skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're just like Enron that always blamed government regulation of the market. Check out this documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The_Smartest_Guys_in_the..., it's nice to learn from history. I agree that government regulation can be as dangerous as out of control police force, but libertarians (similar to communists) are completely oblivious (sometimes on purpose) of how absurd their idealistic word is and lack basic understanding of human nature.
May I ask why GReader is not an alternative?
I actually object to the word "natural" as they use it in the article. It seems in context to mean "things that aren't man-made" which is only accurate in a really broad sense.

Deer flies are natural, for example, but I'm pretty sure that's not what the author means. How relaxing would that walk through the arboretum be if you had to spend the whole time swatting insects?
50 Ways to Protect Your Anonymity Online and Off
In today’s information age, it’s incredibly difficult to keep your personal data private. However, there are a number of ways that you can work to increase anonymity. Read on to discover 50 methods you can use to be as anonymous as possible.
Probably around 2004 I started noticing that many young people had forgotten (or never learned) how to arrange a meeting without a mobile phone. Several times I had conversations like this:

"Just call me when you get there."

"I don't have a phone."

"Umm... so what do we do?"

I had to explain that we needed to agree on a time and exact location to meet. It was very strange, as I hadn't had this problem in the previous decade when I was meeting people.
First, the Clinton administration did not synthesize a surplus out of the social security trust fund; they simply had the good fortune to take office during a period of historic productivity expansion.

Second of all, the "IOUs" you're talking about are government bonds. For your argument to hold, you have to assert that the government is going to default on its own bonds.
Steve Jobs is Ailing and will miss Macworld | TechJaws
Gatlinburg Cabins in Gatlinburg TN - Baskins Creek Vacation Rentals
Now we get war propaganda - come on HN we do not need this sort of stuff. It is not pertinent or interesting and thus fails to meet the criteria for an HN post.
Both translations from latin are indeed correct. But Descartes first used the french "Je pense, donc je suis" so yours is probably more correct.
The parent and grandparent posts don't disprove the slate article's claim, however:

> ...you end up with about 95 percent of all college-level readers reading between 200 and 400 words per minute.

So you both might be in the <5% group who reads faster than that.
Not well for him or for Apple?

Jobs will go to extremes for his sense of justice. He could have stayed at Apple the first time, but he quit instead to make a new company that did what he felt he ought to do.
The retirement component of social security is not insurance. It does not spread the cost of low probability, high cost events among the insured. Only the very small disability insurance part of SS does this. As I mentioned, that is a separate issue.

Tell me; if Madoff called his hedge fund an "insurance program", and actually devoted 1% of it to providing disability insurance, would that make it not a Ponzi scheme? Incidentally, Madoff's returns were not unnaturally high, just unnaturally regular.

As for the fraud, it's true that the nature of SS is quite clear. SS uses force instead; if you don't pay in, you get locked up. So maybe "Ponzi Protection Racket" would be more accurate than "Ponzi Scheme".
It's the same for Linux, too.
Ask HN: How would you change this blog community?
A friend and I have been running a blog network for college students in our free time--TheCollegeBlogNetwork.com. It was somewhat of a stagnant project for a few weeks and now we're back working on it as much as we can.

How would you change our website?

We're currently working on a redesign and a bunch of new features (some of which is related to our monetization strategy.) I am always amazed at how insightful HN can be and would love to hear your input on what you would do to change our website.
Note that in the US, there are strategies for "paying a small salary and the rest in corporate-taxed dividends", as the author recommends; they involve setting up an S-Corp.

People routinely recommend this is a way to avoid FICA, which applies only to actual payroll. However, the IRS requires you to pay yourself a "reasonable" salary. Taking $10k in salary in $50k in distros is likely to get you audited. During an audit, the IRS gets to decide what your "reasonable" salary actually was.

Not worth it.
Malaria has no effective vaccine. Polio only exists in 3rd world countries at the moment, so it's doubtful it's sold in the first world to subsidize the 3rd world.

