skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as I understand the stories, under the current law he's legally in the clear.

Morally, the United States is full of free loading bastards who know every single loophole in the tax laws. Why single out this one guy? Because it's much easier to focus on a single individual and crucify him? He's hasn't done anything different then what other "free loading bastards" have been doing for years.

This is guy is not a born US citizen in the first place and he's been living in Singapore since 2009.
And if a screen reader can see the data, so can the scrapper.
I was kind of hoping that this was a story about employees of Pivotal (Pivots) causing trouble.
It's no coincidence. The Atlantic's "In Focus" blog is run by the same person who created The Boston Globe's "Big Picture" blog.

Here's his personal site: http://www.kokogiak.com/index.php
I've paid for KISSMetrics and really liked it. I know Mixpanel has grown, does anyone have reasons why I should use Mixpanel over KISSMetrics?

Also another good simple analytics service for all the different services you might use is DigMyData (http://digmydata.com/). I'm in a trial right now and finding it pretty useful.
And that is how creativity dies. Not all at once with a swift, decisive blow. More like the bites of 10,000 mosquitoes coming 1 at a time, about every 5 minutes so you don't notice that they've stolen a significant amount of your blood until it's too late.
> If you didn't want to take the risk of a loss, you should not have elected into Section 83.

tl;dr: I did not do a 83(b) election. Never assume you know how taxes work, almost no one does.

I invested in a company, as in, paid cash for preferred shares. That company was later acquired, in a stock+cash deal, mostly stock. The way the tax code works, I realized the gain on the day the deal went through. assume 5x short term gain in NY or CA: That's ~50% tax on the gain, or 2x in taxes ON THE DAY OF THE DEAL. but .. there's rule 144; I didn't pay for the acquiring company's stock - I was given them in exchange for the acquired company stock. So I have to wait 6 months to sell them.

During these 6 months, the acquiring company tanks 60%. My 5x (for which I already paid 1x) is now worth 2x, which I already paid in taxes -- I've lost all of my gains, and my initial investment. Again: I paid 1x originally + 2x in taxes, and now hold something worth 2x in my hands, for a net of -1x, on a successful investment!

Here's where the magic of dates come into play: if the deal goes through in jan-june, 6 month lockup ends within the same calendar year, and you can net the profit and loss. Which happened, luckily for me. If it is in jul-dec, you can't.

The acquiring company was 100 times larger than the company I invested in, and I was a minority investor there. Other than making the initial investment, I had absolutely no say about any deal -- the first time I could do anything was 6 months after the deal date, at which point I had already suffered all the consequences.

edit: corrected the math.

clarification: the numbers are not factual from my case. I actually ended with a modest 0.3x post-tax profit, everything taken into account (on a 5x acquisition!). The deal was very complex - the example I gave here makes it easier to understand.
This sounds like the typical hogwash from any other politically aligned media outlet. Am I reading a Fox News editorial? Just post the video and let "the internet" make the decision. If you think you think you can censor opinion in the modern world then you are flat-out wrong.
Looks like it, thanks!
This type of question comes up a lot. I can appreciate you are using the highly regarded problem / solution, vitamin not a painkiller approach to finding an idea, but STOP!

HN probably isn't a good place to start. We're not typical. For example: I want a tool to help me memorize new VIM commands...probably not a good business.

Start with a problem you care about...cause you'll be working very hard on it, for a long time, to turn it into a business. When you find a problem, seek some sort of confirmation. Then, build an mvp and see if folks will use it.

Good Luck
Hey! Happy to answer any questions anyone may have here :) I'm a co-founder of CrowdMob, huge Hacker News consumer, and ex-YC-reject :P
...and why do you want employees of Pivotal to be causing troubles?
Culture Is One Of The Most Important Aspects Of An Embryonic Startup
Is it sad that I think 6 days is pretty fast?
$18.4 billion dollars is a LOT of cash (to compare, Google raised $2.7 bn with their IPO). They can buy 18 SpaceX's, 2.3 Twitters or, you know, 18 more Instagrams. Their future is minted.
> Discussions about 'inequality' are entirely political

I really doubt that. Given that a Google for "study of effects of inequality" returns 13 million results, a citation of the absence of relevant citations is needed.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/05/07/how-venture...

