skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly, so what it says is if you have 10.000 loss on share-A, and 10.000 capital gain on share-B, then you can set the loss against your gain and not pay tax on that 10k of income. I.e., purely for the share-A you still lose the 10.000 but gain a "tax credit" worth some % [whatever your rate is] of that. A common misunderstanding is that you'd get "tax credit" of 10.000, which you don't.
> WHatever. you are missing the point. Copying ebooks cost no money at all, there's no reason an ebook should cost that much in the first place.

Well, sure, in the world where the only costs that sales price needed to cover were the marginal costs of the current copy, and not some share of the fixed costs of the content.

> Dead Tree books were heavily dependent on material and inventory costs

"Were"? Physical books are still around, you know. Also, those costs are partially marketing costs -- having the book printed and out on the shelf in a bookstore is a form of marketing. While they may not have the printing and inventory costs of physical books, ebooks definitely have marketing costs and, because of the low barriers to entry in the market compared to the market for physical books, arguably have more competing noise that their marketing is trying to be heard over. There's a cost of dealing with it, and the sales price of the books has to pay for it for selling the books to be a profitable business.
I'd like a Firefox add-on that can rewrite URLs that "fix" sites. This Quora fix is one. Another is "&pagewanted=1" on nytimes.com to force single-page article view.
Ooooh. Are you one of the unhinged people who taunt him for his thought experiments?
There are other methods. Firstly, factoring is mostly only useful for asymmetric algorithms, which are typically used only for key exchange. So, if you can negotiate your key through a secure side channel, then you do not need to worry about RSA. Additionally, in some respects, you might say that we have already had the breakthrough in factoring because of quantum computers. At this point it is simply a matter of engeneering a large enough quantum computer to be able to attack crypto-systems. Because of this most research into replacements is done under the name of post-quantum cryptography; and there appear to be several workable methods in that area.
And thank you for writing Electric Duet!

That program inspired me to (cough) take it apart and understand how something so cool could come out of the Apple II's speaker. That exercise taught me 6502 opcodes and I've been working in embedded systems ever since.
I have posted link to this thread in Polish Startup Scene group, maybe we can help. Getting a work permit in Poland is not hard and Germany is close by.
That is rather alien to me, but I am pretty certain it is not the norm (my old school-district, where my mother is still a teacher, certainly doesn't have anything like that). Even so, I doubt an English teacher would take kindly to her pulling out her laptop in the middle of class... I've had plenty of university professors that would freak out if you tried that.

(Also keep in mind, that for most of the time-periods when calculator hacking was popular, web development was also a thing (I was heavily into this stuff during the late 90s and very early 00's). I did that stuff in highschool but it simply didn't interest me in the same way. Calculators were limited, and that presented both a challenge and a goalpost. Doing the same stuff with webdev? That is mundane and discouraging because you know that, at an entry level, you are not exploring the bounds of the medium in any meaningful way..

It is like the difference between seeing how fast you can go down a hill on a skateboard, and how fast you can go on the highway with your mother's minivan. Rotate a few triangles with webgl... or optimize a trig table in z80 assembly....

When I came home at the end of the day, I would fire up my PC and started editing some z80 assembly on it instead of programming the computer itself. Hell, I would test on a calculator emulator running on the PC...)
If I were him I would never-ever take that position as a CEO ever again. He is basically living the dream right now without debts to Microsoft - like unfinished duty or bad rep - and a clean name (founder of MS, steered himself and MS into billionairity yet giving away all his money now).

Unless it is guaranteed Microsoft will climb out of the hole it is in when Gates gets on top, it can only hurt him in terms of pressure and imago. He should stay in the think tank and consulting group, far away from anything really mission critical. No, Gates deserves to be remembered as-is and not as a broken, old man who desperately tried to save an old legacy company to the day he died.
Including Berlin, seriously? I'm tempted to agree with you on the rest of eastern Germany, at least rural regions. But Berlin is more of a multicultural, open-minded island.

Southern Germans however, as you say, tend to be quite conservative. I'm glad for you that you like it here. But as I see it, the most important reason keeping the south from being as unfriendly to foreigners as the east, is its relative economic success and therefore less need for scapegoats.
So did I!

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Oh, I really think you're underestimating Bill Gates. The days of disruption stopped for Microsoft when he left.

For example, I bet that Bill Gates would have foreseen the iPhone as a really big threat from day one and we would now be marveling at one of his famous internal angry emails that changed Microsoft's direction (leaked because of a new anti-trust suit, no doubt). Bill Gates is no Steve Jobs, but he's a heck of a strategist and even now I don't think there's anybody that wants him as an opponent.

