skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'James Joseph, a tax lawyer with Arnold & Porter in Washington, noted that the I.R.S. has taxed illegal contraband at its market value, but added: “I don’t know of any instance where the I.R.S. has assumed taxpayers will engage in an illegal activity in order to value their assets at a higher amount."'

This seems uncontroversial to me - drugs are taxed at market value because it's illegal to own and sell them, surely the same should apply to bald eagles.
Neo Imperio/Tantra, mmo for the hispanic community Mac/Linux/Windows
Also, with this much money involved, I'd pay someone to handle it for me.
EA Canada employs over 2000 people.
The fix for this is to give people the option to sell the items to the government at some high fraction (eg 75%) of the valuation, instead of paying the taxes.
I think minifiers and obfuscators already destroyed any hope of learning from websites. But on the other hand, Github and the likes are a much better learning source than we ever had.
Dyson Vacuum Cleaners.

One sole inventor who developed 5,127+ prototype designs and clearly brought something unique to the marketplace. Gave his whole life and money to the product.

Almost immediately after it came out Hoover copied the design and basically would have put him out of business.

The patents were the ONLY thing that protected him from a huge multinational who didn't invent anything.

Now Dyson went on to invent a whole range of very cool gadgets which never would have existed without patents.
I don't know about an "international" position, but if I'll have to move from Italy for my startup (ie, to get funding) I would consider Berlin and London. Some time ago I would have only thought about London, but Berlin is much cheaper and I don't like UK's attitude towards Europe very much.
Don’t Jump to Conclusions About the Killer
I was just thinking about how many new releases there have been and how little new things have actually affected me or the servers I administer in any way. Of course, most of the added stuff are not part of the core kernel and I will probably never run the code but still?

The thing that got me on this track was thinking about all the systems that still run the 2.6.X kernels (and maybe even 2.4.X), how much, if any improvements would they get from upgrading to 3.5?
You're not serious are you ?

Have you not seen the many cases of vigilantism when people's names/addresses have been posted online.

There have been some terrible situations on Reddit and 4chan.
>That said, I think the point he raises is interesting. There are some ideas which are entirely algorithmic and are hard.

Clever and/or sophisticated perhaps but not hard. The hard parts are the mathematical foundations, done by mostly dead people who are not getting a penny out of it.

>If you hold a software patent you should feel bad about it.

The problem is that they are sunning their arse in the Bahamas and are feeling great about it.
Berlin is for me truly the only place I would live. Although it's not for everybody. And I would prefer not driving an expensive car at least in Neukölln or Kreuzberg areas. There are lots of other subcultures here.
I'm a young developer living in Germany. Here's my perspective. Berlin is cheap, affordable, has an international culture (I'm an emmigrant) and pretty much something to offer to everyone, so the city itself just has a good attraction for young people.

I don't know why the startup scene has started booming here but just type in "web start-up" at indeed (http://www.indeed.de/Jobs?q=web+start-up&l=berlin) and you'll get 275 results. Plus the UK has cracked down on emmigration laws and Germany has opened them up, at least for engineers, etc. b/c of the "Fachkräftemangel" i.e. the fact that the Germans lack skilled laborers. So whereas before for Europeans and especially Eastern europeans the UK was #1 its now changing b/c Germany is closer and easier. Also Germany seems more open to Europeans period, the UK with Cameron is doing all it can to shun the rest of Europe. The only problem I see, is that you still need to know German to get around ( which no one studies in school), which for instance is why my brother hasn't come.

EDIT: I guess I exaggerated with the "no one studies in school" bit. My point is that english is the only language we are all pounded into learning regardless of whether or not we have an interest in languages or a talent for them, so we can at least function at some level with english. German, however, is not the lingua franca I think we can all agree on that. I'm quadlingual (if that's a word), but not all talented developers like languages as well and unfortunately whatever the germans say, you still need to know german if you want to assimilate in germany, get an apartment, go shopping, and live life.
Thanks for responding, I'll create a trial account and have a play. Best of luck.
These are children we are talking about.

It IS normal for their names not to be released. Do you not watch the news ?
Only if you assume that view source was ever a good idea.

If the writer wants you to see the source, you can download it elsewere (githun, etc) if not, there is no difference between not getting the source to office 98 and not getting the source to google docs.
Elm is actually self-hosting by your standard.

If the average IQ of the world population is higher, I　think Haskell will become a widely-used language. Haskell is a language much more than its syntax, and takes a lot of effort to learn.
It has been said before, there is a huge gap between the prototype and the product that will be sold. That means that a company powerful enough will be able to sell/patent your invention faster than you do if they can lay their hands on the prototype. You'll be screwed, and there's nothing you'll be able to do about it.
Yes but thanks to all these people who fiddle around with the bug reports I would say that after a while (a few months, half a year?) your laptop will work fine with Linux.

