skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Express Usability Test - Customer Experience Labs
P/Es are a little confusing... earnings by that metric really means net income or earnings per share. In other words their liabilities and costs figure into "earnings".

Fred Wilson is using some wonky math there. Using projected earnings their P/E would be easily be calculated at 100+ and possibly much more. They would really have to do something out of this world to have a P/E in the teens.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:ZNGA&fstype=ii
Welfare and healthcare (which are really interconnected efforts, or should be) are not just "redistribution from the young to the old", and that's 30% of your graph right there. Countries without these sort of provisions tend to be... "unstable" at best.

You can argue the US military gets too much money, sure, but looking at cultural and voting patterns, I really don't think that's why people don't like to pay taxes.

Obviously public money has to be spent in good ways, but let's not misrepresent all government being about "military and pensions".
>A surface-to-air missile -- after its fuel is burnt out and its payload is detonated -- is basically nothing more than a thin tube.

No, no, no. Modern SAM missiles have either a continuous rod warhead, a quite substantial affair that on detonation will spread shrapnel to a substantial range, or, even worse in this context, are kinetic killers like the HVM Starstreak the UK DoD is deploying. A kinetic killer is a heavy metal rod with some guiding fins that is propelled to hypervelocity (Mach 3.5 for the Starstreak) by a first stage. The Starstreak has 3 of these. There's a strong possibility that they stay intact after hitting their target, as aircraft are more flimsy than armoured combat vehicles, or even worse, some of the 3 will miss the target. What happens then is easy to guess: is goes on a ballistic trajectory at a high Mach speed, and in a dense urban area, may hit something fragile and cause some damage. Each of the 3 Starstreak submunition has as much energy as a 40mm Bofors shell.

So your scenario of "they'll gently come down" is far off target.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starstreak
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous-rod_warhead

Edit: the Starstreak submunitions also have an explosive payload so they won't stay intact neither on hitting nor missing the target. The raining shrapnel caveat still applies, but shrapnel slows down beyond a few hundred meters.
Oh, I think so too. For a while that was what I wanted to work on, except that I figured Whitetruffle were too good to compete with.

One critical part of a business like that is connections with the recruiting industry, because you're essentially asking employers to let you serve as their recruiter, and you need to build trust. You can't just build the site and wait for people to come. Whitetruffle got that part right: their founder is a former recruiter.
It also doesn't give the x or y resolution, unless I missed it.
Thanks, I think. Oddly, I never thought of it as a lifestyle business. The main thing it's done to my lifestyle is to prevent me from getting a good night's sleep for the last 3-4 years of coding, beta testing, launching, and finally managing it.

If that's what it is -- ok. But as I understand it, the thing that stops lifestyle businesses from scaling up is that the owner prefers having a business that works around their schedule, suits their lifestyle, and prefers to be hands-on in operation rather than delegating. To the point that it makes little sense to scale, because the person is the business, and vice versa.

So if what stops lifestyle businesses from being good investment vehicles is the founder's unwillingness to scale, then I completely understand why larger investors would shy away from them. But if an owner of one -- I mean, it could be a bakery or a doggy daycare or anything -- builds out a framework for growth, wouldn't it be logical to pick one that was trying to grow at a slow, responsible rate?

Maybe stretching it here, but why would an investor choose someone who makes great at-home pizza and wants to open 50 restaurants next year, over someone who's run a pizza place for awhile and wants to open two or three more, when the investment needed for the latter is half or a quarter that of the former on a per-restaurant basis?

Is it that VCs won't stoop for pennies? Because - I've always thought it was kinda stupid when people said they wouldn't stoop for pennies. That's money. Why would you leave it lying on the ground.
Wind farms can cause climate change, finds new study
We had this in Sweden for a while. Absolutely no one cares, and i have never seen anyone asking for permission except on some government websites. Example, government: http://regeringen.se/ and police: http://polisen.se/ who have this huge cookie dialog over the whole page. In fact i think they store a cookie before i answer even. Crazy laws, made by politicians who don't understand how the web works.
Forbes ran an article recently describing how some social media companies may be deferring revenues of digital purchases by classifying them as "durable goods", which could be seen as a way to make themselves more attractive as an ongoing investment. The Forbes article is quite skeptical. Worth a read:

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2012/0507/features-social-media...

Your $36/year is revenue, not earnings [1]. Unless I'm misreading the numbers, both P[2] and ZNGA[3] still have yet to report a profit and establish actual ratios for P/E.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earnings

[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=P+Key+Statistics

[3] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=ZNGA+Key+Statistics
No, UTF-8 cannot be processed in exactly the same way as ASCII! It is highly compatible with ASCII-assuming environments because it can accept the same data (e.g. it remains a stream of bytes that doesn't have to be converted to some "fat" integer) and any UTF-8 text that just happens to contain only ASCII characters will work just fine with an old ASCII program. But complex multi-byte UTF-8 inputs will not work without special treatment.

