skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Release Candidate for System Center 2012 Key Building Block in Private Cloud
Release Candidate for System Center 2012 Key Building Block in Your Private Cloud Strategy
"Klout for Energy" Lead Developer Wanted
Wa.tt is looking to bring on a lead engineer to build the "Klout for Energy".

Wa.tt is a consumer application that boils all of an individual's energy data down into a single number between 1 and 100 making it simple for the masses to adopt resource efficiency, gain social status and save tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars on energy in their lifetime.

We have a private alpha up and running, in the middle of raising a round of capital and we have a lot of interest from investors.

Wa.tt just graduated from the first class of the Greenstart Cleantech Accelerator and has an amazing network of investors and mentors in the Cleanweb space.

You will be leading the charge in building the consumer energy platform and assembling a rockstar hacker team. You should have a passion for creating products that truly change the world.

Please contact me directly with any questions: james@wa.tt
As for your second objection, I don't see the issue. If they don't want to be taxed, they can forego buying something.

That's parent's point: if I one buys less because of the tax, that's means someone or some company has lost a sale, which means they'll need to cut back on spending, etc.
In a consumption based economy, you want money to be constantly re-injected into the economy to prevent stagnation.
The tone of this entire thread is very paranoid and it's not helped by slightly rash comments like this.

The EFF says that you can't be required to unlock encrypted files without a court order. https://www.eff.org/document/defending-privacy-us-border-gui...

Whether or not that's a good idea is up to you and certainly (as a non-US citizen) I'd be very reluctant to start making a fuss - if I had anything sufficiently sensitive that a long flight home seemed the less-bad option, I would have just sent it in parallel.

FWIW I'm a Canadian citizen and when returning to that country I refuse, politely, to answer any questions whatsoever (which have become really quite intrusive) on the grounds that there is no legal requirement to answer. It often leads to a customs screen (which is a ten minute delay/irritation) but there, and I assume in the US, there is no right to deny entry to someone holding valid travel documents.
The majority of analysis on the economics of piracy are focused on record company profits in total. Does anyone know of any research on how the economics look for various groups of artists?

----

As an example:

Artist A is a top rated multiplatinum artist

Artist B is a touring, not so profitable but making a living artist

---

Do the economics of the industry for each artist change as piracy becomes more and less prevalent?

My gut is that artist B benefits as piracy becomes more prevalent because:

1)	Artist B makes their money from touring so distribution is unimportant to them for profitability, rather distribution is a form of marketing.

2)	Artist A loses because their distribution is more profitable (still not as profitable as touring for the artist) but their distribution funds their marketing.

Are those 2 points true? I’m going on what I think, but may be off.

More importantly I’d like to hear if anyone knows of any analysis performed on the different classes and how they are impacted by piracy? I would be willing to bet that if there are differences there are opportunities for niche business profits and if one wanted to make a good argument against anti-piracy legislation understanding those differences will be important for fighting those regulations.
Most economists feel it's correct to tax consumption, not income. Taxing income has the effect of compound-taxing investment, which is A Bad Thing. This is why the capital gains tax rate is 15%, since capital gains usually come from money put down that was already taxed.

So we get unfair situations, where a business founder is taxed once on his initial investment, again on his company's income tax, and finally on capital gains; whereas someone like Romney is taxed much less.

One obvious way to fix this is to protect investment accounts. You know how a traditional IRA is tax deductible when you invest, and taxed when you withdraw? Open up more tax-advantaged investment accounts like that[1]. Money isn't taxed until it's withdrawn, presumably to be spent. With such a system in place it will also become reasonable to tax the rich at a very high rate, without inefficiencies like over-taxing transient income or "destroying jobs".

The argument the author presents is strange to me. He says, essentially, that for economic reasons it's fine to tax capital gains at a lower rate. But then in the next paragraph he calls it "unfair". So... he proposes an unsustainably low flat tax rate, which he just implied would be bad, but feel fair... doesn't seem like sound economic thinking to me.

[1] Greg Mankiw mentions this idea in a NYT op-ed: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/four-keys-to-a-b... . I've seen a few other economists also toss around this idea also.
Refusing or claiming incapacity to decrypt is not the answer. Steganography is.

Show them a partition with normal files encrypted with the display key, while keeping your secret-key-activated files on the hidden partition.

Of course, this won't stop a determined search, but it will likely get you by the security guards.
Especially delicious bagels.
Here's an example of the phenomenon described above.

From http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Records-detail-FBI-s...

"A 26-page FBI affidavit indicates that prior to the 2008 raid, the investigation unearthed information that Sweeney may have received payoffs from Powers & Co., which was founded by Sweeney's longtime friend and mentor, William D. Powers, who was state GOP chairman from 1991 to 2001. The FBI's theory was that Sweeney may have received the undisclosed gifts through the salary, commissions and benefits paid to Sweeney's then-wife, Gaia, who was given a job at Powers' lobbying firm during the height of Sweeney's tenure in Congress.