Just check a site like http://www.linux-on-laptops.com before buying and I believe you can actually get better bang for the buck by buying a cheap laptop will full linux support (even if the manufacturer does not officially support it).
The US still Silicon Valley centric, with a growing interest in New York. But there's still a segment that likes to travel abroad. It comes up a lot in the "Where should I bootstrap my business" threads. Cheap rents, broadband access, English-speaking population, and a lot of young people make Berlin attractive.

If anyone's looking for a startup visa, I posted some information here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170466
ok, to wrap things up I downloaded the source, hobin and pestaa are right on - its c with an embedded python interpreter for writing your own scripts.
Since you would need backwards compatability, just make an argument to script elementa that specify the byte code to use instead of the javascript. Then older browsers could continue to function and the rest of us don't have to wait.
Ideally this could be done under a system where the company gives away the right to use the patent offensively unless the inventors agree. That way hopefully the patents won't end up being used in different ways if the company is bought out later.
The BlastBeat server
Is this particularly news worthy? I'd bet people discussed it on Facebook, IRC, IM... maybe even G+.
Yes arguably the valuations are a bit screwy.

> Hey kids, I hear your parent died? Great! You owe us 500 million dollars, get to work.

Clearing up a dead parents estate an be psychologically challenging. Luckily most people paying the estate tax can afford lawyers to help them muddle through. If you have a well adjusted family and the person doesn't die suddenly you could even plan a lot of this ahead of time.
Whiteboard Coding Interview? Preparation Is Everything
Magazines for iPad - aggregates interesting longform magazine articles
Interestingly, the Dyson design was based on an existing cyclone system widely used to separate out dust and particles in industrial settings. The innovation was using the process in a domestic vacuum cleaner.

So it's not too far removed from the "thing-that-already-exists but on the internet" patents which are a large part of the problem, or the
"thing-that-already-exists but on a mobile" patent which is biting Notch's ass at the moment.

Not that I'm saying Dyson's patents are invalid, nor that his designs haven't improved the state of the art in several fields, but he didn't invent the cyclone technology in a... vacuum.
I thought Joe the Plumber owed lots of back taxes before he started squawking.
you make a github account, get some followers and committers, upload your weekend projects, maintain them, and then in 2 years when every employer wants to look at your source you give them a link to your github account :)
"If you own a software patent, you should feel bad." You might think its "just for defense" and have the best of intentions, but like landmines and toxic waste, the patent will almost certainly outlive your use for it and wind up in hands other than your own.

So there it is:
Patents are like the toxic waste of innovation. You promise yourself to keep them safely contained, but its hard to do in the real world and once they spill, they contaminate everything around them, making the ground uninhabitable for 20 odd years.

Feel bad.
>Suddenly it sounds like they found some obscure law to value it at $0, and that they would not get in trouble for actually selling it.

It's valued at $0 because they cannot sell it. It does not have "a high market value" because it is not, and has no expectation of ever being, able to be sold.

The Fish & Wildlife Service didn't say they could sell it - it said they could continue to possess it.
So the IRS are pirates now? Are copyright Pirates still pirates? What about(Somali) pirates pirates?
Yes it's newsworthy, Aurora or any other event has a limited shelf life, therefore to derive maximum page views each news outlet must differentiate their story to disseminate some new information for each cycle. News always has to have something new. A story about reddit and aurora thus qualifies as news and drives page views because it's related to a current event.

Keep in mind that for Aurora you kind of get quadruple nerd score because of the subject matter, and it's about reddit so you're going to get all the reddit traffic too.

Thinking is hard, if you tell journalists that arabs revolted because Twitter loves freedom then they will write that rather than doing their own research and finding out that people were so hungry they didn't care about the retaliation from the regime.

Same thing with Aurora tell them its about reddit and they'll write that, if IRC had a PR agency then efnet would be where people got their Aurora fix, but since EFNET doesn't and Conde Nast does...
Dabr - Open source mobile web interface to Twitter's API
Companies have thrived on "one-off" sales for decades.

Name one in the consumer space. Most struggle, and the few that don't really make their money by selling upgrades and new releases.

There are very, very few non-game companies making good money in the consumer softwear space unless they have a SaaS model (think of virus softwear companies)
"which no one studies in school"

In Denmark we can select German classes in both elementary and high school.
Well no, the "class struggle" and "armed takeover of power by the proletariat" is the core of Marxism, not quite so peaceful. But this is irrelevant to the topic.
side question : how can I make my postbox looks like sparrow ? is there plugins to install ? thank you :)
I enjoyed the time I spent in Berlin last year and I've considered going back there but this seems imprudent with the Euro on the verge of implosion.
Wow, that Windows version was certainly ugly. Why have Windows applications always to suck design wise?
Top 5 reasons why you should move to Berlin, now:

1. Lowest livings costs with highest quality of living. Stay in gorgeous, perfectly renovated apartments in pre-WWII residential buildings with high ceilings, right in the middle of the center and pay a fraction of costs of any other capital (even cheaper than any Eastern European capital). No need for a car—Berlin has one of the densest subway nets and wide streets make biking fun. In addition, Germany has an amazing social health care system including health, unemployment and pension (when working as an employee).