If a company is claiming to do this, they are very likely to be scammers.
Dell Studio 15 Reviews
Hi, I'm the author of the post.

My intent in using Memcache as the mechanism for this type of indexing was more an attempt to relate the subject with something that most developers are at least somewhat familiar with. I explicitly address the weaknesses of Memcache in the section titled "Weaknesses". I also recommend some work-arounds to lessen the effect of Memcache's limitations. In the "Wrap-Up" section, I even go so far as to say that Memcache is really only one example of a distributed hash-table and that there are alternatives. Rolling your own is another option, and both of solutions are probably better suited to the indexing problem than Memcache.

Again, I was afraid that the subject would be lost on most people if there wasn't at least some relation made between the concept and something that concretely exists. Try to look at it as an exercise in thinking "outside the box", using the best example I could think of.

Thanks for the comments, good and bad. These critiques really do help.
The average lifespan is not increasing but the percent of people living into old age is. Someone dieing at 55 vs 60 does not save SS the money of someone dieing at 85 vs 80.

The baby boom also distorted the number of young people supporting old people, but over the next 40 years far more people will reach 95 than did 40 years ago. The other main support of SS was the long term increase in income, but middle class wage stagnation has also impacted SS. Most of the economic growth over the last 20 years has occurred well above the SS cap so it's not capturing that growth.

PS: (technology) Cars kill the young, medicine and sanitation keeps the old alive. Few young people need much in the way of medicine and few old people drive.
You're arguing that Social Security isn't an insurance program. I'm arguing that it isn't an investment system. If we're both right, it's still not a Ponzi Scam. It doesn't blow up like a pyramid scheme, and it doesn't attract victims with returns on investment. What it does is allow a generation of entrepreneurs to start companies instead of working for Geico and Alcoa to keep their parents out of the cat food.
What is all the fuss about how you can write DSLs in Lisp?
I try to keep all my non-fiction cataloged at LibraryThing. I've been kind of sloppy entering tags, so most books aren't tagged. I suppose I should fix that.
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Tangurena

As you can tell from the already tagged books, I'm primarily a .NET developer.
I found it interesting, especially the information about calling ahead of bombing runs. I could do without the commentary on how 'moral' they are.
Rethinking authentication for twitter
According to wikipedia, "hormones are chemicals released by cells that affect cells in other parts of the body". Now, I'm not a doctor, but I think "hormone imbalance" is probably the most general thing one can say about a health problem.

Kind of like my program doesn't work because the characters aren't lined up correctly...
Numerous celebrity/company twitter accounts hacked
Do you really think Steve Jobs would lie about his health like this? What reason does he have? Why would he invent something like hormone deficiency? Why would he lie about being at risk of his life?
Point one: Right, but, depending upon whose numbers you use in 2018 we stop putting money into the trust fund and start pulling from it. Also, it's not really a trust fund. Excess funding does go into a trust fund but it is then lent to the Treasury and spent. Instead of using the power of time to get a decent rate of return it's basically sitting.

Two, I agree, mostly. Since SS depends upon multiple workers for every payee, as the birth rate grows taxes increase or benefits decrease. As either happens it stops being perceived as a retirement plan (which the general public currently does) and starts being perceived as welfare.

On the third point, I don't disagree at all on how many people live off of it. Our generation expects a much, much higher quality of living than our parents and grandparents. $1,000 a month is barely enough to pay for the cost of very basic living. Think no vacations, meager meals, no cable TV, no going out for movies, etc.

The terrible thing is, if that money had been invested instead of sitting like it has, those people could easily be living on man, many times that.

I think far less people would have issues with parking a mandatory 12% of their income into investments than letting the government handle it.
Becoming A Brand: Pointless
FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE Announcement (DTrace & ULE scheduler by default)
I disagree:

to at least give people a small idea of what is going on with him, so they can gauge risk

That's not in his best interest. It is in the stockholder's best interest, the company's best interest and (perhaps) that market's best interest.

