skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, there are some ways that you can make start-ups more appealing for founders without increasing the reward. In the United States, creating a startup has considerable risk and cost. Health insurance comes to mind as the largest cost. Europeans don't have to worry about this in the same way and, therefore, are able to eliminate a cost of several thousand dollars from their startup budget. They don't risk being without health coverage by creating a startup (and that does lower the risk, therefore requiring less reward). Likewise, unemployment insurance is better which makes it easier for those whose start-ups might not pan out to feel secure.

So, the government can lower the risk for founders in a meaningful way. I'm not saying that socialism is awesome or anything, just that certain social programs reduce the risk of doing a start up.

Aaron Swartz (of reddit fame) once wrote an essay on this topic arguing this point: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/prostartup

The lack of a social safety net requires founders to be in a good position - good health, no dependents (spouse, kids), etc. - or get enough VC that they can afford to go in that direction.

It's clearly not the only issue - investment dollars still need to come from somewhere and this doesn't change that risk (other than lowering the amount initially needed since the VC wouldn't have to pay for things like health insurance), but personally it would go a long way for risk-averse me.
False dichotomy: you're either 100% free to do anything you want, or you're a slave. There's lots of middle ground, namely that making certain choices implies accepting certain constraints. Universal health care, for example, needn't _force_ doctors into providing care for certain people at gunpoint. It may imply, however, that if you choose to enter medicine that you may have to accept certain conditions.

This is already the case, actually. Working at certain emergency rooms obligates one to care for those that come through the door, regardless of whether they can pay. This hardly makes the doctors & nurses who work there slaves.

Similarly, in the US we citizens have a right to council, and if you can't afford an attorney, one is provided by the state. Does that make court appointed attorneys slaves?
The 897x's are cheating.
I think the limits vary by type...

IRA 2009 $5,000 $6,000
401k 2009 $16,500 $22,000
http://www.themoneyalert.com/Retirement-Plan-Limits.ht
Indeed, and not just for the compiler's parser. I don't believe that Algol-family syntax is the best representation for source code. Nor do I believe that of S-expressions. I believe it's possible to produce a consistent syntax that's understandable and maintainable (and linguistically justifiable) for a modestly skilled practitioner of the art.

Internal consistency of Perl 6 is more important -- even to novices learning the language -- than consistency with other languages, even Perl 5. Many of the linguistic and syntactic quirks of Perl 5 came from other languages. Not all -- but many.
I was disagreeing with your statement "It isn't a fallacy that the poor don't pay taxes." It very much is a fallacy; they pay all kinds of taxes (as pointed out by the other commenter they pay medicare tax and social security tax as well as sales taxes, gas taxes, etc.). I wasn't making the argument that they pay more in taxes as a percentage of their income, or any argument around utility. There are arguments to be made around that, but I wasn't making them.

I was also basically saying that the whole "your argument is so ludicrous I won't dignify it with a response" thing was a cop-out. Just assuming they must receive more in social services than they pay in taxes, without any attempt to quantify either number, doesn't make for a compelling argument.
3 dimensions is the smallest number of dimensions in which you can make a practical universe. For example photons could not exist in a 2 dimensional universe.

I do get your point that it's not a mathematical property of the number. (But I think you can find some geometrical something that only works in 3 dimensions.)
Rule #1 of risk taking: be prepared to lose what's at risk.

Are you prepared to lose your wife and kids?

This situation is not any more complicated than that. Any thinking beyond this simple yes/no is your emotions getting in the way of your logic.
I would suggest that instead of trying to reduce bad uses of political power via the proxy of transparency, it might be more effective to reduce the amount of political power there is at all.
> think big house and foreign cars

LOL what? A big house in Silicon Valley costs at least 2 million dollars, and "foreign cars" is like saying "wet water".
you just asserted that income taxes for the poor are 34%...
Even if they didn't think about that, I think it's far more likely that they would have if there was a 99% tax on everything over 100K or some similarly draconian tax.
Deploying Django applications to a production server
I like the Pilot G2 XF very much. The normal Pilot G2 is a little thick. For Fountain Pens I really like the aluminum Rotring pens (German). They're a bit heavy, but they feel like a real tool. Ah damn, Rotring doesn't make em anymore... Well, Lamy fountain pens are really good and cheap (also German): http://www.lamyusa.com/safari.html

The Pilot Disposable Fountain Pen is hilarious: http://www.pilotpen-store.com/product_detail.asp?T1=PIL+SV4B....
I'd say that it plays a much greater role than people want to believe.
if the poor paid more in taxes than they receive in benefits why wouldn't social programs be net profitable? the argument makes no sense.
It's really not hard. For example, on the command line:

