skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you ever bought a domain? I see this meme continually and even on threads on hacker news. Do laymen really think that people are choosing these silly spellings because it is "the cool thing to do?"

FYI, to a ridiculous extent, all reasonable, 10 characters or less, English or English-ish domain names are occupied by squatters. I am not the OP, but so you understand the depth of the issue, I invite those who upvoted the parent to try finding available cancer-related domain names that would be appropriate. Submit 10 at the link below. If by some chance you do find a good one, why not report back and help out the op?

http://www.123cheapdomains.com/domain-registration/bulk-regi...
I agree, but man I'd be beyond pissed if the government was taking 50% of my money.
But most of success (especially at the upper echelon) is due to luck & timing; I don't know if that's a true syndrome.
At least it shows the advantage of CSS - within 30s I managed to do View/Page Style/Basic Style and made the text with ridiculous leading readable. The quicker that this particular trend dies out the better - a font-size of 14px with a line-height of 30px doesn't make for easy-reading,
Isn't this the one that was mocked by Feynman?
Making game was my primary ambition when I was young. I got my start "programming" by using a drag-and-drop game-making program called Multimedia Fusion, and first understood a good deal of the basics of C-descendants by reading a lengthy tutorial on a game-focused scripting language put out by the same company meant for MMF users.
I'm bothered by Jeff's attitude that a game made by a bigger company is somehow more deserving of piracy.
One of my biggest shocks of running a profitable small company is how much of that profit vanishes into (Iraq, GM, Bank Bailouts, etc....).

It seems that the large companies have enough accountants, divisions, and clever ways to avoid taxes that they pay a tiny percent, but small business don't really have much available and end up eating the full bill. I'm paying about 55% between federal and state taxes.
This is pretty clearly a chain-email written months ago by a McCain supporter, breathlessly warning of the dangers of electing an Obama administration.

The "...this is the type of change you can keep" is a dead giveaway.
That remains barely, and I stress barely, acceptable in embedded devices which just don't have the resources available to physically display and/or print all of the kanji they would need to accomplish their function. (Not exactly uncommon in things which are capable of printing receipts, which might need a set of kanji which could be almost unbounded at design time -- bank ATMs have to be able to print every name, etc.)

If, for example, you are producing the display logic for a printer it may not make economic sense to give it the necessary capability to write 用紙がありません。 so instead you write ヨウシガアリマセン。 in half-width characters. (Incidentally, that means "out of paper". I hate printer error messages because they are typically scrolling and I can't read scrolling solid blocks of katakana as fast as Japanese people. Funnily enough, my coworkers have the same complaint.)

If you are using a general purpose operating system, putting everything in kana/romaji is not acceptable. My bosses have the quite sensible notion that we are paying for a 100% job not a 100%-of-the-convenient-to-you job.
That is a ridiculous letter and should not be on HN. Fist, it disrespects others, which is bad for business. But more importantly, he fails to aknowledge the roads he takes to work, the water he drinks, the electricity, the schools he went to.... you get the idea.

I don't think government is the most efficient thing in the world, but I do think they have an important role in business development, if not the most important.

After living in developing countries (China, Turkey, Ethiopia), you come to appreciate the little things that our taxes pay for - firemen, policemen, roads, schools, hospitals. I am a small business owner and do not enjoy parting with money to an arguably inefficient government either, but taking it out on employees like that is childish at best.
Any tips? We have what I think are a good group of accountants doing our books and taxes, and yet beyond basic business expenses (computers, attending a conference to sell our stuff, cell phone bill, etc...) we're pretty much paying a TON of taxes.

Maybe that's all there is, but if you have any advice, I would be very interested in hearing it. (devon@digitalsanctuary.com)
There's almost an unhealthy incentive to blow money rather than make any profit, isn't there? Before I folded my little company, I'd routinely buy shit that I really didn't need since I could justify it as a business expense. Oh well.
taxi.