For me, it's not sad that Bill Gates left Microsoft. They were too big, too powerful, too eager to eat the launch of other companies. The industry is better off without him at Microsoft's helm.
IANAL, could you explain how one can distinguish between optional guidelines, and requirements that absolutely have to be met?

From the linked document:

> You must make it easy for users to understand what ads will be shown in your app, where they will be shown, and what the associated behaviors are, if any.

> Further, you should ask for user consent and provide options for managing ads or opt-out.

So the first one is a hard requirement ("you must"), but it doesn't really explain what's acceptable to meet it. Is the second one an optional requirement, because it uses the wording "you should"? In addition, the same requirement is mentioned again in a set of "guidelines". The whole section is really unclear to me.
what hole is microsoft in?
How is any of that relevant to managing a company the size of a small city and financials the scale of a small country that makes a suite of software he doesn't appear to use much?
Well, I'm certain of two things: 1) there is a clear difference between l, l/r, and r and it's easy to say all three if you know what you're doing; 2) I'm doing a bad job of explaining the difference.

I'm pretty sure I know what my tongue is doing in English, but alright it may be due to the vowel instead of the consonant. The problem in Japanese is there's no distinction between vowel and consonant.

Yes, it could be that touching the bottom of the mouth during the vowel part is not as important as the position of the tongue initially. l: relaxed, some sliding, top of mouth; l/r: tighter, as for a rolled r, more forward, top of mouth; r: does not touch top of mouth. loo and roo are both incorrect pronunciations of ru.
I've reached out the guy who runs berlinstartupjobs.com and asked him to ping his database of employers. Do check it out as well. All the best.
Screw Gates.

Get Paul Allen in there.
Thanks for this answer. Do you know the names of the names of the workable post-quantum methods?
You're semi right, in that many parts of government do not care about what the public thinks; however, congressmen are not in this group. They are totally beholden to the people in their district, as that is their source of power. The people who live in a district have that districts congressman by the nose, and they should act like it.
1) Get on a plane to UK
2) cut your passport into very small parts and get rid of just after landing
3) ???? (don't tell where are you from)
4) Profit after 3-4 months waiting for asylum.

At least that was standard tactics from people from arabic countries. Never say where are you from!
James Burke predicted the future in 1973. Now he does it again
Woo this looks exciting. Thank you!
File and/or tear your vendor a new one.
The quality of this site/community has nothing to do with Paul Graham's ability to run Microsoft.
Habanero: Load Testing Framework in Erlang with Real-time Feedback
I'm sure Benioff would love to see Gates return as the Microsoft CEO. Nothing could be better. Better for Salesforce that is.

Gates' time has passed. I'm sure any insights he has had over the last few years have been passed on to Ballmer. Microsoft needs to change. Gates would bring more of the same.
I'm not sure why the audio wasn't working for him, but it all worked great out of the box for me on my MBP. Even some obscure Flash video sites I tried out would send both audio and video up to the Chromecast device.
That is why a talk like the Bret Victor's Future of programming clicked in so many levels[1]. He wasn't focused on the a specific tool, but a whole new way (old way) of programming.

[1]: http://worrydream.com/dbx/
"Why are you not heartened by the Amash Amendment vote? Especially in how it didn't break down according to any conventional lines?
"
This was more about congressmen being pissed off at the NSA, not lobbying efforts by anyone.
Thank you for the support! I'm up for the challenge and can't wait to see what's ahead.
A 38 day battery life and 2 sim ports? Sounds like a good company-provided phone for PagerDuty.
Last I checked, Bill Gates was the richest person in the world. And that was something like a few weeks ago.
i don't agree with you.

in school we learned two ways. there were pencil-tests and calculator-tests. the calculator tests were considerably harder, and if you forgot your calculator that day - and it happened - you were out of luck. MAYBE the teacher had one you could borrow.

learning how to use a graphing calculator is important. it teaches kids how to use a highly technical tool to solve difficult problems in a fraction of the time it would take by hand.
I can't say what you "should" do, but here are some thoughts.

Your name is really really hard for English-only speakers. Sorry.

I have a friend named Nhan. I put a lot of work into learning to say his name correctly. Most people did not. After two degrees in Canada, when he moved to the Valley he gave up and changed to an English name. An ex-co-worker named Nhi has just accepted that everyone calls her "Ni" (like "knee")... at least it's closer than calling you "naan" or "non". ;P As far as I can tell, the best spelling to get people to say your name correctly is probably "nyen". (Like maybe if you put in your email sig "Nhan (pronounced like 'Nyen')") If you want to make a joke about it, I guess you could even say "the 'h' looks like an upside-down 'y', so just pretend it's a 'y'". Although I dunno if you feel okay about using humour about your native language to try to improve communication.

