skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK.

Let's be clear how big this particular one is.

If you take any user on HN, and send an 2 or 3 IRS accountants pouring over their tax records for 3 or 4 weeks, they will turn up something. So tax issues I can see, if they were mistakes, and the person owns up to them and pays the back due taxes. That is the kind of investigation you WANT your public officials to undergo. And yes, given a byzantine tax regime, mistakes SHOULD be common. In fact, the guy to look closer at is the one who has 30 years worth of perfect tax paperwork.

This is a different thing altogether. It SEEMS . . . I'm not saying this is the case . . . but it SEEMS that these guys were not even checked out. That, in my view, should be actionable. Why were they put in their positions, leadership ability? intelligence? because they are minorities? what?

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter, because the inconsistencies outlined in the article are of the sort that lead reasonable men to question a candidates integrity. I have no problem giving a guy a shot in my company if he only has a high school diploma. Got a criminal record and you're trying to get your life back on track? Hell, let's see if we can help each other. But I will not countenance a liar, no matter how well qualified.

Consider that if they are liars, then these two are supremely unqualified. My decision becomes easy . . . IF they are liars. Which I am not prepared to say they are on the basis of this article alone.

As an aside, I would like to address the whole issue brought up in the article's comments of academic credential exaggeration being a 'cultural' issue in India.

That's fine, but this is the United States. As a younger man I attended lots of government sponsored "leadership" courses in the armpit of the East Coast, a place called Quantico. The first time I ever went to Quantico was for Platoon Leader's Class for the United States Marine Corps. I learned the first day about what was expected of me as a leader in the United States. ANY integrity violation, (lie, cheat, or steal), and you would be gone. But nothing else could get you thrown out! Yep, that drunken brawl with those Navy Academy pricks at the bar in DC, not a problem. Just don't lie about it. Was that you at that strip club during last weekend's leave? Yes Sgt. Instructor, but did you see the girl? Just don't lie. Point of the story, they didn't make exception for the Japanese guys, or the black guys, or the latinos because of any "cultural issues" those guys may have had. Enough said on that I think.
Another huge plus for libraries: many of them have conference and meeting rooms that you can book for free.

If you're in the Bay Area, mid-Peninsula, the San Carlos library has rooms with whiteboards. Plus, it's only a ten minute drive to the likes of EA, Oracle, etc.
If the worst comment you receive about the service is the logo sucks - you are on to something!
He said that cable modems would never happen

I remember that, and I smile about that prediction as I use my cable modem to access the Internet, but I count his technical objection as prescient when I experience local modem pool latency here. Cable modems are a kluge, not a sound technical solution to broadband at home.
I second that, the logo looks like it's ancient. It looks completely out of place in amidst the web 2.0 look and feel of the rest of the page.
I'm sorry, but that web site looks absolutely horrible. Can the nation's CTO not be held to the same standards to which we hold "Review my startup" posters on HN every day? Certainly his budget is many orders of magnitude larger.

Of all the incredibly smart and successful technologists in the US, I find it very hard to understand why this guy was chosen.
I suggest you look into the details. They all seem like mistakes I could have made by accident. And, like I said, lots of people fudge their taxes a little. Not outright fraud, but maybe not declaring something if they aren't sure if it's taxable or not.

Daschle's main problem is that he did not declare as income the limo and driver that was provided to him by the company he was consulting for. It's not like he was laundering money through shell companies in Antigua.
Cheapest MBA Program for CS Students Costs $99: It's Called the App Store
This is awesome! I wish I had something like this back in 2003-2005 when I was one of four people on shared pager duty. Nowadays I just write perfect code ;) (and we have a dedicated and awesome ops team).

A couple suggestions...looking at your prelim pricing page, the prices look good, but I can foresee a problem with the notification system that accidentally sends way too many alerts. How will you accommodate that? It would be nice to have a grace period or some way of saying, ok we realize it was a mistake, we'll let this one slide but the next time you will be bumped up automagically to the appropriate pricing plan.

Also how easy is it to integrate with existing notification tools like Nagios or Cacti? Or is it just tied to email notificatons from those systems? That would be a downside if it's the latter. I've worked at orgs with truly crappy email systems that are down more often than not. Sending an email blast for a production system outage is likely to get it canned by the sysadmins.

Finally how does the phone call alerting work? Is it text-to-voice? Or pre-recorded messages? Is it customizable?
Yes, universities make this information easy to check, because not exposing liars about degrees damages the value of each degree.
While I agree that their current privacy settings create complexity and "work," the solution to this problem is to refine the interface so that making privacy decisions is easier and more intuitive. This can maybe be done with the help of AI/NLP/image recognition ("It looks like you're smoking pot in this picture! Want Facebook to automatically make it private?"), or maybe they just need to explore some new UI design options. Regardless, the solution is not to get rid of the option altogether - the complexity exists because human relationships are complex and require complex systems to represent the nuances of interpersonal communication.

It's like comparing the controls of a RC airplane to the cockpit of a 747: of course a jet has a ridiculously complex control system, it's a complex machine that's getting a lot of shit done at once. Any control you remove from a jet plane would certainly make it more "user-friendly," but it also becomes a less useful tool than it was before.

> what's the point of connecting if you're just going to hide everything?

Counterpoint: Where's the depth in your relationships if you cannot choose what pieces of information you share with whom?
Milestones In Digital Music Marketing
Yeah but they usually don't have food and drink at libraries, so you'd have to get up and leave if you got hungry, arguably reducing productivity.
Why Apple Is More Valuable Than Google
I'm happy just knowing I'm better at my speciality :D
Even for something as trivial as this, this is just one of those weird cases where you look around at the world, and wonder "Why are you compelled to post that you don't understand something?"

