skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My company uses Bank of America Online Payroll. We are an S-Corp with no full-time employees other than the two founders/shareholders.

The Bank of America option is free if you are depositing directly to a BoA account. Being that both me and my business partner have BoA, this works for us.

The free version also allows you to file all the federal payroll tax forms, which is handy. It doesn't allow you to file the state payroll tax forms though, but if you live in NY (not sure about other states), you can do that all online directly through the states tax website.

You also need to remember to file with your state for unemployment insurance, which is a separate department from the tax department (at least in NY). And if you have other employees who aren't shareholders, you'll also need to register for workers comp insurance.

One trick I'll pass along -- with the disclaimer of talking to your accountant first -- is this:

If you need to minimize payroll costs, you can do some planning and pay yourself once per fiscal year, usually in Dec.

What you do is figure out what you think you need to make this year for a "reasonable salary" and pay that in one sum in Dec. The rest you can take as equity draws throughout the year, saving you the payroll processing expense each paycheck.

If you don't think you'll make enough to get a "reasonable salary", you can take your draws throughout the first 3 quarters, and then in the 4th quarter, try to have enough left in the back so that you pay yourself 1/2 of the total draws so far as payroll (Example: 18k yearly total > 12k over first 3 quarters, then final 6k through payroll in Q4).

This allows you to save some payroll processing costs, and make filing the forms easier -- it's just for one quarter, with the other 3 being zero-returns (which you still need to remember to do over the first 3 quarters).

But again, talk to your accountant.
1. upvote articles you like

2. Submit more articles you like

I am surprised people keep offering this as a solution. Isn't it obvious that if MORE people upvote and submit other stories like politics, then politics we will have?

Isn't it obvious that majority rules?
Insanity.

Proper response: Refund their money and send them several of the best and newest iPods on the market as a replacement. Also, send them a sincere apology, hand-written (in pen ink on paper, not printed) by someone at Apple in the top 1% of all employees, including an offer to pay for any damages caused by the exploding device. Then, work as hard as possible coming up with the reason why it happened, and as soon as you know, issue a public statement detailing which iPods are at risk (if the incident wasn't a fluke) and how customers can send them in for replacements. Finally, make sure the problem never, ever happens again in any product your company makes. Write a unit test, as it were, for the cause of the explosion and test all future devices for the same problem.

Yes, I know I'm living in a dream world, but it's nice here.
Ask HN: Do you up-vote to bookmark?
Up-voting a submission results in it being saved automatically in your saved entries. I don't always have time to read submitted articles/pages, so I find that I mainly use up-voting to bookmark interesting submissions for later. In order to avoid "cluttering up" my saved submissions, I sometimes avoid up-voting submissions that I find interesting but have already read or don't plan on reading. Do other users of HN experience this?
The article assumes that any cancellations must be unjust, and then uses math to show that there are more cancellations than one might suspect. But if the cancellations aren't unjust in the first place, then the article is all smoke and no fire.

News flash - If you include fraudulent information on your insurance application, your insurance company may cancel your coverage when you need it most. Of course, if you filled out your application in good faith and they try to cancel it for frivolous reasons, you can sue them in court.

What exactly is the problem here?

Most of the urgency in his article comes from comparing fraudulent insurance applications to game show contestants and underage gamblers. Using these kinds of analogies obscures the more fundamental fact that insurance companies can only legally cancel your policy when you have supplied demonstrably fraudulent information.

That hardly seems like a scandal, or anything that warrants additional government regulation in what is already an incredibly heavily regulated industry.
This article seems to offer absolutely no substance to backup the claim made in the title. If 43 states are having budget shortfalls this includes a significant number of red states. This article would have more value if he broke down those 43 states and analyzed the budget shortfalls. Of course going off on a partisan rant is probably more fun than analyzing boring numbers right?
"dumb" is quite a strong word; i prefer uninformed.
Mozart Effect Real for Non-Musicians
i don't mind meta discussion when it's constructive, such as voting, dealing with spam, backend code updates, etc.

but the OP chose to complain about links he didn't like on his page by adding his own link that many others now have on their pages that they don't like.
That piece resonated with me. In the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America), sometimes it takes a fascinated outsider to draw a properly nuanced picture of what it really means to be an American.
As the community increases the quality decreases to have a higher level of comprehension. If anyone is a webmaster they know that a -well- written article about how to hack X vs. a dumbed down version will lose out to the dumbed down version. Quality will simply continue to decline here. I have noticed this as well. Let's start a quality hacker site, this one is slowly turning into another Digg.
Agreed. The interesting point is always when is X the right tool for the job.

Pie charts is a good tool when you want to show the relative sizes of (a small number of) unordered data points. It is a bad tool for displaying Word features introduced per version, since it is not really interesting to see how many features were introduced in Word 2.0 relative to Word 95. (Never mind that "number of features" is pretty hard to quantify.)

