skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Or, at the minimum the payments to vested retirees should not be counted.

There's no such thing as "vesting" wrt Social Security. All benefits are at the whim of Congress. Yes, including those being paid now.

Congress could decide tomorrow to divert all SS payouts to hookers and blow and retirees would have no legal recourse. (They could, of course, vote out incumbents in the next election, but that's no guarantee that the new rascals would restore the benefits.)

> Besides, it is unseemly for a country as rich as the U.S. to have millions of uninsurable people dying prematurely.

The US doesn't have "millions of uninsured dying prematurely". The available research suggests that insurance improves quality of life but doesn't have much effect on life-span. (The error bar goes from "no effect" to "there seems to be a very small effect".)
"I don’t think it’s a problem when Apple decides not to move money made overseas back to the US. That's their decision and there is nothing shady about it either way. I can't think of any moral objections."

I don't think this is a problem either, unless they lobby themselves a holiday under which they can move it back on the cheap. Which is something they have been trying to do for a while now (to be fair, Google, Cisco and others have been pushing for this with them, so it isn't just Apple).

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-29/google-joins-apple-...
WebOS's biggest problem was UI performance. Sick, sad irony strikes again.
What kind of crappy online editor are you using that doesn't save continuously?
Of course, but they'll pool all the profits they can in the jurisdiction that forces them to pay the lowest rate of tax or no tax at all (i.e. Caribbean tax havens), regardless of the actual source of revenue, source of talent, or production location. This is morally unacceptable, if currently legal; laws can and should be changed to account for a changed, more globalized world.

If you design in California, produce in China and sell in Europe, you shouldn't be allowed to shelter your profits in Caribbean tax havens instead of giving back to the societies that made you successful in the first place. We need better treaties among countries to adequately tax large capital movements across the world.

Note how the Chinese try to sidestep the problem by heavily restricting capital flow in exit. This has never been a viable policy for capital-rich countries with saturated markets, of course; but as we've been seeing since 2008, US and EU markets are not as capital-rich as we thought, after all. This doesn't mean that we should blindly follow Chinese policies, of course, but maybe a degree of restriction should be introduced.
This is crazy, but I actually have a comment about Apple's response, not a political rant on the general idea of taxation.

Apple includes "income taxes withheld on employee stock gains" in "Apple's" tax payments. But aren't these employees' income tax, not Apple's? Is this another instance of creative accounting?

Sure, Apple can claim that they helped create that income, just like they helped create the job. But I'm talking specifically about their claim that they are a "top payer of U.S. income tax" because of their employees' tax obligations.
>I would say that HN readers and contributors are among the smartest people on the web

But HN readers are almost exclusively rich white American males. They've never had any adverse experiences in their lives. They've never been frisked by the police; they've never gone hungry for even one meal; they borrowed money from their parents to get started; their parents put them through college.

Having no experience of adversity is proven to produce feelings of excessive competence/arrogance in people. And that's pretty much what you see here.

Very few of them have any sense of the society that they are coasting on top of, nor does telling them that they are one injury from abject poverty make any difference. They don't really believe it, not in their hearts.

So, sorry, but you aren't going to get a lot of sensible responses about taxation here. They're incapable of it.
Ask HN: Has there been a drop in later stage funding rounds?
It seems like I don't read about very many later stage rounds of funding (series C, D, E, etc.) as say three or four years ago. Is it just me or has anyone else noticed too?
This crashed my mac entirely. avoid.
The article completely fails to recognize the value of the acquisition of technology, the elimination of competition and any number of other factors that account for the valuation of a business.

If a successful company with massive earning potential decides to pay what seems like too much for another company with no visible revenue and it doesn't make sense to you, it's probably not a great idea to flaunt your ignorance by writing an article for a major publication.
I manage a repo that has the bare bones of a roguelike in many languages.

It's a little more involved than a Hello World in that it needs to handle input, output, state etc.

I could always use more languages if anybody wants to pitch in.

https://github.com/nrkn/SimpleRL
One key difference is due to non-standard data formats and features, software has a far greater lock in. Cell phones might drop 90% of their "recurring" customers over 3 years, but that's because the phone number goes with the client and there isn't much of a down side. With something like an accounting app or a CRM there is often way too much work to move to a new system, so the churn rates are smaller and the profit margins higher.
They could, but they don't.
it loads mega slow
What browser are you using? Worked fine for me on Chrome.
SlimBrowser 6.01.030 on Downloads App
How To Use Tor With Bridges In case ISP Or Govt Firewall Blocks It
Glencore: A Giant Among Giants
Social Security cannot ever go "completely insolvent", which a cursory amount of education on the subject would teach you.
Indeed, the post completely overlooks conferences, which in many fast-moving disciplines (most of CS, e.g.) are really the main venue for presenting new work, superseding journal publications. Think ICML or NIPS in machine learning -- 6 months apart.

