skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, and I feel the exact same way. Hopefully some of what has been outlined here will help those who come across this thread and start thinking of strategies to "get out of it." You really can't, and I agree that you really shouldn't try. Love your country enough to openly criticize it, and try to find a way to make it better.

We're still the best country in the world, which is plainly evident once you've spent enough time running around the world. Yeah, it's somewhat ridiculous that it costs 45% of your income (and rising) to have a California license plate and a US passport, but there's something enjoyable about the notion of being "too rich to care," which is likely to come into vogue if taxes go up; the highly-taxed wealthy in Sweden and Denmark are examples of what I'm talking about.
Jenoptik Digital Camera
Discover the results of my research into the Jenoptik Digital Camera and it's possible alternatives.
I've got views on taxation that would get me crucified on reddit, but may have a more sympathetic ear on HN. Here's some examples:

1) Eliminating corporate taxes. Would increase employment, capital spending, and wouldn't leave too much of a dent in tax receipts.

2) Eliminating automatic payroll tax deductions. Have citizens actually write out a check every quarter. Very inefficient, but we'd start to see some major reforms in SS/Medicare as federal legislature starts to get calls from their constituents.

3) Cutting payroll taxes and offset revenue with energy taxes (gasoline and carbon).
downvote it but you cannot change the truth
"Chrome is a joy to use, and in my opinion at least, it's the first true advance in web browser technology since the heady days of Internet Explorer 4.0."

Um... add-ons? XMLHttpRequest? User scripting/Greasemonkey? User stylesheets? Built-in search bar? AwesomeBar? Ubiquity? Adblock? Popup blockers? True zoom? Session saver? Tabs?
Abolishing patent and copyright law
Apple introduces new shuffle
This doesn't work. You still have to report your holdings in the company to the IRS as a CFC, regardless of whether the company generates a profit / pays you income / etc. This, of course, puts a red flag on you, which leads to a higher chance of being audited, which thus would cause the IRS to go over each and every transaction from which you benefited (meaning, if the company bought a car and you used it for personal use; if the company bought a plane ticket which was for a trip for which a portion of time was spent on non-work-related leisure, etc) to see where it can be counted as income for which you are liable.

You can, of course, keep a foreign company, file the CFC with the IRS, and keep an accountant on hand to keep the balances separate; there are plenty of people who do this. If done properly, however, it is somewhat of a pain in the ass, and only enjoyable if you're an obsessive-compulsive tax-avoider like John Malone. Remember, life is short, time is money, and money is meaningless once you have enough of it.
Google to Offer Ads Based on Interests
A different perspective:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/03/missing-1000000-tax-b...
I find it more helpful to divide these huge numbers by the number of US households (aprox. 100,000,000)

Doing that we get $10,000/household instead of $3,000 for every man, woman, child, prisoner, etc.

I think budget numbers ought to be reported this way. The recent $410 billion spending bill would be reported as $4100/household spending bill. Suddenly people start to think differently - Do I really want to borrow $4100 to spend on this?
I learned a nice trick with OS X's Disk Utility the other day. You can securely delete already-deleted files, after the fact, with this tool. Just select a volume, go to the Erase tab, and click "Erase Free Space..."
Your argument is one of extremes. The relevant consideration is what occurs on the margins. There are some rich people who have decided not to take their capital elsewhere, but will if they are taxed more. Your premise is that these people don't exist and that is not true.
Front page looks nice-- if I was looking for such a service, your front page would have pulled me in to find out more. Nice job on the first step.
The idea is interesting, but unfortunately the article doesn't have too many details. A spectrogram or something similar would have been nice.
Similar to the point I made concerning Google Reader, this service is one that so long as it is not a huge loss for them, it will probably remain around as it provides huge internal and non-fiscal profits in terms of effort and information. The fact they can open it up to the public and generate any sort of income is a good thing to atleast alleviate the costs.
Excuse the ignorant, but what is SEM short for?

Am I near the truth if I say that you analyze lots of residual bits to see how the drive usually manages to overwrite a one, and then use that to get a fuzzy logic version of the contents of the drive?
My partner and I are launching a new business and have adopted your "13 sentences" as our bible. FWIW, I learned your #1 rule about the choice of partners many years ago at my first startup. Partnering with a dummy for short-term benefits (e.g. connections to investors in the case I saw) will be the death of a startup.

