skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends on the country, but in many (certainly in the US) a very significant portion of tax revenues goes toward funding immoral activities and corruption. If you're worried about the health of society, you should be worried about the trillions devoted to war and propping up the financial industry's elite, not the billions Google retains in order to create more free services on the internet.
I imagine it will be a set of components that valve will sell pre-completed, or the user will be able to create their own.

It could come in minimum, recommended, and max, and the developers would have these basic devices to aim for. The user can upgrade, but it will lead to a small risk on their behalf. If it screws up, they can just put the original components back.
OK, so if the "middle man" is why they are on world tours, then why doesn't the middle man deserve money? Why should the internet nature of the discovery matter?
First thing that jumped out to me is the error of listing Warren Buffet as the founder of Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway has been around since the mid 1800s. Makes me skeptical of the accuracy of the rest of the list. Especially of omissions.

Given the age of many Fortune 500 companies - many of their founders would be dead - what would be more interesting to see is a list/count/percentage of CEOs who founded their company and remained CEO through the company's original growth phase into the Fortune 500.

An obvious example would be someone like Bill Gates. Even though he's not the CEO anymore, he guided the company through its growth from a few people to Fortune 500 status, and deserves recognition at least equal to the folks on the list here.
Excellent point! I added a comment about that so people will know where to look for extra info. :)
When gaza lays downs its arms (rockets) and picks up its laptops, Israel will be the first one in there with shekels, know-how, and support.
So anyone can add bands to anyone else's list? And remove them? What's to stop me adding my band to everyone's list?

Also it can only find 3 albums for Slayer, none of which were released this millennium...

Other than that this is a great idea and nice looking website.
Byuu is one of my hacker heroes. He's passionate, opinionated, and dedicated. The steps taken to map out the SNES, and make bsnes accurate makes it one of my favorite non-library open source projects. I highly recommend checking out his emulation articles on his site[1], and also his piece on ars [2].

[1] http://byuu.org/articles/
[2] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...
Even the technically illiterate hit the black market from time to time to gorge on some shady-looking but insanely cheap DVDs.
"In an interview, Mr. Burrows noted that the audiences in China were far more accepting of the American intelligence assessments — both those predicting China’s economic ascendancy and those warning of political dangers if there was no reform of governance in Beijing — than were audiences in Russia."

Really, they project China as #1 and Russia on a major downwards trend. Astonishing that this would be the reaction.

The whole cyber-attack warning reminds me of all the Ma Bell projections of phone outages during the phreaking era :P
Phastlight, an asynchronous, eventdriven server written in PHP inspired by Node
A game from that era that I wish would inspire some clones is Robosport. I believe it was a Maxis title and was turn-based, but was really clever in that it didn't just feel like a board game that got ported to a computer with some animation tacked on.
The version I played was on the Amiga and supported TCP/IP networking (kinda, I actually wrote my first public tutorial to help people get the networking running).
What should be called being neither negative nor positive about the near future but just being very focused on every details on now ?
Powerful asset pipeline for Jekyll
Companies also take advantage of the infrastructure that taxes pay for. As an example, what if FedEx/UPS didn't have to pay corporate taxes even though they heavily use public highways?

In my opinion, companies should pay taxes but there is room for debate as to what percentage they should be forced to pay.
> Household wiring must always use screw fittings, wire nuts, etc.

This is for reasons of mechanical strength. Naive soldered connections can be pulled apart with your bare hands, and will not stand up to being snagged, tripped over, used as an acrobatic toy by a toddler, etc. This is especially true for the single-strand cable used in building wiring, which can apply a lot of leverage to a soldered joint.

Electrolysis and fungi? No, solder is chemically very stable. It's used to great effect to join copper water pipes, where the large surface area and built-in strain reliefs allow solder to be strong enough.
I'll put my vote in for Java mainly because along with Objective-C it's where I do most of my work so there's clearly (at least some) market demand for it.
The title is in reference to the book "Startup Nation", nothing provocative about it.
AI always seems much better in turn based games than in real time games.

I guess because turn based games are more able to say "stop everything until I recalculate all of the path finding" whereas a real time game has to deliver so many game updates per second and will maybe have to run AI in a separate thread which might not yield a good solution until the AI has already had to make a decision based on stale information.

Chess AIs are often scary good for example and FPS AIs are notoriously dumb.
I liked your "Git for everyone idea".

But thinking about it a bit more, this idea can be split into:

1. Collaborative editing - Google Docs already allows this to some extend.

2. Document history - Tools like MS Word already does this to some extend. There is still a lot of room for improvement.

3. Using Git as a document store - Is Git really needed for this?
Even if the system was backed by Git, would not it be better if the whole Git related parts are hidden from the user?
Even if the system uses Git as the store, in order to present changesets that are meaningful to the user, the system will have to process the Git changesets. So why use Git?
Maybe with games but for movies, books and music there's little knowledge required to pirate them, almost no delay compared to purchasing (in both cases you have to search and download) and when downloaded they're utterly indistinguishable from the "legitimate" version.

