skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
not at all. I find that easy to remember quips and analogies are far more effective than any long winded refutation of socialism or explanations of economic principles. I find that all too often libertarians in trying to convince others are unaware of how the language they are using is self-defeating because of the negative connotations of terms used by mass media.

you heard the one about walmart taking $40 a month out of your paycheck and then giving you milk for 'free'? :)
Doug Lenat on Wolfram Alpha
It looks like some people did retire young, LOL. Seriously, this is more than just some pallets. This must have been one the biggest frauds ever. Unless, of course, the whole point was simply to inject liquidity in the crippled Iraqi economy. This would be a great story for a John Grisham book.
right but people aren't encouraged to think critically about economics and so the idea of doing the math never occurs to them. I think there is a cognitive bias involved in not examining too closely the exact methods of a leader who tells you that he will get more resources for the tribe. We prefer to think of ourselves and project an image of empathy and community, but the most effective tribes were those that killed others and stole their resources. So we like to gloss over the details because it allows us to maintain our self image.
In essence the best leaders are Machiavellian, so we look the other way and pretend our share of the plunder didn't come from initiating force.
A Tutorial on Clustering Algorithms
Qt license questions
Hi,
I'm working on a commercial software in c++ and Qt with other two friends.

We want to sell the software and distribute it with closed source.

Is the LGPL Qt license good for this? I mean, what are its restrictions? I've read something about static linking, but I'm not sure what it is.

Can you help me?

Thanks,
Carlo
If you think that you can recover overwritten data, feel free to accept 'The Great Zero Challenge' over at http://16systems.com/zero/

"Q. What is this?

A. A challenge to confirm whether or not a professional, established data recovery firm can recover data from a hard drive that has been overwritten with zeros once. We used the 32 year-old Unix dd command using /dev/zero as input to overwrite the drive. [...]"

It's been over a year, and nobody has accepted the challenge yet. Even if there isn't any prize money to win, I'd think that the PR opportunity would be quite enough for any data recovery firm to do it.

So my conclusion is: overwriting once is plenty good enough. You want to overwrite the whole disk though, otherwise the filesystem might leave metadata clues even after the file has been overwritten and unlinked.
Useful ORM for .Net implementing a full LINQ Provider
the is dead weight loss in the collection of taxes. A great deal of money is spent on projects that don't improve things or on things like servicing the debt. Money is destroyed all the time.
This sucks. Tracking our every move just to give us targeting advertising is a terrible thing. Especially for consumers.

I'm sure someone somewhere will be naively missing the point, happy that the advertising will more targeted and relevant.
I hate when I get a password emailed to me to begin with. That makes me wait for the email, and takes me out of the flow. I'd much rather see sites require you to create your secure password when signing up, and then sending an email to confirm your email address. You can even make things limited until it's confirmed. But, don't make me wait any longer to sign up. It's already bad enough I have to do that!
If I were to start a country, I would cap spending, and pay for things with a fiat currency. Inflation would be an unavoidable, flat, and implicit tax. The trick would be to control spending.
"A van down by the river" sprung to mind. I could have a pretty nice van for 1/4 the rent I'm paying now. A few solar "battery boosters" from the rv place, an EeePC and a tether-able smartphone and I'm set.

Forget google's "container datacenters", prepare yourself for container startups. Simply place your container of geeks in the sunlight within range of a cell tower, insert ramen and Mountain Dew and interesting web apps should begin to sprout within a week or two. I'm calling it the "Y-Container". :)
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One-line summary of the LGPL: "If you make changes to this library, you have to make those changes public; but aside from that, your code remains your own."

It sounds to me like the LGPL Qt license will work fine for you. (But I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, blah blah blah.)
This is gold. Almost everyone new to entrepreneurship makes this mistake (not setting very clear expectations early on in a business), and it sucks. Here's the comment I left on the site:

--

Very wise advice from someone whose already been there. Three more questions to think about:

1. Expenses: What is and is not an expense? Especially getting clear on business entertainment, business travel, "general life expenses that are also business expenses" like internet access, and so on. Also, what's the max dollar amount someone can spend on an expense without checking with the other person? My default advice is keep business expenses low and stick to the necessary. For a first company, say no to business entertainment, business travel, meals, general life expenses, and any hardware that a person would use for non-business reasons.

2. Profit distribution: When and how will profits be distributed? How much will be reinvested? What will the reserves be? What if one partner wants or needs cash, and the other wants to put it into expanding? This is an important question, and potentially contentious. Especially if your business is growing and money is coming in, but founders are in different places financially. Especially a point of contention if one founder is heavy in unsecured debt, and the other isn't.

