skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Wasn't the 2% tax cut on the side the employer pays? That means if you paycheck goes down because of it, your employer is pretty much a jerk.

In the short run, this would make a difference, but not in the long run - the incidence of payroll taxes has been shown to fall almost entirely (~98%) on the employees.

(For those unaware: the incidence of a tax[1] is a way of describing who really bears the burden, which is completely unrelated to who nominally pays a tax out-of-pocket).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I don't think it's that simple.

The government is both a kind of "autonomous entity" with serving self-interests AND something somewhat controlled by the public (not just by voting: also by the mere fact that it involves thousands of people, has to balance different interests, is bounded by specific procedures, it needs a level of constent for it's actions, etc). To put it this way, from all the entities out there, the government is the more accountable. You think the government serves some big interests (big corporations etc?). It sure does. But a country only at the mercy of private interests, without a mediator like a democratic government, would be intolerable. Actually it would be like what it's in some Banana Republics, where the "government" is essentially a front for corporations and private interests.

That said, the government (any government) is also the scum of the earth, especially went left to rule without vigilance. Sponsors and big interests come into play and bureaucracy wants to increase its reach and rule as far as it can.

And of course government wants to justify itself and its actions, hence the "official version of history", in which the nuclear bombs "ended the war" (whereas Japan, a nation collapsed and willing to sign a peace treaty was nuked just so that US could showcase the new bombs and send a message to the Reds for the post-war state of things). Or in which "Pearl Harbor" was ..."unprovoked" (whereas the US presidency did all it could before it happened to ensure a war with Japan).

Of course the Japanese have their own "official history", in which they didn't do anything bad in Manchuria and Korea (where they enslaved, raped, torture, and genocide-like killed thousands of people).
It's not newsworthy that your paycheck may be substantially lighter in a couple of weeks?
> I thought that Christmas was supposed to be about spending time with loved ones, not about blowing thousands of dollars on unnecessary gifts.

Did you really? I guess that means you don't have kids.

> Has anyone stopped to consider that maybe we should stop wasting so much money during the holiday season?

Actually lots of people, since before Dickens, and often with ironic reference to the basic moral tenets of Christianity. And yet here we are. Like the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, it is what it is.

> more money to Chinese factories ... killing more Arabs or corporate welfare

You seem to be saying that on the one hand, workers don't know how to spend their pay while on the other hand, neither does the government. So perhaps 'ideally' it's not such a bad thing to have the money end up in a part of the world where millions of people a year are actively raising themselves out of poverty on the back of export demand.
The pattern of dots connecting larger cities in the middle of the country is really impressive - and a bit suspicious how straight the lines are.
I can assure you that nobody in the openbsd project is using blob as an acronym. To be clear, a binary blob is so named because it's an amorphous lump (as opposed to source code, which has structure).

[I agree, the word binary is redundant (nobody complains about source blobs), but not because it's an acronym. The phrase "unfree blob" would also be redundant, since blobs are unfree by definition.]
The market is in your favour right now, but in houses 'location, location, location' still holds true. It also very much depends on where you're buying.

The main principles of negotiation (take your time, set yourself a price and if you can't get it for that price walk) apply. But there may be a scarcity of offerings that suit you, a place may have extra perks (location near water / the beach) and so on.

The most important facts about buying a house are how long it has been on the market and what it was bought for. If you can't figure out the latter you may be able to make stab at it by comparing the market development relative to when the house changed hands last and what was done to improve it since.

Happy house hunting!
Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking in American politics. There is no such thing as a temporary tax cut. In the eyes of Americans, there are only two kinds of changes to taxes: cuts and raises. A temporary tax cut is nothing more than a tax cut followed by a tax hike in the view of our wisest statesmen. This gives license to pundits to accuse Obama of raising taxes--because the cuts are not permanent. I remain dumbfounded that some believe that taxes should decrease monotonically from year to year, no matter the circumstances.
Fixing the computer guy posture [pdf]
That's like asking, what does the c in curious stand for?
It supports multi-platforms like iOS, Android, Web apps, Desktop (Window, Linux & Mac).

one-to-one messaging & group messaging

Free Voice call via 3G between platforms
Conference call supported on Desktop & Android.
G+ is long-form Twitter with a few mods. There are definitely people on it that would interest you, but they won't come to you.

Family-and-friends are on FB already, so using G+ for the same thing will be disappointing for years unless you have a very active set of friends. I keep FB private, G+ public. I have a few Twitter accounts for different apps, but I mostly consume lightly.
>In the 2000's, we tried to detain non-U.S. citizens captured in Afghanistan on a military base that wasn't even on U.S. soil, and the Supreme Court smacked down the administration three different times and the detainees all got lawyers.

