skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not offhand. Are you looking to understand how tax litigation plays out, or the tax code? If the latter, bear in mind that whatever is current is likely to be obsolete by the end of the year and perhaps beyond, given the (theoretical) mutual interest of both main political parties in enacting some sort of fiscal 'grand bargain' that would involve substantial changes to the tax code.

On the other hand, if you just want to get the a super-basic overview, the IRS itself has a guide aimed at students that is surprisingly comprehensive and well-written: http://apps.irs.gov/app/understandingTaxes/index.jsp

duke university has a good collection of research materials, but they are really aimed at legal scholars: http://law.duke.edu/lib/researchguides/fedtax/ Tax law is really messy and complex (like our politics), so it doesn't lend itself well to simply analyses :-/
(Guests must be less than 300 pounds to ride airship.)

- best line
If you do any non-trivial work with decorators, the `decorator` module is a must: https://micheles.googlecode.com/hg/decorator/documentation.h.... Think of it as @functools.wraps on steroids (though this probably doesn't do it justice). FWIW I think it should be in the standard library.
Show HN:Like Grunt-Qunit but on multiple browsers-better continuous integration
Can anyone explain how this regex [- ~] matches ASCII characters ?
The latest BeautifulSoup uses lxml (version 4+). How does it compare to PyQuery?
This Reddit comment explains a bit more about the project in case anybody is interested: http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/133bsi/rlint_a_static_...
Mesh Network Connects Sandy Survivors Still Without Power
proxy-au.nikcub.com
And yet they are a safer bet compared to your usual Startup. The demand will exist forever and the revenue model is pretty obvious (adult ads/products).
> anybody who knows a thing or two about psychoactive substances

Which is arguably a single digit percentage of ars readers.
I dont have a problem with coding standards. I have a problem with following something so strictly, even when it makes no sense at all - such as this class name.
Even ignoring the Player / AIR runtime, Flash is a fantastic tool for animation authoring. For example, our game artists use Flash to create SWF clips which we then export and playback with an internal format and C++ engine, supporting a fairly limited subset of all SWF features. This content ranges from UI layouts and transition animations to particle special effects and storytelling cutscenes.

It wasn't hard to write it myself (I'd guess about 40 hours for everything), but if we were going to make HTML5 games, I'd definitely consider this library.
Surveying Earth's interior with atomic clocks
I'd definitely suggest trying to find a team ahead of time. The events that I've been to have always had several people without a team but it isn't until the event gets going that people start talking and working together. I think most organizers do not do enough to try to counteract the awkwardness people have when meeting for the first time.

It wasn't a hackathon, but I found my current colleagues for a challenge.gov app challenge through twitter search (one guy tweeted seeing if any of his followers knew a specific API and I responded) -- now we are in business together.
I'm not voicing my true opinion here because i'm worried i might get in trouble. I can't afford some lawsuits at this point in my life. maybe when i level up from my social class when my raise comes through... maybe.
While I understand that they want something that doesn't require installation, I think it's kind of sad that they felt they couldn't pick up on Gnash or LightSpark or some of the other good open-source Flash work out there. This is a nice concept demo; maybe they will choose to work on a grown-up Flash player instead now. Performance is bad enough without putting the JavaScript intermediary in there, and LightSpark is super promising.

A worthy goal, but I hope they don't let NIH set them years behind the curve.
1) Freedom of speech is supposed to be guaranteed under the human rights act 1998 (article 10), though there are so many exceptions to that law that it's probably useless

2) This was a picture posted on facebook, by a moron, not a threat. There is no provocation here, no immediate danger, no incitement to violence. It's ludicrous that it could be considered a crime.
This is something you always need to consider, with any service. Google Labs first taught us that.
Facebook apps went through the same problems years ago. I don't think facebook ever managed to settle on a solution.
I just set this up for testing:
54.252.21.161 micro instance on ap-southeast-2a (Sydney)

...it'll go away in a day or two, or if I see stupid amounts of traffic to it.
Interesting - I wasn't aware of this when I wrote the article, and certainly haven't seen anything like it myself. Do you have source?
What is Spotify Worth?
If you level up enough they won't touch you anyway...
That is basically what this is.
No second wind here. Think instead of pdf.js and how it relieves you of the bloated security hole called Reader. PDF is a large format (extensions include SWF!) but pdf.js need not handle all of it to be useful in minimizing Reader activations.

Similarly, Flash is going down, never to come back (thanks, SJ). So Shumway need handle only the tall head, possibly as a previewer if not a full Flash replacement. The long tail is not too fat, but it will require a plugin for the foreseeable future.