The bubble is not in IPOs, it's in VC. Venture capitalists having been losing money for a decade. Their General Partners are starting to cotton on, and will start pulling funding.

Yes, there's good VCs which do make a bit, and a few lucky ones, but many VCs are taking money from "bucket fillers" - institutions who are told "put X% in VC". These "bucket fillers" have to invest the money, and the top VCs already have enough cash, so it goes to less savvy VCs who invest it in the startups who couldn't get funded by the good VCs.
People disagree on whether he is/was playing by the rules, and this is the very heart of the debate.

It's not an issue of objective technical compliance, since he has objectively complied with the rules. However, like all anti-abuse provisions of the tax code, there is a subjective element:
Did Eduardo renounce his citizenship to avoid paying U.S. federal income taxes on the sale of his Facebook stock?
If the answer is yes, there is a good probability that the IRS will pursue him for taxes arising from the IPO. (Note: in most situations, the primary intent must be to avoid taxes, but in some situations, any intent to avoid taxes is enough.)

Furthermore, he could be barred from this country ("excludable") under U.S. immigration laws.

The Senator has indicated that he believes the answer is yes. It's not a matter of spite; it's a mater of timing. Eduardo has been eligible for Singaporean citizenship for some time now, yet it was only when the Facebook IPO became likely (last fall) that he actually took steps to renounce his U.S. citizenship. (If you read other news sources, you will see the Senator refer to the timing issue.)

In the end, the only people who know what Eduardo's subjective purpose was in renouncing his citizenship are Eduardo and the advisors he consulted with in reaching this decision.
So do the reasons why such infuriating processes are enacted.
I don't see how the necessity of demand is the 'elephant in the room' - it seems pretty obvious that you need both supply and demand in order for ongoing commerce to take place.

Yes, there has to be a customer; but identifying that customer, discovering his desires, and satisfying them in a way that creates net value for all parties is the role of the entrepreneur. Doing that successfully is not a trivial task, and entails substantial risk. Saying that this isn't a value-added activity is like saying that scientific research doesn't create value because the physical world already is what it is, or that explorers and cartographers are useless because the land that they're mapping already exists.

And entrepreneurs and investors do create jobs: if a venture fails because it turns out that the demand wasn't there to begin with, the employees of the venture still get paid - not by the customer, but by the investors, out of the capital that they've risked and lost.
Atos Origin sets out to be a zero email company within three years
> Discussions about 'inequality' are entirely political

Disagree. If the result of certain economic practices result in social inequality, is that entirely political? Economics is a social science, so why should some results be only political? It's not as black and white as you make it sound.
He became a citizen and he got the benefits of being a US citizen.

Now he's choosing to become a citizen of another country and forfeiting those US citizenship benefits.

Just because you're a citizen, doesn't mean that country owns you – you still can choose to move, leave if you want to.

Saying he's a freeloader discounts basically everything Eduardo has done. I would say the net gain of Eduardo being in the US for the time he was, is significantly bigger than the net loss we'll feel from him leaving – making him the exact opposite of a freeloader.
That is a difficult question to answer without knowing the complete architecture. However there are cryptographic accelerators which would be of help.
Layoffs Are About To Hit HP
18 Mayıs 2012 Günlük Burç Yorumları
Unreal Engine 4 will bring us beautiful games faster than ever
Fifty Shades of Customer Development
> Also, I can do a lot of damage in one line.

