skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The government already collects the taxes for you through withholding. I fear that if people didn't file their taxes themselves they would lose all respect and recognition of how much they pay for their government, which is bad for democracy.

The easier taxes become, the less people complain about paying them. The government then has an easier job of justifying how they spend that money. Arguably, taxes should be as inconvenient, difficult, and painful as possible.

On the other hand, having to file taxes really sucks and I would rather not do it. So there's an argument both ways.
What's frustrating to me is that these SheevaPlugs seem to have enough processing power to be a pretty respectable desktop computer, but they lack any kind of display output. If someone would throw a VGA or DVI port on one of these things, I'd buy it today. All most of my family needs is the ability to run Firefox and Open Office. (Flash would be nice, too.)
Seconded. I had one to many classes with pricks who think the purpose of a class is to complexify basic concepts and espouse their greatness rather than convey useful information.
Heh, heh. I'll see if I can come up with a better formulation; any suggestion?

I agree with your remark about Ruby, but we're now looking into what can be done for speeding up real-world code, Rails being an obvious target. Also, Python is quite popular for scientific computing, and we can integrate CrossTwine Linker into other environments—including proprietary ones.
same in Spain, you get a tax proposal though a particular computer system called "Padre" ("Father" in Spanish, it always reminds me of Alien 8th main ship computer system), you can then 'fix' or add stuff if you want.
It's certainly a factor. The just reported seven-fold rise in netbook sales this quarter certainly put a lot more Linux machines on the field. I don't know how many, though. I just ordered a Dell Mini 9 (it was $50 when purchased with the Latitude E6500 that I was already ordering), but it's got Windows XP on it from the factory. I'll certainly be reinstalling it with Fedora or Ubuntu the day it arrives, though (likewise the Latitude).
Thanks for the reply! What is the biggest benefit to the DD in your daily use?
Where are the CEOs on AP's 2007 top-paid list?
xenophanes's reply to you is exactly what I was thinking. I'm not sure why I was downvoted. Having a good looking SO is important to most people when considering the prestige of the SO. So from your comment, I'm assuming she isn't very good looking. At least she is smart.
I know this is a super late reply, but wow. 125 is insane. Though I wonder how many are employees in first world countries vs third world countries.
tax isn't about raising money. we have fiat money the government can print as much as it wants. taxation is about keeping aggregate demand for fiat dollars high.
Strange article. I started out agreeing that RSS could be better but then when I heard his response, it sounds a lot like a Rube Goldberg machine.

Maybe he should start using FriendFeed or iGoogle.
I agree with you. As an example, I'm sure that I could become quite enthused with Lisp if PG was to spend a few hours with me. But, is this the best use of his time? The opportunity cost is quite high, much as it is for any truly world class academic. What fraction of the value would I receive if I watched a series of video lectures he produced on the subject? One could argue that all interactivity would be lost, but I'd counter that the large size of most university lecture classes precludes all but a few questions per class. Would I be better served watching PG's videos (or reading his book) and having a recitation of sorts with a lesser, but still competent Lisper?

One argument for taking courses from faculty active in research is that they can incorporate recent advances in their fields into the curriculum. Undergraduate calculus does not benefit much, though. It's not like anything taught wasn't known 200 years ago.

I picked on math for poets because classes in those genre often require much one-on-one tutoring, review classes, etc. The professors who ran such courses were often more project manager than teacher. Many teaching assistants were involved, and duties were shared. I could understand having some guest lectures from various faculty members, but burdening them with tutoring some pre-med major on integration techniques doesn't seem like a good use of time.
I've ran both, and I really prefer Tomato. DD-WRT is very nice though, but I ended up not using most of the features it offered. Tomato is very lightweight, and fits all my needs perfectly.

My router is also a little buggy (really need to buy a new one) and Tomato runs with fewer dropped connections than DD-WRT. I'm sure that has much less to do with the firmware and more to do with bad hardware.
This is the book referenced (no referral fee links, btw):

http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Busine...

I've read it and even bought a second copy to lend out. It's that good.
Open Coffee Club Atlanta - May 20th, 3PM
I love DD-WRT, but tomato offers most of the functionality, and is much lighter/has a nicer ui, imo.
There is support for giving certain users read-only access, so that's not a problem.
Isn't your response just whataboutery? I think part of the author's thesis is that misogyny is handled in numerous other analyses. However, even in situations where allegations of patriarchy are ludicrous, certain trends are still present. It is not necessary to catalog every true example of misogyny in order to argue against some allegations of oppression.

Maybe part of the reason that women didn't build boats and sail around the world was because women weren't allowed to own property in many areas of the world, or because women were prohibited from obtaining an education and learning astronomy.

