skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is planned for later versions.
How stuff works has a good article that lists some of the late fees and penalties
http://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/personal-inc...
Unfortunately, the original link no longer works.
Please excuse my ignorance - why do they have both a commercial license and an MIT license? I'm confused. If I want to use it on my commercial site, don't I have to pay for a commercial license? If so, why should I care whether they have an MIT license also? Sorry, licensing is something I never really looked into.
haha, you have a point there ;)
i am frequently reorganizing my folder structures
I was thinking more of SMTP. Twitter and Facebook may be the Compuserve and Genie of Web 2.0.
When do we get a hosted in-document commenting system?
Income taxes in Canada are easy:

Line 1: How much money did you make this year? ________

Line 2: Enter zero or Line 1, whichever is greater: ________

Send us a cheque for the amount listed on line 2.

Ok, maybe not quite that simple, but it does seem that Canadian income taxes are much simpler than their US counterpart. I don't know anyone who spends more than half an hour doing their income taxes once they've got all of the necessary forms together, and for 99% of people, "get all the necessary forms together" just means "look in your mailbox every day until the end of February".
Developing Django apps with zc.buildout
Avoiding iPhone App Rejection From Apple
The fact that anyone was actually outraged in the first place is the real failure here. I would have assumed prior to this past Sunday that nobody would be stupid enough to think that Amazon would maliciously, openly, and unapologetically de-list all material pertaining to homosexuality (or categorize it as "adult").

Okay, fine, Amazon screwed up and there was a glitch or a security hole or whatever it really was. Their bad, they should fix that and people have a right to be upset that their books lost sales or whatever was the case. But moral outrage? Protest logos? Petitions? People either need to lighten up or get lives that lack the required free time to get that worked up over a conspiracy that was obviously irrational.
Josh Porter (a social design expert and author of the blog Bokardo) told an interesting story about Amazon. He was doing some user testing for a competing e-commerce site, and the tester he was interviewing asked if they could go to Amazon.

"Sure. Is it to compare the prices?" he asked.

"No," replied the tester. "It's so I can check the customer reviews."

I'm impressed by the extent to which Amazon has cultivated trust. They tell you what customers like you think about virtually every product on their site; they help you find products you might like more than the one you're browsing; they give you the chance to buy a cheaper used version of the product from a third-party. And so on.

Throw in their speed, low prices, and reliability, and it's no wonder they've captured such a strong slice of the e-commerce market.
You're investing in his business. You're putting up cash (the monthly fee of your software) in exchange for an ill-defined share of his future profits. It's the same as buying shares in his company.

Why would you invest in his business? Don't you have your own business to run?

Say this: "I've thought about your offer, and it just seems too complicated to get into. I think it's best to stay with a straight monthly fee. The best I can offer you is [5% off of whatever you offered him before]."
I'll try to spend my time on other things.
Wow, that's one way to get pagerank..
In a society with nearly ubiquitous access to the internet how valuable is it to memorize raw facts? There are a few anecdotes about Einstein not knowing his phone number and not knowing the number of feet in a mile. His answer was along the lines of questioning why one should memorize something that can easily be looked up.

Personally, I find understanding concepts and composing ideas to be far more valuable. However, I'd be interested in finding out if the memorization of facts somehow exercised/increased the brain's ability to perform more (arguably) meaningful tasks.
Having it available as open source can prove a significant advantage - they might become the Wordpress of microblogging, so to speak.

As for Twitter capturing the microblogging market, with ~6 million users I doubt this is the case. Either what we've seen so far is the tip of the iceberg, or there is very little real demand for microblogging. Twitter seems to be very focused on a certain market and certain set of features, so there's definitely room for other players.
Nice. I don't know htop, but if it isn't a screen-alike then consider gnu screen. Also, one of those pocket projectors might make a worthwhile consideration.
Download VirtualBox and have the best of both worlds!
Dual licensing is not mysterious. I'm not sure why folks find it so hard to imagine that a product can be had under multiple terms, depending on your preference and requirements.

