skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll go with the too naive.

What they want is maximum power/profit.

And it's not politicians --those are mostly puppets.

America is/is becoming a corporate state, and corporatism was the very essence of Mussolini's fascism.

The very notion of lobbyist groups is fascistic (Mussolini himself partitioned the power system in Italy to consist of various group interests in a great extend).

Power and law become then an exchange between groups (lobbying), experts (often paid lackeys of said groups), and politicians, and democracy goes out of the window.

The democratic alternative would have been several opposed political parties, so that the play for power is open to the general masses --the population that supports them-- directly, and is carried out as a public struggle for the vote.

But the differences between Republicans and Democrats in most matters are mostly marginal or a joke, and mainly in issues that don't matter to the actual power play
--- like playing pro or against "gay marriage" to appeal to conservative or progressive voters, the same voters that both parties pass laws to make them poorer and more controlled in every possible way.
Put copyright aside for a sec and lets try to actually frame it in the case of child porn or drug trafficking. How can any legislator conclude that disrupting the public like this is acceptable after having a reasonable discussion about how easy it would be for criminals to circumvent?

The hugely ironic part of all of this is that laws like this don't make moving data harder for criminals. It just forces them to use better data-securing practices in their day to day lives which make it harder for local law enforcement to get their job done.

The only impact I can see this legislation having is making law abiding citizens upset with their democracy.
اهداف مباراة السودان وساحل العاج اليوم 22/1/2012 مع اجمل واهم لقطات المباراة
اهداف مباراة السودان وساحل العاج اليوم كأس الامم الافريقيه
اهداف السودان وكوت ديفوار اليوم
شاهد اهداف مباراة المنتخب السوداني وساحل العاج في كأس الامم الافريقيه 2012
اهداف المباراة اون لاين مع اجمل لقطات المباراة شاهد وحمل اهداف المباراة
تحميل اهداف مباراة السودان وساحل العاج اليوم كأس الامم الافريقيه
http://mobilatco.com/vb/showthread.php?t=5029
I hate reading paper books.
Yes, you can see them in bright light. You also can't read them in no light. I read in the dark way more than I read outside in direct sunlight. I find that I'm constantly readjusting a book to get the light to hit it correctly. With an iPad I get constant light across the whole page all the time.

You can't ctrl-f a paper book.

Page numbers? Page numbers vary per printing of the book depending on its size. It is no better for paper than it is for ebook. In fact, an ebook's word count will be the same across all editions of the book (assuming there aren't any changes).

The only thing I like about paper books is that you can read them on a plane before 10,000 feet and sometimes the covers look cool.
The comic, however snarky and cute, manages only to obscure the point further. The (E) [in the comic] is different than other ones, because there's no exchange of goods nor services for the money between the company and its owner, the Shareholder.

Let me put it my way:

When a plumber puts his knowledge and tools to work, his revenue is taxed once, at personal level.

When a shareholder puts his knowledge and money to work (along with other shareholders, in form of a company), his revenue is taxed at both company level and again at private level.

Can you spot the double taxation now?
> The second person claims back everything, equal in value to his contribution, resulting in no net gain to society.

While I don't disagree with your larger argument, producer captures only a fraction of the value they created. So earning $10M likely resulted in a huge net gain to society, regardless of their spending habits.
Flash tutorials.
MPAA should be allowed to spend as much money as they want to convince the American people. But they like giving money to politicians precisely because they get leverage to pull the money back when the politician does something they don't like.

This system is extremely broken.

I signed the petition because giving money to politicians with strings attached, and then threatening to pull the funding if they don't vote your way is clearly bribery.
...Twitter (and google, facebook, etc.) use a bunch of complex tax structures in different countries to legally avoid paying corporate income tax.

Yes, many companies use complex tax structures to avoid paying US corporate income taxes on non-US profits. So what? They don't consume any US government services either, and Fred Wilson paid appropriate taxes to whatever nation Twitter Europe lives in.