Certainly, in some cases. But even in cultures where women are granted the same rights as men, certain lifestyles seem to be much more popular with men than with women; hence far more men among soldiers, death row inmates, and Fortune 500 CEOs. In cases where we notice more men than women reaping a specific reward, we ought to at least consider different preferences owing to biological/evolutionary origins.

But I see what you're saying. I would have liked to hear some discussion of the blatant and real misogyny that exists in the world. In fact, I would be fascinated to see an analysis of the situations you bring up, in light of the observed differences in gender attitude and aptitude.
Yeah, I found that too. That just seems to be factory servos (big ones) with ethernet built in. The article suggests that there is somehow a way to reprogram the PHYS ics in the linksys to output PWM to drive the servos that were already in his rc copter.

Hmmm. Now that you mention it, I suppose it would not be difficult to format custom ethernet frames with a duty cycle proportional to an analog output.
Good way to explore the screen manual:

screen man screen

Read enough to figure out how to list and switch between virtual terminals, and then you can play around and come back to the man page easily.
I run tomato and like the features but I'm considering switching, because it takes up to 30 seconds for my laptop to connect. (Connection was almost instant with the stock firmware, and is very quick everywhere else... So Tomato seems the culprit.)
Income is only part of the equation. You also need a mechanism to track all business expenses and various itemized deductions. That basically implies that you can't automate it without having all transactions tracked and categorized. Which would be kind of scary!
Part 2 of this article can be found at:

http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/17847
I have often wondered why Republicans/Libertarians/other-tax-haters have never (as far as I know) made a serious effort to abolish the automated W2-style paycheck withholding.

If everyone was required to write out checks to the IRS manually on a quarterly basis like self-employed people are I think larger scale tax reform would happen very quickly due to grass roots political pressure. Those quarterly checks really sting sometimes!
The Mint.com CEO said he was cooking up something revolutionary, last I heard. It's still in the works. I wonder if this is it...
As an introduction of Bach's music to someone whose previous music appreciation extended to Bing Crosby it seems perfectly appropriate.

Now if only our nation's science and math teachers could open their students' eyes to the beauties of understanding the world.
using a bookmark-based system still has it's advantages. not every site has RSS. I get the best of both worlds by using Diffbot [http://www.diffbot.com].
Ask HN: Setting up a home media server, recommendations on hardware/apps?
I am beginning to build a home media server, most likely:

==Hardware==

-hackintosh PC (w/ ubuntu)

-nice video card

-1 or 2 TB harddrive

==Software==

-Plex

-rsyncing all movies/music from other networked computers

-iPhone/iPod touch plex remote

I was planning on getting a mac mini but I hear the internal HD is capped.

Any HNers have recommendations on any other apps/hardware to consider?
I had a discussion about this with a friend recently. She linked me to this:

http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2008/07/math_performanc...

Of particular note: "The present study also indicated that the variance ratio for boys and girls is inverted for Asian American students -- the girls have higher variance. Thus, higher variance in boys is not always a robust finding."

I can't speak to the significance of this, it being way out of my knowledge, but if true it certainly suggests something strange is going on.
I built one of the most popular pipes on Yahoo! pipes (the Social Media Firehose - provides alerts from various social media searches for terms you want to track). I spent months trying to get in touch with someone, anyone on the Y! platform team to see if I could turn it into a real app. No response.

I'll build on the Yahoo platform when they agree to take the money from my warm and willing hands.

PS: YQL & Exec are pretty sweet though.
Linux Market Share Passes 1%
I currently use DD to turn a 7 yr. old router into a wireless repeater bridge for my house. We haven't had any problems with the setup for the entire year we have been in the house.
Yeah, they're obviously brittle, but it's baby steps, y'know?

I think it's pretty crazy that you can now scrape well-marked pages with a SQL-like syntax.
I am still trying to figure out why people dislike affiliate links like these(if you were to put one in) It costs the person buying the book nothing and the person providing the link did some work to find the product and link to it thereby making my life easier. I am all for free and making my life easier.

The only reason that I can think of is that it detracts from the strength of the recommendation because of monetary concerns but since this is not the original person recommending it that should not matter.

Am I completely off on this one?
Cash. And cash means privacy, so it matters.
1. Nearly every house in the US is on a single 240V phase with a center-tap to create 120V. Any load is already unbalancing the three-phase transmission lines. Luckily, throwing a similar number of houses on each phase balances out. But if all the houses on one phase turned on their electric heaters and ovens and the houses on the other phases turned off everything, you'd have one unbalanced transformer, but the grid would still remain within tolerance. Now, if you picked a good 10,000 houses all on a single phase spread across a service area, maybe you'd begin to have a detectable problem.

2. Your outlets are spread semi-randomly around to each half, so if you only plugged things in one half, you could only draw half the rated power before blowing the breaker.