Meanwhile, despite all the theatre, the same prison still operates and the same kind of things keep happening there.

So on top of the very same things we had in 1940s, we also have a "theatre show" about right nowadays. So, the same, plus hypocrisy. This is supposed to be good?

You also forgot tons of other ways people are not protected against the government (from the Patriot Act, to warantless wiretaps, to mass electronic surveillance of mail and web activity, etc) that didn't exist in the past.

Oh, and as for that 40's example? That was at a time of OPEN WAR, with hundreds of thousands of American _common_ citizens fighting, and big domestic consequences to the USA. Nowadays Iraq and co are run like private wars, with the professional army and private contractors, that have little impact on the country (except the expense and some casualties of professional troops), which people only ever care about for ethical reasons.

What would have happened to civil rights if the US was actually involved in a war of the WWII scale and impact is not something anybody can describe.
Yeah, this tool is focused on recognizing specific utterances given the curent context, e.g. (to take an example they use) voice-operating a browser. So you say things like "close tab" and it realizes that you've said one of the command words it recognizes in that context, and acts accordingly. They also have an example somewhere about controlling a calculator by speaking digits and arithmetic operations. Doesn't seem to be aimed at free-form audio-to-text transcription, though some of the technologies it's built on, such as CMU Sphinx, are fairly general.
ليلة رأس السنة ٢٠١٢
ليلة رأس السنة ٢٠١٢ صور بطاقات رسائل ومسجات للإحتفال بالعام الجديد 2013 بمناسبة ليلة رأس السنة ٢٠١٢
I might enjoy running a full X IDE and other tools on my powerful dev box from my phone.

I wonder whatever happened to the NX projects... they were optimizing X11 for high-latency systems.
Have you traveled that part of the country? There are large areas where every road is east-west or north-south, and the towns are evenly spaced for very long distances. I don't see anything suspicious about it at all. Is there something I'm missing?
Open source can have as restrictive a license as you want, the point is that the source can be reviewed and improved by anyone, which leads to a higher quality product. Free software requires a permisive lisence, as the point is to protect the user's freedoms. Unfourtuantly, in practice both types of open source software look the same, so the labels get confused.
A) Do you define "marginal" as "one in a million"? ;P

B) The only reason I opted for "# requests" instead of "# objects" is because it let me put a hard figure on "number of people dissatisfied if you have a one in a million error rate". Let's say you are doing 4 billion image requests per hour (the time scale is actually irrelevant): then at a 0.0001% error rate (which is what I get from S3) then 4,000 users per hour are getting an error.

C) ... you aren't doing S3 static web hosting if you are keeping access logs, as the only people who know about the request are the user's web browser and the server. You can attempt to detect the error in JavaScript on the client, but you can't keep an access log. If you are logging requests made by your server, then the error rate is irrelevant as you can just retry the operation.
A market like the one between startups and VCs?
I imagine these correspond to highways. I did a similar thing a while back with postal codes and their density. I don't know why I was so blown away, but I was. Take the West Coast for example: http://i.imgur.com/WBzWG.png
People may not follow politics, but the do follow their paychecks.
If you're going to make statements, rather than opinions, please base them on facts. If you cut defense 100% and make no other changes, the budget would be balanced.

2012 deficit: $1.1T [1]
2012 military budget: $1.03T to $1.4T [2]

[1] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/pagedetails.action?packageId...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_S...
One could charge $1.99 for an app that allows users to poke the xeyes.
if youre bored with facebook and google and such, no one is forcing you to write about their every single move. there have been plenty of new and exciting things happening recently in medicine, transportation, energy, etc. they just don't happen to be the kind of things that techcrunch writes about...
Linux on Microsoft Surface: What are the odds?
>That's the point of the principle that two consenting adults should be allowed to do whatever they want in their own bedroom: that others may not approve for whatever reason. You believe (perhaps completely validly) that if someone chooses to work for minimum wage they are hurting themselves and possibly "all of society". This is exactly the same argument made by people who don't want people having whatever sexual relations they want in their own bedroom. You will point out that they are wrong and your points are right -- but that's the whole point!

No. The whole point is what is right and what is wrong.

Not if what is right is _consistent_ in situations that is not exactly the same.

The only same thing in those two situations presented is that there are "two adults" present.

In the case of accepting "minimum wage" the one agreeing is not even "consenting" in the same sense.

He is just doing something that he is _forced_ to do by hunger and lack of jobs.

Even if one "needs to have sex", it's not at all the same kind of "need" as needing to eat and feed/shelter your family.

The first is an option and a choice. The other is a necessity, and a leverage you can use of people to let them do degrading things.