Historically code pages mapped character values directly to individual bytes: typically redefining the upper half (129+) while leaving the lower numbers the same as ASCII. Programs could display a wide variety of text encodings correctly as long as they knew what the encoding was, and all they had to do was read bytes individually. These encodings could all be handled in a way largely similar to ASCII.

UTF-8 however is a multi-byte encoding, which means you could have (say) 3 bytes that combine to form a symbol. Not only that, but in certain forms multiple symbols could imply display as a single glyph (e.g. an accent followed by a letter). A program that does everything the old ASCII way would choke on multi-byte UTF-8, despite being otherwise-compatible. Consider a program with a fixed-size read buffer; if the last byte is only partway through a multi-byte character, that character will be mishandled unless the program knows how to preserve those bytes and "complete" the character when more bytes arrive.
Press Esc to exit full screen mode.
Unless you alleging fraud, then it's patently incorrect to say that Apple is avoiding its obligations. Apple is merely demonstrating what their obligations under the law are, and people aren't liking what they see. That's fine; let's change the tax code.
OS X APIs generally use NSString/CFString, which hide the actual encoding of the string; they can be any encoding at all internally.
Google excels at some things but they are useless and should be replaced with others - you shouldn't have to come crying to HN after Google banned your account with years of email, or thousands in adsense revenue, or whatever, in the hope that a Google employee here might see it and act on it.
Many of the greatest people in arts, sciences, mathematics are simply people who worked hard and thought outside the box. There's a little bit of luck there too as it's random if another will recognise a person for their hard work. Even after they die, for example Gregor Mendel: a monk who discovered the principals of genetics was realised to be brilliant posthumously.

Simply measuring a score on an IQ test isn't good enough. Someone who can't actively use intelligence might as well not have it.
#jobinsiliconvalley
Here is an issue (that has bitten me and took lots of blood and sweat to find out):

cat a b c | grep '^foo'
The problem with distributed, grass roots peer review is that you get poor quality reviewers. The current structure is slow and very "old media", but it is this way because it's the only way to guarantee quality peer reviews.

If journals cease to exist, and a new publish-it-anywhere-then-publicize-it paradigm emerges, along with some associated metrics (kinda sorta like Reddit), then I predict that conference presentations will become the new metric of success. They have gatekeepers, and scarcity due to limited bandwidth (i.e. there are a limited number of time slots available). The whole journal publishing infrastructure will just be shifted over to conferences... along with the ecosystem of for-profit vs. trade group, etc., and the Slowness and Single Mode of Publication problems that the OP describes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking provides a way to catch this type of bug. But it is not implemented in most languages.

You could also do clever things with type systems in a language with sufficiently complex type checking, but nobody seems to do that either.

Unfortunately our industry rewards getting stuff done, and not getting stuff done right. (PHP being an extreme example.) So this state of affairs is likely to remain.
If it can be indexed then it's not hidden, right? Though I guess in this context hidden doesn't mean 'hidden on purpose', more that it's inaccessible.
Where'd you get that formula?

In all likelihood there is an inverse relationship between revenues and user count.
Were you 'decent enough' to pay more in taxes than you owed this year? Of course not. Why should anyone else feel compelled to do so?
The heat sink could easily replace the role of the heat spreader if it was soldered on. It's much bigger. I could definitely see processors moving to an integrated and standardized heat sink.
A very significant open question, IMO, is could they have enabled any of those revenue streams without decimating their user base? I don't think they could have because their product is relatively easy to duplicate.

Given that Instagram was free, there was little incentive for anyone else who is serious about getting in front of people to bother duplicating what they had, but had they started in-app ads or anything else that would have irked users, that would have changed very quickly.

tl;dr -- Millions of users can be monetized in a number of ways, but not if your service can be duplicated fairly easily.
If someone suggests removing quotes to reduce download size, chances are they don't understand compression.
There is a huge government union culture that drives spending law lobbying. This has created a situation where spending laws more likely reveals the will of unions, not the will of the people.
Facebook bought Instagram with about 1/3 cash and 2/3 stock they also had 50 million cash on hand which inflated the purchase price. Honestly, they probably wanted a premium to cover the risk that FB's is worth less than 100 billion. But, they still got enough cash to make the founders comfortably rich, and the valuation is high enough that the VC's made a killing on paper which keeps them happy.
Ok, so on the conclusion:

- Nexus tablet is on the way, don't worry, Google will put it out.

- Chrome is already on Android, and the codebases are being merged right now in the chromium tree.

- Chrome will never be on iOS as long as Apple doesn't change the rules. Simply because it can interpret other programs via internet (with javascript) and this is forbidden by iTunes TOS.

