skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The people here talking about shorting bitcoin to moderate the bubble have no idea what they're talking about. Shorting a bubble is about the stupidest thing you can do. Here's how that math works:

1) You open a margin account with $10,000.

2) You borrow 25 BTC from your broker and sell them on the market at $200. You hope that the price crashes to $0 and your net profit will be $5,000.

3) What actually happens is that the price doubles to $400. It would now cost you $10,000 to close your position (buy the 25 BTC back at market prices).

4) Your broker realizes this and decides -- without asking -- that it doesn't like this state of affairs and closes the position for you, wiping out your margin.

5) You are now $10,000 poorer.
> Does your idea solve a problem that people actually have?

Also make sure to talk to your target customers. Make sure they agree that your product solves a problem for them.
But being better at the craft doesn't count for as much as we tend to think. Otherwise, we would not see much age discrimination in this industry.
My car broke down earlier today and I had to call AAA. Glad I didn't have to get out of my car to contact somebody.

This would have been a routine day if I hadn't broke down.

Bet you don't own a TV either.
Certainly not this kind of coffee: http://bit.ly/10Qh0rr

That's from a barista at Google.
Digital Gold Rush: The Bitcoin Boom and Its Many Risks
> Yahoo only knows that you're using your Yahoo identity with Persona

But Yahoo still knows that I'm on that website.
"How much is a pint of beer?"

"Right now or by the time I finish pouring the drink?"
Sure, but the cash has the value of being flexible. For example, if you were looking to save money, you could brown bag a lunch from home and pocket the extra $10.

That flexibility might be more valuable to the employee than the nice lunch.
This seems similar to touting "You get a Macbook Pro as your work laptop!" in recruiting materials (which I've seen countless times in recruiting pitches), even though that's undeniably a work expense when dealing with the IRS. This isn't a zero-sum game; just because a free meal at Facebook may be a net gain to Facebook (employees don't need to go off campus to work and thus can be more productive) doesn't mean the employee gets no benefit out of it and shouldn't consider it as a plus.
Why Did Yahoo Buy Summly?
My thoughts are that the Cocoaheads meetup i go to has all sorts of really interesting talks about advanced topics, but a lot of people who attend are just beginners, dipping their toes in iOS development, and it'd be helpful to show them the ropes outside of Cocoaheads (so the pros don't get bored!).

But rather than the typical beginner stuff you see on the internet which teach things that you wouldn't really use for advanced apps, these would teach good principles from day 1 - at least, that's my hope.

Anyway, i've made 2 screencasts, and i'm curious to see if there's any interest - if there is, i'll make more.

Cheers all :)
It's called double taxation. In your examples, Google is paying the house and alcohol sales taxes when they purchase them.
Unfortunately, the public doesn't have many competitive alternatives for high-speed internet, so AT&T probably doesn't care.
WORLD WAR 3, BY TIME THIS IS ON AIR,USA MAY BE IN ANOTHER WAR
wow. I built a STL file viewer and showed it to hacker news a few days ago and got absolutely no response. (www.supercuber.com). It was a different account though. I realize that this is quite a bit different than supercuber but its amazing how different the traffic to two similar links can be.
Nodejitsu itself is down. http://isup.me/nodejitsu.com
I'm sure the IRS has a few bigger fish to fry, but this one seems pretty big. A few thousand dollars a year multiplied by several thousand employees, multiplied by hundreds of companies adds up pretty fast.
Shhhh! Don't tell him that Austin is great. Everyone will move here, then turn it into California.[1]

EVERYBODY: AUSTIN SUCKS, DON'T MOVE HERE! [2]

[1] it's possible that this has already happened, of course.
[2] I just moved back (from Hawaii) in 2011.
I realised I have passed some kind of milestone - I read that and thought "search"

Thank you :-)
Given the way we shrug people off for using a language we don't like (or not seeming enough of a polyglot), being pessimistic, not working in the past few months, or any number of other silly things, I can't see how a bias against people with less than 10 years would really hurt matters much further.
IMessage is currently down
free lunch is treated as compensation and is taxed as income.
UI nag: the fixed header is not functional (how often do people search a blog)?
EULAs are crap, as they attempt to tell me what I'm allowed to do with an entity that I own. Once the transaction is complete, we're done, and the creator doesn't get to control what I do, beyond the restrictions laid out in copyright law. If I violate a EULA, the creator has no recourse but to sue, and they'll be suing me for taking legal actions with my own property.

