidized apply to urban areas vs suburban areas too. It's just exacerbated in the case of rural areas.
Can you elaborate more on the circumstances in which it happened?
a sphere with an entirely internal cube-shaped hollow section in the middle, out of one piece? internal structure is the main thing it has over traditional CNC
A Marketing Plan for Obama
Those are indeed fascinating.

I do find this a bit of a stretch: "Leaving the constituent elements untouched, the process imposes a new order upon them, reorganizing the sounds along a musical structure." There are parts in there that are almost certainly slowed after recording. The deep thud of the carriage changing direction (starting at 1:47 in video #1) is one such sound that I believe has been slowed.

I could certainly be mistaken.
I just tried Vico (free trial downloadable from the website), and damn is it nice. I'm a huge fan of ST2, and I've been playing around with Vintage mode, but so far it just isn't enough for me: my poor fingers get confused by Vim operations that aren't supported. Vico has much better Vim support (although still not complete), and it's just as shiny as ST2 to boot. Anyone else have experiences with Vico to share?
That doesn't work for their example:

main(t){for(t=0;;t++)putchar(t*(((t>>12)|(t>>8))&(63&(t>>4))));}

use this in stead:

./a.out | pacat --rate=8000 --channels=1 --format=u8

Note that the rate only changes the speed, just like the RPM of a record would.
Show HN:Text to Voice Calling
> Taxes are the price of civilization. Suck it up.

You forgot to show that the taxes that we pay go for said civilization. Some do, but the vast majority don't.

For example, the US govt spends, per capita, about the same as western european countries. None of the folks arguing for higher taxes would suggest that we're getting the same level of services. Since we're paying and not getting, it's unclear why things would change if we paid more.

BTW - The author of "Taxes are the price of civilization." also said "Three generations of imbiciles are enough." in a decision upholding forced sterilizations (of someone who probably wasn't an imbicile, but instead a victim of sexual abuse by a govt official). Progressives are like that....
I wonder how many Facebook and HN readers are using Spotify along with FB's auto-publish feature?

I used it and forgot it was auto-publishing my tunes to FB. I went back to FB and was embarrassed to see it had published a song I wish no one knew I was listening to. Since then I updated Spotify and only listen in "Private Listening," mode.

Spotify is great, but automatically sharing everything I do/listen to is out of the norm. We as humans share when we want and been doing so since well forever.
Actually the hypothetical actors will have $200 and $55 respectively. To reinforce your point, if price of goods does go up 58%, the actor that started out with $50 will be 30% poorer in real terms (now having $55 and his $50 basket of goods now costing $79), whereas the actor that started out with $100 will be 26% richer (now having $200 and his $100 basket of goods now costing $158).
BBEdit: I keep hoping "the next version" brings it up to speed.
I totally agree. Not only does it make the tax code much more complicated than it needs to be, but it also discredits the "fairness" of taxes, damaging the very legitimacy of it.
I have no knowledge of these organizations, but I was assuming we were not discussing fraudulent endeavors.

I guess my larger point is that 'value' is in the eye of the beholder. Someone is giving money to the organizations you listed and must have determined that there was value in that from their perspective.

This goes to the heart of the idea of liberty and freedom of action. Individuals are going to value different things in different amounts and should have the freedom to act upon their own judgement. Someone else may not come to the same conclusion but everyone's circumstances are different and so there isn't going to be any universal agreement on 'value', nor need there be.

To go back to the original point, a private organization can not force individuals to fund their endeavors, while the government can (raise taxes, establish regulations and fees with fines or imprisonment for violation, etc).

Because the government has the unique authority to force compliance we should be extremely circumspect about attempts to expand its scope and power to avoid creating a self-sustaining bureaucracy. For example, the notion that government agencies can't be reduced or eliminated because that would eliminate 'jobs' is a terrible reason to avoid the reduction or elimination. It is an acknowledgment that the government agency doesn't exist for any public purpose other than to cut paychecks. By that rationale we should simply tell the workers to stay at home and at least eliminate the props that support the charade (buildings, electric bills, maintenance expenses, and so on).
Eugenicists are out of date. The reason successful people have successful kids is due to enriched environments and increased opportunity.

The field of psychology can't even agree on a definition of intelligence anymore, and certainly IQ is not genetically determined. The environment is the biggest influence on IQ.

Harvard kids fucking Harvard kids doesn't create genetic supermen. It just creates an inbred aristocracy like has always been the case. Hemophilia is the true achievement of eugenics.

The wise know, and always have known, that it is education and drive that makes a person. Genes play little role in success.
I helped make this site using Trollo's api, simple text to voice calling. My first attempt at making any sort of site using api's etc. Currently hosted on a friends website. Just after any advice really :)
Since the gas taxes are often diverted to non-road purposes....