3. Hours: When (not if) the hours you're working get unbalanced, how to handle that? Less an issue if it's both of your full time gigs and you're putting in full time effort each. Very important to think about if it's a side project or people have other obligations. The way I've seen work is that you define roles clearly to be completed on a plan to profitability, and once you're profitable, founders draw salary for regular, recurring work they do that's at market rates. If upkeep on the business after it's built successfully takes 15 hours/week, but lends itself to one founders skillset so he's doing 12 hours per week, you're going to have an issue really soon. Instead, that founder can get paid at around market rates, or you can outsource that part of his job.

Those are three I've seen issues with - unclear expectations on hours, profit distribution, and expenses. You've obviously been there Daniel, very nicely written up mate.
I agree with your general perspective; but also, I see obvious benefits to charging for one's product directly from the user; revenue increases as you grow, no conflicting interests or prioritisations between advertisers and users.

What are the advantages to the advertising model from a business perspective? I see obvious downsides; ad placement is a careful balancing between frustrating/confusing your users and making money off of them. Costs aren't related to the useage of your product, etc.
the way I think of it is that you want people who are bullets. They are sitting on a powder charge and all they need is a sharp tap to explode in a rush of F=ma.
This also falls in line with the fact that the initial idea isn't that important. Often the initial idea is useful only because it leads you to discover a tough problem. The tough problem is the sharp tap. Some people fall down bleeding, other people explode.

Of course sometimes all that energy gets misdirected (wall street sucking up intelligent college grads anyone?) and we quite literally shoot ourselves in the foot. Creative, productive people have a lot of energy inside them. How that energy is directed can be perverted.
I think it's not so much a question of typing quickly as a question of wether you are able to type without thinking and looking at the keyboard... When you get to that point, typing is just like walking you don't think about it and think about your code instead.
Same here, I removed coding horror from my RSS reader just the day I read that article.

Not because of the article alone, but it summed up with an almost creepy precision what had already unconsciously reduced my interest in his writing over the past months. Most of his blog-posts really match the template.

When I dropped the feed there were still 10 or 20 articles in the queue. Don't think I missed out on much.
Its an excellent retrospective, given the emotion one must have invested in seeing a startup through to the Ramen profitable phase.
Interacting with siftables videos:

http://web.media.mit.edu/~dmerrill/siftables.html
That's half the truth. Jason Fried likes to compare this to how world famous chefs lets people in on their cooking secrets.

Reading their cook books or watching their tv shows isn't going to propel you to their level of skill or put them out of business, just help you a bit a long the way.

The secret to success isn't secret.
I've heard that said as any problem in computer science can be solved by adding a layer of abstraction, except the problem of too many layers of abstraction.
I agree with the article's conclusion, but not necessarily its premise. Not sure "Hauser's Law" stands up, or is it just statistical coincidence?

But yes, raising tax rates can certainly decrease tax yields. Take one of my closest friends. He's 28 now. He's a college dropout, and self-made millionaire as of age 24. Amazing guy. He was grossing about $800,000/year in his age 24/25/26 years. He was netting out mid/low six figures, and paying $50,000-$150,000 each year in various taxes. Working (no kidding) 80+ hour weeks. Often more.

I've seen people cite the top marginal tax rate as being in the 90% range post WWII. But mobility has increased so much since then. My friend is an incredibly resourceful dude, as you can imagine. He's a good person. America wants him here, or at least should. But if the government now wanted, after writeoffs, interest deduction from taxes, etc, say... $400,000 per year from him - he'd be long gone. There's enough countries where you can get a "welcomed exceptional people" visa by putting enough money in the bank, or a resident's visa by buying a property. Dubai being one such place.

So yeah, he'd be long gone if the government wanted to tax him more. Now, I can't speak to whether that's fair, or right, or if he's neglecting his patriotic duty by not being willing to stick around in the USA even if it wasn't a smart move for him financially. But it's the way it is. He grits his teeth and pays what he has to because he reckons he'll make more money here doing it that way. If that were to change, I reckon I'd be visiting him in Hong Kong, Dubai, or wherever else pretty fast. He and I both travel pretty regularly, and both of us have lived abroad some. Heck, I'd probably leave if taxes got high enough too.
You'd be right - if it happened only once. Or twice.
It's not really like firing someone, though - if your bank keeps screwing you up, woudln't you consider opening an account somewhere else...?
Everybody and their dog has said they're going to provide this Really Soon Now for the last 15 years, and it still isn't going to happen, because interest is not intent.