- we might see a preview of Android 5 at Google I/O, but will have to wait the end of the year to see it ship.
HTML documents are hardly unusual examples. Also, look at the other column in that table, where he stripped out the HTML tags and looked only at the body text: UTF-16 was somewhat smaller, and gzipping them made the difference negligible.

Does UTF-16 really have such a great advantage for non-Roman writing systems? Or is this motivated more by a disliking for Anglocentrism?
Think this is more related to the fact that Android has a very plugable Device Management feature, that allows remote wipes, etc. iPhone has similar features but not as enterprise-friendly.
I agree with some of your points, but the last round of ridiculous checks at airports was pushed by American and British governments. Other countries were more than happy to lap it up, sure, but even the ones who would now like to scale back efforts, cannot effectively do that, because US authorities would screw them hard.

Part of the US competitive advantage during the XX century was a first-class air transportation network which was fast and flexible, spreading commerce and culture quickly and cheaply across a whole continent. As you noticed, now it's pretty much on par with what you'll find in that mess of balcanized frontiers and bureaucracy that is our beloved Europe. For them, it's a huge step back.
I switched to Kubuntu after running Ubuntu up until the unity releases. It's not as close to the windows shortcuts as ubuntu 10.04, and some things don't work as well. For instance 'safely removing' a USB drive doesn't power the drive down.
It suppose it takes time and maturity to realize that people have multiple competing goals, and are not perfectly selfless.
Not super I phone friendly yet, eh?
Your XML, it's broken.

Also, what is "edit"? Didn't you mean to use "$EDITOR"?

tail with an uppercase "-F" is more useful with rotating logs.

I also saw some JavaScript in this HTML5-only page.

Hope that helps you with your endeavour.
Social Security is a pension system and should not be counted as an expense. Or, at the minimum the payments to vested retirees should not be counted. Social Security is not in trouble and the part that has trouble is easily fixable.

Medicare is actually a benefit to corporations. Corporations shifted retiree benefits (health care among such benefits) to Social Security, 401(k), and Medicare. Without Medicare worker would demand more money. Besides, it is unseemly for a country as rich as the U.S. to have millions of uninsurable people dying prematurely. Millions more than it currenlty has, that is.

Your statements about unions are without a basis is fact. It is quite obvious that labor, overall, has very little power in the country. Furthemore a majority of non-defense workers for the U.S. government are contractors. We live in an environment of regulatory capture. At the very minimum, the large corporations ought to at least pay to keep the system that they've captured.
According to one Gizmodo article, Apple itself disallow any phones with cameras in its own factories, except for iPhones (that they can control).

http://gizmodo.com/5427058/apple-gestapo-how-apple-hunts-dow...

The operation, as Tom calls it, is not anything special. It is not one of a kind event. It's just a normal practice, and the process is pretty simple: The manager will instruct all employees to stay at their desks, telling them what to do and what to expect at any given time. The Apple Gestapo never handles the communication. They are there, present, supervising the supervisors, making sure everything goes as planned.

All cellphones are then taken. Usually, they collect them all at the same time, which means that the process could take a long time. If you need to contact the exterior during the time your cellphone is under examination, you will have to ask for permission, and your call will be monitored.

They don't ask for cameras because there are no cameras at Apple: Employees are not allowed to get into the campus with them. If the cellphone is an iPhone, it gets backed up onto a laptop. "In fact, at the beginning they used to say that the iPhones were really their property, since Apple gave every employee a free iPhone," he points out. All the employees are asked to unlock and disable any locking features in their cellphones, and then the special forces will proceed to check them for recent activity.

They back up everything and go through all the other phones' text messages and pictures. If you have porn in your phone, they will see it. If you have text messages to your spouse, lover, or Tiger Woods, they will see them, too. Just like that. No privacy, no limits.
And where Apple hardware is built today (i.e. not America).
What digital radio modes sound like
I found a good way to learn some basic assembly is to experiment with things like buffer overflows and reverse engineering (preferably on the right side of the law). There are plenty of websites out there that offer security challenges where you can exercise those skills.
There are more types of J-1 visas, version I know about is to get a job offer fist, signed by US employer from some restaurant or other seasonal work. Its summer work and travel program. This is the easiest way to come and work for summer legally if you are regular student.
If only most of the taxes the government takes actually went to benefit society. At least then there could be a sympathetic argument made for where $6 trillion goes each year.

That's $30,000 per adult, per year, in taxes (local+state+federal). The equation: government == society, is false. Some governments are effective and efficient, some are not; some work for the people, some work against the people, and in varying degrees.

We take as much money out of the economy through all forms of taxation as nations such as Germany, but we don't have the results to show for it that they do. They have better roads, better healthcare, better infrastructure overall, and better education.
I totally agree - completely crazy laws and shows how out of touch the politicians are.