Compare all costs, and you'll land there...
Dull indeed, an old post about an even older post about some one's book list. Read it if you are bored and can't thing of anything else to do ... or you could read a book.
Most start ups fail. With a prediction market, betting on failure is a good default option, even if you know little about the idea.

However, most startups require optimism and a belief that the team has stumbled upon the best sliced bread since the big bang. Having nay sayers betting on failure undermines this belief.
This is why modeling your behavior after a particularly successful figurehead is of dubious value. It's very, very difficult to go back and explain why things worked out the way they did. Bill Gates made some brilliantly forward-thinking strategy decisions for his OS, did it at exactly the right time, and became a billionaire. Had a butterfly farted in an IBM exec's ear early in the process, things could have turned out completely differently.
When people talk about taxing the rich, it usually translates in the real world to sacking it to the people/businesses who have just moved out of the middle class and are finally reaching a growth stage. The mature big businesses all have all sorts of location and tax options they can use. Truly rich people live where they want and pay what taxes they choose to pay. So whatever the motive, the result of these policies is that you end up sticking the biggest burden on the pieces of the economy that are just beginning to grow, provide value, and are most likely to produce even more jobs and value. Kind of a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-to-make-headache-go-away strategy.
"Charge a fair price for it." seems to be a meaningless platitude in this instance, sort of a soup-bone to the "I'm only pirating because it is overpriced" apologetics. Isn't the whole point of the anecdote that World of Goo is, umm, more than fairly priced? (Seriously, people are pirating a $20 pass to pure gaming joy which requires a machine minimally ten times as expensive to run. Probably a hundred times for many of the pirates, since they are gaming enthusiasts.)

Want a recipe for being pirated less? Make something that people wouldn't want to get for free. crickets chirp Actually, that probably won't even help -- I think a large portion of piracy is essentially pathological. Bingo Card Creator -- an which assists primary school English teachers who are, on average, not likely to be reading Chinese pirate forums -- got spikes of 10k+ downloads when the new cracks were released.

It even had a description translated into Chinese... which was hilarious. (My brother translated for me: "Apparently it's like a gambling game for English or some shit.")

Honestly its like putting a shiny object in front of that bird with the unhealthy fascination for shiny objects whose name I am forgetting at the moment. If your code compiles, it will be pirated. You could make a Windows forms calculator with only a plus button, with an equals sign available with a CD Key, and people would pirate that. (I've often thought of trying it.)
The 25 dumbest moments in Gaming
Maybe about as "acceptable" as those terribly translated engrish manuals for electronics goods are to us :)
One of the most interesting new languages I've seen...and it's on geocities?
Even better, in Python!

print "NO"

It's missing some internationalization and it'll probably fail every now and then (but less than 0.03% of the time) but you'll have to agree it is very concise.

Sorry, I'll shut up now :p
Here's the source code for IsTheYesNoSiteMemeOverplayed.com

<html>
<body>
<h1> yes </h1>
</body>
</html>
Cuil Fail: Traffic Nearly Hits Rock Bottom
That's true, though I would guess that for the upper echelon success you need all: luck, timing, intelligence, competence, etc.

"Syndrome" just means this is a common pattern for successful people (independent of whether they are right or not about the role of external factors to their success).

For example, from the article about entrepreneurs and impostor syndrome (linked from the Wikipedia entry):

"Psychological research done in the early 1980s estimated that two out of five successful people consider themselves frauds".

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20060901/handson-leadership.html
I highly encourage people to expense things they'd have to pay for anyway (e.g. health club memberships, cell phones, parking passes, subway cards, etc). Just make sure you talk to your accountant first.
> But one way or another, all systems are embedded systems. [...] host systems often overlap and even cooperate. A city is composed of many interleaved subsystems. So is your body. It's not always a simple containment relationship. Systems are made of, and communicate with, other systems.

So now the definition of "embedded system" is essentially a "thingy". Thingies overlap and cooperate, thingies are made of and communicate with other thingies.