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

GE paid a negative percentage of taxes because they lost money in prior years and used a loss carryforward.

The loss carryforward is a necessary hack to the system to prevent taxation from penalizing businesses with volatile income streams. Consider two investments - one makes $10 with P=1. Another makes +$60 with P=0.5, $-40 with $P=0.5. Without the loss carryforward, the volatile company would pay an average tax rate of 45% (15% of $60 when they make money, 0% of -$40 when they lose money).
Trend line for new JavaScript developers:
http://www.google.com/trends/?q=javascript+tutorials

Trend line for new Java developers:
http://www.google.com/trends/?q=java+tutorials

Trend line for new C developers:
http://www.google.com/trends/?q=c+tutorials

In fact that seems to be the trend for all tutorials:
http://www.google.com/trends/?q=tutorials

What's going on? Are people resorting less and less on tutorials? Are the "tutorial" sites that show up on Google so spammy that people do not bother to search for "tutorials" anymore?
I have no issues with the native WP comments. Plus, there are plugins that change their behavior.
This is exactly what we do. And the point is to give wages to those who value it more, and equity to those who value that more.

It's creative and win/win generally for the team. I've yet to have anyone be upset at this. I encourage those considering it to take a closer look.
In Chrome after the "login" I get a bunch of open windows that I can't close and no dock. Is that how it's supposed to be?
New iPad Accessories for Music Production
The End of a Micro Era: When to Quit That Meme
Realistically, the two are identical. Each is a bracketed, progressive income taxation system.

The only thing that distinguishes them is the number of tax brackets. What's often presented as a "flat tax" actually has two brackets. The first, which starts at $0, has a 0% tax. The second, which starts at $X, has a Y% tax.
If Congress wants jobs, it can’t want SOPA
General sales taxes are state taxes, not federal taxes. Changing the incentive structure to any extent will change behavior.
The question is, how do you calculate income? What deductions are you allowed?

A regular income-earning individual cannot take more than a fixed amount of deductions (in the sense his tax rate is fixed). However, a small business owner or self-employed invididual can deduct business expenses from his income. And there in lies the problem. How do you classify expenses? This creates an incentive to find creative ways of deducting your taxable income, so much that there is an entire industry formed around it.
Womens Business Now - Inspire. Support. Connect. Grow.
Definitely it will be difficult to implement at the moment. At the rate the government is passing legislation on tracking people and making companies provide their data to government whenever requested, though, I can definitely see one day (maybe 50 years) where all this will be possible.

e.g. When cash is replaced by only bank accounts, then every transaction becomes traceable.

As I said before though, you can as an alternative lower sales tax on basic goods and raise them on luxury ones.
If they suspect there's a hidden volume, that won't help you either.
Tax the coke at the point of sale?

Your receipt might look like:

1 coke $1
Consumption tax $0.15
-------------------------
total $1.15

I don't think it would be hard to program cash registers to do this automatically. Who knows, maybe this problem is already solved?
No surprises: it works in Safari, the irony being that its Safari on a hackintosh zooming along just fine on a scuzzy little netbook -- which is even cooler. Or not, depending on how you view these things.
Unfortunately, that depends on the definition of 'Work' in this context which is far from clear.
Zynga, whenever you are ready to charge me for an ad-free Words With Friends for Android, I am ready to buy.
Yes but IMHO the point about the original story is that, all this does not matter, mostly. Like to go to the Cirque du Soleil? Fine, plan a great weekend with your friends or partner. At work you need to find other things, and in my case those things are:

1) Work at things that you actually like, and not just technically. You should think the final product you are building if of some use, is well designed, you would use it, otherwise I would get frustrated (a lot).

2) Be able to make a difference, instead of working to a sub project of a sub project at the point it is not clear to you if you are seriously providing something worthwhile to the big picture. Usually complex organizations tend to fail in this regard, but some big orgs are organized in a way that splits people into small sub-groups handling their own project, so that individuals still can see their scope.