Part of me thinks that I should ignore it for most of my sites, but there are some that I could imagine being big enough to be potential targets should they start enforcing it.
Of campaigns, basically a scrape of their website (they make their money fees, not advertising). Then other people can do review sites of campaigns and do statistical analysis.
As a student in a similar situation, but from Canada, I'd add the suggestion of looking for teams you would genuinely love to be apart of, and targeting them.

Why?
Say you find five or six places that are tackling a problem that really excites you - and a team of individuals at each of these places, that as a student you can feel welcome to work your butt off while gaining a tonne in knowledge and wisdom.

Build something for each of these places - and personalize. Show that you give a shit about the problem they are solving.
It's not documented (presumably) for that very reason.

In fact, the opposite is implied by initWithBytesNoCopy:length:encoding:freeWhenDone: - it should be possible right now to have NSStrings with arbitrary internal representations, even if most other creation methods currently convert to UTF16.
Phew, I'm not sure whether I even have to respond to that non sequitur.

Obviously I'm not a big corporation and obviously we're talking about tax loopholes here, not paying extra taxes on top of what you owe.
Meet the Internet Inbetweeners
Show HN: Weekend project - Gitscore
If you think the only benefits Apple has gotten from American society at large are police protection and a court system, I don't know what to tell you.

On your side of the argument, if you say "Hey, Apple doesn't really gain anything from the wars we're fighting or the expanded security state", I'd agree and include myself in there as well. Others might disagree. But we're all in it together on the costs for that stuff, that's what being part of the same country means.
Most people would love to "go before congress anytime you want to adapt your business" if it meant it was illegal to for anyone to compete with them.

Why is the transfer of wealth from densely populated areas to rural ones considered good? Should we let the real costs shine through so people can make the best economic decisions?
They've got to justify their budget somehow.

Although in S.Korea's army's case, perhaps not much justification needed.
1 month everyday for 4-5 hours.
> but the nature of their intelligence couldn't be more different.

This statement is false. They could be more different in ways you can't even imagine, for no one currently completely understands the nature of intelligence.
I've found that being able to focus on one topic is invaluable for learning. Even more if we consider a difficult topic.
Apple, Google could join Dow index: Barron's
Ask HN: Would you give equity to a strategic partner?
I have a product targeted at young, single people who enjoys going out at night to party. Now I'm negotiating partnership with a top nightlife promotional group locally, who can provide us the cream of the crop, highly targeted users to build our initial user base. We deem this as necessary since our product requires network effects, so we need a big crowd upon launch.

My question is, if we offer equity in the company as their compensation, what might be some implications down the road? Would you ever do it?

Some I could think of are 1) a messy cap table that prevents us getting capital from VCs, and 2) if it was the wrong strategy and we end up pivoting, we have a shareholder who provides no value. What do you guys think? Appreciate it!
What is a loophole, if not something that reduces the amount of tax you owe?

Concretely, how do you propose Apple calculate how much tax they owe if "the amount the law requires" is not the correct amount?
http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/postxss/

It's a good writeup about the post-xss world and what kind of attacks are still exist.
Didn't Steve Jobs call them the best newspaper in the world? I wonder if they find themselves cut-off, now that Jobs has passed away.
You're thinking from the point of view of a display program that needs to split strings into glyphs. That's a fine application, but very rare. And yes, it's inherently encoding dependent and tends to like wide characters instead of multibyte ones.

But introducing a BOM for the sake of that application is a disaster, because it hurts everything else. You can (literally) feed UTF-8 to parsers written 30 years ago and apply all your existing intuition about string handling in C without worry. Unless you deliberately break it by including a binary, non encoding garbage furball at the front of your "file" (and good luck figuring out what a "file" should mean in a OS metaphor designed around streams).
Unfortunately, this isn't entirely true.

- (unichar)characterAtIndex:(NSUInteger)index

will return the UTF-16 "characters" (codepoints or half-codepoints)
Lessons from the rise of Airbnb, by its co-founder Joe Gebbia at TNW2012 [video]
A recent discussion about this involving Brendan Eich and a few other JS folk: https://gist.github.com/1850768
Best of luck with academia.edu!
Macro photographs of CPUs
With respect to your third point, there are already a stack of other browsers on iOS. I don't see why Chrome would explicitly be excluded, compared to them.
The most worrying part of all this is a growing sense, perhaps not even such a definite movement, that the US government / political class is no longer trustworthy with
it's citizens taxes.

Western governments are trapped by politcical stalemates and an underlying shift of economic power, and find they cannot / darent risk change in flawed fundamental policy no matter who is in power.

no wonder many on HN support Apple in paying less tax, if you don't think the government will spend it wisely even of you vote for some other guy.

So Ron Paul starts to look like a clear thinker

But is there really an option. Can we expect to do away with vast amounts of government and find it works better?

Because that is a one time experiment.