2. A vibrant and fast growing ecosystem of smart people. A vast number of new software talents, founders, software companies and VCs are moving to Berlin, every day (Twitter, Google, Soundcloud, Early Bird and many more).

3. People here are open-minded, outgoing, mix well and international—no need to learn German, everyone speaks English! Making new friends is a matter of days. Visit tons of networking and startup events, every week.

4. Easy work permissions—Europeans do not need any and can work from day one and the rest applies for the hassle-free Blue Card.

5. Berlin's night life is unmatched, huge and changing every day (plus ridiculously cheap). Berlin has got some of the most dazzling, naughty, and original clubs on the face of the Earth.

Now, the shameless plug: Berlin is calling and getting the new tech hub of Europe. If you are passionate about building great software, we’d love to talk with you. If you don't live in Berlin yet, we could help to fix that.

=> http://urge.io/jobs
I'm from Berlin, so I naturally enjoy the kind of hype that's being created since one or two years ago. However, I'd like to stress what someone in the video said: It's just budding and really not yet comparable to New York or London. There are quite a couple of cool start-ups here now, but still few with innovative breakthrough technology and also few large investors. But I see it coming, too.

I guess this will also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For ten years people have been telling how cool Berlin is and a lot creative people were attracted. Now everyone's telling about the new tech start-up scene and that will attract even more talented people - hopefully also large investors.

Interesting times ahead!
Indeed. Everyone being brilliant would of course foster diversity, as well as overall cultural capital. I might be wrong, but it seems obvious to me.

To me the original quote seems to spring from an elitist mindset and akin to saying there's no diversity in painting anymore because everyone uses rectangular canvases. It's not the brilliance that makes you diverse, but rather what springs from it.
The taxation rate seems just wrong to me - 471 million for a 1 billion heritage is almost 50%. Imagine that going on for three generations and suddenly you've payed more than the heritage's value in taxes!

I'm not sure why they inherited it at all - wouldn't it be way more sensible to create a foundation who posses all the art? That way, they wouldn't have to pay any taxes at all.
You keep using it. Binary search is the right way of thinking about it, but in some sense you haven't really created an even split by dropping the egg from floor 50 - because you know that you can figure out the correct floor faster using two eggs than one, you could check floors 51-100 much faster than you could check floors 1-50 (Even if you just did the naive binary search approach you first applied - i.e. if the first egg didn't break on floor 50 then drop it from floor 75, and then after that use the second egg to check each floor, it would only take you <=25 goes to find the right floor in 51-100, wheras it would take you up to 50 goes to find the right floor in 1-50).

So the correct floor at which to make the first drop is clearly not floor 50. If you dropped the first egg from floor 40 you would do better - it'd take you up to 40 goes to find the right floor if it's below floor 40, and up to 31 or so goes to find the right floor if it's above (because you can reuse the first egg to check whether it's in 40-70 or 70-100). Floor 40 is in some sense a "more binary" place to drop the first egg from than floor 50.

If you keep following this line of thought, and remember that whenever you make your approach more efficient, you can recursively apply that more efficient approach to "what do I do if the first egg doesn't break", you'll arrive at the solution given in the article.
My favourite is actually bash. I've looked at zsh for a while and found nothing I needed that bash didn't already provide. My bashrc just features aliases to a couple of things I often do, and that's basically that.

Bash is actually suprisingly powerful. You might want to have a look at the Bash Reference manual over at gnu.org.
It was certainly a good idea.

When the Web was young and there was no GitHub, viewing a page's source made it so that you could see by example how every page worked. It exposed you to a huge number of possibilities. The Web partially owes its success to this feature because without it far fewer people would have made it to the stage where they could produce their own pages. Every web developer/designer has used this to help them -- guaranteed.

Besides, the feature would have sprung up anyway whether the browser vendors wanted it included or not. Third parties would have stepped in. It's plain text transmitted over the wire. Unlike the source of Office 98 which is not retrievable from the Office 98 binary, a page's source is readily available to the machine that has to cobble it all together when viewing that page.
Gates and Zuckerberg dropped out of college. Skype's other half, Friis, dropped out of highschool.

The point is that IT founders and employees in average have shorter education than founders of pharmaceutical companies. I think it's a fact that is hard to argue against, whether or not you find it ridiculous.

