skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was referring to his other positions (abolishing most federal agencies, withdrawing from NATO/UN, negating Roe v. Wade/gun regulation, etc.) in addition to the IRS.
Working from Home: Why It Sucks
Desktops yes, but their notebook sales are still strong.

In the college market that I'm in I see a lot of netbooks being used as the only computer... so food for thought. A lot of people genuinely do not see the value in paying $1K+ for a computer, and are willing to live with the poorer performance.
Flat topography would be an economic advantage, would it not?
> Microsoft trained and Microsoft loyal sysadmins who are anything but convinced of Linux superiority

True that. That's huge. The biggest sentence in the whole post. That's your thesis, right there. Those are the people who are married to IE and MSFT Office. You can't even get them to install OpenOffice, and if you want to run FF, you better smuggle it in on a thumb drive. And there are a lot of these MSFT trained folks out there. One only needs to make one call to the help desk of any large corporation to find this out. Or try to start a new project.
Hot or not: subtext programming language
Which is why Detroit is a thriving city, and hilly San Francisco is run down and derelict...? Maybe 100 years ago that was some kind of advantage, but not these days in the industries that SV relies on.
Its all the same to the liquidators, really.

What doesn't get sold in the stores will get sold to Overstock.com or vendors on Buy.com. As long as they make their money, they're happy.
i forgot the exact number but they owe creditors something like 180 million so they are going to charge as much as they can get away with.

wait until the last day for any true rock bottom pricing
>> abolish the income tax and the IRS, and

>> replace them with nothing." -Ron Paul

> What's the evidence that these are good ideas?

http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2003/Hubbardtaxes.ht...

A perhaps surprising result in public finance is that the optimal or the best way to tax capital income is not to tax it at all. Paradoxically, workers are better off with a zero tax on capital income. -Dr. R. Glenn Hubbard, the Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers
1) no
2) yes, or if it isn't, facebook is.

In the first case, you can't kill blogging short of destroying modern civilization utterly. This is silly.
Consider that AM radio is still around, and if you look a little bit harder, you can find people sending morse code on the amateur radio bands.

Ok, maybe "kill" doesn't mean "eliminate". Then you're being sensationalist by using a word that doesn't mean what people think it means.

Secondly, taking the preceding paragraph as read, I find that since I've started using facebook, I have a lot less inclination to post stuff to my blog. I've thought more than once about shutting it down, and frankly the main reason I haven't is inertia.

The reasons for this are at least twofold: one, I think far more people see the stuff I post on facebook, and secondly, nearly all of the five or so people who actually read my wildly popular blog (snort) are also on facebook.
I think Wikipedia is facing a myth vs. reality problem: the idea of an freely editable encyclopaedia is wonderful, but in the end a closed & moderated system might prove more useful.
I Dream in Malcolm Gladwell
Well, I guess there is some justice - if you put out bullshit job descriptions, you should only get bullshit applicants.
Detroit is a thriving city, and hilly San Francisco is run down

Actually, the opposite is true, and hilliness is not the only factor in play. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurious_relationship
Points to detroit for proximity to plentiful fresh water and arable land. SoCal is in a long term freshwater pickle, remember.
I hated it because it was so silly. I am fundamentally a builder, but that era wasn't about smart people building cool stuff, it was a gold rush. I was happy to get out.
Ron Paul subscribes to the Austrian school of economics. They're very much against central banks, fiat money, and the creation of wealth by fractional reserve banking. Implementing any one of those policies in such a time of crisis would be like treating a broken arm with a gunshot to the head.
"The Google Drive, or "GDrive", could kill off the desktop computer, which relies on a powerful hard drive"
Hilliness is not an economic factor at all. Well, perhaps with the exception of some hill towns in central Italy that are still fairly inaccessible, I don't think it really matters in this day and age, in our industry, except for the fact that it makes a place more pleasant to live for many people, like me.