3) Have free time, that is, work for a reasonable amount of hours. You need free hours to have a life, to learn new things unrelated to your work (even if they are still about Computer Science it does not matter), to rest and preserve your health.

4) A friendly environment, where everybody is focused on exploiting the best potentials of co-workers. No envy, no power games, ability to recognize coworkers good accomplishments, and so forth.

I think that meals or other accessorial stuff are not enoguh to compensate the lack of one of the above.
Consumption taxes in practice are incredibly regressive. Someone who earns $20,000 must spend the majority of their money in order to live. Someone who earns $1.2 million will probably spend a small fraction of it.
Yes, but lets say w talk about the $5 million dollar company..if we have no US corp taxes than that company can locate in the USA and save possibly $500,000 in corp taxes.

We might get enough offsets in jobs, payroll taxes, etc to offset the corp taxes lost.

And better yet it does skew certain manufacturing concerns to not out-source but in-source..
Thanks for submitting this llamba. I really feel strongly about this: it's time us techies stop hiding behind internet anonymity & start making a public stand. Anyone got ideas how to give this wider circulation?
I worked at a place like this. They served dinner at 7-8pm, and you only got it if you worked at least 10 hours that day. I remember one day, one of the managers suggested that we up it to 12. "We're spending $30,000 a year on food; it's ridiculous." Yeah, but considering all of the extra hours you're getting out of people, paying an extra portion of a salary per year doesn't seem like a bad deal.
It seems to eat the cursor for me on a development chrome (18.0.1010.0 dev / Mac)
Cool Facebook Games to play with your Girl Friend
My guess is people stopped publishing amateur tutorials and focused on spending time on facebook. Lots of beginner creativity got flushed down the facebook. When I learned HTML or PHP long time ago everybody's first ambition was to get good enough to write his own tutorial.
Not that these are bad books (I've read a lot of them and they are quite interesting), but I think there's more value in compiling a list of the 5 most important books we should read, rather than the 30.

Of course we can learn something from reading 30 books. It'd almost be hard not to (if you chose the right genre). The problem is that, while entertaining, I'm sure a lot of us are looking at these books not just for fun, but because we want to figure out how to run our software business.

To take every software book that's imparted some little bit of insight and put it in a huge list only gives you a huge list of books to read, with no indication of which 20% of those books will give you 80% of the insight. And while some of us can digest this list in two weeks, for others it's a huge time commitment they don't have the ability to make.

I apologize for ranting, and this list does have some useful information (especially in the commentary on each book). But I get uncomfortable when I see a "Top X design articles" or "Top Y books" and the X or Y is >10. I feel like we are feeding our desire to gorge on numerically delimited information without necessarily getting substance out of it.
We also need to seriously start electing people that represent us. Honestly, we need to pick people who understand technological issues and we need to cycle them regularly.

Most importantly, we all need to participate in government.
Agreed on all the points in his list except "readable with any form of light." Books lose to my cell phone in darkness or very dim light.

My book reading is roughly split into two categories. First, the books that I read straight through and can get in and out of very quickly, reading in bursts whenever it's convenient. I read these while I'm eating, while I'm waiting in line, while I'm on the toilet, whenever I arrive to meet someone and they aren't there yet. These simply must be e-books; I can't go back to the days of trying to carry a book everything yet so often being stuck without one.

Second, the books that I immerse myself in for periods of time, because they're more difficult or because I'm reading them specifically for the sake of that immersive, relaxed experience. These I prefer to be physical books, and the arguments in the article weigh very heavily against e-books. It would be a great loss to me if physical books disappeared before e-books improved their navigation and their navigational cues dramatically. I could imagine e-books eventually overtaking physical books for navigation and note-taking. Personally, I write slowly, hate my own handwriting, and do not like marking up books, so note-taking is a chore for me even with physical books, but e-books are just pathetic. Even for me, physical books beat them simply by virtue of their ability to hold different colors and shapes of sticky notes and because I can look at them and see where I've dog-eared pages and stuck in sticky notes and other bookmarks.