A colleague this morning was talking about streaming sites where for him one of the benefits is that he can be watching the movie faster than if he owned the DVD. You can make your legitimate purchase as fast as you like but when streaming and downloading is that quick and easy, you're not going to get it to the point that the legitimate mechanisms offers a significant convenience advantage and is anyone really going to hand over cash for be watching in 20 seconds instead of 60 seconds?

For anything mainstream where it's widely available the cash rich time poor argument really doesn't hold up.
China's Imports And Exports Slow Way More Than Expected
I had brain surgery.
What's more like to full communism, saying contents producers to find a market-friendly method to get paid, or putting a policeman over the shoulder of everybody to watch for draconian IP laws compliance?
I'd like to see a chart of "% of revenue directed to lobbying" then vs. now.
Limiting it to .edu emails kills your ability to sell this internationally ( Irish student here )
Startup Myths Debunked
Doctors ‘cure’ leukemia by using HIV to rewire immune system
But they can do this already. They could just spend the money on research and then they wouldn't have so much profit to be taxed.
Who sits 5 feet from a 42" TV set? That would roughly be a retina display 8000 pixels wide. You are also looking at something like a 400mbps data rates to feed it.
>As an example, what if FedEx/UPS didn't have to pay corporate taxes even though they heavily use public highways?

If this is your concern then the simple solution is to fund public highways with fuel taxes. (This theoretically allows taxpayers to "cheat" by buying more fuel efficient vehicles, but I think we can live with that incentive structure.)
Reflections on My Github Game Off Experience
>We don't want to prevent Microsoft and General Motors ... from investing more and improving their product line

A lack of cash is not what stops these companies from improving their product line. Apple is sitting on $100 billion (maybe somewhat less now that they're doing dividends?). Corporate taxes are not preventing Apple from employing more people, they have no need for more people. If Apple were taxed less, they would not hire more people.

I am highly skeptical of the claim that removing corporate taxes would create jobs in other sectors as well. Why would GM need to employ more people if their taxes were lowered? Consumer demand is unchanged, they don't suddenly need to pump out twice as many cars. Innovation and improvements on product lines don't come from the number of product designers a company has.
There's an insightful comment over here:
http://crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com/2012/02/whether-they-l...

"""I think one of the very interesting things about modern single-player game development is that it creates exceptionally expensive content designed to appeal to everyone and be played exactly once for 8-10 hours. As anybody who plays European board games will tell you, making a game (read: the body of rules, the mechanics and dynamics) is cheap - all you need is creativity and a lot of playtesting. AAA videogames are entirely different, though - millions are spent on voice acting, scripting, graphics, etc. This is why I'm excited for moderate-budget games like Bastion that can publish interesting and challenging gameplay with a budget lean enough that it doesn't have to sell to absolutely everybody."""
VAT is paid by the consumer, not by Google. The best you can argue is that maybe if people had not spent that money with Google they might have spent it on goods that do not have VAT levied on them. That is a pretty weak way to claim they are responsible for £80 million in additional tax revenue.
They're not spending that $2B. They're putting into "safe" investments like treasuries or just keeping as cash. Thus, you are effectively paying them to hold onto it via your taxes (for the bonds) and inflation (for the cash).
It's not double taxation.

Income tax is by it's nature a transaction tax: income is taxed when money changes hands. But that income is counted as income each time it changes hands, so that's not "double taxation." Say we have an economy with just you and me. I make $100. I'm taxed $20 (20%). I give you $80. You're taxed $16 (20%). Total income = $180. Total taxes paid = $36 (20% of $180).

The mistake is assuming that the corporation's money is the shareholder's money the minute the corporation makes it, i.e. that the corporation is a mere proxy for the shareholder. It's not. The corporation is a separate person. If the corporation incurs a liability (say one of its trucks runs someone over), it's not automatically the shareholder's liability, again because the corporation is a separate person. A dividend payment is no different than the payment between you and me in the example above. It's not "double taxed"--it's taxed each time it is counted as income, the same as every other payment.