As I'm sure you've noticed, Vietnamese pronunciation rules have surprisingly little in common with English pronunciation rules, so virtually zero English speakers will correctly pronounce your name, unless they've been told (by you or by someone else). The other more-common examples are Ng and Nguyen (I've been told these are actually Chinese names, but everyone I've met with one of these names was Vietnamese... I dunno, I'm just an ignorant Canadian struggling to be less ignorant). Almost zero English speakers pronounce these names correctly, even after being told many times! It's not that hard, people! But most people are hilariously lazy about learning new sounds. "Nhan" is a lot easier to get almost-right than "Ng" or "Nguyen".

Personally, as a language nerd, I like it when we're forced to learn a little tiny bit about another language, so selfishly I hope you keep your name. =] But you'll have to decide what's best for you.

As a little side story, in Vancouver there used to be a pho restaurant named Pho Bich Nga, on a very busy street (Kingsway, for the Vancouverites in the crowd, which has lots of Vietnamese shops... I'll drop a shout-out here for Green Lemongrass). I'm told that's correctly pronounced kind of like "fuh beek nga". English speakers don't really know what to do with that, but the best guess usually ends up being "fo' bitch nigga". Teenagers think that name is pretty funny, yes sir. Sadly, they changed the name, and a Vancouver cultural landmark is no more.

https://www.google.com/search?q=pho+bich+nga
> I would urge you to realise that psychology!=psychotherapy.

You don't need to clarify that, and it lacks any connection with the present topic.

> I find much (experimental) psychology rather interesting.

I would find it much more interesting if it were scientific, if its practitioners crafted and then tested falsifiable theories. But it isn't and they don't.

> But hey, you'll believe what you want to on this one, it doesn't look like I can convince you.

My position isn't based on belief, it is based on evidence. Consider this summary of an investigation into recent egregious and fraudulent psychological research:

http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2012/11/final-repor...

Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."

Too bad about these academic experts and their "beliefs" about psychological research.

Incidents like the above explains why the director of the NIMH has recently decided to abandon the DSM, psychiatry and psychology's central authority, as unscientific and of no research value:

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

Quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."

Too bad about the NIMH director's "beliefs".

> Have you read any of the work of Daniel Kahneman? Thats what I would consider as psychology (even if his System One and Two stuff is a dirty hack that provides little useful insight to the field).

Hmm -- it seems you are now making my argument for me.

Why do I care? Why am I critical of psychology but give sociology a pass? Sociologists don't have clinics in which they tell you how sick you are, using disease definitions they voted into existence.
And yet, most of that research had trouble getting into the main OS. Linux isn't bleeding edge, when measured against research, but it's basic components (process scheduler, I/O scheduler, huge table manager) are leaps and bounds better than what's in Windows today. Network-wise, BSD is better than anything Microsoft ever published.

Where's the disconnect at Microsoft that allows this to happen? They have the knowledge in-house, that's a given.
One which catches companies when they approach or are of beomoth-size. They are unable to move, grow or clean themselves in that hole, yet manage to live for years on end due to fat reserves and build relations which will throw them supplies from above.
Gumroad API wrapper for node.js
Last year I caught two students IM'ing during a final.

Most of my exams are open book, open note; so I am not unsympathetic to the realities of how a real job is[1].

[1] source: I used to have a real job.
>Come test day, though, I had programmed those formulas into a note on my TI 86.

So you cheated?
Such a good idea I have joined the list - let me know when the next one is.

Really good idea
The second is optional at your own risk - presumably they can toss your app if they don't like your implementation.
Well, there is a chart for that on wikipedia too, and it doesn't look good either. And I'm not talking about Japan.

There was a country just a little over 20 years ago that was in debt up to its neck and was trying to do global surveillance and project global power. Half of the world was screwed when it fell, and not everybody in the eastern block did recover yet. God help us all if this happens to the usa.
Agreed - this is pragmatic advice. It definitely works on an individual level. But if this is something acceptable to go work on yourself, from the other side of the table, does it automatically become ok to judge people on?

There's a logical inconsistency between saying a) Don't judge people on their accents, listen to the message and b) Fix your accent.