That's not very enlightening.

I have no idea what the purpose was of the 3000 (?) word analogy between Mario Cart, a fish tank and embedded systems. And also it's unclear how the "holes" (data channels) are related to reflection and metaprogramming.

And finally, I don't see how he can be so certain the state of the Universe was "undefined" before the big bang. Maybe the Universe had a definite and sensible but (to us) unknowable state before the Big Bang.
Import skynet
Chain letter politics emails aside, if your business looks like this, you're probably doing it wrong. I don't understand why people think being married to a business is healthy or necessary. (It might be in some businesses. If you're the sole employee keeping a hospital's generators running, yep, you just bought yourself a very stressful lifestyle. Don't be the sole employee keeping a hospital's generators running.)

I love my customers. They are very important to me. If there is a bonnie lass who has booked my evening, then their emails can wait a few hours. I'm an engineer -- I'm perfectly capable of creating automated systems which generally function whether I am physically present Right This Minute or not.

If they tend to not do that, you can either code better (not sarcastic -- every time I lose money or time on date night as a result of a bug, my appreciation for proper testing increases) or pay somebody to worry about it for you.
This is an interesting article, mainly because it shows up the differences between the European attitude and the American one.

1. Europeans build smaller, but with higher quality. Americans are not so fussy about quality as long as it's big. Witness the spread of 3000+ sq ft homes across our exurbs.

2. With cheap energy costs predominant, a large house can be built cheaply - thin walls, vinyl siding, asphalt roof, cheap windows - and even still, the costs of heating and cooling can be manageable, even though much more energy is used.

It would be interesting to compare point by point, the area, cost structure, including labor, of a European house and an American house.

I agree with gcv, and with the article, that the cost of building like this in the US is probably prohibitive for most homebuyers in the US.

The interesting question, in parallel with cars, is can the direction of US policy and custom be steered towards smaller and smarter without a failure of house builders and car companies alike?
Fair warning: I am not an accountant, the below information is just from my own experiences and does not constitute professional advice. Talk to an accountant.

The biggest one is expensing things you'd have to pay for anyway (e.g. health club memberships [if applicable], insurance, cell phones, health savings account, home internet & computers [if you work at home enough], parking passes, subway cards, business mileage on your cars and lumping personal trips & business trips together [careful with this one]. These take advantage of pretax dollars. I encourage you to do same for your employees since you're offering real perks with pretax dollars. Just make sure you talk to your accountant first

If you operate on a cash-basis (as opposed to an accrual basis) make any capital improvements/major purchases at the end of the quarter or fiscal year instead of the beginning of the next quarter or fiscal year. You can get around some of the 401k limitations if you own your own business. Finally, sometimes it's cheaper, in a tax sense to issue dividends to yourself and fellow equity holders. All of this varies significantly by legal formation and state.

Finally - and I can't emphasize this enough - invest in a good accountant. There's so many write-offs & tricks that the average person would never even think of and the laws, in typical US fashion, are filled with red tape & loop holes. Having someone to help you navigate them is crucial.
Bjork, Icelandic Singer and…Venture Capitalist?
Not nearly as good as part one, he's back to rambling again.
I see this argument a lot, "Oh well, it's cheap, so people should just pay for it!" and it seems to gloss over one important fact.

Money is not an unlimited resource.

If there are say.. $4,000 (purchase price) of fun and awesome things released in a year, and the average person after things like bills, rent/mortgage, etcetera only has say.. $500 left to actually spend on frivolity, then they might decide the following:

"Well, I guess I will download the rest. It's not like they are losing a sale. I don't HAVE any money, anyway!".

And, if this is the case, it's true. No-one actually LOSES anything. You can't lose a sale you could never have made anyway.

So such numbers can be shockingly misleading.
Is it raining pixels on that site? I see white pixels moving from top to bottom of the site...
What about a hardware token? Are those effective?
My thoughts exactly. This guy is a dick. If I were working for him and got this letter, I'd hand in my resignation.

