skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As clear as I can make it: "Taxation Without Representation."

The Fed creates money when they make loans. Taxpayers are liable (in the event of default) to cover the gap between collateral value and principal. As guarantors of this debt, taxpayers should know what the collateral is.
Where the oil comes from - data visualization with Dabble DB
Excellent.

Now if I could only cut and paste using my iPhone. ;)
we gave the fed reserve the power to grab 700 billion "at any given time" - which is essentially unlimited money from the treasury

like I said before, even the 'modified' bailout the Democrats proposed had no real transparency requirements; the only real difference is a ton of added earmarks
Finally, an analyst gets it right.
The whole point of the bailouts is to prevent runs on the banks, if the fed starts announcing who they are helping that is not going to improve confidence.

This is one example where secrecy probably saves money.
Survey: One DNS server in 10 is ‘trivially vulnerable’
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-Job-Interview-20...
Sun Microsystems to Distribute Microsoft Live Search-Powered Toolbar …
Wow. That counts as a positive experience?
However, every art form (by "art" I refer loosely to anything that requires practice to master) is judged based on its method of transmitting information. The Elements of Style wouldn't help a painter. It absolutely would help a programmer. It would help a screenwriter, a lyricist, a playwright.

The fact that both programming and writing deal with text mean that they have text in common. And learning how to write is something that helps you in both scenarios.

Coding IS just writing. However, it's writing with a different purpose than journalism or novel-writing or poetry. Doesn't change the fact that all of them rely on text and ONLY text as a medium.
That's a silly argument. Programming Is just writing. It is not, however, novel-writing. Or poetry-writing. It's code-writing.

Doesn't make it not writing.
Well done. I read news on my phone, not on my computer. I wish other news sources realized that. I can't tell you how many news sites simply crash my iphone, but here are three: Portfolio.com, the Wall Street Journal, and Vanity Fair. It's nuts.
Yeah you've got it all figured out...</irony>
Need to season this with a little http://mattmaroon.com/?p=583
and what do you think? Please elaborate.
Contact lenses with integrated circuitry
Randinistas!

A question.

Did Roarke have the moral or legal rights to destroy the development after the owners changed the design?
Tarsnap public beta
Hey listen, I know exactly how you feel.

Sleep issues have been a major factor in my life since the 3rd grade, where I started to stay up too late every night and miss the bus in the morning.

My advice is to stop using a computer outside of work. Entirely. Remove computers from your home. Stop carrying a laptop in your backpack.

I stayed up late at night hacking open source for a decade. I'm only now accepting that my health hinges on not working on a software project in my free time.

Just try it for a month. The world will not fall apart.
Another small step towards launch: After many months in private free beta and a bit over a month in private paid beta, tarsnap has now moved into public beta.
The original article has nothing of interest in it.
"If someone called themselves a "Christian" or "Buddhist", but then did something obviously un-Christian, un-Buddhist, and un-nice, does it mean that Christianity or Buddhism are necessarily evil or un-nice?"

Giving a vague definition to some philosophy/ideology/methodology then claiming the good things that arise out are inherent in it while saying the bad things that come out of it are external. Classic. (Sorry, I can't for the life of me express this clearly. There was an article on Agile recently that said it better than I can).
yes, but you're looking backwards and seeing which companies survived. This is very different from looking forward and predicting which companies will survive.
Because they both take such extreme positions and often ignore the path of compromise and moderation.

This isn't to say that absolutes are always wrong (or right), but taking absolute positions on so many different items lends itself to arrogance and the inability to incorporate new evidence.
10 Money Saving Tools For Small Business
Let's give people who actually make austim and Asperger's diagnoses more credit.