$ curl -I http://tinyurl.com/9a4xj6
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.8
Location: http://www.hostingcoupons.org/godaddy-coupons/
Content-type: text/html
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:26:48 GMT
Server: TinyURL/1.6

or in Python:

>>> import urllib
>>> u=urllib.urlopen("http://tinyurl.com/9a4xj6")
>>> u.url
'http://www.hostingcoupons.org/godaddy-coupons/'
>>>

etc...
I used to work in manufacturing, and it was fairly common to hear people decline overtime using the reason that it would be taxed enough more that it wasn't worth it for them. Part of this might have been due to a misunderstanding of how income taxes work (everyone I knew there, including myself, had the impression that higher rates were applied to the entire amount of your income), but that doesn't alter the point in this case.
Ask HN: Critic as Artist
Playing with Oscar Wilde's essay Critic As Artist:

All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate. No poet sings because he must sing. At least, no great poet does. A great poet sings because he chooses to sing. It is so now, and it has always been so. We are sometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they walked, had kind of a poetical quality of its own, and almost without changing could pass into song.

With some license, should you substitute poet for developer and song for program, you end up with a nice description of the art of programming :-) Here's my shot at it:

All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate. No programmer develops because he must write code. At least, no great programmer does. A great programmer develops because he chooses to write code. It is so now, and it has always been so. We are sometimes apt to think that the code that was written at the dawn of programming was simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early programmers looked at, and through which they walked, had kind of a programmable quality of its own, and almost without changing could pass into code
Previously submitted by rms:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=571686

(Submitting an article with its canonical URL helps the HN duplicate detector work better.)
The magic to "smooth out the risk inherent in any market" is to let the interest rates be set by market forces, which will inevitably (almost magically one might say) through the principle of competition, set the interest rates at the level which the available capital in the market can bear. The speculative investing which you assume as a given is not a given if money is only so cheap as the resources in the economy which support it. However, decouple the market from interest rates, and drive those rates down to a level which the capital in the economy cannot support, and you create a demand glut for resources.

The market, if left to itself, is automatically self regulating, both in regards to the price of consumable goods, and in regards to the ability of speculative investors to obtain cheap money. Such a market punishes speculators who fail with interest rates appropriate to the level of risk. It cannot do this, however, when those rates are set artificially by a central bank. Though the Fed is an independent institution on paper, they serve at the behest of Congress and the President. For all practical purposes they are an arm of the Federal government, exercising power from on high, and dictating to the market how it will run.

Appealing to Zimbabwe as a counter-example, as did the previous commenter, is an example of cognitive dissonance. Zimbabwe is a perfect example of what happens when the government does NOT let the market self-regulate, when, rather, the government sets prices and interest rates, distributes property, and prints massive quantities of fiat money to compensate for its inability to create true wealth. No government, no matter how much control it exercises, can possibly manage an economy better than the economy can manage itself. It is too big a beast, too complex, with too many interlocking parts.
I have worked both with mercurial and git (3-5 developers).

Git has definitely more features, but there aren't useful that much. Things like rewriting history is often quite confusing and it is pretty easy to shoot yourself in the foot. It also got tons of quirks.

Personally I think that git is over-hyped. A lot of developers said to me how git is awesome, but it seems that they spent much more time maintaining code then on the other VCS/DVCS. Hg just work, it is easy to learn, gives much more meaningful error messages... and got all of the major advantages of DVCS, but it has much less fans then git.

So the question is whether you want to focus on developing an application and use DVCS as a tool. Or rather playing with your DVCS is a fun itself. First case pick Hg, second - git.

Note that my comment applies only for small teams. I have got absolutely no experience with big projects(> 30 developers, > 2 years) so YMMV in that case.
Is this because Linus gave a git talk at Google calling them stupid for relying on Subversion?
I was under the impression that competition was generally considered a good thing, especially when the products involved in this case are similar enough that it'd be easy to automate interoperation between them.
The Truth About Office Rumors
I've never understood this analogy. We already pay more for more bandwidth which is supposed to allow us to receive packets faster. This always sounds like they're expecting me to pay twice for service.
6 CEOs Share Their Biggest Regrets
Why? These aren't automatically available in nature.

It turns out the answer to your question doesn't require empathy for your fellow man to understand. (Of course, if we were assuming this, the answer to the question would be largely obvious.)

A lot of things aren't automatically available in nature. Police, the military, public schools, and your broadband connection all come to mind.

It turns out that governments and society work based on this concept you may have heard of called a "social contract." Look it up. Saying there's a "master-slave" relationship implied by citizens deserving to have their basic needs met is either really ignorant or very disingenuous. Every citizen of this country is part of the contract, whether you realize it or not.