A ToS, on the other hand, lays out terms for the ongoing use of a service. If I violate the ToS, the service provider is within their rights to decline to provide me service. They're within their rights to do that anyway for nearly any reason they feel like, because this is an ongoing relationship and I don't have them enslaved. Beyond that, they could also sue, at which point things get a bit murky.

There's nothing wrong with breaking a EULA, and their legal enforceability is worrying. There's also nothing wrong with a service provider terminating service when a user breaks a ToS, which is what happened here.

There's no inconsistency.
This is probably true, though in China/computer science, we are seeing increased LaTeX usage. The problem is that LaTeX isn't that great of an experience for writing papers in Chinese, which doesn't have the kerning problems of western character sets anyways.
Why Google will stop developing Android
> How exactly?

On December 31st, you gross up everyone's pay by say $10k, and pay taxes that are the marginal rate for YTD income.

Of course this doesn't fully cover the taxes for dual income high earners, and it can create some additional taxes for employees that have other income, because now their base is $10k higher. In this case, the change will cost these employees up to a few hundred dollars.

A tax change that may cost someone a few hundred dollars, pretty quickly get's lost in the noise when you are talking about multi thousand dollar raises and bonuses.
That's a crazy/brilliant idea! How did the fibre exit the sewage system at the home?
Homes are routinely taxed. They are also routinely taxed at different rates depending on whether they are owned for personal use or for renting out.

There are even countries that have a modest tax on bank accounts.
I think it's pretty clear that Google isn't interested in being a telecom themselves, but have been making moves to try to push for the telecom industry to get their collective act together.

They were instrumental, for example, in getting the FCC to force VZW to treat LTE service as a dumb pipe as a condition of the spectrum sale.

And while much has been made of T-Mobile recently going contract-free, Google was pushing that with the original Nexus years ago, and I had a no-contract, un-subsidized G2 through T-Mobile in... 2010?

Google already owns a ton of dark fiber, so it kind of makes sense for them to threaten the telecoms with competition to push things along. Building out a mobile network is a much bigger undertaking, so their pushes there have been -- and I suspect will continue to be -- a bit more behind the scenes in nature.
You make it sound like everything is so cut and dry.

Do you really think every corporate event is a perk?
One friend of mine was just bemoaning the beginning of baseball season because he has to spend so much time at games with his bosses (tickets paid for by the company). Declining the invitation is considered rude and politically unsound.

As far as room and board go, someone staying at an "extended stay" hotel or apartment paid for by the company owes income taxes on it? It certainly isn't compensation from the employee's perspective.

Even your view on coffee is ridiculous- it is clearly a product or tool used to achieve work.

Also, how does the company just "cover the tax" as you so simply put it? Did you consider that not every employee is in the same tax bracket? What if Joe, in bracket A, drinks 4 cups of coffee a day and Jane drinks none at all?
This is pretty darn impressive, it changes the way the guitar sounds like by manipulating the vibration of the guitar all without amplification. It seems a little over-the-top though, impressive from a technical perspective in how it alters the sound in realtime but this device would probably be more expensive than altering the sound downstream.

There is a lot more innovation in the guitar space than people actually think. A company called Line 6 has been pushing the boundaries of amplifiers and guitars for a few years now, albeit digitally but on the same level. They have a line of Variax guitars that allow you to digitally down-tune your guitar by turning a knob and ability to program them via a software application.

