skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have had requests from the IRS and state taxing authorities to garnish wages for employees that didn't pay their taxes in both of the past two years and were hit with liens. They send me a bill, due immediately, and then leave it to me to subtract the funds from payroll to pay myself back. In one case it was more than the total post tax payroll amount for the employee for the month.
1. Firefox - 84.96%
2. Internet Explorer - 12.64%
3. Safari - 1.49%
4. Mozilla - 0.28%
5. Chrome - 0.27%
6. Opera - 0.22%
Oh, that's just the change that Firefox made for its linux build, due to the different interfaces for different operating systems (such as pasting with middle click, and autoscroll being off). If you go into about:config, you'll find a key called "browser.urlbar.doubleClickSelectsAll", and it should be true in linux but false in windows.

Also, you can still move stuff around on the toolbars, just like in windows.
What version of Chrome are you running?
Spam's carbon footprint: one e-mail is like driving 3 feet
my blog
Firefox 53.72%
IE	28.93%
Safari 7.44%
Chrome 4.79%
Opera 2.64%

my company site
IE	54.55%
Firefox 35.65%
Safari	6.06%
Chrome	1.60%
Opera 0.71%
makes sense, if I need something I usually just go to amazon first, since they usually have the lowest prices anyways
84% of IT pros don't plan to upgrade to Windows 7 this year
Solution to Japan's Jobless Problem: Turn City Workers Into Farmers
Shitty recruiters try to underplace clients because it's faster. If you can sell 3 times as many widgets at 75% the price...
A single instance of Laconica probably won't support millions of users, but the whole point IMO is to federate smaller Laconica sites rather than building a huge centralized monopoly.
If you're curious, I got my stat from here: http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
I think the worst part of this is that "dull writing style is an academic survival skill because they think that is what editors want." I would argue with the author's assertion that "dull, impersonal prose" is not sought.

During my CS graduate school days, I saw several examples of technical article templates (for lack of a better word or phrase) that were specifically geared to follow the existing style of "successful" journal and conference submissions. By template, I mean something that was almost pre-written where you could just drop your data/charts/algorithms/etc into the proper place and submit. The use of such style templates did not leave much room to actually focus on the clear communication of ideas in a paper. But there is so much pressure to publish and build up the CV that I kind of understand why people used that approach. Combine that with the "hack the paper together in a fury of writing in the last hours before FedEx can get the submission into the conference" and I see where writing well is not as valued as simply producing publications.

Of course, I'm also commenting from the viewpoint of someone who received feedback on a tech paper along the lines of " . . . I liked the words and flow . . . but . . " - paraphrasing here - the ideas aren't so good. Not missing grad school so much these days.
It does seem to me like "you're doing it wrong."

I don't know why you are showing adsense ads for dictionaries on your site. I can't imagine your audience is the sort that buys dictionaries. Given you are a slang dictionary, I imagine your users are young. And most young people get their dictionaries online.

It seems like such an oxymoron that you would have an ad to buy something printed on your dictionary website. Your ad sense literally show ads for a printed competitor to your site.

It seems to me you have your adsense set up wrong, or naively. If I go to a page and look up a word slang for a word like girlfriend, you should show me ads for dating! When I look something up in your dictionary, then you start to know who I am and you can show me relevant ads.

As it was, all I get is banners for online colleges and slang dictionaries and a Google ad for Ask.com.

You just need a bit better ads... I guess I was wrong about being able to put up random ads, but I think you could make more if you thought about it more.
For immediate negotiating help, I recommend the book You Can Negotiate Anything: http://www.amazon.com/You-Negotiate-Anything-Herb-Cohen/dp/0...

For longer term and more general help with persuasion tactics (which might be used to get you to agree to a lower offer), I recommend Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini: http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Busine...

You will easily recover the cost of these two books using the knowledge from them.
Listening to users and taking actions is always a good thing. Translating what they did to "telling users to fuck off" just isn't right.John Gruber did tell Digg to fuck off btw.
The end of Computing Science?
I expect the title appealed to some people.