Being obsessed with and good at maniuplating numbers and rule bases systems, and consequently being better at it than peers, is a sign of autism and Asperger's. But one sign is not enough for a diagnoses. If he exhibited no communication and socialization problems, he would not fit the description.
Ahhh, that kind of losing.
Awesome. Thanks for the suggestions. Will look into it when I get back home :)
yeah sorry, my comment worked in my mind, cause I drive past a man holding a "everything must go" sign in front of our local CC
Conceded. If you're taking a 100k W2 and disbursing $1MM, the S Corp avoids the uncapped 1.4% Medicare tax. If you're taking a $1MM distro, you've got an accountant, and I'm not worried about you getting audited.

If you're most people and you try to split your salary $50k/$50k to avoid FICA on the distro half, I am worried about you getting audited --- not worth it.

Also, lest anyone be overly optimistic, the numbers timae is giving are the business' half of FICA; each shareholder makes up the other half. FICA isn't ~7%, it's ~15%.
I read the page and I'm still fuzzy on the concept. What does it do for me? Thanks.
No, that's 7% on all income over what the IRS will justify as your base salary. =)
Hopefully it won't be a war but it certainly is Merb versus Rails, at least if you're deciding what framework to build your website with.
Maldives seek to buy a new homeland
It's not a "ascii diagram", it's a new syntax for CC3 display property.

Complete example:

<style type="text/css">
body {
height: 100%;
display: "a . b . c" /2em
". . . . ." /1em
"d . e . f"
". . . . ." /1em
"g . h . i" /2em
5em 1em * 1em 10em}
#logo {position: a}
#motto {position: b}
#date {position: c}
#main {position: e}
#adv {position: f}
#copy {position: g}
#about {position: h}
</style>
This is my farewell transmission from Mars
You're right that Rails expects you to take the whole stack and doesn't offer you choice. DHH and I consider that to be a huge advantage but it also means that Rails won't be a good fit for every project.

That said, I don't see anything in Merb that would tempt me away from Rails for new projects.
This does exactly what it should and no more.

Great job.
Another equally important thing is choosing your battles: you have to not only work hard, but work hard at the right things.

I could practice basketball for 10,000 hours, but there's no way I could do it professionally. You have to figure out what your natural abilities are, and work hard in those areas.
I actually thought the sale rate would be higher. I know so many people that will click (and buy) anything.

Glad I was wrong.
Get incorporated for free Tuesday (LLC)
No, it's not. This is linkbait crap.

Flagged.
There's not really a whole lot of liquidity on the majority of the state markets. Difficult to make money when the bid-ask spreads are so large.
TRACE and BREAK.
Configuring vim right
What to flaunt to an investor?
I understand, however, maybe then there have to be some buttons. Anything but a random thing to do.
How hard is it to switch?
Short and sweet read says... if you want to be awesome. Put it time. I believe it.
You do realize that spending one hour daily to get good at something would still require almost 30 years, right? I love the post though. Thanks.
He didn't call the election in '04, but one of his co-workers did call Obama a future president back then, after his convention speech.
I think the point is that you spend much more than one hour a day at it.
From LLC to S/C? Annoying.

From S to C? Very easy.
Than you! I used to use the website Buxfer made (http://buxfer.com/yc/) but it has been down for a while... Not too sure what is going on there..
In any case, you should google Bell Curve plus controversy. I'm not sure it's a book that is generally seen as "good science," so much as "popular and possibly misleading science."
The first thing I noticed is that this article misspells 'Roark', the protagonist in The Fountainhead. It's hard to take anything else in the article seriously. But I will answer the titular question nevertheless:

Malcolm Gladwell and Ayn Rand are both wrong.

Contra Gladwell, most great successes have great ability; they succeed where mediocrities would fail. Contra Rand, most great successes have great luck; they succeed where the unlucky would fail.

Indeed, if both ability and luck are major factors in success, the truly great are those who are both lucky and good. This leads to what I immodestly term Hartl's Law:

Since great success requires great luck, everyone great is overrated.

