skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's got nothing to do with increasing tax revenue - it's petty overreaction on behalf of the responsible state body - the FTB. I quote liberally from the article:

> It turns out that a few years ago, someone sued the Franchise Tax Board over being denied the right to claim the QSB benefit [Cutler v. Franchise Tax Bd., 208 Cal. App. 4th 1247 (2012)]. The company at issue in that lawsuit did not meet one of the QSB requirements—that it maintain 80 percent of its employees and assets in California. In August of 2012, the California Court of Appeals sided with the plaintiff, ruling that denying him the QSB exclusion based on the “80 percent requirement” was an unconstitutional violation of the interstate commerce clause.

> Since the FTB lost the case, you might think that they would strike the unconstitutional requirement and keep the rest of QSB statute intact. Not a chance.

> What the FTB did instead was to take their ball and go home. They decided that since they could not impose the “80 percent requirement,” no one would be entitled to the QSB exclusion. They put out an announcement terminating the Qualified Small Business exclusion and retroactively disqualifying all exclusions and deferrals going all the way back to 2008.
I saw the rose trick quite a lot through Germany in 2011, but I had no need/desire for a rose so I never fell for it. I did fall for the "free US flag sticker" in Philadelphia on Independence Day 2011. Supposedly it was some charity's method of fundraising.
Subcomandante Marcos: De la Política, sus Finales y sus Principios
Make it move please! It's so frustrating ;)
Oh, I don't stress about it too much. And yeah, I have no use for their fiction or poetry, but sometimes their criticism can be interesting.
So a forum for google groups of people you know or may not? I guess I am just trying to understand the use case as well as revenue model.
My thesis is: Wedding photography is the biggest market for rental lenses and the lenses REQUIRED for wedding photography are fast lenses that range from $900-$2200. Additionally, there are many people who may shoot a limited number of weddings per year which do not have the cash to spend $2,000 on a lens.

--

Once a photographer has a 70-200 f/2.8, a fastish wide angle and a prime or two, they really don't need anything besides strobes to shoot weddings.

Wedding lenses are important for your business for 2 reasons:

1) Non-pros going to weddings are a great market for rental lenses (1 time use, going to get some great shots).

2) It takes a while to transition to wedding photography fulltime and it is the only place to make real money down the road in most cases. During the transition from 1 weddding a year to 20 weddings a year people will need to rent lenses or not eat if they want to use what is basically required equipment for getting quality low light shots.

They will want to own the body first so that they know how to use it.

---
I don't have data to support that the sweet spot is $2000, fast lenses, but I'd be shocked if I were wrong.

The expensive primes and superzooms and tilt shift and stuff are probably the market, and those are $2000-10000. I've got access to a lens lending program from a manufacturer, and I'd plan a trip around borrowing an evaluation 500mm f/2.8L.

I'm sure this stuff gets rented too and is probably rented more than bought, but the overall market size (in terms of days used) for people shooting with 500mm 2.8 is far less than the 70-200 f2.8.

---
Additionally, those that own the lenses are likely to have them unused 20 weeks a year which provides the other side of the market.
How did the trend develop, especially for things like configuration data?

Some warped sense of ease from using Java and .NET libraries to read / write XML?
How Dev Bootcamp Co-Founder Dave Hoover Learned to Program
Nothing too terribly exciting, but the Source Map feature, allowing easier debugging inside minified code seems very useful. Chrome only, but still an extremely slick feature:

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...
On the topic of women making major contributions to math and sciences, I think Hedy Lamarr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr and Ada Lovelace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_lovelace also deserve recognition
Wow. I also note: The first paragraph stands alone as an interesting tidbit from him.
While this looks pretty cool, having just gone through a huge i18n project at my company, there are a few things I'd like to see in a production ready i18n platform...

1) Plurals

2) Productisation:

If you go into a different country, and you have give you product a different name, you would want to support that new name in all locales.

For example, if in the UK your product is called A and in Germany it's called B. Then when you visit the UK site in the German locale, it should call the product "A"

3) Currency formatting

If you are a US user, who visits a page which is showing Canadian prices, you'll want it to say something like CAD$10.

Different Eurozone countries have different ways of displaying currency (€10/10€)

4) Distance formatting

5) Time and Date formatting

4) An i18n strategy for images

5) This gets more into localisation rather than i18n, but localising images can be difficult (if you have a car, then you would want the correct number plate or you'd want the steering wheel to be on the correct side of the car)

6) Support for different "voice" in different countries.

Countries respond differently to different voices (people in the US might like a more casual tone, wheras people in another country might respond better to a more matter of fact language)
Nope. I never got the email. Make a fake account with a generic ugly photo and that account will never get the email either.