I fail to see how it is in Jobs's best interest.
I'm not sure how it isn't an investment system; you put money in because you are forced, but with the hope of getting money out later. That's closer to an investment than to insurance, though I guess the use of force confuses things.

You could be right, I never thought of it this way. Take a scam, then use a gun to force people to participate without disguising your intentions. Is it still a scam? Maybe not, I'll have to think about it.
if you like waterfalls, get a job where you spend time in a server room.
Entrepreneur Hotels, Y Combinator, and Dead VCs
Shakespeare's use of 'esse' in Hamlet is different from it's the use that is criticized by E-Prime I believe. It's worth noting that the Scholastics, influenced by Aristotle, enumerated and distinguished the different meanings of 'esse.' E-Prime seams to be more concerned with identity, Hamlet is concerned with existence.
As someone who has (succesfully) frontpaged dozens of Digg stories, I can tell you that unless you game the system with dozens of dummy accounts, there's a snowball's chance in hell you'll hit the front page. Spend $100 to hire some Indians to make an account and Digg, or use a service like piqqus.com.
I actually learnt it from Tony Robbins. :) I know a lot of people think that the self-help movement is a load of rubbish, and to a certain extent I agree.

But his guidance has been valuable to me.
In the UK "paying a small salary and the rest in corporate-taxed dividends" is normal practice and completely legitimate to the best of my knowledge. Obviously that might not be the case in other tax jurisdictions. Seek professional advice.
Motorola W377 Pink EUROPEAN T-Mobile Unlocked
Motorola W377 has come out with its well designed structure and great features. The phone has come out to rule in the world of wireless mobile communication. The main feature of the phone is great look having suitable dimension.
Their "thing" will be spamming blogs and forums with your links, which, unless done skilfully, will create severe negative backlash and get your site banned from Google. Alternatively, their "thing" will be showing your site as a popunder on spam domains and botnet computers, giving you worthless traffic that only drains your bandwidth. Don't risk it.
Agreed. I misinterpreted your original meaning. However, the stated upper bound on reading speed is false. Contrary to the article and it's egalitarian appeal, some people are just more gifted.
The anecdotes are quite good, if you happen to speak Norwegian.
Both. In this context, 'to be' is used in the same sense as 'to exist.' I'm not sure how you could use a different sense of 'to be' without rendering the sentence incomprehensible.
Really? In NYC you can't repair your own socks, steal/share wifi or go without contact lenses? Am I missing something?
In fairness, both could be true :)
From coding whore to opinionated developer?
Opinionated software is cool ... what about the opinionated developer?
I think both approaches can have merits. Doctors are only human, and they are not always right.
Open Hacker House: regular Wednesday meetup in San Francisco
Working for yourself is great but working by yourself can suck. So we're going to try an experiment, put a stake in the ground and see what happens.

Every Wednesday, all Wednesday, we will host a meetup/hackathon in the back room of Mission Creek Cafe on 21st and Valencia in Mission, SF. Feel free to drop by any time, meet and work where everyone knows your username. No signup, just show up. We'll be there.

More details: http://www.archivd.com/open-hacker-house
Look at the twitter feed: http://twitter.com/foxnews

Looks like the feed is updated automatically from RSS feeds or some other source. The latest tweet doesn't fit the template, so I'm guessing the "hacked" theory is correct.
master append before going back to nconc
If Japan can pull off this paper airplane that's launched from the International Space Station and returns to Earth (reaching speeds of Mach 20), then I'd have to vote for that:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7230949.stm
I love how some people can 'experiment' with living smaller while many in this country and the rest of the world have no other choice.