I question the need for a for-profit enterprise like the one the author promotes inserting itself into the research enterprise. Publishers are bad enough.
Well, Microsoft is quite active in the patents game too.

http://mashable.com/2012/04/25/microsoft-pegatron-patent-dea...
Bilton is channeling Eduardo Saverin, who pushed for early revenue at Facebook, clashed with Zuckerberg, and got squeezed out with a mere $2 billion or so for his trouble ( http://www.forbes.com/profile/eduardo-saverin/ ).

Look at YouTube. It seems to be doing pretty well for Google now, with more intrusive pre-roll video ads and popups during videos. Google also gets strategic benefits, good placement on iPhones, a better seat at the table for its so far not very successful TV products.

If YouTube had started off with those annoying ads, would it have seen off the competition?

A lot of digital startups are in winner-take-all markets. The conventional wisdom is, push for revenue if it helps you deliver a better product, through revenue relationships that also bring content, users, and lock out competitors.

If the market doesn't value revenue, but values users and the aura of hypergrowth and the next big thing, and it can be fatal to allow space for imitators and competitors, entrepreneurs are being strategic and rational to push for growth at all costs.

It's a perfectly valid strategy to build an innovative product that may be a proverbially two-legged horse that doesn't stand on its own, seize a dominant position, and sell to one of the massively cash-generating platform companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, that need to maintain their position.

Or if you're in the right place at the right time, that's how Facebook and Amazon became platform companies.

Where would Facebook be today if Zuck had pushed for revenue and organic growth, instead of charging for growth and dominance at all costs?

And that hothouse atmosphere is why the US startup ecosystem is dynamic, and beats competitors around the world flat.
yeah, when I saw the title I thought it's about tor indexing (which technically would be a pain)
What comic book movies can teach us about social media
>The government isn't inflating the cost of education.

Well, there is a semi-legitimate argument that the government making it easy to borrow large sums of money is encouraging price increases in higher education, especially in for-profit higher education where most of the students are borrowing the entire cost of their education.
Oh man, I really want to buy this guy's art and put it up in my living room.

Edit: Wow, thanks Google! http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/jason-padgett.html
Sorry, I didn't think to post it because it's not a generally useful patch. It eliminates rather than fixes the functionality.

Here's to hoping Woothemes gets this sorted out. As it stands, automatic updating to 5.3.11 is still broken, and instead of stating this directly, it claims that your currently installed (out of date) version is current.

That's a cute side effect of woo_get_fw_version returning the currently installed version # instead of throwing an error if http://www.woothemes.com/updates/functions-changelog.txt isn't available for download (which it isn't, at the moment.)

--- ./wp-content/themes/inspire/functions/js/shortcode-generator/preview-shortcode-external.php.orig
+++ ./wp-content/themes/inspire/functions/js/shortcode-generator/preview-shortcode-external.php
@@ -58,6 +58,7 @@
<?php

$shortcode = isset($_REQUEST['shortcode']) ? $_REQUEST['shortcode'] : '';
+$shortcode = '';

// WordPress automatically adds slashes to quotes
// http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3812128/although-magic-quotes-are-turned-off-still-escaped-strings
Games--especially the puzzle type--are really hard for me to purchase. They might be crap, or they might be pure gold. But without a free version, I don't know it fits my play style.
I appreciate what you're doing. Whatever you do try not to hinder people learning vim as a core. After installing Janus, I decided that I wasn't learning Vim anymore, I was learning Janus. Getting rid of Janus and MacVim and starting off with a tiny .vimrc allowed me to actually learn Vim. It was the single best thing I did to learn Vim. Since then my .vimrc has grown pretty large (compared to what it was when I started), but it's all mine now. It fits my workflow and it's perfect.
I'm an Arch Linux user and love it.

http://www.archlinux.org/ Installation is not for the feint of heart though.
I like the idea of having a list like what you link to in the game: http://www.wikipeetia.org/src/improve-wikipedia/

Then, you can add other things in your list like mistakes, other grammatical improvements, or even link to articles that have those warning labels (lack of sources, opinionated section, etc.).

You can take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Twinkle too... It's an open-source[0] script that helps Wikipedia users maintain articles.

[0]: https://github.com/azatoth/twinkle
The BOM is not legal UTF-8. Do not put a BOM in your UTF-8 documents. (Accept a BOM in other people's UTF-8 documents, because Postel's Law, and because other people are dumb. But don't perpetuate it...)
BTW, that's a good domain name (jobinsiliconvalley.com) & which itself is a start-up idea.
LinksWeaver: Accepting submissions for the early beta phase
Whether you are a programmer, a designer, a musician or someone coming from any other creative field, whether you have an idea, a project, want to add more experiences on your personal portfolio or simply want to capitalize on your skills, LinksWeaver is going to offer a service you will love.