Gaia "Gayle" Sweeney did little if any work for her income, the FBI said, yet the lobbying firm also paid her commissions from a contract the firm had with Siena College. The college received federal grants facilitated by Sweeney, who became a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee in 2001.

The FBI said Powers told agents that Gayle Sweeney was a full-time employee who did clerical work. But Gayle Sweeney told the FBI she worked part time, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays, and that she spent most of her time conducting campaign fundraising efforts for her husband."
You should never lie to a border agent about whether you or your friend can decrypt a device. You can decline to answer any question, and you do NOT have to provide passwords or keys. Only a judge can compell you to decrypt your drive. That said, border agents can make your life miserable so it's advisable to avoid confrontation.

This advice is based on the EFF document. IANAL.

https://www.eff.org/document/defending-privacy-us-border-gui...
thank you for your comment, I will try to look for a more convenient font.
I answered few cloud computing questions asked by a friend. What do you think?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sjMNPl-1PaAiNmFi5N9lcbTlCoA6PQ2WzTii-jmP4I0/edit?hl=en_US
"You have 5th amendment rights against self incrimination."

My concern is while that is often stated, those people aren't sitting in the detention centre with you for hours while your digital devices and the material on them is being searched and you are being 'threatened' with further detention, likely bogus charges and pressured to admit guilt for using your laptop as a normal user does.
Films want users, not legitimacy.

I'll watch anything a recommendation engine tells me looks like another film I know.
Voting or not only addresses the person submitting a ton of content, it does nothing for all the stories prematurely bumped down to page 2 or 3 of the new section where they are effectively dead.
Sentences and Paradigms
but... how on earth has it come to this??

,ay be it that the old oligarchy wants to preserve their power in society and wants that decisions are traditionally made in Bilderberg meetings ,

and its not good for them if something unplanned happens in the world - such as Arab springs

Jay Rockefeller: Internet should have never existed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct9xzXUQLuY
On the set lights/LED issue - designing a new light that uses LEDs would probably INCREASE the cost, not decrease it, since LED lights are currently more expensive to produce than the alternatives.

That said, if instead you had a company that provided the rental of these lights at a lower cost that normally paid to purchase them outright, perhaps you could offer lower cost lighting with modern, less-breakable technology.

Of course, LED lights are a different type of light from incandescent, etc. anyway, so it's possible that they'd be totally unusable anyway.

Still, a really interesting thought.
Russian Scientist Claims Signs of Life Spotted on Venus
This is silly. What the hell is a "regular font"? If they mean fonts typically installed by default, why did they use Rockwell?

Audi's new logo is essentially Verdana; does it get more regular than that?
Very cool demo.

Add this to full screen mode and you've got the makings of a crazy OSX fake-out scam.
Hasn't this been in effect since 2008? I have probably entered the US 100 times since then and have never had anyone show any interest in searching any of my devices, nor have I noticed them looking at anybody else's devices. Or did I miss something that is going to make them start doing this actively now? It is still scary as hell that this is possible at all, of course.
Signs You Aren’t Really Building a Minimum Viable Product
You have less than 1kb requests and less than 1kb responses on average.

Let's see how many requests a 1gb net card can do? Well it's bit's not bites, but it's also a full duplex so you have 1gbit up and download. 1gigabyte / (8 kiliobit) = 1,000,000 / 8 = 125,000 requests per second. Granted full TCP/IP has a fair amount of overhead, but if you use UDP you can get vary close to this.

Yet, they don't need to get anywhere near that performance, for every 100 million clients updating every four hours using a random second to connect is around 10k connections a second.
I could be fooled by the re-created blackberry and Discovery fonts. They're the two that appear to match the closest.
Is there an opportunity for a data driven approach to politics?

I would be interested in a service that segmented people into large groups based on their political ideas. A cross between a semi-anonymous Facebook, groups and politics, none of the social networky stuff, just ideas, viewpoints, groups and votes.

For example, you might belong to a very large simple 'liberal' group, with vague and general ideas. Within this group, you'd have factions with more specific ideas and options. It may drill down to situations like: "You are a member of group liberal-software-developers (xxx,xxx members), group members strongly support ..., generally support ..., generally oppose ..., no strong opinion about about ...". Eventually you might find a group you nearly always agree with.

With enough support across the population, it would make it easy for everyone, including politicians to see how everyone felt on various topics.

To make this work, you'd need to put topics to people (in a fair way, with proper presentation of each viewpoint) and do some polling. It would then be interesting to see the correlation between groups you are in, and your viewpoint.