If you allow a large enough part of the society to become a desperate underclass, you'll find that they'll become dangerous to the rest of the society. Dealing with these problems will cost you more in taxes than simply improving infrastructure at large as a preventative measure.

Or, put more bluntly: the safety of the rich and upper middle class isn't automatically guaranteed in nature either. If you really want to take the nihilist approach you imply, then you'll find that poor people won't just walk idly by your house in despair; they'll just kill you and take your money. Or they'll get so sick that you have no choice but to start paying for their health care lest you catch the plague. In "nature" no one cares how well you code, only how well you can fend for yourself in the wild. Is that really the society you want?
Keep your TV. It'll keep you in touch with popular culture for a start. Which is handy if you want to sell things to the 'masses'.

I know it's popular on here to hate TV, but this is bs. If you actually make a conscious decision on what you want to watch, assuming you have access to quality programming, then it's extremely useful. You really can't quantify the amount you learn from movies, educational tv, comedy, music etc etc

The problem is when people go into a state when they just watch something they don't really want to watch, doesn't teach them anything, and just wastes their time. But that's not a fault of having a TV, it's just a fault of those people misusing it.
I started skipping school at 13, and left permanently at 14. At first it was just black and white: I hated school, I didn't want to go, but it soon turned into severe anxiety (that's another story.) I'm 17 now.

I wish I could say it's not affected me much, overall I think I'm pretty bright, so I don't fear I'm not going to be technically qualified for the career I want, however it's the paperwork I'm worried about; I have no exam results to speak of, and when I finally get over the anxiety, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Collage? University? I have no idea where I stand, I just hope things don't go completely pete tong, and I'm still in the same situation at 30 or something, when I have far more responsibilities and cannot afford to complete my education. We'll see... :-)

Btw, this is a new account.
Why We Need Audiophiles
Anecdotally...

Most of my friends and co-workers have switched to git for their local work (pushing back to SVN when working on a project that requires this). Since then I've seen more time spent tracking down and fixing weird version-control things than I ever did with SVN, or with hg (which I've been using).

I don't know if this is because one is genuinely more "easy" or more "powerful" than the other, or whether it's just the learning curve of a new workflow (I'm not really using the 'D' in 'DVCS' much, actually).
It's going to have to depend on your app. I say try both and benchmark.

For an app I was testing it out on, it seemed to be about the same.

FWIW, Facebook uses APC.
How Bernie Madoff pulled off his massive swindle
i'm not sure its the free time he is missing. i would guess he assumes that if he had completed his degree he would have the knowledge base to pick up a language and build quick utilities.
Hollywood trade group asks judge to seal courtroom in DVD-copying case
A Sneak Preview of Wolfram Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine
Ok, I'll keep it in mind
It would be more interesting to link to COPACOBANA [http://www.copacobana.org/ , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custom_hardware_attack], which can do roughly the same thing at 1/25th the cost ($10,000 vs $250,000) and is reprogrammable.
It seems that Google did a good job implementing mercurial on its own infrastructure. It could encourage open source developers to switch from subversion to hg.
The percentage of income paid in taxes by the poor is about 34% (ignoring state and city taxes which can easily bump the total above 40% alone).

Sales tax is equivalent to income tax for a poor person (albiet at a discount rate given that their rent, and in some cases food, is not taxed).

Sales tax is not the equivalent for a rich person, who can save the bulk of their income.

Therefore it is fair and not misleading to include sales tax as an additional part of income taxes for the poor. And it's correct to say that poor people pay more than the rich in taxes.

Because of the way the tax system is structured, someone making around 100k a year is taxed most heavily, then less and less in either direction away from that point.
Google Forcing Your Hand, Stealing Your Thumbprint
Raising Bill Gates: Microsoft Founder’s Dad
Doctors can quit.
I don't know exactly what effective tax rates are for the poor (but when I was poorer I was much more concerned about how much I was paying in taxes, for whatever that's worth, and this was just two years ago), but it could easily be the case that such services mostly would be profitable were they not run by an organization with an interest in justifying a higher budget, instead of making a profit. My own feeling is that many things the government now does at a loss could be done profitably in a competitive market, and lots of services for the poor fall into this category.
Ask HN: Recommend any good business/hacker fiction?
I just finished re-reading Neal Stevenson's Cryptonomicon for the third time today, and I cannot get enough of the modern part of the story.

It's basically about a very HN-ish nerd named Randy who gets embroiled in a huge international venture to create the world's first data haven, with plenty of in-depth discussion on technical topics like Van Eck Phreaking and more absurd ones like pantyhose fetishes.