Thanks for posting this.
I have a good friend who I've known for many years. Very smart. So I ask him if he would be interested in coming up with a domain and told him he would be rewarded if we became successful. His response was that he would, but he wanted me to write up a contract. I thought, You've got to be kidding me. So I put on my lawyer hat and spent several hours writing up a contract making sure the language was as sound as could be. He was impressed by the contract (remember, very smart) and wanted just a couple things worded differently. Fine. After all of that effort, he did not come up with an acceptable domain name. Maybe the contract was a smart move, but that kind of thing seems over the top sometimes.
Could a company like Semtex really overlook that type of thing? I don't really condone breaking and entering, but it kind of shows the issues with anything protected with a password.
"Give them money and it disappears". Yeah, I wish they'd stop eating their money and using it as toilet paper, so it could actually do some work in the economy.
YouTube: if we build it, will they come?
We are...it's called the lottery.
Supply side economics has a fundamental flaw: it lowers aggregate demand. The middle class has been able to make up for this over the last 30 years in two ways - by having women join the workforce, and by taking on more and more debt. Debt can be piled on for quite a long time, but when the credit bubble pops, you get what we are going through now. And when consumers find out that debt is not income, and they retrench in their spending, then there is no market for the goods all the saintly business owners are making. This is the worst case scenario.
Cute/Fun error messages will IMO get annoying really fast once the novelty wears off. Just like that clippy thing in MS Office.
Well, it's not the first true advance, but it's got tab processes and the Javascript engine (JIT compiler, I think it was) and some other new ideas.
According to the article, users will get a Ads Preferences Manager. It will show what Google thinks you're interested in and you can change the categories as well.

Edit: It has an opt-out button as well.
http://www.google.com/ads/preferences
Is there anyone still making tube amplifiers? I might like to have one, if it didn't cost too much.
Six devices people have built to communicate with through Twitter
> I agree with some forethought these events could be planned for

Really? One of the things that Hayek is well known for, the 'socialist calculation problem', states that too much central control is bad because it's simply impossible to 'calculate' an economy - it's best left as a dynamic system with millions of independent actors. However, doesn't that also apply to individuals? You can do your best to make plans, only to run into things beyond your knowledge or control.
Thye fault lies in whomever set up the system in leaving the admin password as the default.
SEM = Scanning Electron Microscope. Actually when I say "ours" it is jointly owned by a local university who house it and use it when we dont need it. It is specialised (or rather adapted) for HDD scans though.

Yes that kinda explains the proces. It's rather complex and not something I am fully versed in (it not being my field, I process the data) but I will have a shot at explaining. It is possible to analyse the individual bits and predict what the byte was before by seeing what has "moved" (i.e. when you zero a byte or a cluster it simply moves all the 1 bits to zero)

The reason 3 passes defeats is (mostly) is that it deliberately makes sure every bit is moved at least once (for example by writing first FF and then 00 to it). Then a final zeroing pass. Because you write the inverse of the first pass on the second run it ensures every "pin" is moved. Then when you write 0's anything that can be reconstructed is just the random garbage from the second pass.

Anyway; a 120GB disk will produce about 1TB of statistical data from the SEM process - which we can analyse. Once you get a handle on a few "known" files (like the OS ones) you can begin to rebuild unknown protions based on that data. Keyword recognition and file signatures help identify when we succesfully recover something.

You are talking about a weeks processing on 25 node cluster (100 cores).
The same can be said of living in the US. You could move to a cheaper part of the world, perhaps even telecommute. You could argue that you grew up in the US, so staying home is not a luxury. Those who grew up in the Bay Area don't see living there as a luxury any more than you see living in the US as a luxury.
Getting into character
My buddy lovingly makes these by hand one at a time:
http://toneking.com
He is obsessive about controlling every detail - not only the things you know affect the sound like speakers (custom designed) but also the power transformer is custom wound - even the covering is custom run.

They cost $2000-$3000
For other systems throwing some fine dust or flour over the pad before someone uses it will get you 80% there. If it's dry and someone's already used it recently you can spot what the numbers are by brushing the dust off.
It might well be that many people complaining about "soulless, thin MP3s" would not be able to tell a 160kbps VBR MP3 from the original in a controlled experiment. Low-quality headphones and speakers are obviously a different matter, but if you're telling somebody that compression makes their music soulless and thin, you're an audio snob without any facts.
Interesting. Are the known files required to be able to find the data, and how big they have to be?

I'm more or less wondering if a RAID:ed system (with say 64kb big chunks of data) will make it impossible to recover the data.
Yeah, they can afford junk food so the system must be working, right?
The generalized protocol/URL idea is a nice one. I'm not sure it'd be simpler, but it'd certainly be useful.

It's interesting you mention AMQP; this work I'm doing actually came out of some of the work I did as part of my work on RabbitMQ.
I have read several times that many of the so called "socialist" European countries actually have lower corporate taxes than the U.S. (They have higher payroll and income taxes, of course.)

Offsetting other taxes with increases in energy taxes is close to the consensus opinion of economists, I think.