A pie chart would be interesting to show e.g. the market share of Word compared to OpenOffice.
Well.. I do not disagree with you.

But the article, which my comment is for, says "Please don't use pie charts" which is not the right idea OR the heading is too sensational for HN IMHO.
I believe this article is given to a bit of sensationalism, but with that said, he makes some excellent points.

Word will probably be around for a very long time still. It is still the best (or one of the best at least) choices for many types of projects. For instance, it has some very good formatting options that are hard to match, and it is generally an excellent choice for projects that have only a small number of editors and that do reach an absolutely final version which must ben distributed and archived for long periods, especially when it needs to be distributed outside of one organization.

But with that said, it has certainly fallen from its former prominence. I personally use it only occassionally and most of that is for when I am working on something to be sent to someone outside of my own organization.
Researcher Exposes Flaws in Certificate Authority Web Applications
No, I upvote mostly to indicate

a) that I learned something from the post, even if I disagree with it,

or

b) that the post should be informative to other participants, and I largely agree with it.

My downvotes similarly have a two-fold meaning, but they are more rare.

I upvote so much that I don't use my list of saved HN posts (it being too large to browse through), so if I want to find a previous post, I search for it directly, usually with a site-restricted Google search or Search YC

http://searchyc.com/

search. I do bookmark directly with my browser's bookmarking capabilities some HN discussion threads, and quite a few articles that I first learned of from HN submissions.
Thank you. I do believe we had a viable model. Perhaps other disturbing factors were too difficult. What interests me is rethinking the educational model in the large maybe catching new opportunities.
The Tarahumara simply start running, and by the time they stop, several hours (or days) have passed and they’re tens (or hundreds) of miles from where they started.

This sounds like me programming. I simply start programming, and by the time I stop, several hours (or days) have passed and I'm hundreds (or thousands) of lines of code from where I thought I'd be. This isn't necessarily a good thing, but boy was it fun.
Why do I read Hacker News?

Because the week I'm to fly from California to Ohio, an article about hacking jet lag is on the front page.

Awesome
I disagree.

I don't read it as people being insulted but more so that they see meta discussions as distracting from the more valuable function of HN.

Also, this topic reminded me of this post:

"Meta is a social problem, period. It's applicable to everything you do in life."

(Source: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001282.html)
Self-healing Surfaces
I've said it before and I'll say it again:

Propaganda, payperpost and FUD are killing HN.
I simply loved listening to this. It was more like a fascinating conversation with Paul Graham that we got to listen in on than an interview and it was extremely exciting.

Thanks for the fascinating insights, essays and interviews Paul.
Building a Data Intensive Web App with Hadoop, Hive, & EC2
Sorry, quality was the wrong word. I don't mean to say you should the quality of your teaching, I mean you should focus on a more practical subject rather than something that you may see as a subject taught at "the best schools". Let me use food as an analogy. I see discrete mathematics as a spice. Yes, it's essential for a complete gourmet meal. But why offer a spice before the main staple? Sure it's a high-quality spice, but you're trying to sell it to people who don't have bread.

Honestly, if I need software engineers in a small country, and you asked me to invest in your school, I'd withdraw all funding the second I found out your first and only (at the time) class was on discrete mathematics. To me that seems completely irrelevant to what your investors need.
IMHO Metafilter shows the way here (as usual)-- putting meta-discussion in its own little silo keeps it from annoying the people who don't care.
800 Pages of iPod Fire Incidents Uncovered
Getting started with Autotools
But it's a horrible free throw percentage. So I guess it all depends on your sports analogy.
What a terrific article! I know a comment like that doesn't add much to the discussion, but as a native American, I'm not sure I have much to add to it anyway. :)
If You Could See Google Street View In Video, It Would Look Like YellowBird
> At trial, the defendants only proved $0.99 actual damages for each song.

I suspect you mean the plaintiffs. In any case, it really doesn't matter; the damages in this case are not separable into punitive and compensatory parts. You can argue that this is unconstitional, but you can't argue that that damages awarded are unconstitutional on the basis of your or the defendant's estimate of the compensatory damages, seeing as those aren't what the jury used in their determination of damages. So your $0.99 "actual damages" is a red herring. Had there been more of an onus on the record companies to provide more evidence of actual damages, they would almost surely have been able to provide at least rough estimates, using studies that were cited in the expert testimony of Stanley Liebowitz. There was however, no onus to do so, so it was reasonable for the plaintiffs not to go in greater detail here.

> Your argument about other unproven damages

What argument about "unproven damages"? I have not used that language, please don't put words in my mouth. It's fine for you to quote me; please don't misparaphrase me.
Point #1, he quickly skips over possibly the most important way out of this mess. If people were to eat less meat this entire article would be useless. From another article: "According to the journal Soil and Water, one acre of land could produce 50,000 pounds of tomatoes, 40,000 pounds of potatoes, 30,000 pounds of carrots or just 250 pounds of beef."