The attractiveness status can change BTW: http://www.quora.com/OkCupid/Is-being-one-of-the-most-attrac.... It is a running record of how attractive you are compared to other users.
Just because it's not unique doesn't mean it's not personally identifiable.

For instance, you can quite often uniquely identify a person given their date of birth, gender, and zip code, none of which are nearly as unique as a MAC address[1]. Even the combination of these factors results in < 2 billion unique permutations, whereas the MAC address space numbers in the hundreds of trillions. That means, given a MAC address, I can narrow narrow down the "who" to a fairly small set of people. Add in even one other piece of scraped info, and you've got a pretty high level of uniqueness.

[1] http://godplaysdice.blogspot.com/2009/12/uniquely-identifyin...
I honestly think that he thought he had outsmarted them.
How does "the factor of 34" tell us that something's "obviously amiss"?

Maybe that's more than you expected, but incredulity is a weak argument.

Why does there being "a program with only factor 2" suggest that something's "obviously amiss"?

Maybe that program does not use regular expressions for all the substitutions.

https://alioth.debian.org/forum/forum.php?thread_id=14805...
Perhaps the title should be: "how to hire a hacker, assuming that there are tons of them to choose from."

Your premise is that there's a compromise required. If I'm a Ruby shop, then ideally I'd want to hire someone who loves Ruby, loves what I'm doing, loves my team, and lives where I live. But I don't often get all four, so I should sacrifice the language preference for the fit stuff. This makes sense, but I'd take it a step further and say that oftentimes (at least in this day and age) you get one, maybe two of the four and the required compromise is much deeper. Of course if you plan for it (make training available, remote work possible, etc.) then things can still work out.

I think the post is missing a key element though. How do you find these people in the first place?
Oh, it happens.

The worst story was a friend of mine who travelled over an hour on the premise of having a threesome with a swinging couple who he had met on a "casual dating" website.

He was given a home address but when he turned up he found a typical messy bachelor pad and a middle aged man waiting. He was told that the wife wouldn't be turning up for a while but to "make himself comfortable". Naturally he got the hell out of there.

It was a few years later before he actually told me the story, after I had finished laughing I asked why he had believed the guy. Turns out the guy had been copying photos from amateur porn sites and sending those as his "wife".

Naturally it should be pointed out that I'm sure the majority of gay people do not behave in such a way.
>1) I'm sure pundits predicted a lot of things.

Cheap cop-out. The most widespread prediction was that the iPad would be expensive in the "around $999" region.

2) That's nonsense. The only thing the iPad had was its screen, otherwise it was already inferior when it launched.

Now, that's nonsense, if I ever read one.

For over a year there was no competition to the iPad worth mentioning. Point to anything if you have. Prepare to be ridiculed. Android wasn't even ready for tablets back then.
Twitter files dispute over Twitter.org, domain being used for scam surveys
Related: http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza...
ex post facto, surely?
From the people I know working in banking, outsourcing is in fact quite common. They just have very tight access controls and truckloads of legal contracts, and some work has to be done on-site.
Unfortunately, I don't. But I'm compelled to do my own research... jack up a heroku cluster, run a bunch of image processing across all main-stream porn films... and maybe in 10 years I'll have enough concrete evidence to support John's claims :)
I'll make exceptions myself if there is one declaration that is just way longer...

int x
int y
float z
MyReallyLongTypeHere foo;

Other than that, I tend to prefer having the variable names line up. Though doing mostly JS and C#, I can use var pretty much anywhere an assignment happens, even with null initialization.

var foo = (sometype)null;

The bigger issue to me is comma first vs comma last... I find that comma first is easier to notice a missing/extra.
Ask HN: Was there really a case of Prosecution Overreach?
I've read HN for several months and until the links started popping up about Aaron Swartz, I had never heard of him because like me, I don't follow the news.

But i think the following paragraphs from the Daily Mail is noteworthy and that is the only reason I went to get an account for HN.

"Swartz's most recent attorney, Elliot Peters, said prosecutors told him two days before Swartz's death that Swartz would have to spend six months in prison and plead guilty to 13 charges if he wanted to avoid going to trial.
Peters said he and prosecutors had talked repeatedly about making some sort of plea deal, but had failed to come to any agreement.
Then last Wednesday, Peters brought up the possibility of a deal again.
He said he told prosecutors 'that we should find a way to resolve the case that didn't destroy Aaron's life.'
Peters said prosecutors made it clear their position had not changed: they wanted Swartz to plead to 13 counts and the government would seek six months of prison time or some 'slightly lesser' amount of time.

