skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@bobbydavid Thanks for re-stating what I'm saying.

Re: "So why use such inflammatory and misleading language like "If you claim to support Unicode, you have to support NULL characters"?"

I'm not trying to be "inflammatory" or "misleading". IMO (note: opinion), if a given API claims to support Unicode strings, but instead disallows certain Unicode characters from appearing in those strings, then, IMO, that API only partially supports Unicode strings.

Others could have different opinions (evidently, you do).

I don't know if handling all Unicode characters should be a requirement for an implementation to call itself "Unicode-compliant", but barring another standard, that seams reasonable to me.

A better option IMO would be to have never included NULL in Unicode in the first place, since it is so widely used in system software as an end-of-string terminator. But that ship has sailed...
Thank you for pointing this out. I'm not sure why people just assume that what this author says is true. The author never shows that "geniuses" even think the way the author claims they do. Did Richard Feynman use this approach? Do a majority of people who have influenced their fields in large and meaningful ways also do this? Who knows, the author provides no evidence. I think a much better exposition on problem solving strategies is George Pólya's How to Solve It [0] and without the pseudoscientific analysis on genius.

The author states:

>Recognizing the common thinking strategies of creative geniuses and applying them will make you more creative in your work and personal life.

Again, there is no evidence that this is a common thinking strategy and there is no evidence that if you were to mimic it, you too would benefit from it.

I hope the author and people who too easily agree with the author are aware of confirmation bias [1].

[0] http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/math/polya.html

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
There's a much deeper question on the whole concept of taxation in general. What is it for and where should the limits be?

If you really look around you'll quickly learned that everything is taxed. Everything. Politicians have gotten very good at finding all sorts of areas where they can insert a probe and extract "blood". From gasoline to telephones, communications, dogs, cars, food, air travel, tobacco, etc. Here's one attempt at a list:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/taxed-enough-alr...

Here in California it is not uncommon to hear of more hair-brained schemes to levy taxes on more things. A little-bit here and a little-bit there and politicians have collect billions to keep their gravy train going.

Regardless of whether we are talking about personal or corporate taxes, or taxes in general, it is important to always keep in mind what the "mission statement" might be for taxes. Lately the lines on this have blurred.

In general terms taxes should be used to run the government, military and reasonable social services (the last one being debatable).

Lately, at least in California and other similarly-afflicted states, a huge percentage of taxes are being dedicated to supporting a ridiculous pension infrastructure and a bloated government and public employee sector. Tax increases are being proposed with the sole purpose of finding funding for union pensions. We, then, exist to ensure that the union "class" gets to live happily every-after with their wonderful lifetime pensions and healthcare. This is beyond wrong. This is criminal.

I don't have a problem with the idea of questioning if large companies are paying what they are legally supposed to. At the same time, the system should also demand that government be responsible and not exist to create and maintain their own ecosystem through the abuse of taxation. Name one government entity that, over the last few years, has put forth cuts and savings measures on par with families and businesses across this nation. Exactly.

Watch closely what is happening with the post office. Here's a clear case of a government entity that should start to see massive cuts and reorganization. What do you want to bet that we carry these people on our taxes for the rest of our lives? So, rather than being able to devote our money to the furthering of our own kids and culture we are obligated, through taxation, to support useless hordes of government employees. This isn't going to end well.
The Ever Useful Subprocess Module
"The Ultimate Vim Configuration" is like saying "The Ultimate Pair of Pants." No matter how hard you try, one size just doesn't fit all.

That having been said, projects like this and Janus are definitely a step in the right direction.
You wouldn't prefix every string with it because presumably your API or program's state has already determined the string's encoding. I am not suggesting that every fragment of text has to be explicit (I agree that would be ridiculous). I am only stating facts: there is nothing incorrect about having the mark, a conformant reader must be able to handle the mark, and the mark has some value as a short-cut for avoiding elaborate decoding tricks.
what is immoral or unethical in paying less taxes? The corporate and personal tax rates in Germany and Belgium are higher than the US. Are Germans or Belgians more moral or ethical than Americans?

Apple pays billions in taxes, will pay billions in dividends to shareholders (which goes to retirement/pension funds, universities, charities, etc.), employs thousands (the employees pay taxes), donates to charity, etc. They created an Apple ecosystem that spurred thousands of developers and start-ups to build apps, etc. which in turn created more jobs, taxes, etc.

Are those not ethical or moral to you?
Is string storage really that big a portion of the browser's memory usage? I find it hard to believe that my browser is currently storing nearly a gigabyte of text right now I'm not saying that there wouldn't be performance overhead, but would it be significant? I would be surprised if it made a big difference.