This includes, by the way, both Gladwell and Rand---as, I suspect, Gladwell would readily concede, but Rand (were she alive) would surely not.
It won't be business as usual from one set of outside constituents: prospective customers. Who the heck is going to buy cars from a company that's in bankruptcy?
And be sure to avoid confusion 'natural abilities' with talents. I agree with aneesh that you shouldn't focus on something that you are inferior at genetically - obviously a seven foot tall guy will be better at basketball and a normal sized person if both play professionally - but make sure you don't give up by saying, "I can't seem to do very well at this one thing. Eh, I suppose it's just not a natural ability."
You should consider getting a laptop cooler. It does a good job of keeping my macbook cool.
VMware Brings Virtualization To Smartphones
So the position attribute is being used for this?

What if I wanted to associate #logo with 'a' but wanted to offset it some. Logically I would want to do something like:

#logo { location: a; position: relative; top: 5px; }

What would the proposed way of accomplishing this be?
Rand was rude towards people who disagreed with her for the sake of publicity just like this article. Disagreeing with good reason is what they should do instead.
8 things I hate about the web
Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter
That's why I find it deeply amusing that a whole ton of successful people are Randesque without ever once attributing Rand. A lot of Objectivists miss the fact that just saying you agree with Rand doesn't immediately make you Randesque. That's why people who really think Rand's got something worth saying don't go out and socialize only with other Rand readers.

The world has a history of cocky jackasses who succeed because they're entirely certain that they're right, because they are. Rand tapped a few of them to write her novels, actually.
FreshApps Helps Find New Apps for your iPhone
In case people aren't paying attention, this is well-respected news.yc-er cperciva's big project. Looking pretty good, Colin!

edited for clarity
I'm well-respected now? When did that happen?
No, it's garbage because it makes a claim, then fails to back it up well.

I read the NYmag article. Gladwell in that article does appear to be Rand's favorite villain. However, the blog post doesn't use those points. It doesn't contrast Gladwell's "cutting down the great man" to Rand's points. It brings up Rand, attacks her, brings up Gladwell, draws no conclusions whatsoever, and then says that the author can see a connection. The fact that a good argument as come up is because of the various Hacker News factions, not because of any merit that article had whatsoever.
Well, you're above me... http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Does anyone know of alternative PDF viewers which deal well with large images? Because I know Acrobat, Foxit, and Evince all aren't great and slightly choke up.
I think Atlas Shrugged assumes a fantastic future in which the amount of people who CAN step up to the plate have dwindled immensely, and in which many of the ones who COULD are already broken.

In real life as it stands today, Atlas Shrugged is not a plausible scenario. The trick to reading it without casting it aside in horror is realizing that Rand knows that, and that she's drawing things to their extremes to make a specific point about how she thinks human beings work. People who mock Atlas on that point are missing the point of the book.
Thanks, I've been looking for something like this!

I just have one gripe: http://icombinator.net (without the www) doesn't work.

Other than that it's perfect
"Society or Individual?" = "Nature or Nuture?"

Bad questions lead to bad answers.
Rand was also a little bit extreme in her beliefs. It's very much a "do as I say, not as I do" situation. She told people that they should disagree with her if they found logical merit in dismissing her theories, then disowned anybody who attempted to do so.
Debian ported to the android-powered T Mobile G1
Gladwell has a few racist bones in his body:

"And then there are the math geniuses who, as anyone can’t help noticing, are disproportionately Asian. Citing the work of an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladwell attributes this phenomenon not to some innate mathematical ability that Asians possess but to the fact that children in Asian countries are willing to work longer and harder than their Western counterparts. That willingness, Gladwell continues, is due to a cultural legacy of hard work that stems from the cultivation of rice."

That's right up there with claiming that Africans and African Americans excel at athletics because they purportedly once chased or were chased by wild animals: Patronizing and offensive to the extreme. People in entertainment have lost their careers for saying such things.
They each have different aims with their writing. Gladwell wants to illustrate things as they are. Rand wants to illustrate things as they could be.
I guess it heavily depends on a market segment, but for "family computer software" it is true: lots of PC users playing with free/evaluation versions but for when it comes to premium subscriptions and premium features - most of them evaporate, whereas Mac users like to stick around.

