skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. To be even more specific, the reason why it is slowed down is because of absorption and re-emittance of particles of light (photons). If you go down the the extremely small scale, what you will actually see is a photon moving at the speed of light, colliding with an atom, being absorbed by an electron, then re-emitted on the other side. Repeat this process ad nauseam and the constant absorption/re-emittance will slow down the speed of light to a varying degree. Most importantly, however, is that the c is constant in free space.
I notice a few people using "guy" to refer to the writer here ... unless I'm missing something, I believe she is a woman (Tina).
You don't need payroll until you've actually got employees. You can just distribute the amount earned based on equity ownership across the members in the LLC. This is termed "disbursements".
We are a startup in Palo Alto and have developed accounting and payroll integrated into one web-based product called Exponent. It's much more functional than QuickBooks AND less expensive.

Here's the online demo login:

https://www.thinkexponent.com/
e-mail: demo@demo.com
password: demo

Payroll is located in the Accounting tab.
That server room looks like it's right out of a Spielberg action movie rather than a research institute.
Doesn't it also depend on who 'I' am? If I am part of a tiny startup that is going to launch a twitter clone, then no, I guess not. But if I am at Facebook or Twitter or Google and I am adding a new feature to the app, then hell, yes. You will have millions of users on Day 1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GDP.jpg
The Fundamentals of Scope in JavaScript
Well, and bear with me here, but have you considered the idea that "bouncing back" isn't the optimistic solution? Say what you will about politics the reality is both President Obama and former President Bush signed us up for a hail mary play largely based on the idea that people should never have to act responsibly. That they can sign a deal that's obviously too good to be true and borrow 10 times their projected earnings because the Government WILL ALWAYS be able to bail them out.

That's both sides of the political spectrum endorsing irresponsibility

But you can't live like that. Government != God meaning that misconception can't last forever. Following that logic it means our society learns this lesson now or by some miracle gets by only to have the next generations face a collapse and learn it. Maybe it's time to feel some pain now so our Children and Grandchildren get the message that the Government can't always bail you out.
I would get in touch with a qualified accountant or bookkeeper who has experience in payroll. There are a lot of things to bear in mind and options to consider when you're doing payroll and having to calculate tax deductions. Miscalculating can lead to audits.
So - you're saying that the USA is "too big to fail"?
But technically EU isn't a country right?
Okay, that makes sense. I guess the bar's a little higher for vandals anyway since it requires some programming knowledge.

On a similar note, is any of the code run on the server side? If so, how do you prevent DoS attacks? Are there checks in place to make sure that I don't create an infinite loop or allocate a ridiculous amount of memory?
Harvest looks really good and I think I could really use it for invoicing and time-tracking for some consulting contracts we are doing. I'm not sure it does payroll though. Can you use it for payroll?
My favorite examplei is naked SQL vs an ORM. The ORM will never be able to write queries that perform as well as if you write them all by hand. But, you'll be able to crank out functionality much faster.

Eventually, if you're lucky, you'll have enough traffic to warrant going back and rewriting some of the ORM calls using a SQL query optimized by hand.

Lastly, 99% of the time, the query you end up optimizing will not be the one you expected to when you started writing the app. That's because between when you started and now, the direction has changed significantly and you finally know what it is that you're really building.
While you're right, in theory, it would take a complete change of PHP's semantics to pull that off. PHP adopted Java's static class model, even though it makes little sense in a dynamically typed, interpreted language. There are a few upsides to that (Less meta programming makes it easier to understand programs), but the downside is a rather inconsistent language.
The EU, is far from a single country. Each state still handles it's own treaties with the rest of the world.

Looking at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Supranational_European_Bod... European economic zone is a larger economic group. And the UN is even larger, but hey that's another story.
It took a lot of self-restraint to keep me from downvoting-this-because-I-disagreed-with-it
I currently use PayCycle and they provide a very nice solution and it's very affordable. Intuit recently acquired them, so I imagine they will become even more integrated into their tools.
you should create shouldibeworriedaboutscaling.com, SEO the crap out of it, and have it say yes
I guess I'll be the lone dissenting opinion and actually favor Java over C#.

Java has an extensive library of open source software, which makes it, as they say, more of a platform then a language. From hadoop, to tomcat, to jetty, to hibernate, to spring, to c3p0 (and many, many, many more), you have all the tools you'll ever need to do 95% of the coding work.

I definitely get the love around here for dynamically typed languages, but I've never been sufficiently motivated to switch to ruby. The whole philosophy of ruby, "convention over configuration" is applicable to ANY language, including Java. Java's EJB spec was monstrous and XML config file infested, but I've gone through many projects in Java without a single XML config file and following the philosophy of convention over configuration, and it's been great.