Really impressive device nonetheless, I never thought such a thing would be possible without amplification on an acoustic guitar.
Turns out Google didn’t sell social followers back to Arthur Frommer
Really, I nose-snorted coffee over this one:

- everyone knows you cannot keep up the pace of a sprint
over a long distance race - so they solved it by running
a long distance race but just firing a starting pistol
every 400 yards - and we're off again!
It only doesn't matter to some, when they managed to get a monopolistic control over the market (like happens to be the case with ISPs). I'm sure many average users are well aware about how bad is a slow Internet or a broken customer service.
agreed, it's Tapjoy's story repeating again
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/19/apple-banning-pay-per-install....

ok, Appgratis was "curating" the apps, and their reviews were quite funny sometimes, but still, their business model was not "editorial", you need to pay to get reviewed. And why would you do that? Well...to boost your rankings within the App Store.

With that developer/advertiser money Appgratis can then do their own paid promotion to acquire more downloads, then go back with an even bigger claim to advertisers/developers and resell that inventory. This is basically an arbitrage model and i can understand why Apple wouldn't like that.

Anyway, they've got $13M to pivot, so they should be fine.
If you're interested in what the IRS actually has to say about the taxability of meals and other perks:

http://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b/ar02.html

Meals on Your Business Premises

You can exclude the value of meals you furnish to an employee from the employee's wages if they meet the following tests.

They are furnished on your business premises.

They are furnished for your convenience.

This exclusion does not apply if you allow your employee to choose to receive additional pay instead of meals.

Assuming AmaGooFaceSoft have prominent, enforced "These meals are provided to be consumed on the premises" signs, they're golden. (I assume that if they don't, they will shortly.)
So far its uptime seems comparable to other PaaS services.

Curious what opinions HNers have on this is, though:

How important is it to have pretty downtime screens, or nothing at all? In this case it's 404-ing, which is inaccurate. Would it be better to just not respond to the HTTP request than to show this?

Also have other PaaS services like Heroku got these messages right?
I wish people wouldn't shoot video in that aspect.
>Heck Verizon FiOS offers fiber to the home in NYC and has speeds of 300Mbit/s.

Which is great if you're in NYC. There are huge portions of the country -- I'm familiar with the former Bellsouth territories personally -- where you can't get FiOS or U-Verse at all.

I'm in a metro area with ~250k people, and you might be able to get 6Mbs DSL from AT&T; many areas of the city top out at 3Mbs.
To be fair, T's capex expenditures are massive, something like $5 billion per quarter or more. So to 'materially alter', it'd have to be like $3 billion a year or more.
Windows Phone Users Desire to Access Instagram is Insatiable and Risky
(You can just click "link" and get immediate access to a "reply" button.) As soon as I'm setting up my own servers and having to make certain they are secure, available, and scaling with the number of documents I have, I'm losing a lot of the advantages of using Firebase ;P. In comparison, with a model like Parse's, I can just push the code to them and have everything be handled without me having to get get my hands dirty. (Also, I'm currently 12 days behind on e-mail, but you guys can get ahold of me using other routes if you want or need to; at least Andrew should know how to get me quickly. I'm more just responding to the things you say here at this point, though: I have nothing new to add.) Great to hear that you may add "run real code on the server"!
I've sent messages every day since iMessage was released and I've never once seen any downtime.
My first thoughts exactly when I saw this post. Well actually my first thought was "Doesn't OP mean Google is laying fiber in Austin? Ooooooohh I get it...". I'm happy about this -- it means that Google's mission is coming along nicely. Screw AT&T.
Bitcoin Software Maturity Scale

Ah yes, that scale that's numbered from 0 to 0.8 and then back to 0.7.
It's not just dumb pipes (ED: dark fiber) they also have YouTube which is ~15% of downstream traffic which they would be happy to stream inside there private network even with peering arrangements.
I think it's particularly nice because you can see which tasks exist on which branch, in an ideal world, at least.

It doesn't make sense to me to have a global bug repository that may or may not be present on any given branch or checkout of your repository.
I've done it with a markdown file before - what are the advantages of tdl? (Never heard of it until now)
I think this is the kind of behavior Google wants from competitors. Ultimately companies like Google stand to make the most profit from an America with faster internet connections, and the slow overpriced connections are really making cloud related technologies like Google Drive lackluster.
> Running an ISP is surely Google's strong point and core business.