The MIT license is a couple steps up from public domain (and far more liberal than the GPL). Ext Core can be used under those terms. ExtJS (not the same as Ext Core) has different terms (I think it's a modified GPL and a commercial license).

You do not need a commercial license to use Ext Core in any circumstance. You can use it on a commercial site, you can distribute it in commercial (or Open Source) products, and you can make modified versions without returning changes to the maintainers. The MIT license does have some clauses about IP (like trademarks) and indemnity (i.e. they provide none).
Introducing the Google Lime Scholarship
pocket* is a twitter client for the rest of us.
Yea, right. Every time I was influenced by my peers to do something stupid, I used the acid test, "Will my father kill me?" He's gone now, but I still use that test. That's influence.
Extra-ordinary claims require extra-ordinary evidence. I'm not seeing any.

Here's a quick counterpoint that speaks to the "norm": Almost to a man, every sports icon I can think of cites the influence of parents in their lives. (I'm talking real icons here, not T.O. types that happen to be gifted.)

I'm not ready to accept this theory without significant evidence.
"I could not do many of the things that most people take for granted, such as ... or deciphering a person’s body language, and only acquired these skills with much effort over time."

I'm in my thirties and I think I'll never learn to decipher a person's body language. Now that got me thinking if that makes me a genius or am I just hopeless?
Here's an interview with an unnamed Amazon employee about it:
http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166384.asp

Basically, an employee in France (possibly due to a language barrier) flipped the "adult" bit on a bunch of stuff he shouldn't have, which interacted badly with recent changes to remove adult content from places where kids might stumble across it. It sucks that it affected a bunch of LGBT stuff, but it wasn't intentional.

If you're a developer who is like me, this is exactly the kind of thing you have nightmares about doing, because you know it could happen to anyone. How many times have you typed something, or committed something, and moments later felt the dawning horror of deleting some essential files or missing some essential step? Obviously we erect processes and technical solutions to make it rare for this kind of thing to make it into production, but it still happens.
So...do you have a history of paranoia and schizophrenia in your family? I certainly don't mean to offend, and if I'm way off target here I apologize. But your language is rather bizarre and reminds me very much of a family member who is schizophrenic and has paranoid delusions. You might want to see a psychiatrist about it. There are great drugs for schizophrenia these days. It might help you cope with the issues you're dealing with.
I think the filesystem metaphor can change without it being 'an island'. Just because previously implementations have been poorly thought out doesn't mean future ones have to be.

Use a filesystem backed on a document-oriented database. Have a non-hierarchical filesystem, then use a single field in the database to imitate the hierarchical one (i.e. directory and filename for example). We already have container formats which contain metadata as a workaround for the failures of current filesystems (think MP3 tags or EXIF), just dynamically add and strip the attached metadata to files on the fly for transportation to share it across a network and with other platforms.
Thanks for the link. The more details we get the better we understand...
This is the second major twitter witch-hunt in the last couple weeks that turned out to be targeting the wrong person. I wish people would wait for the facts before bringing out the pitchforks. I guess that's the downside in a medium of communication as instant and viral as twitter.

(The other one was this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552160 )
This guy rode a balloon to 100,000 feet and then jumped
It costs you money to file online in the states? That sounds completely counter-intuitive to me.
1) Its a cool party trick - if you can give someone the 82nd digit of Pi in 8 seconds, they'll probably be impressed because you can't really do that using a conventional method of counting in your head through to that digit of Pi in such a short time.

2) Brain excercise - things like this will probably help keep your brain healthy.

> Personally, I find understanding concepts and composing ideas to be far more valuable.