As to .NET, I would never use it. Never want to get in the business of paying for licenses, not just .NET, but it ties you to Windows server boxes and Windows development boxes.
What's the point of this? Which need does it solve? Why should I use it?
The Fed now pays interest on reserves (new as of last fall). When the Fed wants to pull that money out, it can (1) raise the interest rate on reserves, thus encouraging banks to hold the reserves and (2) sell the assets it bought to raise the monetary base.

Looking at, for example, the current yield on treasuries shows very little inflation expectations.
Pretty decent work for what it is, but nobody wants to develop for a so-called web OS. Instead of building a big thing that only exists to be a framework for other things, you'd do better building something that has usefulness on its own, but can also take advantage of your wiki-coding stuff.

I'd recommend taking your code-editor app and replacing the web-OS bit with that. Then, instead of OS-and-apps, you do editor-and-extensions, applying your wikiable-app stuff to the extensions.

Or, instead of an in-browser code editor extensible with a web ecology of C#, do a similarly extensible email/groupware app. Or a collaboration space a la Sharepoint/Clearspace.

Or hell, do HyperCard. A blank space for slapping down fields and buttons, writing code into them all, and packaging up the whole shebang into something that others can in turn include and build on.

Any of those'd be exciting. Web OSes, though? I already have an OS and it works fine.

"Make Something People Want."
I am sure we'll see increased inflation, will it go as high as it did in the 70s-80s maybe. But this article is claiming the sky is falling. Oooh look scary charts, never mind what velocity of money is or how it works, or that the Fed can increase AND decrease the money supply, just look at those scary charts!
> Anyhow, I seriously object to calling "buffer overflow mitigation" a "domain specific feature" since there's hardly a domain that hasn't been hammered by it being missing.

Numeric computing, for one.
More like sensationalist doomsday headline stuff.
Take another look at that code. If someone makes that many mistakes in a short space, then even if any one of those mistakes is forgivable, it reveals that they are not a good programmer.
Very, very true. I've worked for more than a few companies that built multiply-redundant, highly scalable everything, and then ended up with ten small paying customers.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=735181
This "flying up impossibly at the last minute" is a feature of graphs of national debt (http://images.google.com/images?q=national+debt), but it's also a feature of graphs of US furniture sales.

I'm not saying the US dollar is fine. I'm just tired of people using this kind of graph to try to make a point.
The EU has 2.6 times the population, and isn't a single country.
Be Ready for the Squirrel
Technically the USA isn't a country but an agglomeration (federation) of states.

Originally the EU was fully called the European Economic Community, the goal was to form a single economy. Whether or not it is a single country is not an issue here, the OP spoke about 'economy', not about 'country'.
A better one is a site that also organizes in-person events.

I was at Startup Idol last week and somebody suggested an event like that. There's definitely a market for it.
Setting up Emacs & Clojure with Emacs Starter Kit
The first 20 times I saw this, it was chuckleworthy. Now it's just old and spent.
What do you recommend then for a small business (me, or me + 1) if I'm with another client or otherwise occupied I simply can't attend the second place. I don't have reserves to support a second worker until they turn enough revenue to keep themselves ... so, hotshots, what-do-you-do.
I don't do much promotion. I used to visit some appropriate Usenet groups ( 10 years ago ) and would announce new versions and such on groups such as alt.msdos.batch.nt. Before the dot-com bubble burst, I used to get a lot of traffic from the good shareware sites out there.
Are you referring to "the IBM"? The company with a Market Cap of $150 billion, larger than Google, Apple, Cisco and every other IT company except Microsoft? There's a big gap between what is true on the web and what is true in reality. IBM is very much alive and kicking, still building mainframes and whatnot.
This is a known problem, it's been happening for a while. It's better now than it used to be.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482523
Worked for AIG, it's just that the acquirer (the United States government) got a majority ownership stake. I don't see a reason that the same couldn't hold true on the nation-state level.
We use PayCycle. It is $42.99 + (numEmployees - 5) * 1.50 per month no matter how many checks you generate. This means you aren't penalized for paying weekly or for generating reimbursement checks out of phase with your normal payroll cycle. I really like it. It generates export files which I import easily into QuickBooks.

I'm very happy with it, I just wish it had an API so I could plug my timesheet system directly into it. Presently I have to transcribe from a web report into their interface but as we only have 16 employees total, it is not a big burden.

We evaluated ADP and they were much more expensive for our use case.
Damn, I waited way too long for that page to not load...
Indeed. People look at console sales numbers, and think nintendo is doing great.

But if you look at titles, you can't get the best games on wii. And those doing really well like RockBand are available on other platforms (with better graphics)
I wouldn't worry about that. There are no lulz to be had if nobody notices, and wiki vandalism is so easy (and so easily correctable) that posting a wiki alteration on 4chan is usually derided as lame - so much so that some other 4channer will likely revert and alert, since there are more lulz to be had from getting the vandal's IP banned from wikipedia. Further, 4chan is not so amoral as to find incorrect pharmaceutical information lulz-worthy...it's more likely that they'd add the name of someone they didn't like to an article about embarrassing social diseases, eg suggesting Christopher Poole has a raging case of syphilis.