I'll make you a deal. Let the cities pay for the mass transit systems (capital and running costs) and let the urbs pay for their highways. Both pay for their streets.
t * ((t>>sin(7)|t>>cos(10))&tan(3221)&t>>44)

Alarm clock?
To answer your first point: Our contest will cover different areas of problems, and certain companies will only be available for application if specific questions types are answered.

One of the main appeals for CodeSprint is that you don't have to work on the same puzzle twice. A lot of companies now have a FizzBuzz-style filter, and we're trying to make it so you have to FizzBuzz only once.
Leisure: Don Knuth's 1984 article on the complexity of songs [pdf]
Why does the Unity menu bar's File menu truncate the application name to "Firefox V"? Mac OS X shifts the menu bar to the right for applications with long names.

The author's screenshot hides the fact that the menu bar is hidden when the mouse is not over the top bar. When your mouse is elsewhere, the entire window's name (In my case "Hacker news | Add Comment - Mozilla Firefox") takes up the top bar.
JoachimSchipper is right that it doesn't have to involve cookies, and so are you that IP addresses aren't enough.

Facebook could be using the same methods as Panopticlick (http://panopticlick.eff.org/), which are incredibly effective assuming the two users log in from the same browser.
> The single most environmentally friendly place to live in the US is downtown New York City.

Not even close.

Also, the vast majority of city dwellers go out of their way/pay extra to not live as environmentally efficiently as possible, so it's absurd to claim that environmental efficiency is the most important criteria.

Suburbs provide some things far more efficiently than cities do. And, cities provide other things more efficiently. The fact that you value one set of things more than the other does not imply that your choice is correct.
MySQL Query Analyzer and PHP
If you're using ALSA, ./a.out | aplay
Ask HN: Can a No Budget Indie Movie Make $1m Online?
We've made a no budget indie movie with:

No studio
No distributor
No movie stars

Our goal is:

to gross $1m and fund the next movie

It's sounds quite impossible. But we've come up with a strategy:

Everyone who registers to download the movie will get to display a picture, logo or text of their choosing on a billboard in New York's Times Square.

Prices start from only $10 upwards. So for as little as $10 you can get any message / image / logo (as long as it's not obscene and you own the rights) up on a Times Square billboard.

What do folks think about this and could this be used as a cheap form of marketing for startups?
It's a matter of time. If we're all going to live 400 years or more, we could all be super persons. Nobody will rush to achieve multiple things in no time. One thing after another. Slowly and deep.

The people that read HN at least have the crucial ingredient: intellectual curiosity. Others, like me, lack the frenzy.
"Done in a way that doesn't interfere." :) Good point, though. I was thinking more along the lines of wording of dialogue and descriptions.
> That giant sucking sound you hear are the burbs bleeding the urban tax base dry.

No, that's folks moving away because US cities are a disaster.

Suburb dwellers don't have an obligation to fix or pay for cities.

I get that you like cities. Good for you, but they're your problem. If you can't make them work....
I guess all those experts citing Fitts' Law have to find a new toy when touchscreens get the predominant means to interact with the UI.
Are arbitrary rss feeds recognized?

[edit:] Seems like rss, not atom feeds, are recognized.
I find the author's implication that users select menu text (as opposed to any part of the entire row) interesting. I always move my mouse until the desired item received highlight rather than aiming for text, so the Ubuntu power menu was never weird to me. I wonder how prevalent either behaviour is...
I always try to play devil's advocate for PayPal. I think they process a shitload of transactions every day and end up getting a lot of flak for simply trying to cover their ass a little.

Imagine this scenario. You are a payment processor. A new client appears out of nowhere, and is processing transactions for $20 from credit cards all over the world all throughout the night, hours after creating his account. A percentage of these transactions fail and are placed multiple times. In a matter of days, the client has accumulated $600,000 and you have no idea what he's doing other than trusting the information he willfully provided in his merchant info.

What do you do? Do cash out 600k the moment this client requests it without performing any due diligence? Or do you freeze the funds, make him call in and verify, and get him his money within a week or two?

The business PayPal is in is inherently risky. Whenever I see some surprised post about how PayPal freezed your massive pile of rapidly accumulated funds instead of just handing it to you and assuming that they won't be dealing with thousands and thousands of scammed customers, I can't help but roll my eyes.

Have a little perspective, people.

This is obviously more about notch's situation and less about yours. Yours is just a simple misunderstanding and a less than adequate support system. Once again, thousands and thousands of transactions a day. Some aren't going to go perfectly.