From prostituting themselves to selling their kids.
Well, there seems to be universal agreement that the "temporary" tax cuts for the non-rich should be made permanent. With which I disagree; if we want to have an expensive welfare state and police the world, we should have the honesty to pay for it.
Sounds right to me. Here's an example:

https://maps.google.com/?ll=39.505841,-95.443857&spn=0.4...
What real-world benefits are there behind proving Fermat's last theorem?
exciting things happening recently in medicine,
transportation, energy, etc.

Such as? Would be really cool to see a summary of industry changing / impacting things that have happened this year outside of the internet-technology echo chamber a lot of us unfortunately live in.
The pen, or in this case the mere thought that Biden might wind up holding the pen, is mightier than the sword. I think that would make for a scary world that no one wants to see.
This is definitely not Hacker News.

I can see no way in which this gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
There's some information on the origins of those remarkably regular (and recursive) grid roads in this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System
Huawei linked to plan to sell restricted equipment to Iran
In order to keep your sanity, it's imperative to pick up a few other interests outside of tech and startups. This year, for me personally, I've gotten really into Astronomy and have been blazing through Khan Academy's videos on the topic, sparking my interest in following various resources from that neck of the woods.

I find specific subreddits of something you're fond of are a great way to get a feed of the most recent news on almost any topic.
Actualy Simon project has recently moved to KDE infrastructure: http://dot.kde.org/2012/04/08/simon-speech-recognition-proje... and the code is here: https://projects.kde.org/projects/extragear/accessibility/si...
Tweeters say the dumbest things, pay for it
I choose to see this more of a complaint against tech journalists than of startup entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, founders will continue to do whatever they do well in the ring, ignore those outside of it.
One Year In, Thoughts on Writing
Thanks for writing this. From my conversations with several in the new-company/new-product space (mostly in New Delhi and Bengaluru), I know many of these points will help clear the fog.

That said, there are companies that exist and have been succeeding in their goals across the spectrum (i.e. the spectrum that ranges from "Only Bootstrapped" to "Only Investor's Money") - and what matters in each case are the people involved. Good bootstrappers / Bad Boostrappers / Prudent investors / Good investors / Emotional investors / Hellish investors - it depends on who you get and when.

Essentially, Point #3 in your post is gold. Thanks for articulating this.
I hope those hard drives aren't spinning when you move them on the hinge or the heads will bounce off the platters.
>If he were harmed, why would he choose to accept my offer?

Because he has to eat and you give him no other option (except not eating, which is not an option).

You have this concept that he could "shop around", but poor people cannot shop around. For one, those that would work for that kind of money don't have much bargaining power. They get what they can get. And if employers were allowed to pay them below minimum wage, they will do so. All of them (and even if some do not, their vacancies will be filled quickly exactly because of that).

So, either we correct the power imbalance (a man hungry and desperate for work and food and a guy offering work and willing to pay as little as he can) and settle a minimum amount to be paid, or we let those that have the luxury of offering work step on those having the necessity of getting a job to feed themselves.

>Even if that was the case, society is better off without ugly sexual partners.

Yes, and society if better of without poor people. Let's exterminate them. I see where you're coming from. I hope at some point you loose your job and security blanket and are forced to work minimum wage. Maybe throw in some medical bills too. If anything, it will give some perspective.
Ah yes, you are right, thanks!
Creating a font from my handwriting
I'd guess I drew at least 365 new heroes from 1st to 8th grade. I doubt many of them look as good as his do, though.
Didn't know we were here for Mr. Arrington's entertainment...
There were certainly new taxes created under Obama, such as the tax on medical devices that was part of Obamacare.
I think you could work with a laggy, semi-VR implementation.
This would be fine at 30ms (or hell 300ms).

Once the demand existed for VR headsets for these applications, perhaps hardware vendors would/could start producing low-latency displays as a way to compete in this market.

Then, real VR applications could be made to take advantage of the newly available VR headsets.

Instead of tracking the head, the fake-VR could define slight translations and slight rotations corresponding to WSAD etc a bit like the Wii works with Red Steel.

I think that, without full VR, would already be an improvement for folks who want to play shooters today but get thwarted by the controls.
Getting Started with Kara - A Web Framework in Kotlin
No, I'm not. I'm against cheap labour in general. And I always prefer places that pay their employees well, even if I have to pay some more.
Not if you already knew about it.
And why are you curious, if you don't mind my curiosity?
In what sense do you dislike complexity? Is it "this software has too many features," or "this software has too many lines of code," or "the code isn't well-organized", or all the above, or something else? Don't take this as an argument; I'm likely to be highly sympathetic to whatever you say.