I can't quantify this of course, but I'd say the rare but real risks from bad QC and errors in pharma documentation (typos or oversights on dosage level, contraindications, half-life and so on) are a much greater risk than that presented by /b/tards.
JRuby Performance Tuning
t400 looks like a nicely designed computer. Replacing RAM on a Mac laptop does not void the warranty, and now replacing the HD is pretty easy, too (compared to the older MacBook Pro I have, which requires disassembling almost the entire thing). The advertised battery life has a wide range on Lenovo's site, and I could not figure out which system with which battery had which battery life, and how much weight is affected with bigger batteries. (Note on one of the batteries mentions that it sticks out the back of the computer.)

So I take back the implication that the t400 is not well designed. ThinkPads have a good reputation for hardware design, which I assume is well earned (have not owned one myself). The same cannot be said for all PC laptops. And software is a whole other matter altogether, of course.

As for customization, Apple deliberately restricts the options for customization relative to other vendors. They definitely have an attitude of designing a few models that fit the needs of a many customers, as opposed to many models each appealing to smaller, more specific groups.
Calm down, folks. Just words, and I think we all understood what he meant by "chord". There is a technically correct term for two notes played simultaneously (double stop also works for stringed instruments):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyad_(music)

Of course, his instrument included a hundred or more voices, and several of them were on different octaves. So, I think one can say this was a "chord" by the general definition of "three or more notes from a key played simultaneously".

And, musicians do frequently refer to dyads as chords, as long as the third is there. The fifth has less harmonic weight (and never changes from major to minor) and the whole chord can be implied with just the first and the third. While pianists may mostly always have easy access to the fifth, stringed instrument players generally think of the fifth as the note you drop when you can't pick them all up.
Except the “typical user” will never succeed at typically using those supposedly basic features on that $20 candy bar.

Your mom can and will use every feature on the iPhone.
You have someone you can recommend?
Quick answer: just don't prematurely screw it up. Some features and business ideas just don't scale.

The quickest way to check is to imagine you have everything in a big dumb (semi-normalized, but not fantastic) database. Eyeball the queries you're going to use. Then figure out how much work the database has to do to execute those queries. Also consider read/write rates and contention.

It's back-of-the-envelope, but it's pretty good.
Cheaper only if you have ready access to a couple hundred people. I'd hate to try to fit that instrument in my home studio.
Samsung i780 Black Unlocked
Samsung i780 is including Pocket Office to let you do more and more with your phone as with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF viewer, Voice memo, Callia Player. allia Reader, Photo Slides, Smart Converter, Windows Media Player.
i think the point here is that for the first time in quite a while the dollar has a legitimate _chance_ at hitting a doomsday scenario. whether or not that happens remains to be seen, but the odds are greater than they have been historically.

keep in mind that during the depression we were on the gold standard, thus there was none of the inflationary/deflationary risk of a fiat currency..
Technically US states are sovereign too :) ...and really, if you looked at the US states as separate economies you'd see many glaring dichotomies that would make you wonder how it can be considered a single economic entity.

No, Europe's not a country, but it behaves like one for trade and currency purposes and has no internal tariffs. Nor can Germany (for example) impose a tariff separately from the EU. So in this context, the EU might as well be a country.
Tracking trends on the web with Hadoop and Hive
"Treat" obesity? That makes it sound like a disease, or something outside a person's control. Now I understand that some people are more genetically predisposed to become obese, but people treating it like a disease is part of the problem.
Ask HN - Is it worth joining Mensa?
I was discussing this with a friend of mine, he is in favor of it, and I am not sure (assuming of course, we qualify). Any MENSA members here? How would you describe the experience?
So with two employees i pay $38.50/mo? Or did you mean max( (numEmployees-5), 0 ) * $1.50
Apple (and Steve Jobs) has never tried to market anything in it's product line to all consumers, they concentrate on the mid-high and highend market.

I don't want to sounds like a snob, I use macs for 20 years (I am a designer) and I never go to Wal-Mart, but we have a Prius. Low price is never the first priority for my family to choice any kind of product, and we try to not purchase anything influence by marketing/advertising.

I do use VMWare with XP on my mac. Honestly I was very happy when Apple switched to Intel so I never have to buy those not so well make hardware again.

There will always be people that shop everything at Walmart, and people shop at target/traderjoe, and another group shop only at Wholefood. We all different but I am happy that we have different choice.

Can you imagine if Apple died in the 90s and nongeek like me now have to choice between Windows and Linux?
"They're nice, they're shiny, but you want toughness? Get a toughbook. You want battery life? Get a Lenovo t400. You want something light that you can surf the web with? Netbook."