Me too, they're not mutually exclusive! I very much take the same view about memorizing facts and have a generally poor memory. That's partly why this is cool, I still knew the first 25 digits of Pi effortlessly 2 years after doing this.
Proof that IRS received your information or worrying daily whether or not they got it
How Twitter Is Changing the Way Videos Go Viral
Three people who free fell from 18,000 feet and lived
WARNING: A long, rambly exploration of the state of computing with no real conclusion follows.

-1 for content

+1 for honesty

We're even.
I think he's missing the fact that even non-tech startups can benefit from being in the Valley.

In fact, I'd say most of the things startups need to thrive are not technology specific: many daring investors, a large pool of potential hires primed to work for equity, marketing/sales/legal advice and motivation and moral support from being around other entrepreneurs.
You see Nick Carr's response? http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/04/the_big_company.ph...
From that article:

"Amazon managers found that an employee who happened to work in France had filled out a field incorrectly and more than 50,000 items got flipped over to be flagged as "adult," the source said. (Technically, the flag for adult content was flipped from 'false' to 'true.')"

Oh yeah real technical.

The problem is, without more information, I do not believe a word of that. Filled in a form incorrectly? What form do they have that does that kind of thing? And how can an employee in France cause some kind of cascading re-categorisation of data in the USA?

That explanation sounds like total BS to me. For now, the trolling/CSRF explanation is more likely, IMO. The "troll" has given specific technical details, all of which at least pass the smell test. Amazon's explanation - a foreign employee filling in forms wrong - is just too cute.

Now if you'll excuse me I need to order more tinfoil hats on Amazon ....
I agree with you there. If you work forget about evading taxes. If you do business, do it in cash.

Under-reporting taxes on items that is handled with cash (any type of shop) can save a lot of money.

Probably the best way to evade taxes is to be marginally employed. A lot of people work their ass off to retire early. A better strategy would be to only work 50%-60% of the time and spend the rest on home-holidays (or in 3rd world countries).

That way you can avoid the high tax brackets and spend quality time with your family when you are still young.
Wait, so this wasn't the result of a hack as mentioned here: http://community.livejournal.com/brutal_honesty/3168992.html
Taking offense has become entertainment.
BTW, not many people realize this, but SQLite has "pragma" commands that allow you to dial back its HDD synchronization and transactional consistency. I have used "pragma synchronous = 0;" many times to greatly improve the performance of my apps.
Wow, I'd never seen the public domain Haiku:

This document may
be freely distributed
with attribution.
I really respect Clay for this post (though I am floored that anyone would believe Amazon intended what happened), because it's definitely not socially required to apologize or feel embarrassed for being wrong about anger if the thing was bad enough.

The part about people justifying their anger post-explanation is really true and is present in some of the comments on the post. It seems to mean chastising Amazon for taking too long to address the serious situation – which seems code for giving people too much time to make fools of themselves.

People need to slow down and think.
I disagree with your assessment of sociology as a discipline "filled to the brim with Humanities-Style-Thinking."

Sociology uses rigorous, analytical, and quantitative methods to shine insight on the modern condition. It allows one to better understand the condition of the world, and by extension, one's place within it. And it has contributed significantly to my intellectual growth.

When I've felt a lack of community in my life, for instance, Robert Putnam showed me that civic and social participation in America have systematically declined for the last six decades.

When I've aspired to get into a good school or ahem a prestigious startup incubator, Robert Frank explains how concerns of status and position have a salient effect on my decision making.

When I express a preference for a particular kind of music or type of food, Bordieu shows that preferences that I take for granted are in fact strongly correlated with my culture, socioeconomic background, gender, and profession.

When I pay money to send a virtual gift to a friend, Baudrillard shows that I'm motivated by "sign value" rather than "use value" -- that what an object represents matters more than what it actually does.

And that's just the beginning.

Sociology gets a lot of criticism, perhaps because it's such a broad field. However, it has done more to shape my understanding of the world than any single other discipline, and I'm far from speaking alone.
I keep trying to imagine the database query that would have resulted in this particular subset of items being altered the way they were. I guess my imagination isn't that great.