Elliot said they rejected the deal and he believed they would win the case at trial, which was scheduled to begin in April."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2262518/Lawyer-says-warned-prosecutors-Reddit-founder-Aaron-Swartz-suicidal.html#ixzz2I1KkWb58
troll maybe?
Can't be serious. 6 months in jail plus financially ruined and criminal/felony record is a fair deal?

Regardless of your 30 mins old account, if you are not a troll I want to do business with you, I'm a prince and I need to transfer a large amount of money out of the country and would be happy to compensate you for your help a whopping 25% commission!
Google lifts malware warning for isocket ad network
There's a sizable number of hackers who wouldn't be caught dead using 'that crafty old java thing' or 'what? perl?!'. There is also a sizable number of hackers who would never touch anything high level - C code or nothing!

So obviously if you're hiring someone and your code base is all Ruby, you should at the very least mention it somewhere, even if you don't look for Ruby coders in particular. I don't think I need to point this out though, I'm not sure I've actually seen any job adverts that didn't mention programming language. Obviously most people get this.
Is anyone else from NYC interested in organizing this with me?

Please let me know.
The Harry Potters covers for US and UK are so vastly different. UK ones were more childlike, while US ones had mature tones.
Vote with your feet; it's the only vote that matters in California these days.
If were're doing great first lines, I think you have to include:

Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Who's there?"

Kafka's Metamorphosis: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."
"Warped"? Java didn't exactly have built-in JSON libraries in 1999. The plethora of alternatives manifested largely as a response to the complexity and weight of using an XML parser. Prior to XML you mostly rolled your own parser by hand, use lex/yacc or (if you were using Lisp) used s-exps. Compared to the first two options XML still has a number of meaningful benefits: uniform parsing across languages, uniform validation, and proper handling of encodings. Those aren't anything to sneeze at. "Unicode everywhere" is a fairly new phenomenon (and XML is partly to thank for that), even if Unicode isn't. And different Lisps handle encodings differently as well.
My argument is that Wikipedia has more transparency and a lower burn rate than JSTOR. Also, I would accept the Internet Archive as a feasible repository for the data in question vs JSTOR.
Behance: Most Appreciated Projects of 2012
> A good developer will be able to deliver value regardless of the language they’ve used before.

This is true, but more in the long term. If I hire a brilliant and experienced .NET guy for my python team, sure he'll pick it up quickly and achieve some sort of productivity until he's up to par on PEP8 and idiomatic python. But I feel there are many cases where companies are looking for someone with experience in a specific language/framework in order to 'hit the ball running' aside from the usual getting-their-feet-wet with the codebase, learning the business, and other mythical man month issues.

[Edited for clarity.]
I think beginning an academic or a research paper with a question or something like "Some people say..." or "Recently" or "Nowadays" is often a very good strategy even though it might be clichéd, because telling the reader exactly what is going to follow in the text is very much expected. When I read with the sole intention of finding a specific piece of knowledge, I want to be able to tell from the introduction (or the abstract) whether I will find that piece of knowledge in the given text.

That being said, I think all other kinds of texts should be as story-like as possible, in the sense that they should be gripping and interesting from the very first sentence -- I want to be a little bit lost and not know where exactly the writer is taking me. In this case, I really like the idea of jumping straight into a scenario (or anecdote), I remember having been suggested by my teachers in middle school to do so. Having opened the text with a scenario, you can also use it in the conclusion to wrap things up and let the reader know how the story ended, given the conclusions reached in the body of the text.

My book recommendation is "How to write a sentence (and how to read one)", http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/01/27/how-to-wri...
It has whole chapters on both first and last sentences.
How about you give up on your mind reading powers for a while? I'm sure you can read the psychology of Ortiz and every other prosecutor, and determine that their opinions of Aaron Swartz are exactly like normal people.

I'd rather believe that they saw him like a target to be scalped, bullied into submission by plea bargain. I don't know why, maybe because US prosecutors have a history of treating the accused like targets to be scalped, and bullied into submission by plea bargain?

Books have actually written on this subject, why don't you have a look? Here are some references:

http://www.amazon.com/Liberty-Eclipse-William-Norman-Grigg/d...

http://www.amazon.com/Liberty-Justice-Some-Equality-Powerful...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Tyranny-Good-Intentions-Constituti...

Finally, don't expect me to re-interpret the idiotic opinions that you post as something really profound, because my mind reading powers are as awful as yours.
Express yourself clearly instead.