This is where I live now, and the economy isn't that bad:

http://www.welton.it/photos/innsbruck/innsbruck_panorama.htm...
Maybe 100 years ago that was some kind of advantage

Interesting choice of date. 100 years ago SF was rebuilding from the giant earthquake that had leveled most of the city three years before.

So, yeah, Detroit's got certain topographical advantages. People just can't remember that, because essentially none of the current residents of the Bay Area were living there in 1906, and human memory is short. But there may come a day when you remember. It'll be one day after one third of the buildings fall down and the water taps stop working.

And now for the public service announcement: If you live in the Bay Area, stockpile some drinking water and bolt your shelves to the wall!
If the quote said it works this way for "most" people then maybe there is an argument.

Some of the greatest minds have remarked at how little we know but those same great minds realized that they were great in the context of their time.
Hilliness is not a factor at all.

Did you not just post several messages claiming the opposite?
TipJoy solves that problem. Just click the button and the "money" is transferred. You don't even need to register until they decide that you probably have "paid" enough to make it worthwhile.

I am not associated with them, but I love the idea, think it's a great modeel, and am about to become a customer.
The other problem with working at home is that you are always at work. It's easy to keep it separated at first, but after a year, it becomes an indistinct blur.

I don't know how many times I had people over, only to be thinking in the back of my mind that I should be working.
The Inaugural Address in 1,474 megapixels
Seconded. They lost me at the login screen. Bailout bailout!
Great books on irrational decision-making
No one likes a composite number.
Not my experience - I love working from home. Going to work is just a matter of crossing the yard to get to my office. Almost no meetings, no office politics - bliss.

My only real complaint is that no-one ever reads past the first paragraph of any email. Sometimes emails have to be longer than that, so every now and again, I have to hop on a plane and go and explain to someone what all those second paragraphs said.
You don’t get rich feedback when communicating over a phone, email, or text chat.

Then don't use those. Use immersive telepresence, instead. http://www.hp.com/halo/introducing.html
Seismography != Topography :-) They had a big earthquake in 1989, right? So it's not that old a memory in any case.
I would LOVE to work from home, I could do so much more with my day If I was working from home (more productive stuff) and leave my work knowing I was actually able to get something finished for a change even lunch with my dog is a better prospect that lunch with some of the people I work with at the moment.

Not to mention that my home office is better equipped, quieter and I cant tell you how much better I would feel without someone watching over my shoulder all the time or my boss practising his micro management techniques on me.

I would even take a slight cut in pay for the privilege of working at home.
American Green Cleaning Service
American Green Cleaning products are environmentally friendly. Kid and Pet Safe! We believe we must all do our part to help reduce the amount of toxins on this planet and we can start with our own homes.
"Learning Ruby will really teach you about the low-level fundamentals of the computer."

May it never come to pass...
Nice suggestion, but hardly practical.
I had this problem too. On the advice of a fiend I started shutting down the work computer before dinner. That puts up a barrier to "just checking in" when you should instead be devoting some time to yourself, your family or friends.

If you don't have a separate computer for work then maybe a separate login would help in a similar fashion. Since the physical (distance) separation isn't there you have to find a way to create something similar.
Are you seriously arguing that Detroit is a better place to be a programmer/"knowledge worker" because it's flat?
Will the practicality likely increase over time?
Two favorite bits:

- Important processes can be instantiated as more powerful monsters. They can then defend themselves against inexperienced sysadmins.

- Certain processes are vital to the computer's operation and should not be killed. For example, after I took the screenshot of myself being attacked by csh, csh was shot by friendly fire from behind, possibly by tcsh or xv, and my session was abruptly terminated.
My question was: "How is SV's topography better than Detroit's?". Your answer to that question was essentially that SV's advantage is hilliness:

SV has some things going for it [...] topography, that Detroit will never have. [...] The highest point in the entire state of Michigan is lower than the hills west of SV.
Am I chatting with M-x doctor or what?