A post last week about the latest Microsoft ad was similarly voted up, then killed. So if you flag this one, there's a good chance it will also be killed.
Ask HN: Anyone using GWT in an app?
I was thinking about using GWT on App Engine but the more I think about it, the less I see the need for writing Java code for my client-side JS. Anyone else feel this is overkill and a JS library like jquery makes more sense?

Come to think of it, is there ever a good justification for using GWT?
So you use the mini dvi, plus the minidisplay port?
Email takes up computer space, so delete messages you no longer need.

I disagree. I keep almost all of my email. For me, the cost of storing all email is small compared to usefulness of finding an old email when you need it.
Even without the comments, this story doesn't seem to clear the bar for "interesting to hackers in general". You may have better luck promoting your story on www.reddit.com/r/programming
I noticed a potential "loophole" in interest income this year. If it's less than $10 from a single institution, you don't need to report it. In fact, they will not even issue a 1099. I called my bank and they confirmed that I don't need to do anything.

So, in theory, you could have 100 bank accounts each with $9.99 interest and not pay any taxes.

But then again, maybe having 100 bank accounts would automatically trigger an audit.
AT&T may have to pay dearly to retain iPhone exclusively
Internet Explorer	47.33% (25% of that IE6..ugg)
Firefox 35.39%
Safari 10.50%
Mozilla 4.39%
Chrome 1.38%

(political based site)
Tell and Ask HN: Mobile sysadmin on the road
This is a topic that I've been exploring lately and thought I'd share my nascent knowledge and ask for your input.

Topic: server sysadmin while traveling without a laptop.

How I do it: My G1 is at the center of it all. Stored in it I have the phone numbers of my registrar, my host, and my good friends who can sub as admins.

On this phone, I have a 3G connection with excellent UK-wide coverage (I know of only real reception blackhole!) Worst case is a GPRS connection.

I use Pingdom to send me SMS alerts if something goes wrong with my web app's hardware. I've configured Pingdom to check the text of the page to see if MySQL is dead even if Apache is fine. This is very useful and an I think an overlooked feature.

The phone has an SSH client (ConnectBot) which is freely available in the Android Market. There is a profile saved (without a password in case the phone is lost) for the server. Logging in takes about 15 seconds with a 3G connection and about 25s on GPRS.

Hardware-wise: Although the screen is small, it's still very legible to have a fully functioning SSH terminal. The trackball is useful for scrolling around quickly. Also, I've found that having a hardware keyboard is immensely useful for typing commands into the SSH terminal. I can't imagine what it would be like with a soft keyboard.

Of course there is a very good browser that can render pretty much any website well. This gives me confidence that I can look up any necessary info relatively easily.

The server has nano and htop installed. I know how to use them well, and constantly learning.

In my wallet, I keep a little cheat sheet of various commands, keyboard shortcuts (like for controlling htop), and locations of important files (logs, config files, etc). It folds to be smaller than a credit card's dimensions and has lots of text in 10pt. Having this sheet is a great way to calm down and to save me time because I don't have to work from memory under stress. Unfolding it is like unfolding a battle plan you know you're going to win with.

I also have an sFTP client installed but never had to use it.

So that's me in a nutshell. What do you do? Any special tools/tips/tricks/setups?

Cheers.
Hacking your CRM to handle phone calls
The search for definitions goes back to Socrates -- What is Virtue? What is Justice? Etc...

I hardly think this denotes bad philosophy.
I use Linux too and this should work on both Linux and Windows.

When you start with Firefox it has File Edit View etc. followed by a separator on the top row, then the rest of the row is filled by a flexible space and a little "loading" image. Then on the row below that you have the buttons, the location bar and the search bar.

What I'm saying is it should be possible to drag the flexible space back into customize and drag the url up where it used to be. This will mean the UI is only taking up one row.