So it's not a problem, as you seem to imply.
I run OpenWRT with the x-WRT UI: http://x-wrt.org/ (I think).

There are lots of options that look as though they would be cool, but I mostly use it as a plain ol' WAP.
The problem is this makes degrees more and more worthless and causes "degree inflation" where positions that previously required a bachellor's degree (and still require bachelor's knowledge) now require a master's degree. This is time consuming and a waste of money for those of us who take it seriously.

Plus, much of education is funded by the government (public to a large extent, but also the research grants and whatnot to the privates can't be dismissed), and I simply don't want to pay for people to waste away 4 years in a glamorized high school. I'm all for scholarships and funding for students and schools that take it seriously, but not this junk.
CIA's undercover commandos
It's a good article, but the expendability of the male is an old concept. As is the over representation of males on the extremes.

That's why bucks and does are so different and that's why in most animal populations the sex ratio is not 50/50, but heavily favors females, because one male can fertilize many females.

I think what's new here, is that we've had pretty good gender equality for a while now and now it's becoming OK to for serious people to defend males.

I just don't see the point, as long as we're a species where one male can fertilize many females, the fundamental nature of being a human male won't change. That's life, deal with it.
WebForms is a Lie: Should ASP.NET Developers Learn ASP.NET MVC?
Just spent 20 minutes trying to grab all article links from a newspaper's website based on a url pattern. Failed. The docs could use some work.

Anyone know how to do this?
It advocates Nature, and supports it based on anecdotal evidence involving people who'd had over 5 years of exposure to Nurture, and the assumption that since they are young it must be Nature at work.
>You have to sync to the grid ...
> You have to provide ability for line workers to guarantee that you aren't back feeding power onto a line they had turned off ...

Most solar inverters do this. It is very easy. They don't start adding power to the line until a little past a zero crossing, which solves both the sync issue and the line down issue.

> Say that you're producing 10A of current with your little device. If your breakers are 15A breakers, now they won't trip until 25A of current is running through that circuit.

Only partially true, depending on where you measure the amperage, but I doubt it'd be UL and/or NEC approved to be on anything but a dedicated circuit. If the device is the first thing after the breaker, then 25A could be flowing on the load side of the breaker. However, if it's the last thing in the circuit, the setup is completely safe. No way to assure this, of course, unless it is a dedicated circuit.
I like DD-WRT for my router as well. Its just plain awesome, and their router compatibility page tells you exactly which model's do and do not work, and if what extra steps are needed to install the DD-WRT firmware.

I will warn you, and I'm not sure if this issue exists for other *WRT firmwares, but PPTP VPN and OSX is not ideal on DD-WRT: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/PPTP_Server_Configurati...

OpenVPN is the way to go, but not built in like PPTP is, well, everywhere ...
Consider this though: Maybe congress thinking it can create a system that accounts for every exchange of money and not have loopholes is the stupidity.

I personally think most bureaucracy starts out with good intentions. The tax code included. But with every well intentioned law to close a loophole they added more and more complexity and therefore more and more possible loopholes.
The only audio recording of H.L. Mencken
Most YC companies have raised their Series A with the founders. Founders often transition to fine executives.
That's just as arbitrary (and even worse, inconsistent).

Consider the following:

xxxxxxxxxo
0123456789

Where 'x' represents a person who has been served, and 'o' represents someone who hasn't. Your rule suggests the person at position 8 can't start eating but the person at position 7 can, correct?

I suppose the theory is that the person at position 8 shouldn't start eating out of deference to the person at position 9, but in that case the person at 8 effectively doesn't have food (they have it but can't eat, which is equivalent to not having food). So, if 8 should defer because of 9, shouldn't 7 defer because of 8?
The post was about the Internet granting people easy access to pieces of the past which are easy to forget or generalize or overlook when they're not readily right in front of your face.

"I sometimes wish that the New York Times had run this article again in the last few months, just so we could get reacquainted with the individuals - like Larry Summers - and political parties - both - that got Americans into this mess." While that is a good sentiment (and probably a good idea), the point I took away from the article is that if people really use the web to its full potential, the NY Times wouldn't have to reprint that story, since its existence could be linked to and summoned and quoted by anyone who wanted to look, since it's there. The web is so much about what's happening right now that people, I think, sometimes forget to look at it through the lens of an enormous reasonably-easily-accessible historical record.
Oh - forgot M and _, which watch a buffer for output and 30 sec. (by default) of silence, respectively. They print a message and flag it with an @ in the status line (if any). M combines well with tail -f on log files.
1. I'd be interested in where your number of 10,000 houses comes from.

2. The breakers I was referring to were your circuit breakers in your breaker box. My concern being with their ability to do their assigned task of protection.
A highly stable, practically rock-solid SSH server that is the first step into my office environment. It's exactly what I needed!
After the Great Recession - An Interview with President Obama
Tomato, the extra memory makes a difference in performance.
Tomato.