There are a few more categories, such as cookbooks and reference books (both of which I prefer to be physical) but the first two comprise 90% of my reading and purchasing. (EDIT: To clarify, I think many reference works that were formerly structured as books should not be books at all in the digital age.)
Wanderplayer turns your phone into a wireless game controller – for your PC
Real Madrid vs Athletic Bilbao en vivo
You can lower the tax on goods that lower income individuals are likely to spend on, while increasing tax on goods higher income individuals are likely to spend on, to make it more progressive.
The corporation is a separate legal entity from it's owners, and thus is taxed separately. In step E the good being exchanged is money.
Blindly submitting content to HN, good or bad?
I've noticed an account that's submitting 80+ stories a day all from generally liked sites.

I think it's bad, at the least it automatically pushes everyone else a 1/2 a dozen spots further down when another batch is dumped making it that much more unlikely someone else has a fair chance. It also reminds me of digg's 'power users' where a handful of people ended up dominating the site, this isn't happening right now but when you're submitting 10% of stories the front page will reflect that eventually.

But on the other hand some of the submissions would have been made regardless by other people.

Thoughts?
Unfortunately this doesn't get at the heart of GIT. I'm pretty math-ignorant so correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but I'd do it like this:

Hey, $youngster, imagine that we have a Big Book of Mathematics. This book describes addition, multiplication, and some logic. There are pages like this:

Fact: 1 + 4 = 5
Fact: 2 + 3 = 5

Rule: Things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

So now we know: 1 + 4 = 2 + 3

On another page of the book you see this:

Rule 1. The next sentence is false.
Rule 2. The previous sentence is true.

So now we know:... nothing??

It's kind of funny right? Both of those things can't be true within the rules they set up. The whole thing is inconsistent. We don't learn anything, we don't know anything. In fact this one page ruins the whole book. We should just rip it out.

But then, there's another book -- Gödel's book of Mathematics. On yet another page of the book there's this:

Rule: You can't prove the rule on this page!

So now we know: _________

That's just as funny, like the other one right? But here's the really weird part: is it wrong? (Let them get to No.) That's right, you can't prove the rule on this page. But it's still true. Fill in the blank: now we know "it's true!"

That means that there are at least a few weird things that you can't prove are true, but which are true. That's what Gödel thought was funny!

Next steps: try to get them to notice what's weird about both cases, in that they refer to themselves. Walk them through the idea that maybe you could just outlaw referring to a rule on the page. I can't think of an easy way to explain Gödel numbers, so I'd just have to say that he showed that if you allowed a book to have numbers and addition and whatnot, you could still sneak in weird things like that, by using a secret code.
Most people don't understand technology, but they do understand freedom. The strategy to get a pro technology representative elected is to get a small government person elected in such region, who believes federal government has very little role in every day life of a citizen.
Though it's not semantically correct, it shows how big portion of the service the downtime affects. Took 1ms of cognitive power.
"I would rather buy an iPhone made by aspirational Chinese than victims of the war on drugs."

One of the weirdest statements on this topic so far, it supports the hypothesis that humans are not rational (and likely are completely f*ing insane) when it comes to arguing theology, philosophy or politics. Let's just take the gloves off (or better, pull out the guns and start shooting) - we're obviously better designed to do that than to come to any reasonable compromise (it is always a compromise, not an agreement) through speech.

P.S. Am reading Maurice Ashley's "England in the Seventeenth Century". That was a period chock full of political/theological/philosophical madness. Threads here show humans remain as "rational" in their thinking as they were then.

Both the book and this topic are a hoot until one realizes that some of those involved were/are in responsible positions. My conclusion so far: Taleb's description of Black Swans is optimistic: we're much more likely to see some civilization-crumbling in our lifetimes that we formerly thought.