In the far future, archeologists will pore over archive contents at the edge of the Beyond, decoding ancient languages including JS and SWF, leery of evil transcendant malware ;-).

/be
Salvaging Digital Certificates
US Titan supercomputer clocked as world's fastest
Time to switch to Kaspersky!
Also the addition of the ffi library. It totally changes the way you integrate with C code (for the better) - its the best FFI I've seen in any language.
Awesome!! See you guys there!
Skype rats out alleged WikiLeaks supporter without waiting for court warrant
Thanks for update!
I don't think its contradictory that I want title bars and thinner theme. The title bar serves as the main handle to move a window. When its taken away it makes it hard to pull the window out of being maximized, depending on where there is free space that will let me drag a window around to pop it out of its maximized state. The title bar serves a purpose. The extra padding on tabs, buttons and menus doesn't help me much as I know what i am looking for.

I fully understand that gnome 3 isn't a final product, and like basically all Open Source software it is available "as is" and without any guarantee that it is fit for your purpose. I would have thought that the "regular user" for a system like gnome was a person like me. I guess that is no longer the case, which is fine, its just hard finding a new desktop environment that i'm comfortable in.
Petraeus case shows FBI's authority to read email
I've seen him solve algorithms problems for coding interviews in Javascript and Ruby. He also helped with some html content on a site I'm building.

By holding his own I meant able to understand and contribute to technical conversations. I can't even have a technical discussion with some CS students without having to explain the definition of recursion.
Tesla Model S - Motor Trend Car of the Year
How much do you think you'd be willing to pay for an SVG diff? One issue I'm grappling with is that I think people are willing to pay a lot to diff their CAD files, and probably nothing for their text files. There's a lot of useful stuff in-between, but I don't have a good feel for what price is appropriate.
wow. as someone born in the late '80s, thank you.
1) The human rights act isn't quite as clear cut as you make out and it makes for an interesting read. I was surprised to see that it it explicitly allows for governments to shoot and kill rioters for instance.

2) I never said it was a threat. I said it wasn't a thought crime.
Google and Bing metro apps compared
There seem to be a large number of people (lets call them dumbasses) who are quite happy with the status quo, and rather like the idea that people can be put away for saying the wrong thing.

This is (of course) because in their minds they are part of the in-crowd and people caught by these unjust laws are part of the out-crowd and are therefore 'other'. Many humans do not care about what happens to anyone that can be defined as 'other'. It never seems to occur to them that it could be used against themselves or their relatives. They also seem to trust government implicitly.

Perhaps it's a generational thing. I hope this changes.
> For all the weird ad/spam accusations I've heard against Android, it shocks me how much this seems to be an iOS issue.

Your shock is misplaced, since this issue is rampant on both platforms. Shitty software developers will do anything sleazy to make a quick buck.

I noticed that all of the spam I encountered was from games that had their own in-game currency. After the <blah>ing-With-Friends / Draw Something fads died out and I removed those Zynga games, I can't remember the last time I saw a garbage notification.
Thanks! I must be doing something wrong with flowplayer, I'll dig into it.
"Most ML algorithms perform well when there is some underlying phenomenon whose characteristics are being statistically inferred by the model. However, the stock market is now essentially a large network of computers trying to model one another."

This is one of the insights that I think deserves more ink than it gets. Historically system's analysis has focused on predominantly linear systems where underlying factors that were unseen but capable of being modeled as FSM combined into emergent behaviors which were more complex but ultimately still linear across the region of analysis.

That sort of analysis falls down however when the modelling system is a part of the system it is modelling. The result can easily become non-linear (or turbulent or chaotic depending on when you were introduced into systems analysis :-)) and the calculus for those conditions is a lot harder to tease out.

The feedback algorithms become signals to other feedback algorithms and you get hard to predict changes which don't track the measured data, they track the response to the measured data, which is itself changing in response to the response.

From a practical viewpoint (for me) its of interest in discovering entities that use ML techniques to game search engine rank which is itself being derived by ML algorithms.
Who's fault is that?

With the internet it would be easier than ever for OWS to get their message out, but they're not.

You can't protest the rich and then turn around and expect them to promote you on their TV stations.
I am thinking about enabling them for a similar purpose although my style will be different. e.g. when a reviewer mentions not being able to reorder items I might send everyone a push to a tutorial explaining how to reorder lists. Afterall if one person is struggling maybe others are (I also look at my usability again after reviews like that).