No less so than developing a web browser was when Chrome was launched, or doing the same with a mobile OS was when Android was launched.

Perhaps more relevantly, Fiber has a similar role in terms of developing and promoting Google's existing core business as Android and Chrome did when they were introduced.

> Why didn't you compare Fiber to the [Google's "second spring of cleaning" announcement] ?

Because none of the products and features closed in the second spring cleaning were the focus of large-scale investment and promotion aimed at improving the market for Google's core offerings the way Chrome browser, Android, or Google Fiber is.
I think the main issue with this is the status page. It should be hosted off their normal infrastructure, Heroku went through this a year or two ago if I recall correctly. I don't mind downtime with a PaaS (within reason), it's having zero visibility into the problems, what exactly they are doing to remedy them, and what the ETA for the fixes are.
It was intended to be a play on the phrase "The revolution isn’t dead."
JavascriptOO.com  - Examples of every JS library you should be looking into
"you gross up everyone's pay by say $10k"

It's nice to pretend that it as easy as waving your hand and saying everyone got $10k worth of perks, but what about people who didn't? Really, not everyone is eating the corporate food every day. Not everyone is going to the corporate happy hour. It is not fair, or possibly even legal, to just amortize the costs across everyone.

When faced with the accounting and legal overhead, companies are going to throw these perks out the window.
I would agree with you if it weren't for the heat. And don't give me anything of that "It's a dry heat" bullshit; >90 days in a row over 100 degrees is enough to make the city turn into Do The Right Thing.
You should learn how to use records, protocols and hierarchies if you want to organize things that way in Clojure. You'll have to be a bit more ad-hoc about the same kinds of things when you're sending them to Javascript or storing them in a database.
This is one of those perennial problems: if you're spending engineering time making your "we're down" screen look good, you're really optimizing for the wrong thing, but on the other hand, some downtime is unavoidable and you don't want to look unprofessional.

An HTTP 500 would definitely be more appropriate in this case, but it seems a 400 is accurate -- it's down because it has somehow forgotten where the apps are (their Twitter stream says a problem with load balancers).
Sewage systems are non-pressurized gravity flow and many have cleanouts for service. The line could exit out via the cleanout. My house has a clean out just as the sewer line exits the foundation, and the sewer line itself is a 4" pipe. Lots of room and easy access.
I love Emasc but it can't even do proper full screen. I really wish ST3 has more APIs in the Emacs spirit, but keeping it modern.
WSJ: Should ECB Kill the 500-Euro Note?
In most of Europe meals are a taxable benefit. There are various ways that a company can deal with that. What Google does is exactly what I described. You badge in for lunch/dinner, and the accounting department makes sure that the net effect to the Googler is $0. (The badging is there just to make sure that Google doesn't need to pay the tax for the people who don't eat). This is of course made in a way that ensures no effect on any "automatically pay x% of salary to a pension insurance" schemes.

Now, I'm sure that your tax system is much more dysfunctional than that, and an ignorant European couldn't possibly appreciate all the subtleties of it. But somehow Google manages to nullify the tax effects when doing things like giving fancy consumer electronics as christmas gifts.
Ah, sorry, I didn't realize that.
As is often the case, their Twitter stream is a backup for news:

https://twitter.com/nodejitsu
netflix has chosen nginx to saturate much more than 10Gb. Do you ever try to tune it? In fact nginx default config just sucks, it seems for small vps.
Would be nice to be able to provide Linkedin details in lieu of a resume.
As a former trader (FI arb), I absolutely love this... for all the wrong reasons. I always wanted to DDOS my way to higher profits.
Agree - Flotr2 is awesome. To be fair this library seems to offer a little more in terms of interactive charts, which I don't think FLotr2 does much (I know you can kind of get 'selection' in pie charts, but I don't know of anything else).
Surface Pro has a standard mSATA interface in there if you don't mind tearing it apart. It won't take the part in the OP, but there are lots of them on newegg in sizes up to 480GB.
Better vimdiff mergetool
Can anyone actually articulate the value of "perfectly-semantic-markup" I'm still struggling to see the value of it.
> and 80% of the global transaction volume is run through a company in Tokyo set up to trade Magic: The Gathering cards

Gasp! You're right! What other companies have I foolishly entrusted parts of my life to?

/looks at his video game console, run by a company in Kyoto set up to sell handmade hanafuda cards

Not you too, Nintendo! ;_;

I don't know what to believe in now.
Carry a 2M HT and hit the local repeater when you break down. Give them your position and they'll call a tow truck for you.
> Until Git can ignore trailing spaces as part of the merge strategy

It can:

git merge -X ignore-space-at-eol
Content Marketing Ideas for Enterprise Startups
But that would moderate the bubble somewhat, would it not?
If they do that a few times without expanding in other areas they open themselves up to a significant anticompetitive lawsuit.
Just delete the line. It should revert back to the default theme.
My nodejitsu site is down, it was up yesterday.

404

No application found for "adams.jit.su"
I will defer to Bill Hicks:

http://youtu.be/gDW_Hj2K0wo
Hulu is not down but its load time is terrible
Bitcoin Charts [1] keeps history for dozens of exchanges (which all float at slightly different values) and has a free API to let you request any period of interest. Beyond just market price, I think you can get records of every individual trade. If nothing else, this whole bitcoin thing is a fascinating experiment!

[1] http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/
A really nice idea ... but why, oh why did they have to choose a language that has a lot of extra scaffolding like Java instead of something simpler like Python, or Ruby?
> I think we can all agree that it's not good when one single entity holds this amount of power over arguably one the world's most important computing platforms.

They created the platform. There are others.

Stop spouting this foolishness.
If you need further evidence on how dangerous shorting is, even for something that everyone thinks will go down, consider the "Widowmaker" bond trade.

Essentially, most traders agree that the Japanese Government (JG) will have to soon increase the yield of their new bonds (which have historically been very low) because of Japan's huge and growing national debt (200% of GDP) and the slowly increasing risk of defaulting. Once this happens, the value of the current bonds in the market will drop because who wants to buy bonds with a lower yield at the same price? After the Fukushima disaster, investors thought for sure that the JG would increase yield to get more money to repair infrastructure, deal with a weakened economy, etc. Many, many hedge fund managers have shorted Japanese bonds and all of them have lost money. Yet, the idea persists and every day, traders are shorting JG bonds, convinced that it can't stay low forever. No doubt, one day it will pay off, but will you be the lucky one to cash in? Unlikely.
This reminded me of the time I got a Resume from someone applying for a software-engineering job. The guy somehow thought that putting "Sandwich Artist" as part of his work experience was valuable for his application. This, on a 2-page resume which could have been easily reduced to 1-page.

I got the resume before the first phone screen... he did not do well.
Varnish is slow as hell, see: http://todsul.com/nginx-varnish
I don't think you'd like the water-proof junction box.
A search in Google Patents for "BW-tree" or "BW tree" turns up nothing (but I don't know how fast their database is updated or how long patents can be hidden or delayed).
Nah. Use araxis merge and all your issues go away forever. If other devs want to use shitty tools then that's their fault. If you have a repo and are trying to merge pull requests then you definitely should stop using shitty tools. Even if you don't trim whitespace you should have non-shitty tools for local usage.

There's no reason to use shitty tools here.
I seem to be doing OK on the south coast as a contract C and C++ programmer. I could probably get 50% more in London (not 100%, not easily), but then I don't have to put up with the crowds, the grime and terrible smells or all the miserable faces on the tube, and I'll be buying a detached house with a garden soon...

Much better, IMHO.
On the other hand, this issue reminds me of Peter Thiel's TedX talk, where he makes the argument that real technological invention may be slowing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOB7nezuQ7g

I agree assisting people to reach the airport on-time may morph into a larger corporate vision, but I disagree it's likely to contribute to solving cancer, making better fuel, or reaching strong AI. ...And it's arguably a distraction of rare talent from that calibre of problem.