Has anyone here read anything along the lines of this? A book about a hacker/entrepreneur who sets out to change the world and comes across all sorts of wacky scenarios?
Classes in all levels (preschool to universities) and public events where suspended today in Mexico City due the Influeza outbreak. 68 people have died the past days and 1004 cases are under treatment.
Books To Make You A Better Product Manager
Facebook Duplicates Twitter, Launches Public Profile Text Updates
did you mean "virtualization"?
Anybody notice that there are fewer employees in retail stores in the quarter after Christmas then the quarter before? This is a non-story story. Apple does a lot of holiday quarter business.
Sporty software reveals where blurred balls are heading
IMHO, the 2 products are too similar for the competition to be very advantageous.

The past has shown that all real future innovation in version control will come from new products, not established products... Five more years of Git vs. Hg is probably not going to help innovate version control systems.
Yeah kind of. Another place that does facebook face mapping is http://www.face.com.

The facial recognition isn't our main feature, just a decoration/extra on top of our actual product/service which is related to photo organization and synchronization.
I enjoy the Pentel Graph Gear 1000 - pretty heavy for the $20 price and the extended drafting-style tip retracts when the clip is opened. https://www.pentelstore.com/index.php?grp=760.
In reasonable people you can assume a degree of psychological integration. They probably believe what they say. It's hard to function otherwise.

Is it safe to assume the same of media outlets? My intuition says no. Management sets the tone and the editorial position. Editors and staff execute. That provides ample room for what would be psychotic behavior if management, the editors and staff were all one person.
Agreed about 40. That answer only works in English.
Suck it up. Go back to school. Suffer a little to save yourself a big headache.
I am confused. Are you 30 or 17 years old?

I am 18 years old and I would like to quit high school but that mean I'll be booted out of home with no job and no future.

It would probably be fine if I just have a laptop, car, portable food and water storage(with self cleaning water filter?), and a steady source of income that let me eat. However, I have health issue, and I wouldn't survive long on the street without medicine.

So even if I got a large enough source of income and emergency fund, I still need health insurances so I don't die and they're really expensive.
no. the poor pay about 10-15% in income tax, then about 7-9% in sales taxes.
I agree. the poor in our country live like kings not because of social programs but because the market forces prices down to a level where everyone can afford more luxuries.
I didn't mean any offense, I meant only to share my experiences relevant to the article with HN.
Secret No More: Revealing Windows XP Mode for Windows 7
Tautology. :) People with the same priors cannot either disagree or exist, in the real world.
This was ten years ago. I wonder how little a machine like that would cost today. By Moore's Law, it would be on order of $8,000(a gross simplification, and doing the math in my head but interesting nonetheless).
Oracle on the future of Oracle and Sun
Promotional Calculators 
Promotional calculators are affordable, and come in many fun shapes.
Oops. Sorry. You are correct.
Considering the size of the codebase and the amount of developers that have contributed to it over time, I find the comments to be very mild.

Every commercial codebase has hacks and special cases. Limited developer resources, deadlines and idiotic external constraints (hello third party libs/apps!) simply force that.

There is an art to capturing stupid stuff that is beyond your control at the integrating level (with checks, logging and exceptions at that level) without allowing this to contaminate the deeper levels of your system. That's another story entirely.

If you want to read some highly amusing comments in source, read http://www.jwz.org/doc/censorzilla.html - the list jwz published of the stuff that had to be removed from the Netscape source code before it was open-sourced.
17. :)
I can only imagine the bloat of running a complete copy of XP under 7 for app compatibility. The blue box worked for Apple, though.
Because of the bandwidth cost or some other reason?
Doesn't your 10-15% ignore social security and medicare taxes?
Social security is 15% of a poor person's income alone. Medicare is another 6%. At 30k/year, you additionally pay 13% federal income tax. That means that the amount of money from your paycheck going to the federal government totals 34%.

A poor person making $30k/year is paying 34% of their income to the federal government, before any other taxes. It's not all officially named "income tax", but it's paid as a percentage of income which meets the definition of an income tax. (http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aincome+tax&ie=ut...)
I think with virtual companies you need to be more transparent. Show real names, give out a phone number, show a real mailing address, and email address.

I hate companies that have an order button but only a contact form and nothing else.
Incorporate in your home state, otherwise you need to register as a foreign corp in whatever state you will be doing business in.
Cure For Honey Bee Colony Collapse?
That is quite the endorsement. Would you like to disclose what your relation to Pearltrees is?
FTA: Now, they can claim almost complete Windows XP compatibility, or almost 100 percent compatibility with all currently running Windows applications.

It'll be interesting to see what software that currently runs on XP fall outside of the "compatible" line.