Like this: http://i41.tinypic.com/f7y9j.jpg

I don't know how to change the selection behaviour though. Personally I like having the whole URL selected but I can see it could be useful that way.
Reminds me of the Mythbusters salami rocket: http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2006/04/episode_51_myths_reopened...
REST + SOAP
"Growth" here refers to the size of the installed user base, irrespective of retention. By "self-sustaining" I mean it requires no external input of users to continue to grow.

Using your model, let's say usersLosingInterest = 0 and 0 < viralCoefficient < 1.

How do you get exponential growth from this? Each new user brings in a finite number of additional users, a function of viralCoefficient. Call this number N.

This increases your growth by a factor of N, but it's still dependent on some outside source of users. If I acquire M users then through my viral process I get an additional M*N users total.

Another way to think about it: if your viral coefficient is less than one then the viral growth of each cohort dies out.

I see nothing exponential here. Am I missing something?

This point is mostly incidental to my two main points, though: outlining how the viral coefficient affects the cost of acquisition, and an argument for a hybrid strategy of accelerated but not viral growth.

What do you think of those points?
I guess this is a side note but I dislike links that automatically sign me up to stuff. Hadn't realised I was logged in to Chatterous, nor that being logged in and visiting this link would subscribe me to the group. I guess curiosity killed my inbox.
Digg Does The Right Thing With DiggBar
And when that government becomes corrupt, there will be no refuge, nowhere left to run.
The company was ready for approval I think 2 or maybe 3 years back and then the FDA quite unexpectedly asked to go back for more trials. So yes I'm pretty sure this is real advancement, but obviously there are no silver bullets.

There are also no body slams, despite what the reddit-like headline may have you believe.
Flapjax: A Programming Language for Ajax Applications [pdf]
aaah. another year, another release.

Ever since 7.1, I'm a near-fanatic PostgreSQL-user, if not to say fanboi.

I love, love, love PostgreSQL for its performance, its features, its awesome community and just for the fact that it's getting better and better every year.

Congratulations to the PostgreSQL team.

I've said it before and I'll probably say it many more times: You guys rule.

Sorry. This had to be said :-)
Yes, pure oxygen is quite a thing. When photosynthesis first appeared on earth it did serious damage to all other life forms, they weren't used to so much O2 in the atmosphere.
The one thing I find most hopeful about the fight against cancer is that it doesn't evolve. With bacteria and viruses, there's the inevitable resistant strain to worry about in the future. It becomes nearly impossible to totally cure anything sufficiently volatile.

Prostate cancer, however, will pretty much be the same 1,000 years from now.
Teens Turn to Summer Start-Ups
Whether your offering helps or hinders their business is irrelevant to you. You are a provider of software and they pay you to use that. Whether they succeed or not is not your problem. Don't get entangled with their business success.
And further: if they are including third parties for Amazon -- presumably including the new-and-used sellers -- that implies they are including Ebay in the "third of all e-commerce" calculation. Is Amazon actually facilitating more commerce than Ebay at this point?
Prop betting - Twitter buyout odds
Just now I was playing with BumpTop: http://bumptop.com/ . It's quite cool but definitely needs work before being a replacement for the OS desktop.
Inside the Financial Aid Office at Boston University
I think I'm going to have to stick some money into Twitter not getting bought at +250. 2009 is a rough year and they'd have to sell for a very high amount.
Normal chatroom with discussion is here:
http://www.chatterous.com/hnyc/
Learn the first 100 digits of Pi
Intermediate and Advanced Software Carpentry in Python
Ext JS 3.0 RC1 released (Samples)
I am sooo eagerly waiting some kind of follow up to all the objections from that blog article. It was truly and eye-opener; there are people in the research community holding their breath for this guy!

That said, the SciAm article says nothing new and does not do anything to defend against infopractical's criticisms. It presumes that Tammet is the man he claims to be; it's still a mystery! Although for a person who is supposedly Kim-Peek-level in terms of memory, he is using the term "antisocial" incorrectly (he means "nonsocial," although this error is as common as the public's misuse of "hack").