There is a deep symmetry here between how income is treated between separate entities and how it is taxed between separate entities. Say we have a married couple. The husband stays at home and does housework, and the wife gives him a $1,000 a week allowance. If they divorce, but the husband still does the housework in return for $1,000, then GDP (i.e. the sum of national incomes) goes up by $1,000. This is the nature of the GDP calculation--when you break apart an internal transaction and make it a market transaction, GDP goes up without anything else changing. Taxation precisely mirrors this. The husband doesn't pay taxes on his $1,000 while he is married and part of the same taxable entity. It's not income to him. But if they divorce, it becomes income to him. GDP goes up and taxes go up by the same proportion.
A very common argument - four points:

1. Companies are not necessarily double-taxed on foreign profits when they enter the US - they can actually claim a foreign tax credit to offset their US taxes. See here: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/06itcorptaxsnap.pdf. There are issues with this - you cannot have a tax credit that results in a refund - but it is not a given that all profits are double-taxed.

2. Google (along with a lot of other companies) utilizes the so-called "Double Irish" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement) - and this, specifically, is a tax avoidance strategy. Thus, it is a misrepresentation to say that they are not avoiding taxes. Granted, they have passed through one local tax jurisdiction (Ireland) on their way to Bermuda, but that means that a lot of other countries, in addition to the US, do not get access to the taxes from companies that are operating in their countries.

3. US companies are already holding enormous amounts of cash on their books - but that hasn't lead to large-scale increased capital spend.

4. On 2004: the argument then (as now) was that these funds would result in jobs and new capital being spent. But that didn't happen. Instead most of the money was just paid out in dividends which really only affects, a big scale, people in the 1-2% incomes who get a lot or most of their income from dividends.

Comments welcome!
Sorry, I did not like this one.

I respect Derek Sivers a lot, for a lot of things. But I honestly think, this one lacks the punch of some of his other (earlier) writings. For example, he was at his insightful best in 'ideas are just a multiplier of execution'. When I read that, I was blown away, "what clarity!" I thought. And it seemed like a genuine outpouring of a Doer.

But this one is ambivalence at its peak. Sort of Chicken-soupish. It lacks the balance, and is a bit extremist. Any very unlike the writings of a stoical mind (And please-please, I am not pulling any punches at all. I hold Derek Sivers, in high esteem. But even gurus, need some candid feedback at times), which I am sure he is, most of the times.
Ask HN: How to do responsive design with 1080p mobile phones?
With devices cramping more and more screen resolution into small sizes, bootstrap and other frameworks won't scale anymore. (My understanding is they change layout based on resolution?)

Is there a good database of useragents mapped to screen sizes or some other way to know what type of device this is/how big the screen actually is in inch?

Obviously this will also be needed for TV designs for the possibility of different UX.

Any ideas?
The FAQ addresses some of these points. If you keep your username sufficiently unique and secret then no-one can edit your list. I wanted a really low barrier to entry for trying out the site i.e. no email addresses or login via a social media service.

The service shows you albums from the last 5 years but that could also include re-releases (which might explain the Slayer weirdness).

Thanks for trying it out and the compliments.
Real time voice language translation is shipping in Japan [video]
Copyright itself appears to be a rethinking of monetizing creativity. The threshold pledge system managed to monetize creativity with no concept of "intellectual property": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system
Great comment. It seems interesting how people don't see the contradiction of having everything for free. Why do people think we are entitled to have Disney content, or Harry Potter books for free? Why Google and related companies seem to believe they have the right to display newspapers' content for free? Just because everything is nowadays in digital format doesn't mean that we are entitled to have a copy of it.
Asynchronous JS: Callbacks, Listeners, Control Flow Libs and Promises
Government investigating makers of cellphone apps
They'd only be paying £40M in employers NI if all of their turnover went on salaries - which seems unlikely as they are clearly profitable.

I'd also argue that it is employees who pay income tax - not the employer (even with PAYE meaning that employees don't see that money).
In any other industry, when you have one guy who deals his wares to thousands of other vendors and enforces an exclusivity relationship such as in Hollywood, allowing no other sources to produce similar work, demanding the price remain artificially high, and what do you call it?

Price fixing! Racketeering! A cartel!

Mr. Producer, do you want to support a whole cartel? How much of the product of your work is siphoned into the pockets of these middlemen that you claim are so shadowy? Is it because you don't want to pay them that you downplay their role?

Why are they entitled to a share of what you earn, when distribution models that scale and support themselves in a feedback loop like BitTorrent are available, and the people who are consuming your content will foot the bill to the cartels for these distribution contracts?

What justification is there for price fixing, where regions that have larger collections of wealth amassed into smaller groups that can afford to pay more are gouged? What basis have you to charge more in the US or Australia than in India and Africa, where digital broadcast entertainment might be more or less pervasive?

I am obviously very angry, I don't know what you make, but the reality seems to be that you are claiming ownership of an arrangement of bits. It's in my nature when discovering interesting configurations of bits to show them to others, or to keep them to myself (to maximize my benefit from them), and it's wrong for you to play on both sides of the fence like this.
How to Create a Twitter Card
Never use VirusTotal in its current form on sensitive files. Everything uploaded goes to their subscription feed. I see corporate documents that should not be out in the open, for example, pass through every day.