You could then pivot the data based on categories and any number of dimensions to see what people are thinking.

Some other usecase ideas:
"I'm a member of liberal-software-developers, I generally agree with this group's viewpoint. I'll trust viewpoints from group members who are better informed on topic Z, rather than some TV commercial."

"My group doesn't have a strong opinion on some healthcare thing, I'll trust liberal-doctors instead..."

As a step for the original question, perhaps conduct a fair nationwide poll on each contested topic? You could ask 1000 people what they thought of each topic in a credible fashion. The result then gives media organisations some content to work with and read out. If public support is overwhelming for each topic, then it may become difficult to ignore the polling data.
A skilled magician can sneak a raw egg through a full strip-search. What do you imagine a determined attacker could do with a MicroSD card?
(a) Virtually no-one ever admits their country's system is flawed. The Brits don't realise that the House of Lords is a really crappy substitute for a senate. The Americans don't realise that proportional representation, compulsory voting, and instant runoff voting is a much better system. They say stuff like "you'll just get a candidate that nobody hates, not someone who a few extremists really love, and if voting is compulsory you'll have normal people voting", and not realise that's a good thing.

I've no idea what the Australians get wrong ... though it probably involves having too many levels of government.
You can't ctrl-f a paper book.

But how often do you need to? Large topics are in the index, and if you remember a detail but can't flip to it within a few seconds, then you don't know the structure of the book well, and it will do you good to spend a minute or two looking around.

I agree that there are many works where you want to instantly find a particular five sentences and read nothing else, but they should never become e-books. They should become some other form, such as a web site, a wiki, a set of man pages, etc.
My concern with this US border search is the idea of confidentiality. One, we've all seen movies. Lots of them. And though we may laugh at how easily the antagonist acquired the needed information from the protagonist, it can't be said that it can not happen in real life. And this US border search is making that highly possible. Also, for doctors and lawyers, this confidentiality thing I'd like to believe, is sacred. So when another person sees that on their laptops or gadgets, would it be the same as doing a breach of contract or doing something against their oath?
Supposedly, if your hard drive is encrypted, customs agents can hold your computer indefinitely if you refuse to provide the password. The irony is that gigabytes of encrypted data cross national borders every second -- over the internet. So dump your important data in an encrypted file and put it on a file sharing web site, or a VPS, or whatever, and download it again when you get across the border. Nobody with "interesting" data (and half a brain) will be physically bringing it across a border. The searches are useless.
Another thing we lose with digital books is serendipity. Erin McKean talked about this amongst other things in her brilliant TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4VzuWmN8zY.
USA would profit from it when it would be made a law, USA is the primary driver of it. Other countries might accept it once it's ready but it's USA who are making it.
King of the Cosmos (A Profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson)
Why don't you submit a business proposal to them?
And this is the only response in the thread worth discussing.
If they don't have the means to go to the movies (which I believe, yes) then there's no loss.
good thing they are making €€€
The poor antialiasing in some of the new versions makes them look worse than they really are.
Impressive, especially the menu bar after login.

Is there any JS code involved in dragging windows? From the code, I could see JQuery UI is being used. So, its like OSX Lion in CSS3+JavaScript.

Nevertheless, a commendable effort.
Oh, of course. The discussion is about the output of this program, though. If you format your book with it, you lose all the formatting if you want to publish on other channels, as the article said.
America is/is becoming a corporate state

You're being way too reductionist, buying the anti-capitalist propaganda. To be sure, there's plenty of bad things to be said about corporations. But it's tremendously naive to believe that it's corporations that are calling all the shots.

Remember, the corporations looking for these perks are every bit as dependent on the power of government as the government is on corporate donations. So directing ire at corporations for trying to get rents out of the government, without simultaneously excoriating government officials for selling out, is misguided.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the only viable strategy to combat this is to combat the government abuses.

The corporations are doing what's natural: find places where they can get advantages over competitors, and take them to maximize shareholder value. But the government officials are more culpable. They are making promises that they (seem to) have no intention of keeping, and in doing so are blatantly violating their oaths of office. While the negative end results is the result of each, I believe that the members of the government are more immoral, and more deserving of our anger.

And the answer is not greater legislation to control corporations. That's just giving the government more power that they can sell to the highest bidder. The answer is to strip away the government's power. This may seem counterintuitive, because it appears to leave us unprotected against corporate abuse. But when the vehicle to that abuse is through government power, then curtaining that power leaves the corporations themselves unarmed against us.