The hyperconnectivity stuff is simply an extension of spread activation. Under this framework, everything he says in that article is obvious.

Finally, somewhat irrelevant to infopractical (which is still the most curious issue here), Tammet's objection to IQ is valid, but stated exceedingly weakly. "This sounds a lot to me like astrology, which lumps everyone into one of 12 signs of the zodiac.": that's exactly what it does, and what it was designed to do, but that doesn't amount to a reason against it. The problem is the faulty inference that IQ translates directly to a discrete measurement of intelligence.
I'm surprised to find that the tax situation in the US is so lax. Here in the UK it's a massive and very serious deal if you don't pay your income taxes (to the point of people wrongly accused of not paying taxes being declared bankrupt within months and losing their homes, etc.)

Short lesson is, never, never, never dick with the tax man if you're a British tax payer.
OK- done. It was kind of a cool.
Use this to impress your friends by recalling the nth digit of Pi where n < 100

It took me four days I think, 5 words a day, and got me some beer money from my maths teacher.

Only slight relevance to HN because I'd like to think that its a cool way to hack number memory.

It works by sorting the 10 digits 0-9 by number of occurrences in the first 100 digits of Pi, and then associating each digit with the corresponding top n most commonly used letter of the English language (eg. the letter "E" is the most common English letter).
Why I don’t object to Array#sum
As do I. I left them feedback that "Apparently, you have a cross-site request forgery vulnerability: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=564145"
"Found Haiku" in Linux Documentation
Broadcasts limited to the stuff relevant to you seems like the entire Twitter problem statement.

Absolutely not. In twitter you follow people, which makes absolutely no sense in corporate context. Who am I supposed to follow, my project manager, all my co-workers? Am I supposed to change my followership for each project? What when I'm jumping between projects?

As I see it the only meaningful messaging context in the corporate world is per-project or per-team. And nothing easier than starting a chatroom, campfire or similar for that. Or why exactly should Bob the programmer care what Sarah from accounting is working on if she's not part of his project or team?
Random Love Letter Generator with Ruby Rant
My math teacher in 8th grade used to have PI in one long print-out across the upper edge of the wall, and I'd usually space out and end up staring at the wall rather than pay attention. 10 years later I know that Algebra was at least 18 digits boring.
Poll: How do you startup-owners prepare your taxes?
For you startup owners, how do you handle your taxes?
I do it by hand
I use online software
I use offline software
Outsourced accountant handles it
Have an employee do it
A friend or family member does it for me
Other? Spill the beans
I agree with wittgenstein and the parent. most "philosophy" is arguing over vague definitions. The real meat of philosophy is arguing over axioms. Every system has presuppositions, those can be fruitfully argued about.
jobs was selling what he had available at the moment, which only makes sense. yes, a lot of people were disappointed that he didn't announce a true sdk at the time, but i'm pretty sure it was because it wasn't anywhere near ready yet.

jobs didn't hint around that true sdk-style apps were coming, because apple never talks about unreleased products, unless absolutely forced to. the introduction of the iphone itself was one of only a very few times where this happened. if apple hadn't preannounced the iphone, the story would have gotten out anyway, due to fcc filings.

the oft-repeated refrain that "jobs said web apps were good enough" is mean-spirited and wrong. i suppose it's so often repeated because people felt he was being deceitful or patronizing at wwdc 2007, when web apps were introduced. that's one way to interpret it. i choose a different one: apple is secretive. you can claim it's not the best tactic, but it's what apple does. i for one thing the positives of that policy outweigh the negatives.
The Failure of #amazonfail
For me, it's also the ease and simplicity of being able to use a single payment system.
I was kinda dismissive of your blog post ... out of random impulse, I clicked through the link and was just as impressed as you were. There's a lot of interesting things in there. I've been talking to my business partner and my friends about it ... and trying to apply it elsewhere too.

Later that day, I stumbled through Steve Blank's blog and greatly enjoyed that too. One particular article, http://steveblank.com/2009/04/09/supermac-war-story-6-the-jo... ... has much of the same ideas, though it didn't go into the details of the neuroscience. Based on the neuroscience from the juxtapositional thinking blog though, it definitely explained why SGB was able to build such a great team.