If you are about to cite Stripe, well:

> Stripe is ten people.

Stripe is nice, but Stripe is ten people. They have nowhere close to the scale that PayPal has to deal with. If they reach PayPal's size and still remain developer friendly and don't have issues like this, I would be truly amazed.
I don't think I understand. You post content elsewhere, and then this mirrors it?
Estimate says Amazon will be making a $50 profit: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4228505/Kindle-Fire-...

Estimate from iSuppli (yes, the infamous iSuppli) claiming loss:
http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/Amazon-Sells-Kin...

Make of that what you will.
You're wrong about that.

>... these impressions come from someone who’s used mostly Windows at work and Mac at home. Sure, there’s a sprinkling of Solaris, IRIX, and Linux mixed in there, but I’ve never used Ubuntu, haven’t used any distribution of Linux in quite some time ...

The author seems to be using it to prototype a research project as quickly as possible.
Very little meat in this post. Also-- the freedom to sexually mutilate young women is a horrible example, because anyone doing that would be violating her right to life & liberty.

libertarians want government to stop force & fraud, and that's it.
Using batman.js for offline apps
Sure, but they appear to be moving to single-sign-in for all their services and that single thing is a real-name based identity service.

Google has reportedly closed other accounts that predated G+ for G+ problems. I don't know if they'll push that to gmail too but they haven't said they won't.

I'm not calling them bastards based on no evidence or anything but I'm not using gmail for anything important because I can't really count on it.
The vast majority of the so-called subsidy is welfare, which has been pushed by urban politicians.

If you don't like the costs of the programs that you push, look in the mirror.

I've no objection to making welfare a county-level thing, so cities can pay what they want (and are willing to fund) and suburbs can pay what they want (and are willing to fund).

Deal?
I think it follows from Fitts' Law or rather is its reverse:

If the cursor is outside an area, the bigger and closer this area is the easier it is to purposefully hit.
⇔
If the cursor is inside an area, the bigger this area is and the farther away its borders are, the harder it is to accidentally leave.
Start it up from the terminal -nw and it complains about a non-existent libexec directory under the source directory.

EDIT: They may well have fixed this recently. I'll rebuild and see.
If you've made changes to your profile, you may force a refresh by pointing your browser to hackerhub.org/r/yourid.
Okay, I oversimplified - but you are doing so as well. Societies as a whole can become wealthier over time. The difference between the 90th percentile and the 10th might be higher today than it was 200 years ago, but the 10th percentile today is also probably better off than the 90th 200 years ago in absolute terms.

Edit: s/dollars/utilons/g
I have an ipod touch and I ordered a kindle fire because:

1. I want the larger screen. The ipod's is too small for comfortable reading.

2. I want to be able to transfer books to the device without having to go through itunes. Isn't it mysterious that I can copy pictures from the ipod using a usb cable, but cannot copy anything to it?

3. I'm hoping Fire's browser will be able to see shared files on my LAN. Safari on the ipod mysteriously won't, although Safari on the Mac will. This limitation severely limits the usefulness of the ipod, as it cannot see my local shared books, pictures, or music.

I have an older Kindle, which I like very much, but it won't see shared files either. But at least they labeled it's browser as "experimental", so I had no expectations. And I can transfer books to it via usb from my desktop without needing to install anything on the desktop.

Don't get me wrong, I like the ipod a lot. But I want a fire, too [stamps feet].
All of these things fall into the same boat, security-wise -- so by my interpretation, the PCI rules make sense here.

If the attacker can insert their own code that says "hi there, we may have to close the site unless we can get some donations ASAP - please help!" followed by a form for CC data, that's that. It doesn't matter if they normally accept payments by redirecting to PayPal, or if they use an iFrame, or the Stripe JavaScript approach. It's all the same at that point, security-wise.

So let this be Bucket A, for websites where CC info doesn't touch their servers -- this is their risk profile. If a site in Bucket A is compromised and it takes a month before the complaints add up and the host shuts them down, that's a month's worth of stolen credit cards (this is not "worst case", but let's assume the thieves aren't terribly patient and start selling card info soon after stealing it).

Bucket B is for sites where the CC info DOES touch their servers. For them, CC data may be recorded on the server (intentionally into a data store, or even accidentally into log files of some kind). This is a different security risk. A site in this category could be compromised, and in half an hour 10 years worth of their credit card info could be stolen.

To steal 10 years worth of CC data from a site in Bucket A is naturally much more difficult.