Especially if it takes a week to revert it. You reap what you sow.
Wait. Does twitter have a reputation system running, even just in the background? That sounds like a very interesting direction for them (and, I secretly hope, a solution to the prevalent spam problem)

Or is this just a side-project?
Why and how is a Photoshop plug-in being sold only through the App Store?
Do you actually use the Push service? If you do, I would err with the side of caution since it shakes up the battery pretty bad.
Another way of replacing meat(and maybe reducing the price of food 10x and land and water use) , is using synthetic biology to manufacture the basic components of food and combine those to create tasty food[1].

The effect of this technology seem both really exciting,and really frightening(millions of the poorest losing their job).

[1]http://www.wesolveforx.com/#t=t&n=ee7350c5
Exactly, if you're not free to leave of your own choosing - a country begins to sound a lot more like jail.
I agree, but the key problem is that the U.S. tax system is structured to collect taxes after the period to which they relate. This is done to minimize the compliance burden on taxpayers and to minimize the IRS' burden in ensuring compliance. The alternative is to collect all taxes as they accrue (like sales taxes are now), which would significantly increase compliance costs for taxpayers and the IRS's workload.

The primary argument is that Eduardo owes these taxes because the underlying income was earned while he was an American citizen/resident. It's not a matter of what he is doing right now--it's a matter of what he was doing back then.
I wonder how Path is doing overall.

I have intentionally not invited anyone to Path because the value in it for me is a tiny tiny circle, and I don't really want to add anyone to it.

But I also check my Facebook and contact lists to see who has joined Path, and beyond the usual list of very early adopters, there's been no one new in months and months.
'Fuck that shit.'

maintenance programmer words to live by.
The most fun I'm having is watching "0" fly off to infinity when you switch from page 1 to page 4 or 5.

I guess negative infinity is pretty close to positive infinity in that toolkit.
BetterWorks (Employee Recognition Platform) Lays Off Most of Employees in Pivot
Thunderbolt also requires additional hardware. When Ivy Bridge brings built-in USB3, Thunderbolt will still require additional hardware. And Thunderbolt devices aren't nearly as widespread as USB3 ones. (I can go to Target and buy a USB3 memory stick right now; it's not certain that Thunderbolt memory sticks will ever exist.) They tend to cost over twice as much, too.
Why aren't you appealing directly to Philip more often? Give him a list of what you need and he could have what he wants with 3 emails. Also I don't understand what "access" you need to Marge? You can't email her or something?

edit: d'oh
To clarify (and answer @sureshv), Varnish allocates one worker-thread per session (active connection), but those threads are pooled by the managed thread pool @sureshv referred to. It's recommended to leave the thread_pool value at 2 and scale the thread_pool_min and _max values to suit your traffic.

As for the handling of the websockets, setting the pipe_timeout variable in the vcl file would release any persistent, yet silent, connections.
Why are you so intent on something bad happening to him? In the large scale of things - he got screwed when it came to Facebook.

Sure you might not like the guy, but when you're hoping bad things happen to him just because he's about to make a lot of money makes it look like you're awfully jealous of the guy.
If your data matters at all to the scraper, this won't present much of an obstacle. Fixing up internal links is really easy. Your average script kiddie could probably figure out how to work around this in a matter of hours. Like so many "tricks", it sounds like more trouble for you than for them.
A lot of the people commenting on these techniques being fallible are missing the point: the idea isn't to make scraping impossible (despite the misleading title), it's to make it hard(er).

A determined scraper will defeat these techniques but most scrapers aren't determined, sufficiently skilled or so inclined to spend the time.

I've been curious about a variation of the honeypot scheme using something like Varnish. If you catch a scraper with a honeypot, how easy would it be to give them a version of your site that is cached and doesn't update very often?
Employee Recognition Platform laying off all of their employees... oh the irony!

Interesting move as they just raised $8M in August (http://blog.betterworks.com/press-release-080111/)
I could be wrong, but I think Homer and Marge are servers, not people.
Do you have any evidence that he's sold all his stock? Because he wouldn't have paid all his capital gains tax until the last share is sold.