Thanks for linking this. It's going to affect a lot of what I set things up from now on.
Wasn't this launched in 2006? Why post it here now as if it's just been introduced?

http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/flapjax-griddle-w...
Facebook versus Twitter: A brief competitive analysis
Make Your Own Personal Cloud With Pogoplug
Reddit is going to go nuts for this
I was looking forward to built-in replication, but I'll take whatever I can get.
I'd go so far as to say that the command line is with us now more than it was 10 years ago. Google is essentially a command line for the web. Spotlight (as well as third party Mac utilities like Quicksilver and LaunchBar) are command-lines for launching programs, which satisfies a primary function of the original command line. As long as we have usable keyboards we'll have command lines one way or the other. (Phones, even iPhones, are an example of unusable keyboards by this standard. An iPhone command line would be less usable than the standard interface for launching apps, for instance, while on my Mac, Spotlight is more usable than the Finder.)

I don't like the attitude that keyboards are some outdated relic. Keyboards are the most efficient human-thought-to-language medium ever invented. On even the most simple Notepad/Pico/TextEdit style text editor, I can go from thoughts in my brain to written language faster than a pen, and almost as fast as my mouth can go from thoughts to spoken language. And with far more accuracy than either alternative. If the keyboard is ever replaced, it'll be replaced by something even more arcane and unnatural.

Doing away with hierarchical file systems is easier than he lets on. In fact, Gmail has already done this in our mail client. The solution is, instead of having a single static directory structure, you dynamically generate views of your files based upon search queries and user-added tags or categories. He mentioned Spotlight as another example of this, and he's mostly right (now that you can save "smart folders").

But sometimes human categorization is still going to be needed to keep related files together. In the past we did this by making directories. These days, "tags" or "labels" are more popular. But we might want to make hierarchies of tags, at which point you have a hierarchical file system again. There's one advantage—tags allegedly allow you to have the same file under multiple tags—but that's nothing more than hardlinks, and "there should be a better UI for hardlinks" would make a very boring essay. Then again, if we reverse engineer this thinking and refer to "tags" as nothing more but "a better UI for hardlinks", we just might have a good idea for a new filesystem UI.

(It also occurs to me that hardlinks are one-way links: each hardlink knows where its inode is, but the inode doesn't know where all the hardlinks are. A tagging UI is going to have to cross this chasm somehow.)
Transportation costs are incredibly cheap.

For example, the "eat locally" folks are anti-scientific, and don't acknowledge/realize that you can move a cargo container full of food across an ocean of 1% of the cost of raising the food.

Moving sewage is even cheaper, by several orders of magnitude. Shit rolls downhill.

These two things being the case, why would we POSSIBLY want to put housing, waste processing, and agricultural land all in the same place?

The New Urbanists tell us that density is the key to interesting places, and they get all upset about folks in the suburbs daring to want and have large yards and swing sets, when they could live more densely and share parks.

So, if YARDS are a waste of precious urban land, suddenly we're supposed to import FARMS into our residential areas?

This is a crack addled idea from start to finish.
Is Stanford worth it?
I'm an undergrad and all the Stanford administration did all this awful shit to me. Apparently, they sweep a lot of people under the rug. I'm not going into detail because they retaliate hard. I didn't even make it as far as the computer science department before I got vaporized, so to speak. From people who have gone here: Is this place worth it?
Moving into the cloud, losing your freedom?
Pure marketing bullshit. M/R vs. SQL is a crazy comparison since you use them in two different spots. The paper's authors all have a financial or egotistical stake in Vertica and they fail to mention that any real DW effort is dominated by ETL times (which they admit M/R was better at). Another thing they fail to mention is the exhorbitant price tags associated with the current batch of commercial column-store databases (re: 6 figures and up for Vertica or Aster).
CNN Acquires CNNBrk Twitter Account