I tend to dislike complexity in terms of user interface, and for the most part, "out of sight is out of mind." That's why I have to use dwm over a more typical desktop environment. So I don't really mind a command line program that has a lot of options I don't use. Same thing for vim: I can easily just ignore the features I don't use (the vast majority), because of the way vim is designed.
>You must be some kind of masochist, because you STILL keep going on about that strawman. I told you, over and over again, I have my own compass for what I consider "good" or "evil", and anyone who isn't trying to be dense would know what that means. I never used to explain behaviour, but to describe.

And you must be dense because I'm not interested in what YOU do with "evil", but in what people do in general. I don't even know you, so it should be _obvious_ that I did not start this thread with _your_ usage of "evil" in mind.
Have a little girl.
>No, it's a shorthand for saying "I disapprove of his actions".

It's the worst possible way to say that you "disapprove of his actions".
The Gift of Code (lessons learned)
Fair point, but I thought it was clear I was referring to the first "exception", that is, calling a function like "foo()". Your example, while interesting, doesn't apply.

I'll be more clear:

> When there is no ‘.’ the keyword ‘this’ is bound to the global object window.

False if the function has "use strict".
There is something of a sea change going on right now (perhaps it's still too early to use that term, but the tide is surely shifting).

Let's distinguish two types of "negative" studies: one is a study whose result simply failed to be positive. "We performed exome sequencing in a kindred but failed to identify a common mutation in all affected members of the family." There are so many possible error modes, including erroneous fundamental assumptions about where this family's defect lies, that this is possibly uninteresting to virtually anyone.

The second type is a study that was done in a way that was powered to detect a positive result, had it been there. "We performed a randomized controlled trial in 1,000 patients with hemochromatosis to determine whether iron chelation was non-inferior to bloodletting for the treatment of hemochromatosis. We found that iron chelation failed to achieve non-inferiority." In this example (which is made up), this is a negative result that teaches us something immediately, and which could change practice (or could tell everyone that practice is not about to change despite rumors of a potentially new therapy).

Along these lines, to prevent these valuable yet "negative" trials from going unpublished, high-end medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine are now requiring that all trials enter into a registry.
No, but some people are stupid enough to list HTML as programming language.
One of them wil be replacing my T61 then. Thanks for the report :)
We are aware of the consequences that could arise from security glitches. We already have a few things in place to improve security and we are coming up with many more. We are setting up a semi automated way to filter suspicious packages. Also, We plan to have people stationed at airports who can handover and pick up packages to inspect them before giving to/taking from travelers. We have also teamed up with ecommerce retailers to help deliver to places they dont normally delivery. When an ecommerce company is delivering stuff through you, you have more reason to trust the package contents. Travelers have an option of rejecting packages which they are uncomfortable delivering.
It doesn't stand for anything in normal speech. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/blob?q=blob

In the context of 'binary blob' I think it would be clear it just means an amorphous mass of bits and not some Jargon File definition (which in turn is clearly a play on the regular word in itself).
>But the concept of "evil" is still very useful. The point of defining evil is so that you can teach people not to be evil.

>But the rise of Hitler was not inevitable. Had Hitler been raised with a stronger, better moral compass, had the people who enabled his rise possessed a better moral compass, the war and the Holocaust would not have happened.

Things could have happened differently, but the war was more or less unavoidable due to the Versaille treaty. Hilter was just one man -- millions of Germans wanted "war" and were enraged with the treaty even before Hitler became known.

>After the war, the American occupiers rebuilt the education system to teach people that what Hitler did is evil, in order to install a moral compass that would prevent a repeat of the Holocaust from happening again.

What? This is extremely condescending to the German people. They knew very well what they did, and the rebuilding of the educational system has nothing to do with their "moral compass". You really believe that they needed ...Americans to instill a "moral system" onto them?!!! As if Americans are ...morally superior people?!!!
Donate to The Firebird Foundation
You're right, Snapchat has network effects which _does_ create a commitment effect; however, as Nir Eyal points out, network effects aren't enough (http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/04/the-network-effect-isnt-goo...). The rapid growth of Snapchat (without use of Facebook/Twitter integration) exemplify this. Users are willing and able to switch services much more easily today than ever before.
I am absolutely floored at your rationale here. Every single thing you describe is completely irresponsible. Didn't buy health insurance for your employees? You're not irresponsible, everyone else just "doesn't understand.

I'm not asking anyone to plan for every eventuality, but if you can't afford to pay someone, and still hire them anyway, I frankly don't think you deserve to run a business ever again. I feel like these founders should be named and shamed every single time this happens.
Maybe. But how many of them are likely to notice a 2% increase on a tax that is already just a few percentage of each paycheck as it is?
I had to google to figure out what the heck hackulous is: http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/jailbreak/hackulous-shuts-down-...
Here's the full book available free online:
http://www.chem.fsu.edu/chemlab/isc3523c/feyn_surely.pdf