Starting today, LinksWeaver is accepting submissions for early access to its beta phase. Visit www.linksweaver.com to register now.
Chattanooga looks interesting.

They have reasonably priced, supafast internet access and there are quite a few startups in the area already.
I am trying to get the graphics I made for the children's book I wrote with this concept (not yet published, but now it's time to try) uploaded in a decent form onto cafepress. I'll post if it comes out okay and I can sell t-shirts.
Speaking as a user rather than a dev, even the current package management system is better than what we have on Windows. On linux, my libraries are six months out of date because that's how long it takes the community to add them to the repositories. On windows, my libraries are anywhere from two to six years out of date because that's the version that's distributed with each program, and my programs are anywhere from six to twenty months out of date because that's how often I reinstall my OS and go looking for new installers. I'll take Linux for now. It could be better, but it also could be worse.
So, you don't like the back button in browsers either? The Android back button does the same, but for the whole OS.
Show HN: easily embed Gists in your Tumblr blog.
The Startup Resume
I think we need to start using a [WebGL] tag or something for these... obviously some browsers don't take it well, and it would keep a lid on all the (kinda pointless) "Doesn't work"/"works for me" comments.

Works for me. Super cool.
Another Brazilian here and you are definitively right, our government is mostly filled with white color thiefs.

So this might be mostly a some criminals going after another group for some problem they had.
Well, it was farther off two years ago when I posted the picture. And I got my MA in 1986 on my 22nd birthday. (Later got an MLIS on another birthday.) I put a math problem in my follow-up post. You should be able to calculate my age and my son's ages from these clues: http://sonderbooks.com/blog/?p=10000
It's Florian Mueller who's behind the site.
His credibility it... well.. just google around, you know soon.
Amazing Creative Video Infographics
Loaning money that poses no risk to yourself (subprime brokers) is quite different from loaning money you risk losing (VCs).

Morals don't come into it, they are factually different. VCs aren't on selling their risk (thus mitigating it). Are they? (I could misunderstand how VCs operate).
Apparently "Ivy Bridge" is NOT the name of a female model.
I'm working right now to see if I can get the charts I made into a good enough copy to upload to cafepress and sell t-shirts.
On the Origin of Consumer Electronics: An Essay
tl:dr; Use UTF-8 when you need to use unicode with legacy APIs, never anywhere else.

UNIX isn't UTF-8 because UTF-8 is better, UNIX is UTF-8 because you can pass UTF-8 strings to functions that expect ASCII and it kinda works. This is really the only thing you need to know about UTF-8 and why it's better.

There are few pieces of software that don't have to talk to legacy APIs that store strings natively in UTF-8.

C# and Java are probably the best examples of software that was engineered from the ground up and thus uses UTF-16 internally because it's much less likely to run into issues like String.length returning 32 yet only containing 31 characters. If you use UTF-8 expect this result anytime a string contains a real genuine apostrophe.

"UTF-8 and UTF-32 result the same order when sorted lexicographically. UTF-16 does not."

This is complete and utter bullshit, to sort a string lexicographically you need to decode it, if you've decoded the string into UNICODE then they sort the exact same way.

There are lots of gotchas for sorting UNICODE strings including normalization because you can write the semantically equivalent strings in unicode multiple ways. eg. ligatures.

If you're sorting bit strings that happen to contain UTF-8/32 then you're not sorting lexicographically and your results will be screwed up anyway.
Chrome 20. browser went full-screen, all white. Couldn't even force quit, had to reboot.
Okay, you passed me. I knew I should have pulled out my very old Modern Algebra book. I was thinking in terms of modulo groups. You can show lots of number theory with the sweater, granted that the number on the end is the equivalent of zero. I want a group under multiplication. Is that making any sense?
I completely agree with you regarding our current tax-and-spend practices; but I think the flaw is not with taxation, but rather with corrupted democratic practices, both in the culture, and in the electoral-industrial complex. If government was truly an extension of public will, we would have mechanisms to pressure it to spend efficiently in ways that create infrastructure and jobs (operating system : software :: government : businesses).

Now, there's a case to be made that such corruption is inevitable, that power will always overwhelm the public good, and that distributed self-governance simply can't work. I think that view is merely born out of cynicism and a feeling of powerlessness, and it betrays a lack of imagination. If the enlightenment revolutionaries had thought that way, we'd likely still have nobles and kings.
> "Pandora, for example, may not have any earnings, but the value of controlling the source of 100 million users music is no doubt quite valuable."