To the author: You're not the navel of the universe. I'm oh so sorry you've had to work hard for your shit. So has everyone else. In your darkest hour of disdain for the hapless employees you've hired to help expand your business, never forget: if it wasn't for all these people, you wouldn't be rich, because you wouldn't be able to hire all those people to make money from you.
I actually get bored well before something comes together... as soon as I can see the solution, it takes quite a bit of discipline to actually execute it. Since I haven't yet highly achieved, I'd say that if there's such a link, it's to a sweet spot rather than "more easily bored -> more acheivement".
The most interesting thing about the BT paradox, for me, is its interplay with the Axiom Of Choice. Most of the mathematics I did as part of my PhD would fall apart without AC, but I still remember being very unsettled by BT.

The existence of nonmeasurable sets, such as those in the Banach–Tarski paradox, has been used as an argument against the axiom of choice. Nevertheless, most mathematicians are willing to tolerate the existence of nonmeasurable sets, given that the axiom of choice has many other mathematically useful consequences.
Whats the point of this article?
I used to use a Nalgene bottle. I wonder why a Nalgene (or other) reusable bottle would be safe but a disposable bottle would not? Possibly: wider mouth facilitates washing? It's a good point but I'm a little skeptical - if the study was sponsored by bottled-water sellers then...? In any case I'd like to look into it more. How to test easily for bacterial/fungal contamination?
Rick Hanson Trilogy on the BBC Micro.
That explains why the author is not known, and why the whole point is that you will get fired if taxes increase.

I don't find that threat credible. If the guy wants to retire, he will sell his company, not shut it down. Even if it's unprofitable, he might still find a buyer who hopes to turn it around, or values a part of it. This often comes with layoffs, but firing every single employee would probably be stupid.
Maybe, but it's sparked some pretty good conversations. I've always found the discussions on HN to be better than the articles/news anyway :).
The internet is full of gold bug blogs.

Here's one response to the gold bug arguments, by Nobel prize winner Krugman:

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/goldbug.html

Even libertarians like Arnold Kling don't really have much time for the gold standard:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/01/the_new_deal_an.... (and in other articles)

Generally, it's not regarded as territory for "serious economists", although of course it is always possible that serious economists are wrong.
I can't believe this is on HN. He writes as though he didn't get the memo on the fact that the McCain plan was much worse than the Obama plan. Why are we discussing this?
With the hyprocrisy being that both parties are indisputably big government.
Yes, it is. Feynman was not a big fan of things that couldn't be proved experimentally.
Also, consider that ability is distributed more or less on a bell curve. Effort... I don't know, but you can't work that much more than the average for that long, so bell-curveish, again. However, in modern society, rewards can be way, way outside the bell curve. Not that that's a bad thing, or illogical - a new invention that makes millions of people's lives better is worth a lot of money and should be rewarded - however, maybe it's one of the reasons that people are a bit suspicious of extreme wealth.
Too many to name, but I did do my "cocoon" stage by spending most of a school year (after school hours) in my room, building a Wolfenstein-3D-like raycasting engine. That was fun.

I used this book:

http://www.librarything.com/work/202092

And this book:

http://www.priceminister.com/offer/buy/501846/Collectif-Pc-I...

Mostly.
And TechCrunch continues their transformation into FuckedCompany 2.0.
What's the piracy rate for iPhone apps?
I think this is part of a theme mentioned in one of pg's talks, namely that people still have it ingrained in their psychic that getting lots of money can only be done via fraudulent means (since for such a long time that was more or less the case).
Yeah, he should really define a function that spawns threads to evaluate each of those boolean pieces to speed it up and keep that bug from happening.
How we built Dojo Learning - Don't bite off more than you can chew
Minimal Advice to Undergrads on Programming
This is the fourth part of a six-part blog post I wrote talking about how we built our startup, Dojo Learning, from my perspective as co-founder/lead developer.