Anyway, do any of the AV scanners VirusTotal wraps around even handle Android malware?
IBM creates first commercially viable, electronic-photonic integrated chip
I currently use http://www.albumreminder.com/ for this. It imports your artists from last.fm or itunes, and provides you with an RSS feed and/or email notifications of new artist releases.
These are two hard issues though.

1) The main thing people are complaining about in "TV" UIs is the cable box UI. If you want to replace that, you need to do the whole CableCard thing, and now DVR is a requirement since most cable boxes have that. And your TV doesn't work for satellite TV, sorry.

2) You integrate the game hardware into the TV and now you have lifespan issues. Is Apple going to support games on your TV for the 10 years you own the TV, as hardware continues improving? Or are you just going to end up with something that theoretically can play games but none are actually supported on your old hardware?
Show HN: My side-project, UllrLabs.com, made Outside Magazine's Best Winter Apps
some features cannot be "polyfilled".

You cant magically make proxies , weakmaps ,let , or generators , or even modules(the python way) work just by adding a library to Javascript. You cant change inner workings of the language with functions.

If you could there would be no point creating a future version of the language.

All transpilers that compile down to javascript are basically syntaxic sugar generators , but do not add semantic like ES6 does.
> You will experience this as the harder you work the more money you are obligated to give to the government.

This is not really true. There are many ways to make money without expending much effort. Example: capital gains. By simply having a lot of money, I can invest this and make a solid profit...and be taxed in a lower bracket.

It has no bearing on effort expended. In fact, you can easily argue that "More Effort = More Money" has a very definite ceiling which you can't cross. At some point, you have to start leveraging other assets (money, employees, etc).

Taxing based on the amount of income earned is really the only sensible way to tax. You can't tax "effort"
Lets put ourself in the shoes of a adult worker. S/he just have worked a whole day, drove 30-45m, picked up a pizza, and just now sat down in the couch to see "something".

Now lets force that person to decide what they would like to see, and then wait 30m. Even if it was 10m, the question of what to see is as much of an issue as the wait.
Can someone explain to me why we don't lower corporate taxes across the board and raise dividend and capital gains taxes to compensate. It seems to me that the later taxes are fairer and more difficult to dodge. Plus they encourage reinvestment (eg. hiring) since money gets taxed when or if it leaves the company.
Be the Startup I Want to Fund
Well, ideally laws that don't make sense to enforce (e.g. drug laws) wouldn't even exist in the first place. Failing that, not enforcing them would be the next sensible step.
Nice spin. Regardless of your angle, there is no "miscomprehension of these tax stories", but it is the case the Google does its best to avoid paying taxes in all countries except the US.

Considering that over 50% of Google's revenues are non-US, I personally find appalling how they avoid paying little-to-no taxes in other countries. Here are the self-proclaimed "don't do evil" and "down with Wall St." institutions acting as "vampire squids".
I think as long as you're not being held back by whatever tool(s) you use, then it's fine.

For example, I couldn't use an editor without a split pane view. I feel like not having that feature would be a serious productivity killer.
> Anyway, do any of the AV scanners VirusTotal wraps around even handle Android malware?

The submission has a table showing which malware was picked up by which AVs, and quite a few of them did a good job with it.
Could a corporation exist without the implementation of state law? What is a corporation if not a group of people working within a hierarchy?
I view what Google (and many other corporations do) as tax arbitrage.

We see this here in the US where States will undercut each other to get a business to move to their state (although it is different from doing this at a country level). In my opinion it is a fools game for States to do this - it is a race to the bottom and the company will just pack up and move to another state as soon as they're done taking advantage of the tax code.

I also think it is fine for an individual politician to express indignation as (a) they may not have been in office when this was passed and (b) one politician can't, by him or herself, change the law.

What I find most interesting was what happened in the UK with Starbucks - basically they bowed to public and government pressure on tax avoidance. Still, Starbucks sounded like they were "doing the right thing" as though paying tax was voluntary. Hysterical.
I don't understand? "IP laws" are totally incompatible with communism because property itself is totally incompatible with communism. I'm not sure what you mean by "market-friendly" but it sounds like some sort of euphemism?
That's vertical decoupling.

Well the point of the abstraction is that you don't care about the contents, hence the term "black box abstraction".

It doesn't matter to the interface consumer what the implementation is, just that it does what the interface says it will do.

Our VFS layer has various backends which can be picked based on the client's requirements and this covers REST APIs, RDBMS and filesystems. There are various depths of stacks and abstractions hiding behind all that but to the consumer, it doesn't matter.

If it blows up anywhere in the stack, we can throw 80 levels of stack right down to the container thread if need be, but we only care about the abstraction at the point of failure.