To pg's credit I think he frames this purely on efficacy of communication ( it's similar to typing out better phrased emails) but that ignores the other reasons people with accents get judged.
the one without all the google/apple money
Surely also ridiculous diversions such as the C5 electric car.

"Micromen" is a fantastic drama of the period...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIcAyFVK0gE
For anyone nostalgic about TI-BASIC, I implemented the 83/84 variant a while back: https://github.com/lunixbochs/pitybas

It lacks advanced math tokens and graph screen IO, but it's incredibly easy to extend and emulates much of the language's quirky behavior.

(-> terminates the token stack, end quotes are optional, you can use "If; End", order of operations, matrices, lists, menus)

There's a VT100 terminal output module which allows you to play home screen games like Mofrog, but I haven't implemented a graph screen IO module yet.

You can run arbitrary .BAS files found on the internet.
Bill Gates' biggest act of genius may have been to leave when he did, right before MS entered the bad part of The Innovator's Dilemma.
There's a lot of Steve Jobs hero worship I hear of this sort. What did the poster do to deserve being called ridiculous? He laid out a very compelling case that there was serious ambiguity in Job's statements to the public.

Do you think it does any good to elevate Steve Jobs above what he actually did? Who does that ultimately benefit?

We have a whole channel full of entrepreneurs here who deserve to know the true story because they may also have co-founders who claim too much credit or they may have resentful co-founders. They all need to know that friction does not mean that their businesses will fail.

Founders are human. Like Steve Jobs.
I think you may be overthinking it.

If you just created a document with each hierarchy organized properly, I think you should be fine.

E.g. you create say 3 heading sizes in Word. 24px, 20px, 16px.

Then for the main point, i.e. the content in the left-most column, you put those under a heading that is under the 24px - then any sub content from the 2nd column would go under a 20px heading that is under the first 24px heading and so on.

So there is a chronological order of the content.

I think that's all you need. Proper placement of the content under the right headings, make the headings different sizes and you make sure it flows like the author intended (which I think you can ensure by using the order they setup on your site).

That's just my $0.02.
pg's done vastly more to rid the world of spam than BG ever did.
I think you overreact. He made a great point.
I find it interesting that this article was contributed by a Brightcove CTO...
That is not what's at play here. There is a systemic problem in Silicon Valley and San Francisco in startup culture. Berating founders for their accent publicly (as has been reported) is an excellent example of the problem.

That is not polite, cordial conversation between equals. That is not the behavior of two equals talking business. It's not acceptable behavior in a civilized venue. This is not because it's "politically correct," but rather because of the profound implications of antagonizing someone for what they are and where they were born.
Microsoft's problem has been growth, and that's because they appear to always miss capitalizing on the new thing (web,search,mobile,social,tablets) - all things a startup guy is most talented at.

They lack vision, a guy who has vision himself and can herd cats (visionaries) is the best thing for them. PG's about as good as anyone at that.
Not Vistaprint! I had a pair of terrible experiences with them. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, to hell with Vistaprint!

I now go through Overnight Prints and have been pleased with their work after a few orders so far.
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Don't think this makes sense.

People seem to forget but MSFT's stagnation started under Bill's reign. It just continued under Ballmer.

Bill was the one that 'vowed to crush Google' by investing $2B in R&D in search and web services.

We see how much that worked.

I think they should get someone that can lead them into the web services future - not someone that is deeply attached to the desktop.
Are you short MSFT?
I agree with the author that the iPad could definitely be a more approachable platform. However, I think that the comparison to a TI-83 is also a little bit naive. The TI has a 64 x 96 pixel greyscale display. The iPad's resolution 2048 x 1536 in full color with a quad-core dedicated graphics processor. In order to work with that, we have huge APIs implementing complex abstractions. And all that extra complexity must be dealt with using an antiquated programming language with horrible syntax.

Yes, we could create some kind of simple emulator that makes it possible to write simple things as easily as they could be done in TI-BASIC. But what kid wants to write a nibbles or mario clone when they can with a few finger taps be playing a 3D shooter or racing game. The simple reality is that we are no longer in the frontier days of computing, and I would argue that our languages and abstractions haven't kept pace with other advancements. The easy things have all been done. And the interesting things that haven't been done are hard. That has a significant role in what the author is talking about.

There are also other forces at play--such as the very large economic interests that exist around programming iOS--that weren't a factor for TI back in the day. So while I'm all for the author's thesis that things should be more explorable, I think he's ignoring the fact that a significant amount of essential complexity has made that a much more difficult proposition than it used to be.
How NoFlo Aims to Make Building Software Easier
Discover the Ladder Paradox, relativity's greatest thought experiment