So, maybe too extreme for Reddit, but not so far out of the mainstream, perhaps.
Maybe we reached a point where web services assure they won't disappear in the near future.
I really dislike these cutesy google-style error messages à la "oops something went wrong" and "Aw, snap ..." - Often, their information value is zero: they don't explain to you how to solve the problem or what went wrong (maybe with the exception of the frozen error message). When you are frustrated because something isn't working these messages can get on your nerves fast.

It's great if you can package the information in a funny way, but if you can't I'd take function over form any time.
Governments are a corner case though. You don't get to decide, in most cases, what services you want and how much money you're going to spend for them. In many cases, the services provided are for public goods, which have wonky economics and pricing (or lack thereof) of their own. So it's fairly irrelevant to the sorts of products and things most of us work on. If you really want articles about strategic pricing, there is a lot of far more directly relevant material out there... trying to tie this into startups feels like "6 degrees of hacker news".
If you say it all day, every day, then your 5 year old will go to school and use it. On the other hand, if it slips out when you hit your thumb with a hammer (assuming you're not a very uncoordinated career carpenter) then your 5 year old will know that it must have hurt like the dickens, but that it's not a word for every day use.
The problem is that is the 40% of the country with hardly any money, so there's not much revenue to be gotten from them, anyway. They also still pay a fair amount of more regressive taxes like social security, sales taxes, etc.
I don't think Google is that good with integrating all the data they have. For example they still show me Google Chrome ads on pages I open with the Chrome browser.

I also doubt Google AdSense would show me ads based on the contents of the referring page (as a limited form of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_targeting). Also Facebook could use all the external links you post or click to build a profile of you, but their limited keyword ad targeting indicates they don't.
it's not about large quantities of money just sitting in a bank account. it's about investment. high taxes discourage reinvestment of profits back into businesses.
I know you use the phrase saintly business owner as a form of sarcasm, but you do realize that you're posting on a board that started dedicated to hacking and startups, right? I mean, a lot of people on here are either saintly business owners or want to become one.

Be careful using such a broad brush.
Absolutely false. Nobody in the US has "no access to healthcare at all."
Yes. We have welfare, food stamps and related programs, which consist of transfer payments to non workers. In most regions we have homeless shelters, which provide beds and food. Various regions have a variety of other programs.

In particular, I believe Seattle guarantees a bed in a homeless shelter. I know NY does. People live outside the shelters anyway.
Apple goes retro with latest iPod Shuffle
No not needed: but they shortcut the process because the software can get a handle on the data it is given a little better. It just cuts the processing down a bit (never tested it without that kind of searching so I couldnt say how much).

I suspect that a RAID would foil it. For a start we would need to program in the facility to rebuild the RAID (and analyse based on Chunks). I doubt it would work out.

We do quote a price for SEM Raid recovery but it is in the 10's of thousands - a.k.a no thanks :D
There was an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond about this. Ray buys his dad a really nice, new CD system along with CDs of his favorite music. His dad hates it, they get in a big argument, and the episode ends with the dad in the basement listening to the scratchy sounds of his old record player with his eyes closed, obviously taken back to memories of his youth.
Most people forget overwriting on the directory file name holding structures (of the different file systems.) The names of the deleted files stay there for long time. This is more so on FAT and FFS-type directories (guesstimate ~99% of file systems.)

If a prosecutor (or government torturer) can prove the suspect had a file and wiped it out (e.g. /documents/superillegalfile.txt), I wouldn't like to be in his place.
I've never heard that term before but I really like it. Hats off to your mother.
You may want to target law and gov't offices. Fewer people will bitch at them about what's legal, and they have boatloads of signatures to collect.

For me, fax-to-email and printer driver-to-internet fax are cheaper and more convenient.
Everybody who is voting this up, I dislike you personally.
You've just got to pray that everyone keeps using Dollars to buy/sell oil and doesn't switch to the Euro.
That's exactly what Adpinion does: http://adpinion.com/
Absolutely. My sister works for a company that ships byproducts such as cow hearts and brains over to Europe where apparently there is a pretty big market for the stuff that we're too finicky to eat here in the US.
You don't have to go through all these contortions.

Increasing price always eventually results in less revenue. Your ability to choose has nothing to do with it. The curve holds even in forced markets.

That's the point I was making. You're asking for an exact match or nothing, which I think is a little bit on the extreme reasoning side. We don't need six degrees of hacker news, but we can't abandon power curves because it might be uncomfortable to talk about them either.

In fact, even the exceptions are interesting here. It turns out you can soak the rich, at least in narrow markets with the right positioning. What you can't do is force a generic product into a high-end market and expect similar returns.