This experiment would have meant more in 2004 when everyone was living high on the hog.
PageRank is only one of the signals Google computes while ranking pages. From what I have heard, they have more than a few hundred different signals they compute - and are constantly iterating on to keep the search quality up.
yeah, we (or at least, i) discussed this idea in the last thread on this topic.

if i had more money, i'd be working out a way to make it happen, already.
SS is based on the assumption that people will die at some predictable rate. http://www.ssa.gov/history/genrev.html "If I have anything to say about it, it will always be contributed, both on the part of the employer and the employee, on a sound actuarial basis. It means no money out of the Treasury." It's only a scam if people who live don't get paid.

Anyway, they are projecting problems 40 years into the future if nothing changes. An influenza outbreak could dramatically change those predictions as could moving retirement age back 1 month. Suggesting we know the shape of the economy in 40 years is probably overly optimistic.
Underwater archaeology + prehistoric remains + lost shipwrecks = midwestern mystery
One does not necessarily invalidate the other.
Before his death, Robert Anton Wilson taught several online courses at the Maybe Logic Academy (http://www.maybelogic.org), which he founded. A large component of these courses took place in online discussion forums, where RAW encouraged the participants to use e-prime for all discussion.

At least one of the courses also included readings from Alfred Korzybski and the General Semanticists, who played a large role in formulating the concept and practice of e-prime.

Korzybski wrote a fascinating book called Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. In this work, Korzybski postulates that the multi-millennium-old Aristotelian system of thinking contributes a form of "essentialism" to the underlying metaphysical assumptions of the Western linguistic and philosophic traditions ("things" having "is-ness").

Korzybski argues that these metaphysical assumptions appear "false-to-facts" with modern scientific understanding (i.e. an operational accounting inspired by biological and physical systems thinking). These assumptions introduce flawed and delusional reasoning when projected on to a linguistic domain, and their operation on a human social system over time results in the emergence of pathological behaviors in individuals' interactions.

Korzybski and others concluded that a step towards a more-sane system of thinking might result in part from making explicit the flawed metaphysical assumptions implicitly derived from Arestotelianism, and eleminating their behavioral manifestation in speech (i.e. as forms of the verb "to be").

Science and Sanity can be previewed online at Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=KN5gvaDwrGcC&printsec=f...

Incidentally, the same RAW course which took readings from Korzybski also included James Joyce's Ulyesses as a primary text.
The iPhone version is pretty terrible (especially compared to Bloglines) and I don't want a separate app for it (like Byline). No per-feed view settings (headlines vs. full description) which makes skimming feeds way too cumbersome.
Fox News Twitter account hacked
SMART reminds me of performance evaluation at my last employer. In theory, it made sense, but in practice, the landscape often changed during the relevant timeframe and one was left retrofitting the goal to actual experience. Further, in practice the grunts were more subject to the SMART regimen. Management was free to (re)write their own definition of success; of course, they almost always succeeded.

If it's not too off-topic, I'd like to ask whether others have developed aversions to "goal management" based on experiences like the above? How did you separate yourself from the process? I hate B.S., and it was a constant struggle to make myself "give up" and "play the game".

I suppose the real answer is to get out of such a job. Perhaps my questions are more rhetorical that literal. However, one can't always immediately change jobs. Further, I wonder to what extent such experiences can negatively influence one's own mindset and behavior. Faced with such a lack of control, does one learn not to plan?
noodle, thats awesome. I know people are talking about opening up a Hub affiliate in SF and NYC, so maybe there's an opportunity
Actually it does. Here are two quotes from the article, both of them emphasized in the original.

"Studies show that people who read at or above the college level all read at about the same speed when they read for pleasure."

"the fastest college-level reader will read, at best, twice as fast as the slowest college-level reader."