Look at various PC/Mac softwares out there: most of PC-only software belongs to "free&shitty" category, but nearly everything for OSX you have to pay for, and they (users) are accustomed to it.

I am not sure if I can post results of the research my company has done (and paid for) here.
I considered (and agreed with myself) Thinkpad T500 which is in the mail. :-)
The original report:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=358884
I've not really had trouble reading yCombinator on my iPhone and I can't vote up stories on your 3rd party site.

So I appreciate the sentiment but I don't see the point.
I think a better (and cheaper) way to do this would be to create a custom CSS file and assign it to ycombinator.com in Safari.
The original article is vastly better than this blog post.
Yes, FPGA design is more like programming than it is like analog electronic circuit design. No need for soldering, or for thinking about analog equations. I think a lot of the audience of Hacker News would find it an interesting way to learn more about hardware, even though it doesn't answer the original poster's question about electronics a la resistors and capacitors.

If one prefers Verilog, Pong Chu also has an edition of his book using that language. VHDL is more verbose than Verilog, and more strict about typing, which many consider to be a good thing for hardware designs. But at the level of Chu's books, they're almost equivalent--he uses a bunch of re-usable code templates which are easily translated between Verilog and VHDL. It's not worth agonizing about the difference; I chose VHDL mostly because more reference designs for the Xilinx starter kits are written in VHDL.
Agreed. I felt like doing some math. :) Anyway, one hour a day is what many of us have to pursue other personal goals different from work, family, etc.
Can I jump in and say "It's most likely a mix of the two?"

Steve Jobs was not and is not a huge computer hacker. Not like Bill Gates. But still, he was able to conceive of the idea of a personal computer, before anybody else had the idea. How did he get 10,000 hours working into that? From his own words, he got the idea by dropping acid and deciding that people weren't using this new technology in a way that could change the world. He repeated this again and again with the iPod, the iTunes store, the iPhone, even with how he changed Pixar.

Jobs is unquestionably talented. However, it isn't shown that he's talented solely because he practiced at what he did heavily. I think that part of what makes Jobs as great as he is is his unbridled ego, his belief that he alone is right until proven otherwise. And that's something that you can't entirely pin on the society around you.
I've always wondered if this is naive: couldn't a large part of it be that somebody at Google said "all these other browsers suck" and decided to fix it? I mean, Chrome takes ideas from other browsers and puts it together into something that's superb in nearly every way, especially for a beta. Google could very well have started the project intending just to make a really good thing.

That and, you know, the millions of dollars thing. That's big too.

(Does anybody else find it annoying that Google's software is always more aesthetically pleasing than their online programs?)
It's a great discussion! I love it! But the article is still pretty poor. I'd rather have a good discussion over a good article than have one or the other missing.
Crowdsourcing: Democrats predict voters with credit-card data
Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory
Thanks for this one:
"Store temporary files in a central spot
Swap files and backups are annoying but can save you a lot of trouble. Rather than spreading them all around your filesystem, isolate them to a single directory"
If you get 3 solid hours of work (work you could, if you were being paid hourly, bill for) on something you're doing in a day, you'd accumulate your 10,000 hours in about 9 years, assuming you get 3 hours in every single day of the year. That's unrealistic, so bump it up to 10 years.

This has been brought up before: http://norvig.com/21-days.html
I thought I was the only one who found "the most intuitive phone in the world" a bit confusing. I also hate touching the screen because I sometimes accidentally click something I didn't mean to.
Too much crypto, not enough value prop! Everyone believes you on the crypto stuff already, Colin.

Move out of privacy --- privacy is a dead end, nobody has ever capitalized on it successfully (see: the original PGP, Zero Knowledge Systems, that stupid data center in the pylon off the coast of England).

Rewrite your content to focus on shared hosting. Emphasize that you don't keep the keys to the backup data. Consider an OEM deal with a Slicehost-like provider. Backup services at hosting providers fucking blow.

People won't pay much for privacy, but businesses will pay a decent premium over basic hosting for CYA security.