I often see vegetarians make the argument that one acre of land can grow far more vegetables, but you're completely ignoring the fact that the calorie content of beef is far higher than the calorie content of vegetables. I work out and pay a lot of attention to my diet and calorie intake, and a large portion of my diet consists of vegetables and beans. One of the first things you realize on a diet like this is that you have to eat a serious amount of vegetables to take in the same amount of calories as you get from beef or chicken — like, an entire dinner-plateful with each meal.

100 grams of beef has approximately 330 calories, while the same amount of tomatoes has approximately 18 calories. That works out to about 20 times more calories in beef. So, 250 pounds of beef is actually equivalent to 4,500 pounds of tomatoes. It's still an order of magnitude off, but it's certainly not two orders of magnitude as it would at first seem. (All numbers are approximate as a result of some quick Googling.)

Furthermore, the fact that other useful products are produced from cattle is ignored: leather, gelatin, glue, tallow, bone meal for fertilizer, etc. Literally every part of the cow is used.
Why 2010 Will Be the Year of the Tablet
Like I said, once a year you get all those young tourists from around the world eager to fight the police. Apart from that it's quiet and peaceful. Barely any crime.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=738766
I agree. I was willing to give this guy a fair listen, but that anecdote, and the following claim that sows routinely crush their piglets to death made me think: either this guy is lying, or he fails to realize that something is already very, very wrong if these things are true.
I never eat a breakfast. I usually eat my first meal after 12 closer to 2. I am now convinced I need to set up an easy breakfast the night before. Cause this night owl stuff just isn't working anymore.
I'd argue it's much easier to fall asleep sitting rather than walking.
"I should note that this isn’t terribly radical, and in fact, it isn’t all that different from the direction Gnome and KDE have been heading."

Given that he just seems to be proposing the Vista-style Start menu (which I think is a good thing) is not that radical, no.

Alan Cooper covered most of this in his book, "About Face", but Cooper noticed the important things which seem to have gone missed (well, it is Cooper's job, after all).

For instance, getting rid of the menu altogether is probably a mistake. Cooper pointed out that the menu is the pedagogical interface. i.e. the way people learn how to use programs, and what programs can do, is to go through the menus and find stuff. Just by looking through menus is a good way to get a feel for what a program can and can't do (one of the reasons why you should only grey/disable menu items, and not sub-menus).

The way a lot of users actually use the program once they've learned it is with toolbars, shortcut keys, direct manipulation, etc. Some people still use menus all the time, and most people will use menus for the features they don't use often.

The Office ribbon is a smart evolution of the UI - you can still explore the ribbon to find out how to do stuff, but that stuff is generally more available than hidden away on a menu.

Presenting people with either an empty box that they have to type a search into, or a massive pane of everything the user can do (seemingly what he suggests with his Paint reworking), doesn't seem like a great idea. By this I mean that it takes away the user's ability to learn a program as easily.
Software and Obama's Victory
Sites based on user-submitted content will tend to be dominated by a maffia.

There must be editors who enforce and maintain the spirit of the community or it will become a propaganda outlet for the rulers.

We've seen it happen with Apple many times, one post about the GV fiasco is enough, not ten posts a day for a week trumpeting your own horn.

Or ten posts a day about dropping the iPhone.

Or ten posts a day about how much the AppStore sucks.

If you think we don't distinguish propaganda from real news, you'll be greatly disappointed.

HN is going down, whether we like it or not, and only PG can save it.
Ask HN: A tool to share bookmarks with only my company?
Hi HN, is there any web based tool that allows me to easily share links, sorted in folders (not tags) with only the members of my company? And that can be setup in such a manner that each member gets notified when a new link is added?
Not that I want politics to take over the front page, but those "politics" links are often technical/business opportunities for hackers.
You are correct, which is why I qualified the statement by pointing out the human life factor. If human life is involved, and the risk can be mitigated then it should be.

Nothing is risk free, but when you are dealing with something that is irreplaceable, even small reductions in risk are worthy of consideration.
> Do you up-vote to bookmark?

Sort of. For me, an upvote means "I'm glad this was posted on HN". Sometimes I'll see a new submission with no comments yet, and I'm interested in what people might say about it, so I'll upvote to bookmark not just the article, but the HN post, for later comment viewing. However, this is not inconsistent, since I'm saying, "I'm glad this was posted to HN, because I'd like to see what people say about it."

> I sometimes avoid up-voting submissions that I find interesting but have already read or don't plan on reading.