Flat places are boring. Hills are nice. There are lots of sports where having some hills is more or less necessary. Who likes to go hiking in the corn fields? Grapes for wine are best grown on hills. Thus, SV (and California in general, outside of the valley) is better.

Subjective? Entirely.

But probably true for more people than those who absolutely love monotonous flat places. In terms of voting with their feet, SV beats the rust belt "hands down". If someone simply doesn't care about having some hills or mountains, than perhaps that's not an advantage for them in SV. But the climate is still quite nice, as well as access to the ocean, for some people.

I actually wouldn't want to go back there, but it's got a lot of attractive things.
I've had this issue in the past, but with my current employer, I have less of an issue.

I'm on the east coast. Most of my direct co-workers are on the west coast. I typically work from 06:00 to 09:00, then perhaps do other stuff for a few hours, then work again for a few hours in the afternoon. Then, depending on work load, I may get back at it for a few hours once my kids are asleep, which still allows me to interact with people on the west coast.
Vista Home costs dell ~40$.
What's essential to being a good programmer now will not necessarily hold.

Personally, I think the importance of C will remain, as it's basically portable assembly. But time will tell.
I'm not with him 100% but he does have a point. I know too many people who think that "little blue e" is the internet.
What a great (free) resource. Does anyone know of a good resource for RNNs ?
Ready Lisp (new version)
That article essentially says it sucks to work from home because you don't get out and get social interaction. Um, does it assume people work from 8am to midnight or something.

I work from home. I get lunch with friends. I get dinner with colleagues. I go outside. I'd trade a 6 figure salary for just barely scraping by/starting-up and working from home any day <% unless @married = 1 -%>.
AMD CEO: netbook/notebook distinction will blur
I do agree, I'm working from home for 6 months, and being lonely is the hardest part. My dream for now is to work in a small office as a part of a small, talented and concentrated team.
I'm currently working from home more and more with a small company, too, but I am being proactive to prevent these problems (which I clearly see are coming down the line if I don't do something).

Cultivating that rich feedback that he seems to be missing is hard. I think that IRC is a good start. Video chat is better. It may not work for this guy's company because they still have their "professional" personas active while chatting. You have to let your hair down and be comfortable with a flamewar once in a while. If the personalities of those involved aren't compatible with this, then maybe they shouldn't be in startup/small companies.

I hate to use so many cliches in one sentance, but you really have to be able to be agile and iterate quickly. The development infrastructure helps to address this. If you have good source control and a good project structure that lets you check out a branch to a new directory and just GO then you have a good thing going. If your product requires lots of setup and back-end things that take time and careful configuration, it's going to suck a lot.
T-Shirt Hell Claims It Will Shut Doors After One Too Many Hate Emails
The Ron Paul plan to prevent this economic mess (from 2002) was to stop inflating the housing bubble.

http://www.ronpaul.com/2008-09-26/ron-paul-on-the-housing-bu...
The idea of "co-working" is gaining steam in many cities. You could certainly start up a group in your area if there isn't one. Basically you just get together with other people who work remotely, but perhaps in somewhat the same vein (web apps, a certain language, whatever), and you can form a team that you can bounce ideas off of and get support from. It could even just be occasional or for lunch every day or something like that, but it helps.
Data Security: US military files on second hand MP3 player
I agree. I've asked several times over the years to be allowed to work from home one day a week. Always denied.

People who list complaints about working from home don't know how good they have it - they have freedom to work the way they want. Working from home takes discipline and should be seen as a privilege, not as an entitlement.

A big drawback I can see of working from home is that, regardless of where you are, you have to call in for a daily 9:30 (Eastern) scrum call. On the West coast, that means 6:30 call-in.
How different is it than people just using iMacs with iChat video?
You guys do realize that this is from 1999, don't you? It was really funny back in the day but I though everybody knew this by now ;)
Good suggestion.

I even live in a lost city as far as technology is concerned and have found at least a couple of others who also work from home doing software development. We try to get together and work from a coffee shop every now and then.

Look around for local Linux user groups or programming language interest groups - you'll probably find some other kindred spirits.
Most important "business" lesson I ever learned: never write a "document" in an email message; write it in Word and attach it instead, to activate the pointy-haired neurotransmitters.
They had a big earthquake in 1989, right?

http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/prepare/future

There are two things wrong with that. First, Loma Prieta was not the big one. It was a moderately big one, certainly destructive to some parts of the Bay Area, but nowhere near the size of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. [...] The new report also says that the next one will most likely strike farther north than Loma Prieta, somewhere between San Jose and Santa Rosa on either side of the Bay. The epicenter of the October 1989 quake was in a sparsely populated area. The next one, according to the study, will likely be centered in a more populated area.
Google growing its ad revenue
Uh, why isn't lisp a functional language? True, it is not pure and side-effect free the way Haskell is, but that hardly disqualifies it.

I mean, OCaml is clearly and widely regarded as a functional language, and it has nearly all the features that Lisp has, including a bundled OO syntax, side-effect IO, and mutable data structures.
My friend/ex-boss Mike had a permanent videoconference running during the day, so that everyone in the office had a "presence". And you can mitigate some of these problems with IRC.

But if you possibly can, get everyone on your team together every day in a shared space; http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=251884.
That is an interesting business model. Because my oldest son is in the Stanford University EPGY Online High School

http://epgy.stanford.edu/ohs/

at the moment, I'm curious about the social model of the online college even more than I am about the economic model. The article refers to

http://www.cramster.com/

as an example of a successful online community. I get the impression that any online education provider will be successful or not largely to the degree that it builds a student community (and, for minor learners subject to compulsory instruction laws, a parent community too).
And in PLT Scheme it's

(hash-set! *hash* "foo" "OH HAI")
I managed to snag Grid PC for about $16 ($20 - 20%) and a UMD case for PSP games for about $9 ($13 - 30%), but the vast majority of the stuff in there was still horribly overpriced.

Luckily, thanks to the internet, it's a lot harder for stores to call something a "deal" when in fact it is higher than actual market value and get away with it.

Or maybe that's just an illusion, since there were plenty of people in there still running around grabbing stuff as though it were a super bargain, but I have to believe there were less folks suckered by it than there would've been 10 years ago.

Sidenote: I suspect that once a store starts sliding downhill, it's much harder for them to recover than it once was thanks to the same basic effect. Once upon a time, a store whose stock was starting to slide could send out a bunch of flyers, get some people in their doors, sell some merchandise and turn things around. Now, though, we all know within a day that the reason the flyer is in the mail is that the store is tanking, and so we stay away.
I would presume so but electing a president who wants to quickly and drastically cut the federal budget would:

A) Fail because they don't control the budget

or

B) Cause the total collapse of the US economy if it where to be suddenly enacted.
Much higher quality. There is something in our animal selves that demands a certain threshold of realism, which these new systems have. Technically, it's just higher resolution, faster connections, better screens, better cameras, etc., but the total effect is greater than the sum of parts, as in the system replaces plane tickets instead of phone calls.

This article in the economist was good, but now behind a pay-wall: http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...
A major factor in telepresence immersion is eye-contact. http://www.google.com/search?q=telepresence+eye+contact Perhaps someday a YC company will figure out how to inexpensively enable eye-contact over ordinary video chat (teleconferencing).
Zombies Ahead
Don't you read Consumerist? Liquidation sales are apparently never a good deal:

http://consumerist.com/5138341/the-secrets-of-liquidation-sa...
I guess it's ok if you have some allocated office space so you're not literally working from your home.

I've worked from home before and I can pretty much relate to what the article says. It's nice to do once in a while, but I much prefer to actually go to the office.

The key to working from home is to have a clear separation between your office and the rest of your life. It's ok if it crosses over (after all, that's the advantage of not having to work at an office), but they shouldn't be intertwined.
You might be surprised at the economics of Microsoft volume licensing. Businesses are not paying retail price for every copy of Windows and Office. And neither are most consumers. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if retail revenue of these products was insignificant and they exist only to implant the idea of "value" in people's minds.
I did this a few months ago and wrote it down, so the numbers might be a bit off by now:

Google results for "Web x.0":
"web 1.0" : 989,000
"web 2.0" : 81,800,000
"web 3.0" : 2,070,000
"web 4.0" : 102,000
"web 5.0" : 25,700
"web 6.0" : 41,300
"web 7.0" : 12,000
"web 8.0" : 8,190
"web 9.0" : 2,030
"web 10.0" : 5,260
"web 11.0" : 392, # meaningless results
"web 12.0" : 1,220, # meaningless results
How do you say happy new year in chinese
Double blind is setup so you can see low order effects. If your testing is 1 pound of cyanide is lethal it does not take a lot of scientific rigor to find out.

If the pads are 1% better it would be next to impossible to find out. But if they are 1/5 or 5 times as good it would be obvious.
Senator To Microsoft: What Was That You Said About Wanting More H-1B Workers?
It started much later?

For some reason it has taken off in Toronto though.
genius marketing campaign
I can't tell, is this satire? I really hope it is... if not, then wow. I mean, is he debating the merits of operating systems by familiarity? The people he's talking about can't remember what they did in Word yesterday, so why would it make a difference if they changed the program. The argument is weak.
The Register occasionally publishes a Windows vs Linux article that is simple trolling. The Inquirer is even better because they troll Windows advocates as well (this is presumably their idea of balanced reporting).

The give aways that this is a troll:
"Users aren't stupid. They just have better shit to do than learn C++ programming or tinker around with FreeBSD.". How is this relevant. My wife, my daughter, my father and my daughter's former pre-school principal all use Linux. None know what C++ is, only my father has more than a very vague idea ("its something they use to make programs") of what a programming language is.

"How do I PivotTable in OpenOffice?": The average user does not use pivot tables, or Visual Basic for Applications. In the average working environment only "the guy who knows about computers" (there is usually one per department) uses the "advanced" stuff.

"To the average user, the computer is a means to an end.". We knew that, but it does not automatically follow that they will always regard Windows as the best means to the end. People pay a premium for Macs that are more different from Windows than the default Gnome or KDE configs are.
There's a horde of "IT" people out there that barely deserve the title of 'Technician' (much less 'Engineer'). The only education they have or seek is strictly vocational.
"check company IRC, say good morning, make sure nothing’s on fire yet" etc etc

The thing I get from this whole post is that the author lacks passion for his work. His tone makes his work sound like some terrible chore that he's forced to do. Don't get me wrong: a "good job" every now and then is always nice, but not receiving it shouldn't be the primary reason you shouldn't work from home.

If you're the type of person that gets bored easily or needs lots of external feedback in order to motivate yourself, working from home/starting your own business is going to be very difficult.
Actually, of the two, I think Craigslist has the worse name. It's like if Yahoo! (originally "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web") had settled on jerrysguide.com.
I live in a condo and work from home and the separation is very difficult. Especially when I was contracting and trying to work every waking hour.

However, I still really enjoyed the flexibility of it and still had enough social interaction to keep me sane.

Now that I am only working on a startup, it is so relaxing :) Maybe because I am enjoying the process and work instead of just trying to put in hours.
I don't particularly understand why he would care if he gets hate mail or not.

Actually, scratch that. Hate mail means he's achieving his goal, ergo making more money.

Clearly, this is trickery. Trickery, I say.
Much as it's probably true, I absolutely hate that. Somebody once showed me a diagram demonstrating the increased efficiency gained by using a wiki instead of email - but the entire gain would have been nullified if they assumed that rather than entering stuff directly into the wiki, people would upload word documents to the wiki (which the pointy-hairs invariably do).