I am not saying they are less smart, just that they usually have less formal education.
Sure, here in Finland too, but who bothers at that age? Most people couldn't care less about "learning stuff that could be useful in future", and even less ever actually start thinking that taking optional classes could be benefitical. And even less of them think so at high school, let alone elementary school. So, in essence, no one studies German in school.
There's a variant of this riddle where the solution is using a big brush and painting over the dots in one stroke.

I think all of these solutions are interesting and creative.
This says a lot more about the absurdly unrealistic prices on the app stores than it does about the actual value you get from your $10 purchase.
You may be right about the patent office, and that would be OK by me. But for those who say that only some patents are a problem, it leaves open a nice incentive to make that distinction real. All it means is that the USPTO suffer for their own errors of judgement rather that foisting that suffering onto others.

If instead you punish those defeated at trial, there are many who say that this is unfair to small players who cannot afford to make as strong a case as the really rich companies. I personally don't see this as such a great problem as they should be doing something more constructive than filing lawsuits, but I think holding the patent office accountable does not favour large players to the same degree.
> By the way, JavaScript does not suck.

The depths to which JavaScript sucks are well documented & well understood: http://wiki.theory.org/YourLanguageSucks#JavaScript_sucks_be...:
Same goes in Sweden. It's quite easy for us Scandinavians to learn German since our languages are closely related (all except Finnish are Germanic languages). In fact, its the same with English, which is also a Germanic language.
In the UK there is no consent among the investors where the action should go. I was quite surprised to learn than basically every credible accelerator has it's own view of where my start-up should be based.

Oxygen - Birmingham

Ignite100 - New Castle

Seedcamp - London

I get their desire to improve local culture but hey this is just ridiculous to ask me to settle somewhere because you gave me some money. Also, start-ups thrive in a tech-savvy areas only.

This all adds to the problem and Berlin has all the odds to become the answer.
How To Benchmark Your System (CPU, File IO, MySQL) With sysbench
That's funny. ;)

Some Euro countries (Greece) might be on the verge of implosion, but there's no way the general currency could suffer any significant damage and Germany is the very reason for that.

The German economy is among the most powerful in the world and quite frankly you're more likely to experience an economic collapse in the US than in Germany. (Albeit that's pretty unlikely too, obviously. At least for now.)
Wow! Is that the kind of attitude you have over there? ... I feel bad for you, my neighbour :(
It'll get cluttered up with ads for denture cream and adult diapers once they realize what their true market is.
Yes. Especially ThinkPads seem to be very well supported (typing this on a X220), with everything working out of the box, amazing battery life (up to 12 hours on mine) and a very stable system in general.
As someone who has never taken LSD and is curious about the experience I have a question:

Have you personally ever taken LSD and actually suffered flashbacks? If yes, how bad were they?

This is a very personal question, so of course feel free to ignore it.
Right, because Tumblr never goes down.
The whole thing is very, very slow. Why should it reload the whole page from the server each time I request a new random color?
I suppose it's a neat concept, though I still don't get why you'd use this over another means if you already have building physical access.

Assuming you're pentesting, either you're trying to get someone to willingly plug it in (to ethernet and all power stuff too?), have physical access yourself (in which case why not use something cheaper), or are already allowed in (why add another device?)
There is a second part to it. The text may be better when edited, but that is not what they get paid for.

You also should teach aspiring writers about the new digital ways of earning money. I still see so many people who are in the "I am a journalist / I am a writer" and so on camp relying on old thinking about 'but I only get paid by that'.

Slowly we will change that.
It's simply not true that it has no expectation of ever being able to be sold. The piece is already on loan to a museum and displayed there - the sale to a museum (perhaps the one displaying it) for its permanent collection is something they should fully expect to be approved. They are trying to skirt the law on a technicality.

A letter from the Fish & Wildlife Service stating they can't sell it to a museum - even though it's already on display in one - is what would show this; but if they asked, they would not get that letter - they would be told they could, for the same reason that they could keep it. (Because this is a famous, exceptional, well-known piece that is attested as being produced before the law that made it illegal.) The conditions would be the same - it would have to go in a museum.

You have to realize that under the law you're quoting it's illegal to POSSESS as well. This is what changed my opinion of the case.

So the family is saying "it's illegal to own or sell", so we'll just do the former since we already got approval but we'll say we can't do the latter, and won't even try to get approval.

Personally, I think they should put the price that a museum would pay (and not a recluse billionaire) and which they would expect the Fish & Wildlife Service to approve. Or they can ask for that approval, which the article doesn't show them doing. If they asked and the Fish & Wildlife Service said, weirdly, "you can keep it - as long as it is on display in a museum - but you can't sell it to that museum" then the article, and you, would have a case.