This is all good stuff. Take out the politics and you've got a great discussion about how product positioning affects gross revenue. The item in question is simply a fixed product in a forced market. But heck, we're in that situation now with many monopolies, so it's not like government owns this particular discussion -- it's a generic discussion with government simply as one example.
This is the second time in as many days. Sigh.
Supply side economics has a fundamental flaw: it lowers aggregate demand.

I can't make heads or tails of this. if oversupply occurs prices decrease.
its profitable, just not scaled to mega profits yet
Very MacGyver. From Radio Shack parts you can build a piezo sensor circuit and stick that on the keypad.
Latency is often more important than throughput.
The planning fallacy, and how to fix it
Agreed. The best programmer I ever knew had severe carpal tunnel syndrome and had to use Dragon Dictate. Yet he could do things that teams of other programmers couldn't.

Before I arrived he had made a network monitoring system more than 100x faster when the team responsible for it was on vacation. (The CEO reported that the events now flew by, whereas before you could easily observe the event stream crawling.) He later single-handedly implemented and maintained the router configuration system for an ISP that spanned the US and there was never a single (non-cosmetic) bug reported against it in the 10 years I was there, even in the face of changing requirements, new hardware, and the company constantly coming out with new connectivity services.

He had learned to program in the days of punched cards, and he would do all his thinking on paper before he started coding. He would then dictate the code, top to bottom, without any bugs.

I'm willing to concede that he's an outlier.
precisely. we can't forget that money is just an abstract representation of the productivity of people. It is constantly created as things people want are produced and destroyed as those things are consumed.
Is there any way to search by region? I wanted to build a search restricted to vendors in New England, where shipping costs to Boston are probably lower, but I couldn't immediately figure out how to do so.

For obvious reasons I expect many if not most of the vendors to be on the West Coast, but hope springs eternal...
These things do get killed if people flag them.
Yeah, for a couple of projects. It's been a pretty smooth experience imo.
Or we could pay private companies to build fiber and then let everyone use it, which exactly how bridges work.
So I need 2 hands to forward delete? I know all about this, but it doesn't help. I usually end up using ctrl-d instead -- but guess what -- control is in the wrong place! Arg!
The euro??? The euro has a much, much better chance of ceasing to exist than it does of replacing the dollar as the reserve currency. Countries like Spain and Italy that are near depression will have huge incentives to leave the euro so they can conduct their own monetary policy. If Eastern Europe is not bailed out before it goes bust, then more Western European banks will go bankrupt - and many countries in Europe are too small to bail out their banks. There will be immense pressure on the eurozone countries to leave the monetary union.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The dollar does not look good, but compared to the euro or the yen, it looks great. We don't have to worry about losing reserve currency status anytime soon. We just need to figure out what to do with insolvent banks.
Oh, they'll switch. I don't know if it'll be to the Euro, but they'll switch. Right now our policymakers are throwing the kitchen sink at stopping asset price deflation. Employing inflationary policies to counter both moderates the severity, and delays the turn. But since we're in crisis mode, we're not doing any planning around how we're going to remove the inflationary policies when the time comes.

Combine that with massive fiscal deficit, and you have a recipe for inflation and dollar devaluation. It's played out exactly this way many times in many parts of the world throughout history.
Indeed I'm well aware of how to remap it, but I'd just prefer it in the correct place. By correct I of course mean the place where my muscle memory has zero work to do to hit it.
Doing a startup with a friend is similar to renting an apartment together. You are almost guaranteed huge problems that will put a strain on your relationship.

All this talk about putting things in writing is more or less bullshit. Yes you will know who is right based on your preparations...but so what? All this will do is make the final decision easier in a dispute for the winner...but thats it. The other person will still feel wronged. Your relationship will still suffer, because you had to put your foot down.
How We All Became Elvis
Google Now Lets You Target Ads At Yourself
I was going to - but the parent article is pretty interesting (and i didnt have time for the resubmit :D)
Facebook Developers Getting Antsy Over Verified Apps Program
If you promise a reward based on 'success', then your friend was right to get a contract from you.

For such a small contribution though the whole thing sounds rather silly. Better to pay something upfront and/or ask for pro bono.
I didn't think about it until you mentioned it, but I would love to have my mix tapes back from high school.
Yeah, but consider the alternative: you can have a successful venture for many years, and earn a lot of money, only to have one party find a loophole that allows him to attain and exploit 51% control, and screw the other completely.
He did that? I missed it. Which book did he review?
Apple Announces New iPod shuffle
Nothing like trying to make up for a loss with volume! (Speaking as a prime member, I have a sneaking suspicion they are losing money on a lot of my orders. However more frequent those may be.)
For #1 how would you handle situations where someone signs up up on the 20th of the month. Would you charge them for 10 days, or for ~40?

What about if instead they signup on the 28th of the month? 3 days or ~33?
Supply, demand, and price are all related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand