skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How does taxation keep aggregate demand for fiat dollars high?

On the margin, people work for their after tax income. If taxes went away, employers would pay employees the same amount as their current after-tax income -- why would they pay more than necessary to provoke someone to work?
I just used DD-WRT on a new wrt54gl I got. It works fine and I have a working wireless bridge from my older white russian wrt54g.
JD Power and Associates Ranks iPhone First Among Smartphones in Customer Satisfaction
Yeah, and the other 40k has to come from somewhere. From what you've described, it seems like it'd never be a net win for either for you or for tax payers, even under the best conditions. Not unless the price comes way, way down anyway.
ITunes Connect now lets developers see crash reports
Product reviews and prices, software downloads, and tech news - CNET
boxee is awesome and runs on ubuntu.
2009 kentucky derby winner
Or if you're self-employed etc. Technically even if you're renting a spare room and it's all covered under the rent-a-room allowance you have to do one. Still, they're fairly easy and you can do them online etc.
Ask HN: Coding Quickly; How?
We frequently hear about how fast an application is deployed, and of course the golden rule "deploy fast, iterate often" is all about timeliness.

I am a novice programmer developing with php/kohana. I measure my production time in days, not hours, so any tips on just how to "code quicker"?

Is it normal practice to consult php.net and google like mad when developing? Or do the fast programmers "just know" over time? Memorization?

Thanks for any tips, all stacks welcome.
Its especially useful to be able to threaten people with an audit when the tax code has become so complicated that compliance is nearly impossible.

For example, if a president nominated a certain person for a position that you happened not to like, it would be right handy if you were guaranteed to be able to prove that they "broke the law" when it came to filing their taxes if you looked hard enough. You could get a lot of miles out of that one before people realized it works on everyone.
DD-Wrt has a great feature set, and is pretty stable. It also has lots of expandability options. I would also recommend OpenWRT if you want even more expandability. OpenWRT has its own package management system with thousands of packages.
Most people don't deduct business expenses, and most people don't have sufficient medical expenses to exceed the 7.5% threshold. For the small number of people who do, they would amend their forms.

As for other deductions, state income tax & property taxes are already known to some governmental agency, just need to pass it on up. My bank sends me a total of my mortgage interest together with my other tax forms, I'm sure they could file that with the IRS too. The only other common deduction I can think of is charitable contributions. It would be a bit of work to set up, but it seems within the realm of reason to have charitable organizations provide that information to a centraal system as well.
It should be noted that the force with which the contents of an exploding rocket hit the ground is not infinite, and objects have been built to withstand it. In particular, the casing of the plutonium bricks used in the radiothermal generators which powered certain space probes had this property.
This Week in Startups Episode 1
Sight, another Ruby interpreter claiming some odd times increase in performance. I really wonder how much faster Ruby APPLICATIONS would be if people spent more time updating gems and libraries to work with 1.9 and working on the MRI (YARV atm), rather than building oodles of Ruby interpreters.
Throughout most of human history, the powerful people have behaved in a way that, by our standards, would be considered repugnant toward those who are less powerful. Most of the powerful people, following the author's thesis, would be men. So the vast majority of women (along with a majority of men) are going to be beaten down by them. Women were denied the vote throughout much of Anerican history, but so were blacks and non-property-owning men.

I think his point is that women haven't been relegated to second-class status in many cultures because of a deliberate conspiracy to oppress women per se, but because the powerful people usually oppress the less powerful, and men tend to reach the highest levels of power for individualized, non-conspirational reasons. No conspiracy or intentional patriarchy is needed.
What's a Hackintosh PC w/ Ubuntu? Isn't that just a PC running Ubuntu? Or are you dual-booting with OS X?

I'd recommend getting a video card with HDMI out. Just one cable to your TV or receiver. Check out the Intel G45 line.
I'll be in town to work on my Shotput Ventures startup, I'll see if I can make it ^_^
Me too.

But let's not turn this discussion into an endless sequence of "me too"s.

Maybe, keep it as replies to the above post.
DevjaVu will be shutting down
Vimeo page effect: Honda Insight - Let It Shine Ad
Ccons : An interactive C console based on clang and LLVM
Is Spatial Ability the "Geek Gene"?
Why do you think impassioned personal appeals are worth posting in reply to a comment saying anecdotal evidence is worthless?

It seems more like you are trying to convince yourself than trying to convince me.
here are the pdf slides discussing the project. Pretty cool!
"How do I get to Carnegie Hall?"

"Practice, practice, practice."

One thing, though: "Fast programmers" are not monolithic. Yes, you will be faster in an environment where you are not constantly looking up API functions. The world's fastest Perl developer that has never encountered Erlang is not going to turn into a fast Erlang developer overnight. He'll learn Erlang better than a novice will given the same amount of time, but it will still take time.
Why Windows 7 is not the answer
If you're a novice, of course it is normal to consult outside resources a lot. With PHP it will require an obscene amount of memorization since there aren't really any strict naming or parameter conventions within the builtins lib. Plus, you've got to recall everything about the framework, too. I've been developing with Django for a couple years now and I still have to look up stuff I don't use that often. It just isn't efficient to try to memorize every single detail.

Don't worry too much about people who claim to have made an app in 30 hours or something. Chances are they (a) used something familiar to them and (b) most of the code came from existing libraries, APIs, etc. For what it's worth, I flag everything with some sort of development time in the title because I find it to be both arrogant and largely irrelevant (you made a URL shortener in 5 hours?! Do you want a cookie?!).

If you want to write code faster, write more code. You will get faster. That's about it.
Consulting php.net isn't an issue. I've been programming PHP for years and the language is so inconsistent I wouldn't be surprised if even the developers check their documentation every so often.

But, please, don't code for speed, code for quality. I can't tell you how many cesspools I've seen as a result of "rapid development". Namely, Lighthouse and github are some of the buggiest and unstable applications I've ever used.

They're still great applications, but dammit, when every new ticket goes to a milestone that expired years ago (Lighthouse) and I currently have "-1" unread messages (github), I can't help but be annoyed. Lighthouse more than github.
I've been programming ruby on rails apps for about 9 months now and I can tell you that things definitely speed up over time. I still have a few browser windows open with the ruby and rails apis ready, and I still make heavy use of google to solve problems quickly. I think it's the little steps that individually don't cost much but on aggregate really slow you down that will steadily disappear and improve your efficiency.
For me, it's all planning. I consider myself a terrible coder, so I have to lay out everything first. Working from that plan, I get things done fast.

Think of it like giving a speech. Write the speech, revise it, and then go over it in your head (The "practicing in front of a mirror" part doesn't really apply here.) Then, finally, give the speech. You might stumble over a few words, or have to consult your cue cards occasionally, but there's nothing wrong with that. You'll do it less as you give more speeches.
A lot of people don't trust Yahoo because they willingly and actively collaborate on governments' attempts at oppression, censorship, and privacy invasion. I think Google is now making a farce of its "don't be evil" marketing mantra, but at least they put up some resistance on some key issues.

Also, Yahoo was an advertising company first and a technology company second. Google was a technology company first and an advertising company second. Now, they are the same, but those old perceptions exist.

Finally, there's a lot of FUD about whether Yahoo will even exist as a seperate ongoing entity. If/when Yahoo can do something about it, the community will be more willing to rely on it.
I have four children: three sons, and one daughter. I have lived in two different cultures. I think the issue of how children develop a sense of gender roles is VERY complicated, and I'm not ready to hazard many guesses about what the quiddity of being a boy is.

That disagreement with the author of the submitted blog post noted, I'll ask you too what you think about the comments in the submitted blog post on the fit between boys and schools, as we encounter boys and schools in the countries we know best.
The behind the scenes "how it's made"
http://vimeo.com/4295148
A good comment from the original blog submitted here:

"It sounds to me like spatial ability may predict success in CS1 because that is the way we TEACH CS1. If we taught it a different way, different students would succeed."

And perhaps if people with different kinds of minds moved into computer science, some problems that now appear intractable would appear easy to those people. Diversity of thinking styles appears to be good for a developing discipline.
I was having the exact same problem with DD-WRT! Ever since then, I've just been too lazy to setup Tomato. I'll have to set it up one of these days...
I think that the more you code in a language the quicker it will come to you. For example I can usually churn out python, which I've been using for a while. However I'm just starting Objective-C and I need to consult Apple's reference library every other line of code. But it's not like riding a bike. I used to be able to write Fortran code like mad and now I can barely remember any of the syntax at all(possibly a good thing).

My issue is not so much remembering syntax and common algorithms but "brain drain" and typically take breaks all too frequently. Hacker News does not help with this.
Thanks, I was considering if someone were to say "don't worry about being fast". Since I like sports, I made it a point to say "quick", because in sports being fast could mean messing up and being sloppy, whereas "quick" has a much more positive connotation. I do NOT value making sloppy code, rather I'm just hoping I can learn from guys much better than me, and how they work smarter.

Thanks for the comment.
I've used both, and like Tomato better. It has a nicer AJAX based UI, SVG bandwidth graphs, and is pretty well layed out. Lot's of nifty attention to detail in the UI, e.g. wireless network neighborhood to find unoccupied channels.

Have been using it for a couple of years, even running a startup's infrastructure behind it. No problems, whatsoever.
It may be embarassing, and it may be a flaw, but if you sent it to Bugtraq or asked ZDI to pay you for it, you'd get laughed at. I'm not making that up, it's obviously true, so why are you arguing with me about it?

If you contract a team from Matasano to assess your website, and all we come back with is "you store passwords insecurely", we're the ones who will be embarassed. Sorry. Hate on 37s all you want, but in no parallel universe is "weak password storage" a gameover.
I still don't understand why they can't just use a popular URL shortener like TinyURL, is.gd, or bit.ly that is unlikely to disappear overnight? It's not even like they're using their main domain name as their shortener to (possibly) increase their Google juice.
This reminds me of the ad for Wario Land on YouTube. Unfortunately, it isn't as effective anymore because it's using the old YouTube design. http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii
tomato has a simple ajax interface and really good QoS functionality which is what attracted me to it. I haven't tried the others.
N97 Gets Feature Changes
"But targeting the other program in such a way is no different than someone installing two A/V softwares. Sure they may conflict in some areas..."

No. Hell no. Antivirus programs conflict for a good technical reason. NoScript and AdBlock conflict because the author of one dislikes the effects of the other program; were it not for that, the two extensions would be completely compatible with one another. Equating these two things with each other completely misses the point.
I've always been confused about Bayesian probability, until I read that article. I am a heavily visual learner, so the diagrams made a lot of sense to me...I finally get it!!
duhhhh. I guess I didn't need Warren Buffet to tell me that.

I think the same thing is going to be true for all the big TV broadcast networks like CNN, CBS, NBC, and ABC in the near future.

Typical teenager spends 30 hours a week with the world wide web. Newspapers and TV stations have nothing to offer anyone who knows how to surf the web. They all goin down.

And, in my opinion, it's none too soon for this class of arrogant troglodyte.
I'm giving an example of a way to approach this problem. Installing Noscript could add a rule to an Adblock whitelist. What Noscript is doing by trying to sneak it in is wrong. If they wanted to overwrite a rule, let the user do it. As that article points out, and as Mozilla points out, making that the non-default option is very important.
Dustin is absolutely right that Microsoft needs to figure out a better way of 'what needs to happen automagically, and what doesn't'.
The other side of this is of course the mac.
With my mac I often feel like it's doing a bunch of things for me, and not letting me know what that is. I think Mac goes to far in the other direction.
Yah dual booting osx86 w/ ubuntu, so I can experiment with both.

Intel G45 looks good.
AdBlock Plus shouldn't have forced the issue by making it even more of an "island" war. They should have started with this kind of blog in the first place before escalating on the technical side.

Okay, so, you do realize that Adblock faces spammers that are constantly trying to tweak the system to get through blockers like Adblock, right? It's a constant fight. How is what Noscript is doing any other than other spammers?

Adblock is simply treating them as any other ad company that's trying to sneak ads in. Given that that is the reason people install Adblock, that's a perfectly appropriate response.

The NoScript developers not only overreacted, they also acted incredibly against the wishes of the users installing both programs.
I remember a story a friend of mine told me about high school. He was in US history, and was supposed to do an assignment on Andrew Jackson (or something similar), so he rot13'd the wiki article, so that everyone else would have to either know how to see history, or do real research. Admittedly, he did it to annoy rather than teach them, but an interesting side effect.

In an unrelated node, I remember playing with Encarta as a small child as well. There were some games of some sort in it, I think (something interactive, anyway), and I spent long hours playing with it.

It is almost my only recollection of it, in fact.
"Is it normal practice to consult php.net and google like mad when developing?"

If by php.net you mean the language manual, then yes. You will consult the language manual less and less, but you will always have new libraries to pick up, not to mention platform documentation.

Eventually you will know so many different things that you will seek to learn how a given system differs from another system you already know. You will end up getting a book on a new technology you have never used and jump straight to chapter 5, for example, or flip to the appendices, or read the dense 50 page spec over a cup of coffee. Sometimes, specially for protocol wrappers, you might skip the whole manual and retain the help of a disassembler of a packet sniffer. Sometimes you will start attacking a given implementation from its weak entry points: first the test cases, to see how something is used; then the header files, etc. You can skip on a whole new fangled thing by reading the BUGS and TODO files, if they exist (be weary of their absence more than their presence.) You will get an eye for the brittle by skimming the source and see how the developers implemented a few standard things. I have dumped way too many weak C system applications by just looking at how the developers implemented command-line parsing, for example. This will help you narrow down what you actually need to use, and from there you can choose the easiest one to learn of the few good remaining options (at some point you will learn to isolate library use-points by wrapping calls to other people's code in functions/modules, so you can replace them in one tidy place.)

At some point, also, you will end up googling for error messages more than actual tutorial help. This is specially true if you're interfacing with infrastructure software like an RDBMS or system libraries.

It always takes long to write the first solution, but as you write many different kinds of software, you will develop a portfolio of useful solutions you can apply in other works. Projects that are written fast are also the ones that don't teach you anything; it's not flattering to have churned out something quickly, it just means you're not pushing yourself (which shouldn't be a goal in and of itself, btw.)

Don't worry about the speed of development and just try to write small, fun programs that solve your immediate needs (if no need is apparent, then brag points; nothing motivates like the kudos of your peers. Ok, maybe cash, a red Ferrari and a night at the Vegas strip ;-)

At some point, also try to broaden your horizons. PHP is not exactly a fun thing to work with.
You will eventually memorize the important bits of a language, and that will make your time decrease. Furthermore, you may learn a new style/language where the paradigm just "fits" you right. Both of these will make your times decrease, although a quick time is not necessarily a good thing. Remember that oopses can happen more easily if you're blazing away on the keyboard.
more practice.
reading code also helps.

But if coding, anything new (anything meaning - anything outside the domain(or even the current library) can put me off. When this happens,I feel like i have no control over the language, then I look it up and find more features, better ways to implement it, get depressed about my ignorance. The better of us here learn to implement it anyway and get better.

I should also add - I've been coding well over 5 years and the looking up web resources has deferred my learning any language via implementation. There is always some code online that I can refer to and refactor to my needs. Now, I find it hard when I want to code the same logic by myself. (Wonder how many have the same feel..I know many of you are true hackers, but how about the few of us?) AND when I try to implement without looking up, it really strains me and takes a lot of time(which i don't get in my enterprise world!) and plus the fake ego of having x years of x language and not able to write a working program.

Anyone?
My understanding is that BillG had to rip the radio out of his car back in the day. He needed to think, and he couldn't stop himself from listening to music while he was driving.

We have the noprocast feature.
> Why is everything written by a Ruby programmer so damn long-winded?

Because he hasn't yet learned Smalltalk.
Well I do think 7 is a step in the right direction, but you're right, this dialog is horrible.

You know what I'd like to see? An "Engineering Windows 7" blog entry that explained exactly why Microsoft found it necessary to include this abomination in their flagship product.
Kickstarter - Social Lending Meets Venture Capital?
because if there was no central demand for money denominated in us dollars people would be free to use all sorts of competing economic systems.
Should I come out of my comfort zone and visit for cuiosity's sake?

Just paid my deposit at Emory to study Economics, two things made it tough the cost and GT's Tech Square.
There is another post on HN (or it was recently) about men vs. women. It discusses (in a reasonably but not strictly rigorous manner) the differences between the sexes.

Link: http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
Ok. Me too!
You should come out. Most people find them invaluable.
There's a more explicitly anti-tone-deaf example in The Merchant of Venice: "The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted."
As the author noted, this is Release Candidate software. Bugs like this are supposed to get ironed out here before it is released to market.

These kinds of bugs can often be difficult to catch because when I am debugging things, I often click through dialogs without really reading them. Of course they say what they're supposed to (and it makes sense), because I wrote them!

It's like having someone else proof-read a paper. If not, you'll just fill in the holes yourself.
I found to do something well, with clean code, documented methods, and tests, it takes more than a few hours. I operate on days not hours for those sorts of things.

Now if it's a quick script and not production code, then I'm usually pretty quick.
FYI Angel Lounge is that very evening, so there might be more money than usual in the room. Just sayin... ;)
What Can Adorable Robots Teach Us About Altruism?
It takes about two years to become deeply proficient in any language/framework. Up until then you'll get faster, look stuff up less, and churn out code faster.

Unrelated to that is the domain-specific knowledge, which has a different effect - you don't get faster, you learn what code to write, and more importantly, what code not to write. In the long run, it probably has more effect on productivity than being comfortable with a language. How long this takes really depends on the domain.

My experience with 10x programmers (I don't count myself in that group) is that it's the second area where the big productivity gains lie.
I would go with Tomato unless you want customizability.

Last time I checked, DD-WRT was just a set of packages on top of OpenWRT, so going with straight OpenWRT lets you add only the functionality you need and customize everything to your heart's content. I would choose that route over DD-WRT. However, I did run into some reliability issues, (wireless connections would drop spontaneously every few weeks) which show up in DD-WRT as well. In OpenWRT, many basic settings (all settings unless you install a web interface) are only accessible via config files. That can get tiring.

Tomato is rock-solid and dead-easy to configure, but startlingly light on functionality compared to *WRT.

If you have the time, try them both!
Scott Adams was hilarious back when nobody was making fun of corporate culture yet and I was working at Eli Lilly, but when he tries to be funny about international politics, somehow that just doesn't work for me.
The CEO of Cocaine, Inc.
I'm using Firefox 3.0.10, but it's probably an issue of resolution as windsurfer pointed out. Mine is 1024X768.

This page http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=583159 has it worse, and would probably need scrollbars in some higher resolutions too.