I ran DD-WRT on a WRT54GL for a few months, and during this time, I kept experiencing intermittent connection problems. I spent hours and hours poring over packet sniffer logs, and finally discovered that the router was the problem.

So I tried switching to Tomato, and it worked perfectly.

(That was 2007, and as far as I know, the bug is still there)
I agree that it would take a much more rigorous look at what social influences boys and girls encounter to show that genes rather than environment drive male-female differences. Most children are probably quite responsive to what they are expected to do, even if those expectations are never verbalized. That would be expected from the evolutionary history of children learning most of what it takes to be human from social groups.

What did you think of the blog author's comments on the suitability of school for boys and for girls, as we find them today?
> start adding power to the line until a little past a zero crossing

That sounds technically sound. Is it compliant with power company rules? The reason I ask is that I looked into setting up a wind generation business 20 years ago, building windmills in Wyoming and selling back to the power company. The power company required special "blessed" devices between user generation equipment and the grid to protect the grid. This usually took the form of sensing circuitry and a physical relay that could completely isolate the grid from your equipment if necessary.

Doing everything in silicon with MOSFETS and algorithms is definitely technically feasible, but lacks the fail-safe behavior of physical isolation on demand. I'm surprised that they allow this.
Graphic Design: The Forgotten Web Standard
I've been using non-stock firmware on my v1 WRT long enough (since before OpenWRT had version numbers) that I can't even compare them to the stock firmware anymore.

I tend to end up using my wireless gear in dumb WAP mode. This is usually precipitated by wanting full specific control of my firewall/NAT configuration, full control of DHCP and my public IP attached to something with storage. That said, the interface and feature set of DD is nice enough that I'll probably give it a shot next time I flatten my home network, and DD is probably powerful enough that it will stick for a while.
I prefer DD-WRT to Tomato. Just find that it has more features and that there is a lot more that you can do with it. I've used both though on a WRT54GS V2
You mean access to your bank accounts? They do that already.
Only if the aggregate impact of those errors is lower than the aggregate impact of the overpayment mistakes that people make when the file their own taxes. The latter also offers much more in the way of plausible deniability.
Python is popular in scientific computing circles because of NumPy and SciPy, which use C++ and Fortran (!) libraries for the heavy lifting.

If you want to stick to the original phraseology, then I think "The CrossTwine Linker engine reduces the execution times of these synthetic benchmarks by up to 75%" is more appropriate, though I would prefer something that highlights the quixotic nature of optimizing computationally intensive Ruby code. I suggest the following.

"Here at CrossTwine, we understand that when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. Our integrated CrossTwine hammer has been optimized specifically for pounding all kinds of nails! Got a nail with threads on the outside? CrossTwine! Nail with a hex head? CrossTwine!"

I kid, I kid. If I could earn a living optimizing interpreters all day long I certainly would. Incidentally, I really like the name "CrossTwine" despite the fact that I don't understand how it relates to your product at all. Can you explain it to me?
kindly point to the factual inaccuracy of my post. our current monetary policy is about controlling aggregate demand for dollars. this is not controversial.
It raises (founded or unfounded) suspicion that the recommendation is not genuine, but was only offered to collect the affiliate fee.
A fantastic article by Lessig on this very topic:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.05/posts.html?pg=7

The teaser: Imagine if tire manufacturers lobbied against filling potholes so they could sell more tires. Or if private emergency services got local agencies to cut funding for fire departments so people would end up calling private services first. And what if private schools pushed to reduce public school money so more families would flee the public system? Or what if taxicab companies managed to get a rail line placed just far enough from an airport to make public transportation prohibitively inconvenient? Pick your favorite of these outrages, and take note of how it makes you feel. You'll experience it again when you read the next story - and this one, unfortunately, is true.
There are many old-line industries, especially when lots of money is involved, where computers have not been used to their full advantage yet; right now they're just used as electronic filing cabinets with better auditing and retention than paper.

Also, in the United States, the IRS is prohibited by law from competing with commercial tax-preparation services. This is why you have to pay Intuit or TaxACT to file electronically. Presumably, this doesn't help to foster innovation either.
Ironically, it was actually Milton Friedman who came up with the idea for automatic withholding. He later lamented this after he realized the impact it had on the growth of government.

I think the initial idea may have come from the desire to enforce fairness, which is a great idea, but sadly it also led to tax increases being far easier to implement, as all the IRS needs to do is threaten to shut down a business if it doesn't make the proper withholdings.

As it stands, enforcing withholdings is the primary way that tax money is collected and it's taken extremely seriously by the IRS. There are even massive penalties for paying withheld tax late (something like 25% interest).