For legacy reasons, there probably isn't a point in changing it. But I'd be surprised if performance reasons turned out to be gating.
Because the US has a population of 400 million?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...
I stopped reading when they quoted Freud as a genius.
EBay Deal Mint - Auctions for deals publishers and retailers
Our algos can work out where the product is in the image. Technically it's the centre of the convex hull of the set of matched keypoints
Objective-C 64bit ABI doesn't have fragile base classes; there's an extra layer of indirection to access any data member of an object.

And it actually has private data members! Isn't that nice.

(Private meaning they aren't declared in the public headers, not meaning it uses the useless 'private' attribute.)
EARTHEREAL: ISS Timelapse
So all Microsoft bashing happened here for this tax collection news is irrelevant. And those who bashed Microsoft there are some narrow minded people who doesn't get the Big Picture?
Creating an HTML5 game using C++ using Emscripten
Maybe they had just accumulated a good set of heuristics for doing good research.
Think of 'genius' as something you get for free.

You can make up for that lack to a certain extent by applying yourself. A person applying themselves with merely average innate ability more often than not will outperform a person born with some windfall. This goes for money, brains, the lot. Apply yourself, that's half the battle.

Plenty of people never learn to apply themselves and that includes plenty of geniuses and people born into wealth.

The best part: whether or not you apply yourself is under your control. What you're born with is the luck of the draw.

And knowing a few things will make it that much easier to learn a bit more, knowledge begets more knowledge and insight.
Great, bookmarked.
Rich individuals with good accountants get to chose from a variety of tax avoidance methods, ranging from regular "following the rules" through "finding new loopholes" through "finding new loopholes knowing they'll be closed soon" to outright tax evasion.

Small companies, and individuals without clever accountants, miss out on those benefits.

Since companies benefit from the advantages of the nation state in which they're based (rule of law, policing (often protecting their products) roads, etc etc) they should make an effort to pay reasonable taxes.
How To Build Backlinks And Increase Rankings
I have Lion, on a 2010 MBP, and I have Activity Monitor open ALL THE TIME.

On Snow Leopard, I found what you say to be true. On Lion, either the mysterious process is eluding me, or it is just much slower. I do development and I can tell you that the iPhone Simulator is a frequent culprit, VirtualBox is also rough (but if I ssh in to my virtual machines rather than use the GUI it's fine), also the Time Machine daemon trying to backup causes things to slow down (even when not plugged in to a disk), but even after that performance is downright crap compared to Snow Leopard.

If you have any idea what my specific source could be I'd be thrilled to hear it. Frequently at the top of my Activity Monitor is WindowServer and kernel_task, except when compiling or other fun things. Even when the interface is locking up I can't find anything fun.
Agreed. The user of "cat" is responsible if they've created a stream that is invalid input to some other program. Unix philosophy is for programs to do (ideally) one simple thing well. If the contents of any one file cannot be used directly, then the idea would be to run some other filter program first (e.g. one that strips bytes from the beginning) prior to using "cat" and piping the results somewhere else.

In practice though some programs and protocols have text/binary distinction (e.g. FTP). It's not unreasonable to have a mode that hints when bytes are to be used as text. This is frequently done to handle different new-line styles for instance.
The likelihood of Javascript becoming non-dominant in the next 20 years is pretty low, I think. Rather than replacing it wholesale, you'll simply see it turn into something better over time.
Somebody needs to make a relevance algorithm which takes into consideration, (1) noise at low levels of citation activity, and (2) social proof being misleading at high levels of citation.
Show HN:Resurrecting a 2 year old project as my weekend hack project
I wouldn't say that they couldn't figure it out, but it wouldn't be an intuitive solution for someone who doesn't hack. We want marketers that can code for the same reason that we want designers that can code. We want that because some of the most important design decisions happen in code. A corollary to this would be that some of the most important marketing decisions happen in code.

The most obvious of this would be recognizing how you can programmatically hook your application with 0 users to another system with thousands to millions of users. An obvious solution that a regular marketer may recognize is simple address book integration. A less obvious solution that a hacker with API experience would recognize is how to hook into the Twitter search API, programmatically recognize hashtags and generate responses that appear legit from a real user.

Any sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content. It often takes a hacker to make the decisions that further advance field of spam to the level of content.
They should be #1, not "among the top".
Applying taxes every time money changes hands creates huge market distortions and gives big business a tax advantage over small businesses: Compare the tax burdens paid by a vertically integrated conglomerate which cuts down trees, converts them to lumber, builds furniture, and sells the furniture at BigCoRetail with the total taxes paid if those four steps were performed by separate logging, sawmilling, furniture-building, and retail-selling companies.