I suspect the troll/CSRF might be the simplest explanation here.
I would guess they mean domains that link to these.
Agreed, but you're not disagreeing with me.
It's a lying, but it's usually white lies, the ones necessary for society to function as it does.

(I wasn't saying that you shouldn't lie through inaction; I was just saying that inaction can be a form of lying.)
The good ole USofA will be there soon enough...
I seriously doubt the passport thing is true in the common case. You do need tax returns to file as the sponsor for a VISA application though.
I don't think there's been any official explanation, though the 'employee cataloging error in France' has come through journalists with a chance to judge their sources.

The external flag-bombing initially sounded most credible to me -- as with 'Google-bombing', there's a precedent for such campaigns, either by earnest folks with a content agenda or pranksters. And Amazon would have reason to downplay any such explanation, to avoid encouraging copycats. But I don't think people linked to Amazon would lie to cover such an event.
Yeah, exactly my line of thought.
U.S. Mail with Delivery Confirmation is still cheaper, if your income is such that you don't qualify for free e-File.
Great Twilio application! Great writeup Kevin.
I worked at Amazon for three years. While the company isn't quite as secretive as Google, it's still extremely tight-lipped when it comes to any sort of public statement. Even when being more open would probably be better PR (like in this case), it just goes against the company culture.

For what it's worth, my friends still working at Amazon who went and looked at the trouble ticket and the resulting changes say that it was indeed just a stupid mistake.
"N% of startups acquired were located in city X" does not mean "startups located in city X have an N% chance of being acquired".
Congratulations to him - I'm pretty sure 99% of his followers just auto-followed and had no idea it was not officially CNN. James Cox, the UK developer, in effect, created a wildly popular public announcement service by being the first and obscuring his officialness.

Brief history of http://twitter.com/cnnbrk

"With the advent of Twitter, especially when it still delivered to my cell phone (I’m in the UK), it seemed like the easiest way to solve that problem, and so @cnnbrk was born."

January 1, 2007

"everyone - added CNN Breaking News to twitter. ev - great API! -- just do add cnnbrk and you'll get the alerts as they are sent out" -@imajes

http://twitter.com/imajes/status/1963133

August 1, 2008

"I do indeed wield the power of their brand: if I posted right now that Bush is due to be impeached, or that Diet Coke really still contained cocaine - I think the repercussions would be unpleasant."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2008/aug/01/thecnnbreaki...

January 6, 2009

"You’ve mentioned that CNN has been in contact with you. Describe the nature of this contact. Have they given you their blessing?

We’ve had a few conversations. Blessing is a difficult word in mainstream media, but certainly the guys over at CNN have done a lot to protect and help me."

http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/the-twitter-cnn-breaking-news-...
I don't know about English, but in Japanese digits can be pronounced in several ways and many of them are short (e.g. 1 = "hi", "i", "in" or "hito", 2 = "ni", "nin", "fu", "bu", "pu" or "futa", etc), so it's typical to compose a meaningful phrase or sentence to memorize various numbers (e.g. phone numbers).

Remembering pi is a popular game among nerdy kids; I can still recite 200 digits I remembered back in elementary school. Several friends of mime can do 100-800 digits.

For those who can read Japanese, this is one of old ways to remember first 40 digits or so. For 100 digits or more you usually need to come up your own mnemonics:

産医師異国に向こう/産後厄無く/産婦御社に/虫さんざん闇になく/ご礼には早ういくな

Pronounces: さんいしいこくにむこう/さんごやくなく/さんぷみやしろに/むしさんざんやみになく/ごれいにははよういくな

Corresponds to: 3.14159265 / 358979 / 3238462 / 643383279 / 502884197

Roughly translates to: An obstetrician goes abroad. Postpartum is without problem. The new mother is to visit a shrine. Crickets are chirping in darkness. Do not hurry to visit.
Where you will run into trouble is with getting paid if you work for a company in New York. If you don't draw a paycheck from a company based in New York, or have anyone paying you so much that you file a 1040, there will probably be little way for them to catch on.