It's been a quiet and peaceful ride down the river so far but I'm going to buy a barrel and some tar - I think the roaring sound I hear ahead is a waterfall.
Internet can be a cheap multiplier. While it can't easily buy ads on TV, it can put you on headlines for a fraction of the cost.
That would depend entirely on the specifics of how the contract was written to include the food. If it just said generic food, sure. If it specified a monetary value, then I think she'd have a case.
Funny. I always run into issues of glare under florescent lighting with the iPad and it drives me nuts. And no matter how long I use the Kindle, I can't stop noticing the distracting flash between pages. On the flipside, searching and highlighting is advantageous with ebooks, which is why I've primarily used them with reference books.

This is a great piece on interaction design that's been posted to HN already, but in case you missed it, have a read: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...

The parts on distribution of weight make perfect sense to me, especially when I compare that experience of sensing place to the experience of sensing place in, say, the New York Times iPad app.
From the article you linked: "This case made clear that manufacturing and distribution of circumvention tools was illegal, but use of those tools for non-infringing purposes, including fair use purposes, was not."
So it is legal to rip a DVD, it is illegal to make or distribute a tool that allows DVD ripping. Yes, the law is insane like that.
Clearly in a legal sense? Honest question.
I've seen comments far better than the original article they respond to.
Another problem with it is that food isn't as liquid as cash. I can't buy a car with their food. I can't buy a TV with their food. I can't even buy groceries with their food. Presumably, yes, I am going to have to buy some food anyway. However, perhaps I would prefer to buy something cheaper, and use the money for something else. Or, perhaps I would prefer to buy something more expensive, and not have to worry that I've already paid for Google's food on top of it. Or perhaps I just want something different. Saying, "We're going to convert $X of your salary to an equivalent value of our food" robs you of choice. I'd want a deep, deep discount in exchange. At least 50%. And no, I wouldn't accept an inflated number like $20k just so they could discount it to $10k. And yes, I'd get this perk in writing, including availability hours.
Oh. That'll be it then.

Silly of me to have forgotten the trivial CP scheme.

Considering I've probably paid £10 per person to have seen it in the cinema and then have bought the over-priced DVD as well. How many times do they expect me to pay for the same-old-same-old?

I've paid two, maybe three times for the same product. Fair Use isn't a crime and I'll please myself. Either that or simply stop participating and stop buying their product entirely.

May as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb, eh?
Economist David K. Levine on Domain Seizures
When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming 
Is Ladies Learning Code awesome and feminist, or just awesome?
It's nearly impossible for people to truly grasp that $500,000/year for 50,000 employees is the same impact as $10/year/employee. Even incredibly smart people get this wrong. It happens in business, in politics (see all the people arguing that policy X that works in country Y can't be implemented in the US because the US is Z times larger than Y), everywhere, even with people who otherwise have a very strong grasp of math and science.

It's baffling.
Thanks for the morning laugh. :)
Specific ones you might recommend? I'd be happy to hear some options worth considering.
How naive, to believe that anointed technocrats could somehow make better resource allocation decisions than the free market.
Twitter to hire a team in Germany, the country it was partly developed in
"That is a completely and utterly ridiculous idea. But yet, there it is, seriously stated"

Maybe to you, but not for me. I'm a doctor and a geek. I work on confidential patient data which I manipulate with custom software I write (some C, some perl... even some php at times :-).

But every devices this data goes into is encrypted.

To avoid any problem, when I travel I take my special "travel laptop" which has a brand new OS install from the night before. I take absolutely no data at all, unless I absolutely need to work on it during the trip - and in this case, this piece of data travels on an external media, in an encrypted form.

The macbook and the external media are disposable - should any agent want it, they can have it and keep it. I won't even complain.

What I care the most about is preserving the data confidentiality.

Why exactly wouldn't you want this kind of protection on your data from your doctor?