At the time I wanted none of those.. I just wanted something small that could run OS X (this was before OS x86 and hackintosh obviously) as I thought it was a cool OS and had previously only used OS8-9 and not much OS X in high school. As for "social pressure aspect of Apple's Marketing technique", I guess you could pile me into that group but in a different way. Most of my friends were hardcore linux types, and some just happened to have Macs as their weapon of choice.

I could go on, but I don't feel like starting a huge Mac v PC war again. I'm happy with my decision and that's all I care about. :) As for why I use a Mac now in 2009, well I do lots of Rails and design stuff and there are just so many great, small Mac apps that help out with this.
Where did I claim the EU is a single country ? We were comparing economies, not countries.
It's just an apples & oranges comparison, especially because the euro isn't as popular a reserve currency.
Things like "economies" work by practical consensus rather than by theory. The dollar has the value that we all agree it has.
Honest question: what is an economy?
Where are these people come from? Installing Eclipse is as easy as unpacking ZIP file. Unlike VisualStudio, whose installer is just slow and buggy piece of crap, which constantly breaks so hard, that you have to download a special tool to reinstall it.
Does it absolutely have to be a country to be relevant? The EU share the same currency. I don't know for sure, but I can't quite think of a reason why economies absolutely have to be countries.
Great analysis of Amazon's evolution of their call to action. One thing that struck me the most while reading it though was:

"Back then, ... Amazon, for the most part, sold books."

I just consider them a generic shopping mall now.
Yeah but that's not great if you have non-working members and useless if you want to pay based on hours.
So I am left with the question "how can they not know how botnets work", which was oft repeated in the article. Also left dangling was how a million kernels is going to help this problem.
I didn't mean this to sound snarky. The advice and help, and the fact that they are invested, (in all meanings of the term), in you are far more valuable than the ~15k you get.
Or they go though it once and opt out of the system after that and live on cash. I know many people now that refuse to have a credit card as they became far too expensive in the long run.
Is their system browser based as well? If so, seems like a clever Greasemonkey could greatly help with that automation (might need an temporary cache there somewhere).

Scrape your web report, stuff the data somewhere (locally), then on their site, read your cached data and populate their forms.
The new price will make this one sink.
Tina http://thinksimplenow.com/about is both passionate and keen.
Let's say I measure a rope many times, and come up with a mean value and a 95% confidence interval for the length of the rope. That is, assuming my "experiment" is constructed correctly, I say that the true length of the rope lies within that range, with a 95% confidence. That's an objective confidence.

But in order to come up with that number, I had to assume my experiment was correct. I very well could have had a systematic error in the experiment such as misusing my ruler, accidentally holding the rope such as to artificially shorten it, or completely misunderstood the concept of length. My confidence that my experiment is correct is both independent of the confidence interval I reported, and not quantifiable.
That'a good one.

I think an economy is a region with a 'scope' that depends on the discussion at hand. You could speak about the ecnomy of Colombia in isolation, or you could look at the economy of Latin America as a whole. When comparing you'd compare Latin America as a whole with for instance North America, Europe or Asia.

It is common to compare the US economy vs the EU economy or all of Asia, not to compare the economy of Germany with Texas.

Usually regions that can be lumped together share a border.

To make the comparision more fair I think if you wish to compare 'apples with apples' as much as possible probably the inclusion of the NAFTA region would be more appropriate when comparing with the EU.
> That, combined with structs, unions, and it's basic data types allow you to use it for virtually ANY protocol.

Sadly, when you use C to implement low-level binary wire protocols, you quickly discover that structs, bit-fields, and unions are nearly useless because they are incompletely defined. Byte order is undefined. Structure layout is mostly undefined -- you pick field order, but you can't choose packing, alignment, or padding rules. The sizes of the integer types vary by platform and compiler. Bit field layout, packing, and alignment are almost completely undefined.

What you're left to work with are unsigned characters, pointers, and bitwise operations. You have to pack and unpack everything manually, or your code won't port. It's enough to get the job done, but it's like using a wrench to pound in screws.

I could do with a little less specificity of action, myself.
If there is is evidence it will be accepted for review, if not it will be rejected..... simple.
I was certain that the contents of this article were to be "Diet and exercise."
While I will agree there a tons of irresponsible borrowers but I wish people would give some anger over the irresponsible lenders that helped create this mess.

There were far too many companies willing to throw as much credit around as it was more profitable to lend more than people could handle.

It was getting to the point that all you needed to get $10,000 of credit cards was a pulse... and even then that wasn't needed.
The search is absolutely useless without the status updates. I don't mind them getting away from the status updates some but they cannot completely abandon them.
Opening external links in new window?
Well writing your secrets in French will probably keep them safe in America, but not in other countries.
What's the point of being a Mensa member?