However if you get a driver's license or register your car there, then you may start getting snagged. If that happens you will be deep in see-a-CPA territory, since you'll need to prove that your primary residence really isn't in NY, and that you paid taxes on all of your income in another state, didn't earn any of it while working there, etc.

If you put down your New York address on any payroll forms though, it's pretty much all over. I have heard anecdotally they are extremely aggressive (and also don't have the rules against double-taxation) compared to other states.
Inside the "James Bond Villain" Data Center
You're pretty biased here, axod.

It's simple for people who are used to "idling" on chat channels, periodically checking back to see whether anything interesting has happened. But not only is that an uncommon use case for most corporate computer users, it's annoying even for people who are used to it. To wit: much as I like Campfire, I have to be reminded or scheduled to get on it.

Most people don't spend their days lurking. Almost everyone on the Internet does spend their days available on IM.

You're not acknowledging the Twitter use case. Twitter isn't a chat system, even if people abuse it that way.
Yes - my site is jamroom.net (we sell a social media platform) - most users are web designers, developers, etc. Hope this helps ;)
# of links != importance

popular, maybe.
For another great article on Judith Harris, see Malcolm Gladwell's 1998 piece in the New Yorker:

http://gladwell.com/1998/1998_08_17_a_harris.htm
Twitter isn't a chat system, even if people abuse it that way. If you want to continue casting the argument in terms of why Twitter is worse at group chat than IRC, I'll continue conceding that you're right about group chat and totally missing the point about Twitter. There is a difference between a status update (which people already organize their days around in big companies) and a chat message.
Decision Time For Facebook: Term Sheets Received At $2 Billion Valuation
The main problem with PG's article is that he is, as always, overly focused on startups. For something to be a revolution, it has to last for a while (otherwise it's just a rebellion, and a failed one on top of it), which is something directly opposite to the nature of startups.

By definition, startups don't last -- they either disappear (either by failing or M&A), or they stop being startups and turn into "regular" companies. But, that being said, I still think that Paul is on to something -- the future model of a succesful company is not a large multinational conglomerate like IBM, Microsoft or Shell, which is too large for its own good and where, like with dinosaurs, it takes ages for a signal to travel from limb to brain and back.

Instead, I believe that the future of companies lie in small, flexible and agile companies which have simple operations and global reach. This doesn't mean that a successful company should somehow prevent its own growth -- but it should grow in small units, sprouting new, smaller companies which operate on their own.

My favo(u)rite example, which proves that this model works, is the Virgin Group, which includes lots of small to medium sized companies which operate in a number of different industries. For a traditional, centralized company such diversity would be a suicide, but in this case the companies are connected by the common brand and its messages.
Inventing a New World
Why iPhone development is better than web development.
* minimal UI forces you to focus on the most important aspects of your app

* no choice in tech but the one choice is better than most widely adopted web technologies

* less competition

* better business model

* possible to build a reasonable app all by yourself

* UUIDs mean no registration required for users

* rich client means less work required for your server, making the Google App Engine an excellent choice
Kudos to him for admitting his error, but can someone remind me why this guy is famous?
Yeah, SQLite is as lossy as MP3 :)

FWIW, I've lost some of my mails at least twice in Apple Mail due to corrupt SQLite files, but that maybe due to OS X's crazy fsync implementation.
Yaw, I think it's a large number. 23% for one little collection of cities.

Right now, the data is really only merely interesting. The question I want to know the answer to is more related to ratios.

i.e. for every 100 startups that spins up in the valley, what percentage ever have an exit vs. the rest of the world?

It would also be interesting (as PG suggests) to screen by deal size.

Once I get 2007 and spreadsheet it all out, I might try a fiddle with a few reports.