If he has indeed paid all the tax on the Facebook lottery winnings, then I don't have a problem with him renouncing his citizenship. But I've seen estimates that he saves $100m by doing this, and I presume that's because he still has the stock.
Honeypots are pretty worthless. The article counters itself.
Homer and Marge are most likely some kind of testing systems.
I thought it was pretty obvious that Marge is a computer.
New York Gets The First Underground Park Of The Future
I imagine that those limits are per-page, or perhaps per-domain.
(free, of course)

But the whole point is they only put the talks they want you to hear on YouTube.
Rich people hearing about income inequality is nothing new, but it's downright scary when they limit the non-rich hearing about it.
Reliability and quality are obviously important, but you have to question whether all these steps are actually helping you to achieve that.

All of these items in the story add overhead and reduce agility, but potentially do very little to improve quality:

- Mandatory paper trail via fields on the issue tracker
- The need for documented internal sign offs
- Standards and policies with no clear reason for the existence
- 'Micro' Code reviews
- Excessive permissions and security processes internally
- No pragmatism with regards to testing the change

This kind of stuff is a constant and substantial overhead on getting anything done. You need to look at these processes very critically and be very sure of the benefits in terms of quality before introducing it.
Ironically, work to prevent layoffs neatly identified all the people who should be laid off immediately.
We use APNS and C2DM, but you can turn them off if you're concerned.
>Finally, after 22 days, it came back up in the rankings

That is EXACTLY what is supossed to happen. Google runs a SE with over 5 billion URLs - if anyone tells you, or told you, that a transition was seemless and instantaneous, they lied.

To explain why, Google has this flow:

1. Crawl the old site - once it finds 301 redirects, it kills the old site and has no data on the new site yet.

2. Google crawls the new site, and starts to apply the old sites criteria - this is NOT, repeat NOT instantaneous.

3. All the "pre processed" signals are applied from the old to the new site.

22 days is a pretty short time to see things come back better, and I'd thank my lucky stars!
File-Sharing Is Linked to Depression, Researchers Find
A reasonable way to show high resolution images on retina displays
Facebook allows you to choose to either pay for impressions or for clicks. If you choose to pay per click, then why exactly is it only for branding? If the user clicked your ad, then there's your intent. If he didn't, then you didn't pay anything anyway.

Why exactly is that everyone keep repeating that facebook ads are for branding, there's no intent, low CTR etc. When you opt to not pay when a user doesn't click anyway?

In the article he talks about an example of a person who payed $100 to sell a single book. But I just looked at Facebook, and it costs around $0.25 per click. That means that 400 people actually clicked on his ad and only 1 bought a book. That's not a low click-through-rate, that's a low people-interested-in-your-book-rate. How is that problem any different from Google?
No, don't quit! Embrace! That's 14 hours (if I remember correctly) you could have spent working on your own projects instead of being pissed off on HN. The world is full of this, and it's well accepted and nobody questions it - make the most of it.
Unfortunately, Illustrator is essentially abandonware at this point. It's so hobbled by design defects and other bugs that you're much better off with Corel Draw, even if you have to run it in a VM on a Mac.

This is just one example:

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2362/1800773495_d1f776e335.jpg

Many (most?) vector-drawing applications let you select only the items that are fully enclosed by a selection rectangle. So if you wanted to select only the circles in that image, you'd need only to draw a selection rectangle around them.

Illustrator gives you no way to do this. Every shape that comes into contact with the selection rectangle (or even the path of the lasso tool) is selected. You can fire up Windows and do the whole thing in Corel Draw in the time you'll waste tediously clicking on everything in Illustrator.
Scoop: Google, Microsoft both targeting Amazon with new clouds
I think you hit the nail on the head, and find it very interesting people are down voting you.