Valuable to whom, and to the tune of how many dollars?

I'll agree that some startups have the potential to be worth a lot of revenue down the line - I mean, it is how nearly all startups get off the ground. But this doesn't seem like the case here - Pandora never really saw very much revenue despite dominating the online streaming market. Their valuation was always based on an ephemeral notion of being able to monetize better some undetermined time in the future with their user base.

And then Spotify and Rdio came in... so now Pandora's market share is at risk long before they ever got around to really monetizing their users.

So while your point is theoretically valid, in reality 99% of the time it simply doesn't apply.
I think that's my bottom line reason why I didn't include it. This is all about factorization. 1 is the background color, because anything times 1 is itself. But I don't think 0 would quite fit with the pattern.

What do you think of my plans for a prime factorization scarf? http://sonderbooks.com/blog/?p=10000
PREordering pizza...
Another great post by you guys. Love the distinction between Loops and Arcs, though I'd love a specific example of Arc -> Loop -> Arc as a primary game flow. Most RPG games (like Mass Effect) go Arc -> Arc -> Arc, with Loops typically being regulated to side quests or objectives (like resource harvesting). In RTS games, the entire game is Loop -> Loop -> Loop as far as gameplay is concerned, and then the story itself is an Arc.
I'm gonna add to that 'not for the feint of heart' line. Install a couple linux systems like Debian, Gentoo, or Arch, and it's like riding a bike. It just comes to you after that, so try out Archlinux. It's my personal favorite, and I'm running it just fine on my Macbook. Read the new user guide, and spend the time to experiment and make a system that just works for you. If you're worried about stability don't enable the testing repos. Flash is as simple as pacman -S flashplugin. Actually I think it's time to install Gentoo in VirtualBox and see if I want to switch back to my old love.
Same here. Had to reboot.
Finding a business partner (co founder) is just like finding a life partner. You have to start out with a business date and see if you can take the relationship to the next level. Running a business is all about conviction and hard work. You will go through lots and lots of ups and downs and for better or worst your business partner will be there to share your burden. You should try to get a co-founder with skill-set that is different from yours. So, if you are a coder, try to bring someone who is great at sales and marketing especially with user acquisition experience. Two hackers are good but diversity in co-founder is even better! Especially, if you can get someone with user acquisition experience upfront, it will make all the difference. Building some thing that every one wants is the hardest thing to do so in a team try having one person focused on building the product and the second person on bringing users to test it.
Hm. Interesting. Using binary graphics drivers (nvidia et al)? Maybe something corrupted memory. Did it survive even a restart?
I wonder how they determine that an Android device is actually running their MDM software instead of a fake program that simulates it while being observed by the authorities?
Probably because modern Korean text is Hangul, which is not really derived from the Han characters Chinese and Japanese have in common.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters
That's disingenuous. How have the companies you funded in 2005 been doing? For those that were acquired or IPO'd, the current valuation bubble has benefited you immensely. The amount you invest in new companies pales in comparison to the payout from a company like Groupon. Granted, few investors have a Groupon in their portfolio, but you're still getting paid more than you would without inflated valuations.
A lot of software predates UTF-8.

For example, scripts on Unix-like (Unix, Linux, BSD) systems. In order to determine that a file should be executed using an interpreter, they look for the ASCII bytes "#!" at the beginning of the file. If those bytes are not present (such as if the file is UTF-8 with a BOM), then it won't be executed with an appropriate interpreter.

Now, once the interpreter is found, it can interpret the rest of the text as it sees fit (for instance, interpreting it as proper UTF-8). But the first two characters of the file must be "#!".

Furthermore, the BOM is simply a bad idea. It was poorly conceived from the beginning. It means something different at the beginning of a file than it does in the middle (at the beginning, it is the BOM; in the middle, it is a zero-width non-breaking space. This means that you can't simply append files or strings that begin with the BOM, and have the result still be valid.

The BOM should not be used for sniffing files, except as a fallback. Sniffing is a terrible way to tell what encoding a file is in. The format should be recorded somewhere (in file metadata, by default, by the locale, or something of the sort). Sniffing should only be used as a last resort.
CCP: players' attempt to destroy Eve Online economy is "f***ing brilliant"
> decoded the string into UNICODE

I think you are quite confused.

1) Unicode is not an acroynm.
2) You cannot "decode into Unicode". I think you mean "decode into codepoints".
3) If that is what you mean, then you are wrong about sorting: Sorting UTF-8 and UTF-32 bytestrings will indeed sort them lexicographically by code point, which was the author's point. No, that will not generally be the sort you _want_; but no amount of 'decoding' will give you the sort you want. For that you need to first normalize, and then follow the collation rules, which don't sort by raw code points at all.