This post talks about managing workload, planning for releases, and setting attainable goals for yourself.
He mentions the 50% figure a lot of times and it's one I find particularly interesting, because in a lot of countries which tend to have good socialized healthcare, social security, et al and don't have to run deficits or anything like that, tend to have personal tax rates of AROUND 50%.
Well, the Prius is also just a nice car for gadget-lovers. Keyless entry, start-button ignition, big LCD dashboard, Bluetooth, GPS...
I think the problem is that these people are not willing to accept that luck had a great deal to do with their success. Instead of worrying that they are not truly the master of their own universe, they should accept the fact and be thankful for what they have. I think they should feel an obligation to 'give back' to those who are less fortunate, because there are others out there who have worked just as hard and just didn't get lucky. The truly classy rich people all seem to get this.
MOTOROLA W5 ROKR BLACK (UNLOCKED)
Motorola Rokr W5 is clearly yet another addition to Motorola's huge range of cookie-cutter clamshell phones. It's around the twentieth incarnation of the RAZR as far as we can tell. their music and videos by using the 20 MB internal memory or 2GB microSD card slot.
And the url is so not internationalized. Stuff like esnavidad.com should redirect.
Hi, you appear to be brainwashed by the PC establishment. Try this experiment: attempt to think for yourself for a few months. (Try out the craziest thoughts! If they're 'scandalous' you don't have to run them by other people, just evaluate them for yourself.)

Also, think critically about the people who promote these views. Most of them aren't very smart (in the sense that a tenured professor with awards can still be an idiot), or have a vested interest in promoting these views (typically racial).

Here's the first Google hit I could find disproving your joke. Someone else can find a blog post where a lesbian buys her daughter a firetruck and the girl begins to nurse the firetruck.

The world evolves in a certain way for a reason. Do you think this is the first era in which people thought that everyone might be equal? This is the first era in which we've had the luxury to attempt the experiment. The results are in: people aren't equal. Pack it up and go home. We're all tired of hearing this drivel.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/boys-like-blue-gir...
I'm currently driving a 350Z, so yes; same problem ;)
Sort of a reductio ad absurdum proof against infinities? :)
> nobody knows exactly what they did right

I think pg knows pretty much what he did right, and has explained it to us.
What's even more of importance about that web server(mongrel) was that there was no good web server that could reliably run Ruby/Rails apps at that time.
> afaik haskell also crushes erlang in lightweight threading

For some definition of "crushes"

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=thr...

But with quad-core Erlang processes float between cores slowing things down for sequential programs

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=th...
It's even worse when the person who had the luck/timing in a previous success sets out to recreate that success and doesn't adjust to the changes that have occurred since. At least one such startup I've worked at the CEO had what we referred to as "Delusional Rich Guy Syndrome". Many of the investors he teamed up with also shared the same disease.

It's the idea that somehow, all the other people that failed lacked their special innate abilities so this time it will be different.
part one was really great article. it made me watch bettas in youtube and appreciate them.
Yep - and both derive from this 10 year old measurement of context switching:

"Performance Measurements of Threads in Java and Processes in Erlang"
http://www.sics.se/~joe/ericsson/du98024.html
Yup! As a Canadian we can pay more than 50% income tax plus Provincial taxes, sales taxes and all the other taxes.

It doesn't stop Canadians from operating businesses. RIM is Canadian, EA has a huge operation in Canada. When you hear of companies moving from Canada to the US, I believe it is more often brain drain than due to the taxes.
To be honest, I did not understand part 2. There was a nice idea lurking out there somewhere around the subtitle "Reflections", but then he started generalizing and the post just ended.

I guess this is the point from which we should stop reading and start thinking.

I should probably learn more about meta-programming in order to understand what he meant.
It says you can prevent piracy by:

> writing a completely server-side application like World of Warcraft or Mint

But that is not true! World of Warcraft has lots of "private servers" where people play for free.