I'm very interested in saving for retirement. As a working professional, convincing me to use your brokerage/retirement products instead of the next guy is worth Quite A Bit Of Money as long as I stay. However, I have no intent of switching brokerages today, like I would be demonstrating if I had just googled [open roth ira account]. Ditto "wow, he certainly appears interested in computers" vs. "I have my credit card in one hand and my mouse in the other, who wants to sell me a laptop".

This is the big reason Facebook can't monetize my pageviews despite the fact that their algorithms could infer more about my interests than many people who have known me for years.
I think this is becoming more and more true as globalization reduces the sedentary habits of business. when you're selling things over the internet, what incentive do you have to stay in a highly taxed region?
Obama says he'll set policy according to the science... Let's see, shall we?
Why would it be a cage? Isn't the idea of a free society is that it is a society? A group of responsible adults could agree that events could occur which result in people having to live on the streets for no reason of their own. I agree with some forethought these events could be planned for, but this is the sense of noblesse oblige. It recognises that not all people in the community are able to plan with the same level of forethought, and that the resources they have to work with will forbid this level of planning. And so a wealthy society can afford to look after all people if they so desire. If they wish to opt of the safety net then that is fine, I don't see how it's a cage.
I've never heard of this idea... I'm scanning econ blogs for the rest of the day to see if anyone comments on it.
Dude's problem is that he thinks he's (still) primarily a developer, whereas what he is (now) is a blogger.
Doesn't this call into question the premise of a Laffer curve?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

And if increasing taxation lowers GDP doesn't it follow that lowering taxation should increase GDP?
"Imagine if you had to wait one second for your keyboard to respond to any key you type (and one second between keystrokes)"

I've had this experience, while traveling I had a really slow internet connection and had to do some work via ssh to fix a server, it was hell...

You go through that experience one time and you learn that being able to automate as much as possible with tools like capistrano and sprinkle for server setup is crucial (it also started me on the path to keep my /etc configuration files on git...)
Phew. Interest meaning involvement/attention and not interest rates. I read the headline and checked the date to see if it was April 1st already because Adsense revenues based on the Fed prime rate or 30yr fixed mortgage rate would be a funny caricature of the current economic situation. Of course, it would not be funny if they actually did it, which I'm glad they didn't.
Good call Jack - kind of obvious now that you mention it.
I would be inclined to agree with you. I don't think the inconvenience is too great to wipe with three passes just to make sure.
excelent piece of advise - one thing I find quite hard (impossible?), though, is to have EVERYTHING explicitly spoken/written: there are just so many variables out there, you'd probably lose a lot of time sketching things down - and still not covering the bases that will turn out to be problems...
Required reading for every programmer who upvoted the parent (and who presumably don't touchtype):

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirties...
Breathe deeply, relax. You're obviously bright and driven but don't let it drive you to desperation.

You need a partner, a co-founder to share your dream and workload. Start there.
Google Gets Into Behavioral Targeting, Launches “Interest-Based Advertising” Beta
Lawmaker wants Google Maps to blur certain buildings
Ultimate Round-Up For Version Control with Subversion
That's one argument, but I think the parent comment was making a different argument: whoever gets to write the test gets to decide what matters, and what guarantee do you have that the test will really be testing value-neutral relevant facts, or (even if it is) that the choice of which facts won't introduce bias? I expect it wouldn't be hard to come up with a test for which (1) almost all the experts agree on what all the answers are, but (2) if you select from the general population on the basis of what those answers are you get a sample that's politically biased. (Ludicrous example: suppose the test gives you lots of quotations from Ayn Rand's fiction and asks you which character said what. The answers are totally uncontroversial, but if only people who answered correctly could vote you might just happen to get a distinctly more libertarian government. Do something similar with the works of Karl Marx and you'd get a distinctly more socialist government. And so on. Of course in practice someone seeking to bias the test would do it in more subtle ways.)
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To The Brain, God Is Just Another Guy
It's definitely impossible to plan for every eventuality, but that doesn't mean that doing some planning isn't useful. Ultimately, start-ups are very resource-constrained, so you have to do what you think matters most and hope for the best. If you at least have a good stab at answering the questions outlined in the articles (and the comment by Sebastian), you'll be a long way ahead of where you'd be with no planning.
As an American citizen, you are taxed globally. Now, you may think that you can simply renounce your US citizenship, burn your passport and call it a day, but as of 1986 the IRS is able to come after you for taxes for up to 10 years after renunciation of citizenship. In addition, tax information is now shared with INS, so you can be barred entry from the US or end up getting carted off to somewhere you don't want to go if you don't have all of your ducks in a row.

Perhaps you're thinking of starting an offshore company, and keeping your money there. Well, you've got to file a special form each year with the IRS for each entity of this sort, as they are known as "Controlled Foreign Corporations." Failure to provide the IRS with this information once again causes you to run afoul of US laws, which once again puts you at risk of punishment from the country that is globally known as "the world's policeman."