I wouldn't call out specific reviews or even mention the trigger in any push messages although I have put responses to many reviews on my website.

http://human-friendly.com/ (recently redesigned - needs images still)
http://itunes.com/apps/fastlists
Re: the insufficient data sets problem, I've been surprised how hard it is to find large quantities of historical financial data.
Decent sources of the data seem very expensive, and I'm surprised there isn't a startup out there that is tackling this well since I'd be willing to pay a decent amount of money for minute by minute or hour by hour tick data--but am finding most subscription prices crazy. Is this data really as hard to come by as it seems?
Almost Being There: Why the Future of Space Exploration Is Not What You Think
1) Pretty sure I said it wasn't very clear cut...
2) You used examples of threatening, offensive danger on the street and a very specific behaviour that could cause death in a stampede (and is therefore a threat to life). What the idiot did was post a comment and picture to facebook - speech. Making certain types of speech illegal is pretty much my understanding of 'though crime'
I actually wrote this. Problem is, cheapest VoIP termination is ~$8 a month (not to mention server/bandwidth costs).

We had a nice system where you could group contacts and depending on both your location and 'status', certain people would either ring through, be prompted that they may be interrupting and ask if they'd like to proceed, or go straight to the cellphone's voicemail.

People loved the demo we'd show them, but very few loved it enough to pay more than a couple bucks a month for the service.
You're missing the point of the discussion completely. The starting point here is that the electoral college does not accurately represent the popular vote. If "the Republicans can't field a candidate that inspires the goodwill that Obama did", can you explain the tiny gap in popular votes between either candidate, or that by number, the vast majority of geographical divisions voted for Romney? There's a compromise between all states being equal and proportional representation, and the point is that Texas becoming a blue state would throw that balance even further away from the popular vote (regardless of that being a good or bad thing). In any case, there have been repeated discussions on HN lately about the theories behind why each party will simply change their platform to get as close to 50% of the vote as possible. Please don't take the chance to rag on your opponent-of-choice. I'm not a Republican either, but this is just not classy discussion.

edit: If you're still unable to discuss this without bias, think about the 2000 election - same problem.
Didn't apple use to have an R&D department and one of the first thing Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple was he scrapped it?
Thank You, Bravo, For 'Start-Ups: Silicon Valley'
How much does it really cost to send a text message?
In the US? Liability. That's why this doesn't happen. Actually having to tell someone "we're not hiring you," regardless of polite spin, puts you in the crosshairs of a lawyer.

Much like discussing former employees in my "right-to-work" state. "Yes, she did work here from P to Q. No we can not discuss her work performance." Doesn't matter if she was the model employee or an incompetent moron, saying anything is a potential liability. If you express your opinion that she was that incompetent moron, you're stifling her ability to find work and a jury of her peers will find against you, the former employer.

So back to the topic at hand. Say you get the generic "not hiring you" email. Are you going to leave it at that? If so, great, everyone can move on. Or are you going to try to appeal to the HR staffer's humanity and harass them with questions like "why not?" And then some candidate gets all pissy because "that's not what the job ad said!" and lawyers. So we send the email from a generic address that ignores replies ... and someone fouls up and sends it to all current candidates.

Should companies adopt a "we're not hiring you" generic message to send out and just never reply to replies? Sure. I'd love that. It's easier to ignore people.
Good point; you're right that the example does a good job illustrating their optimism.

I agree with you that we shouldn't put too much stock in these algorithms. Still, it's interesting that OK Cupid reached the same conclusion as Alex's wife: we're too different.

The enemy part is particularly interesting because it indicates conflict. The story would seem different if it was like "Ok cupid says we're 70% match but we think we're 99% match!". Instead, it's OKCupid saying: "you have conflicts" and the couple deciding to move forward despite those conflicts.

I'm not trying to make a big point here; I just find this part of the story fascinating.
Excellent collection! I will add one more.

Python Imaging Library - Today's web is full of images and PIL makes it easy for image manipulation. Although, it's not extremely performance efficient at very large scale.
Aircheck yourself before you wreck yourself
This sounds suspiciously like the pipeline of new ideas is running dry.
USB stick-sploit makes anyone a Windows admin
Especially since the revert brigade makes it very difficult to make any legitimate changes, let alone spammy ones, on any page that would be worth it.
Very well explained, you seem to know a lot about Javascript.
I guess we'll continue to disagree in the absence of an expert. My information comes from a discussion I had with two professors who migrated to CMS at LHC after the SSC was canceled. They agreed that the real tragedy of the loss of the SSC was the higher energy, and that with realistic estimates for the SSC schedule the timing advantage would have been minimal.
I'll probably do this soon. I've already put an option to mail a report set to pop up in various error conditions in the code. Some information is automatically added to the message but the user can add some more if required to describe what they were doing.