Take your crypto content off the front page; ironically, I think you're decreasing its value by fronting it like this. Instead, brand it: 100% audit-ready, fully transparent, something like that: "the only secure backup provider with [blah blah blah]".

I should have to click to see that stuff. For normal users, they should just see the stamp of assurance and a page they can click to with lots of docs.

I'm a lot less concerned about the clientside security here and more concerned with the serverside --- even though I know intellectually it doesn't matter much, because the security has been factored out to the client. That could mean one of many things, including these two:

(1) People are never going to get over their concern about serverside security and you're going to have to do so something to demonstrate that the server code and associated web apps are secure.

(2) You're not doing enough with your pitch to emphasize that your design moves security off the server and onto the clients, where the customers control it.

How do you do dynamic updates? Spend less time sniping at SSL, because SSL is still the weak link in this system.
Look Out Google Site Search, Lijit Says It's Right On Your Heels
I guess it test your urls at least. From the above link:

NOT MATCHED: account/email/
NOT MATCHED: account/register/
Yeah. That's another misconception of Rand's work, I think.

People assume that Rand is saying that people are inherently good or inherently evil. That's absolutely not the case. She says that they're inherently imbalanced, that we aren't all perfectly equal, but that we still have the freedom to decide which side of her argument we stand on. Look at Guy Francon in The Fountainhead, who is a fool and a faker but who decides, in the end, to support his daughter. Or look at Fred Kinnan, in Atlas Shrugged, who is talented and bright enough to know that he's doing the wrong thing, who is morally straight, but who decides that compromise is inevitable and that it's worth him sacrificing himself if it means protecting the people underneath him.

Rand has imperfections in her writing, but she doesn't have a lot of the ones that she's accused of. And it makes discussing her online rather difficult. Neither side wants to admit the virtues of the other side.
Thats brilliant, thank you. I love the instapaper integration. Looking forward to seeing the new/threads/profile pages if you're adding them :D
Malcolm Gladwell: The capitalization of human potential
OK then. Give us some statistical evidence from the future.
I think Rand ended up getting too full of herself. The Fountainhead is my favorite book of hers. By Atlas, she was dealing with a beautiful scope and marvelous characters, but she lost the willingness to really flesh her characters out. You get hints of moral contradiction and moral struggle, but that's it. Not like The Fountainhead, in which the hero and the villain are thoroughly explained.

Rand believed very firmly in her philosophy. Her fiction, however, is romanticized: Rand says that she portrays things not as they are, but as how she wishes they could be. It pains me when her "followers" take her black-and-white approach literally.
The ratio of emails sent vs. sales generated depends largely on the quality of the mailing list.

Professional mailers buy or lease mailing lists which are more less targeted and hence have higher return rates.
On the flip side you have mailers that scrape the web for emails so they have a lower acquisition cost but also a lower hit rate.
You need more pictures of girls, and less half-naked guys on your homepage. I'm totally serious.
Yeah. But that's an exception to the rest of the book. I mean, good heavens, there's a mad scientist with a mustache who creates a death machine called Project Xylophone, there's a failing novelist named Balph Eubank, and a pirate is fraternizing with a coal miner. You can't look at that with any mindset other than "This is, above all, a fun read."
Silicon Valley start-up success for savvy Aussies (Omnisio, YC 08)
Ask HN: Offline log analysis/analytics
Looking for recommendations on offline log analysis/web analytics. Been using Google Analytics and Woopra, but the data has been tainted by a bug in our system that was reporting stats from our dev servers.

We've been using awstats, but our front office peeps find it lacking. Help?
By your logic, stating the obvious fact that there are differences between races makes you a racist.

There are differences between the races and some do stem from environmental factors, a fact that is well documented and is part of the theory of evolution and natural selection.

It's ridiculous to call Gladwell a racist for pointing out one of those differences and theorize on its cause.
"Contrary to what you may have read just a few years ago, you can now form an LLC with just one person in any state (or the District of Columbia)" - Pg 16, Nolo's Quick LLC

I happen to have read this last night :)