You have to remember that you are a citizen of the world's smartest country. They have pretty much thought of everything.
That's like saying "150k ain't rich if you have a 100k/year gambling habit" or "150k ain't rich if you have an enormous house purchased with a big mortgage". Living in the Bay Area is a luxury that only the well-off can afford without great hardship; it has benefits which mean that many people do it even though after paying to live in the Bay Area they don't have much disposable income. Just as many people choose to take out large mortgages, or buy fast cars, or gamble, or whatever, even though they may not then have much disposable income left.
There's much truth into this.

I think that if you don't have to think about typing at all you don't have to schedule time-slices for thinking and editing. It's just a side-effect that your fingers work really fast for almost anything when they're autonomous: this is the thing referred to in the article.

For example, I often observe that I have two parallel processes going on: thinking and editing. I keep editing the file, correcting formatting, keeping lines beautifully cut and moving stuff around _autonomously_ while I'm still thinking about the _actual_ problem. It's like biting your nails when thinking over something: it just happens, you don't _do_ it. Doing stuff that you don't need to think about at all actually helps me in the thinking part.

To be able to do that you have to master the keyboard, both for writing text, writing code and moving around (and you need emacs to move around quickly enough, imho hehe:)). I wouldn't want to imagine synchronising my trains of thought over a mental mutex in order to switch between editing and thinking.

This means that there's minimal latency over your thinking and what gets into the program. If it's low enough, programming becomes fluid as you couple thinking and changing the source code in nearly real-time. I could guess that many poor souls who have spent way too much time over the keyboard have realised this.
libertarianism and capitalism are not at odds with social consciousness and charity. as a libertarian I object only to the mandatory nature of government sponsored regulation and subsidy. instead of having a government sponsored safety net let startups compete to monetize the homeless market. As mentioned a lot of these people are doing day laborer jobs and other miscellaneous things. there is probably a lot of potential there that is only being stifled by minimum wage laws. Minimum wage laws prevent anyone whose labor isn't worth at least $x an hour from finding employment.
"but paying homeless people $3 an hour is barbaric, what do you want, homeless sweat shops?"
$3 an hour is better than $0 an hour, and the defining feature would be that everything was entered into as a voluntary contract. Nothing would be forced on anyone. It would simply be giving homeless people an option that doesn't exist now.

Imagine: Better Living Inc. offers housing, counseling, and vocational training to the homeless. In the interim the homeless person works for $3 an hour until he has enough saved up to jump start a real life again.
I'm betting the numbers add up.
Young people prefer the sound of MP3s to uncompressed music
I'd love to take them on. However they are right it is highly unlikely data can be recovered from that drive. They have only a few folders/files on there it seems leaving little to go on to rebuild the image.

It's not worth it - who needs the PR.. it's worthless when we recover zeroed disks frequently anyway :) If their willing to meet the cost to recover it (I'd do it cheap for £600). We are UK based so I guess they wont.

I dont think you can draw the conclusion that overwriting once is plenty fine based on their conclusions. At least not till:
- Someone has tried their disk (people not wanting too is different from giving it a shot :))
- Someone trying a more real life example (install an OS, then copy some files in, then DD it).

Considering the second one has been done... :)

They are quite welcome to clone any old OS drive onto a disk and wipe it the same way with DD. Then fly it over to us here and pay the £1000 (ish) cost to recover it. (yes, I know that is a bit outrageous but so is their "challenge").
Ah, I expected someone to make this comment eventually. It's true that the United States' tax code is the only one in the world that sets tax on its citizens living in foreign countries, transacting business in foreign countries, with foreign citizens, foreign suppliers, doing business with no connection to the United States. Brits in particular have a good laugh at our international tax code. They simply don't believe it when I try explaining it to them.

Anyway, as someone that knows quite a few expats and international businesspeople - practically speaking, it doesn't always go down like you say.
It's a REALLY bad idea to start a business when you are desperate. Work on your business nights, and let your day job pay for it. Hire people, manage them and let them be working while you are in the office. Dedicate half your income to your startup, and you will get there without any risk. If you do what you are doing now, the fear will prevent your business from being a success.
I had a bigt discussion about this not very long ago with a client we were destroying some disks for. He had read something along similar lines (one pass is fine).

I agree: 1 pass will tend to hide a lot of stuff. But when I did a quick example and showed him us recovering SAM files (windows password files) from one of his HDD's containing the MSCACHE hashes of several employees on his Windows Domain he was convinced

(edit: of course that was a lucky break - and you do have to crack the passwords too - but we got some contact info and other document segments too :)).