And don't call me a child - that's ad-hominem, jackass.
To Make Open Access Work, We Need More Than Liberate Articles
The other point in there that struck me was that JSTOR signed off on a deal with no prison, but MIT wouldsn't.
Judges just accept prosecutor's amount over and over and over.

Doesn't work.
Apple cuts orders for iPhone 5 parts
The SC ruled that the retroactive immunity given to telecom companies was legal.

I'm pretty sure "Ex Post Facto" is dead.
It's partly historical: these applications already exist on mainframes, and it would be very expensive to change, so they don't.

But mainframes have a lot of advantages because they are integrated systems designed for exactly the sort of high-throughput tasks that businesses use them for. Their (single-threaded) processing power is good but not outstanding; where they really shine is parallel I/O performance which lets you execute large numbers of operations per second, or distribute workloads across large numbers of processors with extremely high bandwidth inter-processor communication.

They're also designed to be highly reliable, redundant and modular. You can do things like upgrade and replace processors, RAM, and disk drives without interrupting applications. And speaking of processors and RAM, modern mainframes can scale to >100 processors and terabytes of RAM in one system.

Yes, you can build systems with similar specs and capabilities with clusters of commodity hardware, but then you have the complexity of managing a distributed system. With a mainframe, you have a single beefy machine. You'll also have a support contract with the manufacturer to call when things break, so they can be responsible for doing any complicated maintenance.

On the downside, of course, they're expensive in the "Q: how much does it cost? A: how much do you have?" way that enterprise pricing works.
I don't envy having to work on something of that scale! At least for my particular case, the only item in that list I needed to worry about was plurals (which I have with the __n method). (And thankfully there are other good JS libraries for currency and time/date formatting that I can use.) I recommended people look at Jed.js and messageformat.js for some of the more complex cases, thankfully I haven't had to go down that road yet!
Stage X. It's a video website.
Taxes are even worse for (international) investors, small sales and so on in Ontario/Canada. With the exception of SRED which is being reformed
From this Forbes piece:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/01/15/would-y...

"""
In truth, the most radical part of Crazy Blind Date (whose name and basic concept OK Cupid toyed with in an earlier form more than five years ago) may be the way users are asked to express their satisfaction or lack thereof. After a date’s conclusion, the participants are invited to rate each other by purchasing “kudos.” Spending a few dollars implies that a date was enjoyable...

Why pay good money to improve the dating prospects of someone you might never see again? Because there’s more than generosity at play here. The user who never buys kudos for his or her dates will find himself increasingly shut out by the algorithm in the same way that your own friends would eventually stop setting you up if you rejected enough of their suggestions. “It’s a soft payment for access,” says Yagan. “How much you donate determines your product experience along the way.”

"""
Who will become successful at getting dates then? Those with the most kudos purchased? And, what does that do to the quality of dates one might expect to have?
The blame belongs to both.

Google should not allow ANY ads that contain a Download button, when the page has a link containing the text "Download." These ads can have no other purpose but to confuse users who are looking to download software. The problem is that Google makes money from these ads, and these ads have fantastic clickthrough rates. If they banned these types of ads, they'd make less money.

The author of Paint.NET is making good money every time a user mistakenly clicks on such an ad. This money also reduces his incentive to get rid of the confusing ad.

I get around this problem by running an ad-blocker, so I only see the one legitimate download link. But most users do not.
I remember working on OS/390 and doing COBOL stuff.

I understand how "important" money transactions are. Every time I make a transaction with my VISA or a wire transfer a mainframe is implicated in the process. We get it. It's important.

But what has changed in the last 20 years? Credit cards payments? Not really.

What has changed is that I know have ubiquitous Internet access, things like Google Maps or Open Maps, things like blogs, forums/discussions websites like Hacker News, eBay, Amazon, price comparators, plane fligths finders, StackOverflow and Quora and all the others helping to disseminate knowledge, Youtube and Vimeo, online university lessons, on demand computer instances and storage and so many other things.

So, sure, I could have decided to work on back-end payment processing. We get it. It's important.

But young programmers much prefer to either work for --or try to build-- companies shaping the future.

And it very much looks like the future ain't build on mainframe computers...
There must be something off about the Android version. I've never seen that high a proportion of 1-star ratings.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.okcupid.cb...
> So, after each blind date, you ask the participants, "would you go on a date with this person again?"

Does anyone know if Crazy Blind Date actually does this?

One of the great mysteries of OkCupid to me is that they do not attempt to collect this information. There is no "I met this person" button which then asks how it went and whether the match represented themselves accurately.

It seems like this would be an extremely valuable data point. There must be some reason that the feature doesn't exist, but I don't see what it is...