Me too, but I don't see any inconsistency. If I've already read something, then, usually, I don't especially want to see it on HN. So I'm generally not glad it was posted. Thus, no upvote.
Audio White Paper – Get To Know GPO
I upvote to bookmark only. Unfortunately it means I don't upvote items that should be upvoted. I upvote comments though. I wish there was upvoting and stars for bookmarking.
FCC Opens Inquiry of Apple's Ban of Google Voice
Brilliant tutorial - Very in-depth and covers quite a lot of ground.
Great idea, there are plenty of personal web services that need a business clone and del.icio.us is one of them, same as wikis, twitter, etc.
They always humor me when I order 'small'/'medium'/'large'.

But also, did you know there's a secret even-smaller 'short' size? See:

http://www.slate.com/id/2133754/

I don't think there's an "animal style" cappucino, though.
Yeah, I agree. The time fragmentation in grad school makes it a bit difficult to put a lot of time and effort into any one thing, but I never found it as excruciatingly impossible to concentrate as this guy. The environment is definitely manageable.
hmm ? "majority rules". How can that be not obvious? It is called a community. The advice is to do something about it rather than just complain. More often than not the people who complain (like dag) have not contributed much articles. If i remember a pg comments only 10% of the users visit the new page. And something like 4 votes are often enough to put an article on frontpage.

I wonder how much upvoting of new articles happens by the people who complain. The only publicly available metric for contribution to articles is submissions and dag certainly hasn't contributed enough. So yeah, the advice still stands.
I concur. With the title of your blog.
"You can checkout any time you like,

But you can never leave"
Actually, as an undergrad I find it troubling too. I usually pick out my hardest class and pretend that's my primary task for the term and regard the others as annoyances.

Summer session--where you only take 1 or 2 classes at a time for six weeks at my school--always worked out better for me.
Here iphonear.org doesn't work, but www.iphonear.org does. (probably a DNS caching issue).
1. Is mathematics a sub-department of logic? One might call "distinguo" here.

2. Is it possible that advertising and propaganda are simply not worth the trouble in a society that has little disposable income and where the opinion of the greatest number of its members has no effect?

@-321abc: If you are trying to illustrate Ms. Sayers' assertions about modern education, congratulations.
Really Understanding Linux CPU Load
Different strokes for different folks. You apparently don't like news about copyright law or big tech employers that hire tons of hackers. I do. On the other hand, I don't care about resetting my sleep cycle, exploding ipods, or rails and apparently that isn't too offensive to you. This is a social media site that serves up news to tons of people, not just you.
Perhaps you nailed a major problem:

Education should not give employers what they want.

Education should give the graduate the best possible odds for a fulfilling professional lifetime.
Agreed. Very well written and thoughtful. Born and raised in the US, I enjoy these kinds of perspectives. We generally aren't treated to enough.
Just goes to show that if you make the extra effort a lot of the time things will tend to work out. This guy was extremely prepared and didn't even need the information that he gathered with an awesome day's worth of coding because the lawyers thought he wouldn't even show up!

Nice work though. Hopefully all of the work he did will help someone else save some $$ too because he said that he posted the DB online.
No TechCrunch links and nothing about Twitter. That's an exceptionally good front page for HN.
The theoretical economics are, potentially, even better, because there are many more PhDs than academic positions. The actual economics are probably worse. As the author briefly admits but never returns to and addresses, professors (in my experience) consider their job to be research first and teaching second. For some, teaching may be a first-order concern that they spend plenty of time on, but it doesn't seem to be why they got into academia.
I think you can see the application to business where the efficiency expert's systems to optimize costs becomes so extreme that it has unintended consequences for morale and productivity plummets.
The title of the blog, or the title of the article?
Saturday's Times had an article on the fiscal troubles of Jefferson County, Alabama. Alabama is rather more disputable ground than much of the US, but its blues don't seem to be of the blue-state sort.
wow. Glad to see you posting here then! First http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=710384 and now this.

Don't worry about the car and the fine, I'm happy that the CAT scan showed no lasting damage and that in the end this is hopefully just a material thing, nothing affecting your health.

And please go a bit easier on your body, sleep deprivation is a great way to harm yourself permanently. Your body really needs that sleep and to push yourself past what is good for you is not something that you can equate with a 'couple of hours of sleep debt', it can harm you on a much longer timescale as well, even if you don't get into car accidents because of it.
In throwing away type safety, you're trading fewer characters for much more fragile code.

The Scala example in the comments demonstrates that you can have your cake and eat it too:

case class Mountain (val name: String, val latitude: Int, val longtitude: Int, var country: String)

It's concise and type-safe, and can readily be used with more powerful aggregate constructs.
pie charts are for zero sum topics ONLY, where the gain in one would be a direct loss of the other.
Does he officially have ADHD? I felt increasingly horrified as I read through that post - everyone gets distracted but his level and inability to focus seems to be way past normal and into the pathological.