The article isn't talking about 95% of college-level readers, it's talking about the best college-level readers. The above posts (as well as my observations outlined below) refute it quite well.
> Most OO languages are based on no theory

That's just not true. "A Theory of Objects" is a good introduction. See http://lucacardelli.name/TheoryOfObjects.html
for apple
I tend to write down every month large goals that I want to do. For example, I want to become a successful entrepreneur or I would like to win the world karate championships. After that I just focus on every day and see if my day matches my long term goals. I tried to plan too much in the past, I realized my time horizons are defined by now and my ultimate dreams.
Free, legal downloads of every Beatles song
Not a complaint about the article. I liked it. =)
only awesome once the ball starts rolling, until then, just idle thoughts :X

i originally wanted to start up some coworking space, but evolved it to include the concepts mentioned in the article.

edit: also, fwiw, i'm relocating to the atlanta area, which is a place that has potential but is not being correctly tapped (you might recall this article http://blog.jeffhaynie.us/whats-wrong-with-the-atlanta-start...), which is one of the reasons the thoughts turned towards how to make more than just coworking space happen.
I added the "It's not" about two minutes after posting, you might have got your comment in before I said that.
What's the odds you live to be 105? What's going to pay your income if you live that long? Ok, what happens in the great depression II shows up in 40 years?
Gizmodo was part of the problem Steve referred to, and they're still at it trying to cover their mistake. Their "updated" article still says that Steve is not doing the keynote because of his health, yet nowhere in the letter does Steve even imply that.

http://gizmodo.com/5120687/steve-jobs-health-declining-rapid...
If you've read The Watchmen, this is exactly how Rohrschach speaks throughout the entire(?) book. It makes him sound like he's a walking, talking news ticker or weather report.
I'm particularly interested in thoughts you have about how you lay Y-Combinator type investment on top of it. What's the right strategy? Having those folks give some development time to nonprofits is just one idea. Another idea would be to actually have promising college-age developers have a year long fellowship where 50% of their time was pro-bono and 50% of their time was working on their own projects.
ESnips: A Story of Hearthache
Again on your first point --- the only one I'll engage here --- the trust fund is:

* a fiction only if you believe that the government will default on its own bonds;

* projected solid into the '40s; and

* a red herring, because without it, we're discussing the general federal budget, and any predicted shortfall in Social Security is going to be dwarfed by Medicare-related programs and defense.
You have it backward. The percentage of people living into old age has not changed significantly. The average lifespan from birth has, but that's not relevant to SS. The average lifespan of someone who enters the system (an adult, at let's say age 18) is the same.

The percentage of people who live from the age of 18 to the age of 95 will not be higher than 40 years ago, in fact, it may be lower.
Get rid of the black background.
100 backlinks? How come google only shows one?
I'm not sure why you are writing about the Heritage Foundation or "Conservatism": Milton Friedman is a classic liberal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism), so it's a strange vicarious ad hominem attack.

His laissez-faire ideas have been extremely influential and have a stunning track record of success where they have been used.
"I am Sam" is active voice, and it's using the verb 'to be', because it uses 'am'. Eliminating the 'am' in this case would be pretty difficult, but another poster has reworked a line of Hamlet that uses "I am" and it's a pretty good example of using E-Prime for the sake of improving writing style.

"I was assaulted" is passive voice, also using the verb 'to be'. As you may notice, the passive voice uses 'to be' very often, so eliminating 'to be' would eliminate most cases of passive voice.

Languages like Russian and many others sort of do this: in present active indicative you do not use 'to be' unless you are emphasizing it, so "Sasha is a student" is literally "Sasha student". There is some linguistics term for it but it's escaping me at the moment.
Madoff was a Ponzi scheme because he paid 12% interest. That interest meant he had to get new people in the door to fund it. Ponzi himself borrowed money, then paid it back with interest.

Social Security doesn't do this.
Ah okay - thanks for the reply.
Once you start to get big, hacking and spam surely follow... It'll be interesting to see what the story is here. Is every twitter account hackable? Are they going to start implementing some sort of spam filter? or a method to report spam?
E-prime renders me incapable of expressing a value judgment as a statement of fact, proving my superiority over you ignorant savages still using standard English.

This sentence has awesomeness.
What is Social Browsing?
Always Treat Money Like It Is Your Own