If you've got to draw a line somewhere, that's a reasonable one.
For python vs ruby:

Why Python over ruby: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682101

Django vs Ruby on Rails: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195423

Python vs ruby in depth: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=741257

I use Python, Some resources for learning Python in no particular order:

The Official Python Tutorial - docs.python.org/tutorial/
"Dive Into Python", by Mark Pilgrim - http://diveintopython.org/toc/index.html

"A Byte of Python" - swaroopch.com/notes/Python
Google's Intro to Python Class (online) - http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/

"The New Boston" Programming Python Tutorials - http://youtube.com/user/thenewboston#g/c/EA1FEF17E1E5C0DA

"Building Skills in Python", by Steven F. Lott - http://homepage.mac.com/s_lott/books/python/html/index.html

"Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist" - http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html

"Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python" - http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/han...

OpenCourseWare: MIT 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

"Learn Python the Hard Way" by Zed Shaw - http://learnpythonthehardway.com

Practice Questions at PySchools - http://pyschools.com

Begin Python - http://beginpython.com

More Tutorials - http://awaretek.com/tutorials.html

source: http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-learn-to-program-in-Python
I have personally been using http://www.sandboxie.com/ to use facebook only.
Most practical? Python.
I agree more or less with everything you're saying. I didn't mean to lump government in with business except in that the US government has gained a monolithic corporation's obsession with "quarterly profits" (the deficit) over investment in the future, and it's driving us into the ground just as surely.

Like you, I see the government as a special case, which needs to follow different rules. Ideally, everyone would understand that our fortunes are all tied together and just be nice to each other. Unfortunately, short-sighted individuals will always (or have in the past, anyway) see that as an opportunity to sell out tomorrow for a dollar today, so someone needs to be forcing people to cooperate or the whole thing comes tumbling down.

The only question, which is still open as of this writing, is how you keep an organization which is by definition empowered to break its own rules on a short enough leash that it can't hang itself.
(Yes, sorry, I'm loving this.) As Katie Couric said, "not to belabor the point", I feel you are still not seeing when crucial point of this however tangential thread. You say

So congratulations on nailing me for reversing the order of the austerity program and the default -- great job, I feel really dumb for failing to correctly order a sequence of events related to a tangential point.

Well, it's not a minor point to this thread, though this thread sure is, I agree, completely inconsequential in absolute terms: reversing the order means that the culprit could be the austerity measures, not the fuck-the-system default, which happened right before the first derivative changed signs!

Let me repeat that you have referred almost interchangeably to default, devaluation and an austerity program, which is really confusing. The first two are easily marked on a timeline: December 2001 and January 2002. By now I don't know what austerity measures you refer to, but again all this would take you very far from your statements linking default and/or devaluation and poverty. So, however tangential this thread is, it is based on the core of your original statements. Currency crisis and/or default did not, in any conceivable way, lead to the inception of cardboard collectors, nor to the 50% poverty rate. These issues had been building up steadily for a decade by the time the default happened, and this is not an interpretation or factoid.

As an aside (not countering any point!) be aware that for countries like Argentina big-government initiatives and fuck-the-system approaches go almost hand in hand, because comply-with-the-system plans means that you have to put aside a lot of your GDP to pay outrageous debt interests (forget about capital), leaving you little money to spread. I mean, look at the US debt ceiling fight the world witnessed last August. With a fraction of that spectacle any Third World country would have been left paying >30% annual rates, while the US is not (yet?) susceptible to speculation and still pays its cozy 3%. Fair or not, don't expect countries to behave the same "serious" measures under such a varied array of conditions. [No references for all this data. Feel free to grill me with factoids.]

As a final note, a few comments on:

Have you ever read about the Argentine crisis, or is your knowledge limited to Wolfram Alpha's graphs and Googleable factoids?

Have you? Should it ever matter in a debate? I'm presenting facts based on Wolfram Alpha, and you on Wikipedia. Why should we consider them factoids and not facts? Because we don't dig all the way for primary sources? We are both supporting our points with factoids, then. So? Should we support them with "reason alone"? Incidentally and ironically, you seem to have never read about Argentinean economics in depth: nobody with the lightest acquaintance of contemporary Argentinean economics could have honestly been unaware that poverty was, for almost a decade, sharply on the rise up to the default, and make the basic mistake of saying "look! default led to poverty". But boy, do you have a hard time accusing others!
More like cargo-cult super. Geniuses are often musical and multi-lingual so if junior can play sax and speak French...

Except that the components turn out, in most cases, to be cheap facades of the real thing and the spark of real genius is nowhere to be found.
Validate Your Idea Using a Letter of Intent (LOI)
how is it the movie that's making the money?
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -nw works fine for me. (Running OS X 10.7.1 with Emacs 23.3.1 I compiled when it came out on OS X 10.6.something.)