This has shown TED doesn't want to spread the word about controversial issues that actually impact the vast majority of people's lives. I stand by the accusations of them being cowardly.

But of course, a society by the rich, for the rich is nothing new.
Facebook: 3rd Largest IPO Of All Time
What evidence do you have that his actions provide massive value? I grant that the actions of somebody at Facebook did, but I don't have particular reason to believe that he was the key factor. He was, after all, forced out early on, and hasn't done much interesting since.
All generations had plenty of bubbles. Maybe you were too young to have seen a previous one last time around, but certainly people in charge weren't.
Facebook insider sales are huge red flags
An Intro to In-Camera HDR on the iPhone and Canon 5D Mark III
the racist bit was not "feather not dot", it was holding up the "feather indians" as some stereotypical bogeyman of wild, uncivilised behaviour.
It could very well be, but it could also be that Ford is just using this as a creative marketing opportunity, to piggyback on the GM and FB hype to get their name out.
It would be interesting to see if Ford continues with their current FB Ads investment or increases in future.
With New Privacy Policy, Twitter Commits to Respecting Do Not Track
If I remember correctly, you were going to reinvent the Address book on iPhone. If I may ask, what was the reason behind pivoting from that idea to a private social network.? Curios to know the reasons behind abandoning the idea of building a better address book.
I've worked places where 6 days would be a miracle. For me, the worst has always been when the database query plan suddenly switched to something with a full table scan (I'm looking at you Sybase) or the always fun full sort merge (nice going Ingres). It always seemed to come down to forcing indexes which tended to get deployed fairly quickly.
http://www.MySlices.com
I find it tragic that this "storm in a teacup" instigated by a very rich and powerful person even happened.

Saying TED shy away from controversy, or even defining this talk as huge controversy is tragic.

Take this talk for example: http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_abo... -- stop reading this comment -- AND GO WATCH IT. It touches on many very critical issues in our society and the USA in particular that are marginalised and forgotten. If this talk was "censored" due to the fact it deals with "minority issues" I would understand a "censorship" claim.

The "tax the mega rich" talk was not powerful enough and did not properly deal with all the surrounding issues. As a person who watched many TED talks I also feel it was not at the right level. I also find it very disingenuous that the speaker did not tell anything about his story, what is he doing to change the state of affairs (besides talking at TED).
DRM stopping research
I think they are pitching it as a sort of 'exit tax' in response to perceived abuse.
I understand the advice to quit because of the agonizing process involved, but worse than that for me is the idea that this parameter is hard coded, and even with this change in place that limitation still remains. NO WONDER the change process is so painful, the software design is clearly brain dead. I bet all kinds of unexpected shit happens when changes are rolled out. This is a code smell like a rotting corpse.
Here is my approach on how to find scrappers.

They are already supplying fake data to see if they are being scrapped.

Using this fake data they can find all the sites that are using their scrapped data. Congrats we now know who is scrapping you with a simple google search.

Now comes the fun part. Instead of supplying the same fake data to all, we need to supply unique fake data to every ip address that comes to the site. Keep track of what ip, and what data you gave them.

Build your own scrapper's specifically for the sites that are stealing your content and scrape them looking for your unique fake data.

Once you find the unique fake data, tie it back to the ip address we stored earlier and you have your scrapper.

This can be all automated at this point to auto ban the crawler that keeps stealing your data. But that wouldn't be fun and would be very obvious. Instead what we will do is randomize the data in some way so its completely useless etc.

Sit back and enjoy
Ask HN: Flag/Unflag Effect?
I am on a tablet. Sometimes when I try to click on an article here, I accidentally flag it instead. When I notice it, I immediately unflag. I tried to search HN to see if there was prior discussion but found none. Does anyone know if promptly unflagging genuinely erases the damage to the items ranking?

Thanks.
And this is why many people like me refuse to allow https connections to their sites... Who wants to confuse Googlebot?
Rails : the next five years, by Yehuda Katz