Moreover, applying taxes to gross sales rather than profits eliminates some profitable business models. Suppose I can hire someone for $50 to take $49 of lumber and build $100 of furniture. I make $1 of profits and even if I pay 50% tax on my profits, everybody is still happy. But if you tax revenues, unless your tax rate is less than 1% I'll be going out of business -- at which point there is less government revenue, less value created, and Joe Carpenter has lost his job.
South Korean military starts iPhone ban in its major buildings, permits Android
Built this over the weekend, to play with heroku mostly. Stack is Django / Python / Coffeescript / lesscss.

Must say, Heroku has blown my mind at how simple it was to get going and I was even using a custom python/npm buildpack.
The Hardware Hacker's Guide to Home Automation
I don't want to get in the way of some nice comfortable randian ideology, but you could at least read a wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%9311_California_budg...

The Cali budget crisis was caused by a decrease in revenue. Let me repeat that. Decrease.

Similarly, federal spending on domestic discretionary (what you're complaining about) has been flat or almost-flat for a decade, while spending on defense/security has been skyrocketing.

Lastly, if you want to reduce government spending on employee benefits, the first, second and third things you should think about are healthcare reform, not pensions. Healthcare costs are and have been inflating a lot faster than any other cost-of-living cost. Compound 15% over 10 years and see where that gets you.
Has there ever been a book or news article that actually made an attempt to randomly sample individuals/companies and tease out relationships between some hypothesized factor and outcome?

It doesn't even seem like you have to be much of a genius to do this...
What if it becomes the dominant way of developing software? In that case, Apple might finally lock down the Mac since people can just visit "xcode.apple.com" or whatever.
Arch may not be the system for complete beginners, but if you've been on Ubuntu since 8.04 (4 years I think), you'll definitely know enough to set it up.

The Arch wiki and user guides are fantastic, I've not yet found anything that there wasn't a wikipage for.

The whole point of arch is that you only install exactly what you need, but you also have access to the latest and greatest packages. Plus the AUR system is so much better than PPAs...
Is jurisdiction the real reason you block proxies?
Great job, Nils. I didn't know Google doubles the reward if it goes to charity.

I wonder why Microsoft doesn't have a similar program. Hotmail just got hacked pretty bad[1], and the hackers were selling the vulnerability for chump change in forums[2]. What if they had an incentive to report it to Microsoft instead?

[1] http://www.vulnerability-lab.com/get_content.php?id=529

[2] http://www.whitec0de.com/new-hotmail-exploit-can-get-any-hot...
If you just want a REPL, you can get that actually running in your browser with http://repl.it/
I am working with some of those types of people right now. Researchers, who are undeniably smart, but seem to be far behind on their project goals, micro-managing incidental tasks, and not focusing on the big picture.

As to the source of the fear coming from schooling, I'm not sure. I'd never punish one of my kids who got a bad grade because he applied some creative approach or reasoning that happened to be incorrect, but most cases of bad grades I've seen are due to simple lack of effort.
Why Entering a Room Makes Us Forget Something
Start one. Ordinary people do it all the time.
you can when the jobs act passes, i saw there was a startup like kickstarter that will open soon starting with 3 companies to enable anyone to buy shares in to them but i dont remember the name. If you find it please reply.
For mobile as there's no concept of hover, we'd put an always-on button in a user-specified corner of the image. When the button is tapped our ad overlay would show.
Why CISPA is a threat to the world
"It's time for a search engine that isn't all about ads."

How does a search engine make money then?
This was a great talk! I was excited to see that there's (or was) some work being done to extend GHC to support this: http://goto.ucsd.edu/~rjhala/liquid/
God bless ya, bryan :p
Vim completely freezes and consumes 100% cpu right after starting up.

Also, the yankring plugin has a problem with non-existant ~/.vim/tmp directory.
>The vast majority of our global work force remains in the U.S.

lol. Clever phrasing of outsourcing work to foreign countries.
Money doesn't sit still unless it is truly hard cash and stuffed under a mattress. When companies sit on huge piles of cash, what that really means is they have invested huge piles of cash.

That means they gave that money to someone else, and perhaps they are hiring, or perhaps they in turn invested it again.
How about China and India.
The BOM is in-band signalling. It breaks the ASCII-backwards-compatability of UTF8.

BOMs are only necessary where the provenance of data is not known. Normally, there is a context provided which will determine the encoding.

Basically, yes - text should be tagged (unless 'utf8 everywhere' wins) but imho the tagging should be external to the content.
As you identified, domestic discretionary is not the problem. It's likely higher than it needs to be, but it's not on an exponential curve. It's domestic entitlements that are going to bankrupt us.
Building a Bare-bones NPM package (with mocha & travis-ci)
An article I put together after figuring out how to build a bare-bones npm package.

I'd love to hear if/where I was off the mark on node/npm idioms if there are any errors.
> You could argue that lower taxes on individuals stimulate demand and encourage job creation, too.