I've never actually had one back which I think I take as a good sign, I don't think I've had a crash report on iTunes Connect either so touch wood it is pretty solid although I'm adding more under the covers error logging at the moment using Parse which makes it pretty easy (saved me a day or so setting up and securing a server to my satisfaction). This will mean I can log from later in a crash (if it happens) than I could from email as I don't need to pop up any views just send it although where possible I will pop up the email option.
Whether or not it was scrapped when he first came back, R&D doesn't seem like a new thing for Apple.

For example, I remember coming across someone working on touch R&D for Apple: http://murderandcreate.com/

From the page:

"In 2007 I started working in research and development at Apple on multitouch hardware. There I spent my time inventing and patenting new touch technologies. Now I lead the Human Interface Device Software Prototype group at Apple."
Good for the people who work there but to me this looks like yet another sign where apple is becoming like the "other companies". No longer think different.
Samsung Galaxy S3 stores passwords in plain text
As opposed to other services, for which you sign up and expect them to last a lifetime?

Companies prune under-performing services or products all the time--nothing new. The key is allowing customers to exit gracefully:

1. Give them their data

2. Suggest an alternative

3. Give advance warning

4. Thank them
StackOverflow has the philosophy that high-ranked users are just about indistinguishable from staff. So in that sense, high-ranked user profiles are similar to the staff page and the strict dichotomy of user-generatedness is blurred.
Agreed. There's a lot more to improve about phones' actual telephony.

>> Family/VIP, who can reach me 24/7/365.

Also: a message like "Hi family, I'm asleep/busy, but if you really need me, press 1 to ring me anyway" would be wonderful. They wouldn't worry about calling at a bad time, and you wouldn't get awakened for something trivial.

In general, "what would a good human assistant do?" is a good question for computer systems. A secretary wouldn't wake you unless it was important.
The idea of revenue churn is startup biz hype. This is how startups play with numbers to make their business seem better than its really doing. You can't make solid business decisions based on a framework of revenue churn since it hides real business issues.
The real issue with churn rate is that you have users leaving the service. If you want to better your business you want to reduce this number and get it as close to 0 as possible. Revenue churn would hide this and make it think you're doing well, when in fact you're not. You could be facing a dwindling user base with just a small number of high paying users.
The reddit audience has changed over the past 5 years due to large growth and the introduction of subreddits. Old users from digg eventually took over reddit. Comments on the sites went from was what intelligent and humorous to stupid and blatant.

Submissions continue to degrade and more cats continue to appear.
Is Quora going to real-time answers and will become 2nd Aardvark?
> it's kind of sad that they felt they couldn't pick up on Gnash or LightSpark or some of the other good open-source Flash work out there

The whole point is that doing it in JS avoids the need for a native code plug-in, which cuts off an entire avenue of security problems. Same story as PDF.js.
Groupon fights for its life as daily deals fade
App + Device that Track your Wallet
I think you need a better landing page. Right now it's tough to see what your app does right away, the font's a bit tough to read as well. The sign up page doesn't do a good job of showing pricing in a clear way as well.

I'd also consider drastically increasing your prices if you can chat with customers and see what type of value you're delivering...divide it by 10 and charge that much. I find it tough to believe you're only delivering $50-$100 of value to people if the service this app works with is a ridiculously priced piece of software.
How so? Sounds to me they're just doing something about their "retention of talent" problem, which is surely one of the biggest issues facing Apple today. Giving their developers a little freedom and flexibility is just what they need.
waaaait just a minute, you would pay five thousand dollars for an hour's worth of advice from paul graham (or anyone, for that matter)??? when i saw the price tag i thought, "shoot, must be a nice restaurant."
Indeed -- it opens up a (scary) need for models to be "self-aware" of competitors' models and their effects on the training data. Above my pay grade, for sure.
This seems like a good logical way of approaching it. In my case I would be the tech lead. There are 3 other people involved. One is bringing the talent for creating content. One is going to manage the team and also UX and design. One is coming in as an adviser and seed investor.
I thought that Google didn't really have 20% time anymore.
Did anyone enter the $4million SAMSUNG SmartApps Challenge?
In particular the S Pen category?
Digesting Big Data
Looks like they failed to negotiate better bandwidth charges with Telstra.