This is really quite analogous to the arguments for/against gun control. Sure, demanding licensing of guns, etc., keeps the weapons out of the hands of much of the public. But the bad guys still get the guns, and the poor law-abiding citizens are then left defenseless. It's better, in my mind, to ensure that we can all compete on a level playing field, rather than handicap the citizenry so that the bad guys (or the corporations) get the power.
Most of those look the same.
I can't see any obvious disadvantages to having a set limit of, for example, 10 article submissions a day.
As someone who was a former book enthusiast who now owns an iPad, I also miss the appreciation of the binding of hard books, how the pages felt and the musty smell.

I think the iPad is great but the part of the atmosphere of a good book is gone even though digital is desperate in the attempt to replicate it.
> America is/is becoming a corporate state, and corporatism was the very essence of Mussolini's fascism.

Not the same thing. 'Corporatism' in the Italian Fascism sense does not mean what you think it means. It means all society is organized 'corporations' controlled by the state.
Stop buying BigContent. If they don't find Finding Nemo on your disk, there is nothing they can do.
>They don't consume any US government services either

These sorts of arguments always bother me because they over simplify the complexities of how one benefits from a public good or service. One example would be that Google doesn't have to worry about their engineers getting into a car crash on the way to work because the governments (federal and state) collectively spend billions of dollars ensuring that our roadways are safe for vehicles.

Another example would be that google doesn't have to spend money hiring private militaries or police forces to enforce their contracts because we have a judicial system that is paid for by the tax payers. This particular example is where your "consumption" argument falls down rather directly. Although it's true that they hire their own counsel, they are not the ones paying the salaries of all the various court officials. They "consume" these resources but in many peoples minds, myself included, do not pay their fair share.

>Similarly, my employees (all located here in India) don't pay any US income taxes. Is there some reason they should?

Of course not. The company that you set up and domiciled in America pays income taxes on the profit that you generate. Profit is usually defined as revenue minus expenses. Taxes paid in other countries are considered expenses and as such are accounted for.

>The loss carryforward is a necessary hack to the system to prevent taxation from penalizing businesses with volatile income streams.

Although we can both agree that GE's tax situation is very complex the problems that I and others have is that they directly lobby the government to get these tax incentives. The example I am thinking of is their lobbying arm advocating for an increased depreciation schedule on some of their capital equipment. This isn't fair.

The summary of my problem with your argument is that you benefit from all the things that America provides (government services, easy access to higher education, educated working class, pro-business climate, etc) but don't think that you should have to pay for any of this because "you didn't consume it." Just by living in America and being able to take advantage of these things you have consumed these things and you should have to pay your fair share. Consumption doesn't necessarily mean somebody handing you a check or waiting in a welfare line.
It's close enough to true, though, in the context of manufacturing. Extended shifts at overtime rates are not cost effective. And there are no good alternatives. I ran a manufacturing company (granted in California, a very employee friendly state) where everyone wanted to run 4 days of 10 hour shifts, called the 'alternative work week', instead of the usual 5 - 8 hour days. There is a regulatory means for doing this without it resulting in overtime pay. The problem is, the regulations are onerous and full of potential pitfalls and the consequence of screwing it up is that an employee sues 2 years later and all those 2 hours logged over the usual 8 hour max are retroactively deemed overtime and must be paid to the employees. So even though everyone wanted to put in an extra 2 hours each day to get the fifth day off, we couldn't do it because of the risk. In other words, it's not always just about what people are willing to do.
It is unfortunate that they cheaped out on the screen. This 13" laptop has the same resolution as the 11" Air. I suppose they are counting on people being content with having the same screen _size_ as the 13" Air when comparing specs.
Which is hilarious, because so many Hollywood directors are pedophiles.
Every now and then you have to step back and look at your world.

When I was young, people having to take precautions like this were clicheed signs in a movie of someone oppressed by a totalitarian regime. Invariably the "good guys" were working to free people from it.

Can we reverse this trend?
CBS Broadcasting Hacked by Anonymous Hackers for #OpMegaUpload
Yes. Actually not only "could be", but it is H.264.
Say, "I'm sorry, I don't feel comfortable answering that question."

And when they ask why say, "Because I believe that it is my right not to."

But nothing more. Just be short, to the point, and courteous. You're not guilty of anything for saying that, and they will understand that you understand your rights.

They may make your life a tiny bit harder because of it, but if your courteous and patient you can maintain your dignity and your privacy.
As a non-citizen, I would not risk being labelled uncooperative by the border agents. Just because they cannot compell you to surrender your passphrase doesn't mean they couldn't hold it against you in the future (longer visa processing times, extra background checks).

As suggested in the pdf, a wiser approach is cross the border with an immaculate system and download your data afterwards.
> fascism

How this this fascism in particular and not, say, Communism?
Can some arc hacker explain the algorithm for the rest of us here. As far as I know the rank of post declines exponentially over time and improves with upvotes. Does the decay also depend upon the rate of submission and the points earned by previous submissions?