Correct, but you should also consider that creating a company creating jobs also adds another tax payer to the economy.

> should have the burden of proving it's worth it.

That is actually the whole point. The impact of consumption (purchasing power) will over time (if increasing) make it reasonable for companies who experiences these demands, to hire more employees to follow. How does that deviate from the idea of lowering tax so that the companies have incentives to create these jobs in the first place?
Imagine the tax is twice as high (which, in most countries, is equal to the max taxation of indivduals). If that increase causes the company to only hire one (or none) employees, how would that be benificial?
The new jobs would provide more tax revenue to the government, keeping in mind there's still the tax which the company pays, and the two tax filings by the job holders.

But to your point, let's say both coorporations and individuals pay the low income tax. I'll try to say this the least synical way I can: there is a trade off between working and leisure. People (in general) would work less, which is not desirable if you're trying to maximize tax revenue.

Overall, what I'm trying to convey is that consumption and company tax rates are combined means to a goal - tax revenue.

What I question in your post is how stimulated demand creates more jobs if there's a shortage of employees due to people not needing to work as much.
Maybe it's invested in China. Maybe it's run through 10 mutual funds on the way to becoming 10 cents on the dollar in terms of salary.

"The cash probably goes somewhere" isn't that convincing. I'm not saying that companies should hire with extra cash if they don't need the employees. That would be a bad business decision. I'm just saying that "cash sitting on the sidelines = probably employment somewhere" isn't a great justification for them paying less taxes than I do. I work too, you know.
Front End Performance Case Study: GitHub
Also check out F*

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fstar/
Why would ads be the only way they can make money?
I'd like to see the actual hidden web indexed. I'm not talking about data behind apps, I mean a browser with built-in onion support, and onion-google.
Thanks for your feedback. There is an element of trust involved as we are going to modify the look/feel of the host site. But if this causes potential customers to wonder if it works well, then we should probably reword it.
By the way,

Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Lost to Tax Loopholes

Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-sho...
Unless the only difference you can think of between China/India and the US is their tax levels then I'm not sure what your point is.
I think there is a bubble in articles about whether or not there is a tech bubble. I cannot wait for it to burst.
I recently had a chit-chat with a 5th year phd friend of mine in front of the stanford bookstore. We both did academic research, and both know all too well the incredible frustration of tech not-having full penetrated academic research. If ever you'd like to work toward making research faster, reply to this. We could think about a couple of things and start cranking out some solutions.
Well, there's medicare, medicaid and social security. For SS, "bankrupt" is a little overblown. Adjust a percentage point or two for Social Security and it projects to be fine for like 70 years. Assuming the feds pay back the money they've borrowed from the SS trust fund. (Man, remember that "lockbox" guy? What a dweeb.)

Medicare is the big problem. And the problem is costs. The government's on the hook for the old, the poor, and the too sick to get insurance, and like I said, insurance and provider costs have been increasing by 15% a year or so. We need a better system of healthcare regardless of how the accounting is done.
followed by "a lot of people say they're doing Valve, but almost no one is doing Valve correctly. If they were really doing Valve, it would work."
Why Yahoo & Other Public Internet Companies Can't Innovate
My dev 'workstation' sometimes consists of Linode, SSH & a tablet. That will get you working quite effectively on an iPad.
your favorite ad company is also doing the same thing.

Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Lost to Tax Loopholes

Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-sho...
Is this essentially a VPS with python batteries included? If so, if my app on PythonAnywhere gets slammed by HN how quickly can you respond with extra provisioning?

Also, do you have scipy installed, too?
There actually exists some "hard-wired" geniuses, but not the kind of genius we would use to describe e.g. Darwin. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd1gywPOibg

edit: Found a better reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superhuman
Awesome stuff, blows my 'learning to code' tumblr out of the water. I'll definitely use in the future. Any background on how you put this together? I've got a vertical I think this would work really well in.
Would you be interested in a Computer Science Bootcamp?
In San Francisco there's a real distinction between developers that have the fundamentals in their tool belt and those that don't.

I've interviewed a lot of people and go to a lot of networking events and this is what I've found:

It seems that if you know your way around ruby or javascript or such you can nab ~ 80k/year.

However, if you know even some of the basics of various algorithms and data structures -- think -- searching/sorting/hashing/etc you can easily command a 130 --> 150k/salary -- almost double!

Does this sound like you? Would you like to improve your skills and pay yourself higher?

Would you be interested in a 'computer science bootcamp' and finally learn the fundamentals that will allow you to obtain a significantly better salary and work on more interesting problems?

If so, would you prefer the following?

Full day Saturday workshops for 3 months?

1 month everyday for 4-5 hours?