People are making, selling, designing, buying owning glossy screens. This means your mental model is way out of alignment with reality.

But that's not a problem, there are several explanations in the comments on this very page which you can read and then you will understand why people own glossy screens.

1) That was the only option if you wanted a new MacBook Pro.

2) Even now, it's the cheaper option to purchase.

2) They make blacks look blacker and screens look shinier, which is (subjectively) desirable.

3) Because of this, they're (subjectively) nicer for looking at pictures and movies on.

4) Under many use scenarios, there are no downsides because it's pretty easy to position it so there's no glare.

5) There is no ugly bezel around the edge of the screen as there is for the matte screens so it (subjectively) looks nicer.

6) It's the sort of small thing that can be easily overlooked, or not noticed if ordering online, and someone could end up buying one without knowing in advance that the glare would annoy them, then ignoring it as a minor inconvenience.
Geithner didn't pay taxes on-time because the IMF has a genuinely funky tax setup which made him liable for self-employment taxes. His tax status was disputed during his time at the IMF. He paid his back taxes with interest. He was liable for more taxes than a normal person, and he paid them. What's your point?
My problem with working in a coffee shop/library/anywhere is that I can only use my laptop, and not my nice 22" dual monitor setup on my desktop. How do you manage to get as much done without a real mouse, a real keyboard, and big monitors?
Turing completeness is not a point; it's as irrelevant as if you'd said that it's composed of 1s and 0s.

> Don't mix JavaScript frameworks .

That's my whole point. JQuery should just be for DOM manipulation (not a full fledged application framework) but the core Javascript library is so terrible it needs to include things like each, grep, map, and an implementation of string trim for Pete's sake!

PHP is a terrible language for encapsulation, but at least I have chance if I want to include more than one PEAR library. Encapsulation is possible - for instance I can bootstrap a Zend Framework application inside something else and I know it will work because it uses no global variables and it's simply not possible to extend the core language.

So what if I use Dojo and do really like a component in JQuery UI? If you don't think that's a severe and damning limitation then that's a failure of imagination.
Congrats on the benchmarks.

A couple of questions:

How has RethinkDB been affected by the recent changes to SSDs that have an improved firmware for garbage collection?

Unrelatedly, does RethinkDB use the same clustering strategies as MySQL?
Yes, wind might be an issue for miniture zepplins, though I wonder whether there might be ways to mitigate the effect of wind. It's not like they'd be flying very high.

Regarding robots on segways, the robots would not be on the segways; they'd be self-balancing robots of approximately human dimension with a rack for carrying parcels. You wouldn't be able to easily ride one, and stealing one could be made quite difficult. For instance, you could have the robot automatically phone home along with it's current GPS position when it detects itself being "kidnapped". Or you could program it to emit an extremely loud siren. Or fry its own circuits so that it's useless to the criminals. Or snap photographs of the perps and email them to a remote location.
AlarmPoint Systems is a competitor, but they sell enterprise software, with the usual enterprise tagline of "call us for pricing and a demo" and 5 digit+ price tag. Another one is ReliableResponse. This is a smaller company, but also enterprise software.

We have tried to offer a SaaS solution aimed at small and medium businesses.
This isn't reddit, no one is impressed that you can google a user name.
You need 200+ now to downvote people, and you can only downvote a comment to -8.
Uh, chemistry is also the basis of computing. Chemistry, physics, mathematics, these are pretty much the basis of reality as we know it.
That's an interesting clash of sources. The university registrar is the authoritative source on who has a degree. The university news service is a captive journalistic organization--it will be interesting to see if its report rather than Dvorak's is confirmed from the primary sources.
I don't know the particulars of this case, but I can share some things I learned as a freelance writer 20 years ago.

It doesn't matter what you know or how good you are: government appointments are done on a "good old boy/girl" basis according to who knows whom. That means that knowing and impressing the right people is much more important than cost savings, innovation, or any of the other things we associate with being somebody in power.

There's nothing new or unique about this -- it's been going on since the first time anybody was appointed by anybody else. It IS good, however, to see the tech community working to vet those who claim to have the knowledge to make tech community decisions.

I always told people if I had any sense I would have went into politics in my early 20s. With an affable personality and a sharp mind, you can make a lot more bucks than actually having to struggle through forming a startup, and it's a lot more interesting than suffering through a corporate career.
You're forgetting that there are other reasons for looking at this besides supporting this idea or thinking it could work....

For instance, I upvoted it because it is still thought provoking. People trying to game a website to donate rice? They're obviously well intentioned. How does one deal with such users? What could their efforts be redirected towards?
The 10 Most Expensive iPhone Apps
I can't confirm this but I don't think it matters. If it was true, it would prove "not patents suits involve patent trolls as plaintives" but this would not, by itself, even prove "some software patent suits have validity".

Sure, they might have done something before MS and patented it. But processing XML is not rocket-science and thus, to me, this patent stinks. Further, if this validated either MS buys them and they go after everyone else OR they just go after everyone else on their own. Either way you get monopolistic rent extraction.

Sorry if this give any new or exciting angles on this subject.
You're right. I guess it just seems funny to me that a bunch of hackers and entrepreneurs are so focused on somebody's CV instead of whether or not they can do the job.

And as I mentioned below, it's amusing that John C. Dvorak is the one criticizing someone else's grasp of serious Computer Science concepts versus pop Web fads.
I thought the exact same thing actually.
A CS degree isn't a requirement for most F-500 CIO positions. The CIO of a real company doesn't make low-level technology decisions. A business background is more important for most CIO roles than a computing background.

If Kundra lied about his resume, he should resign or be terminated; no question. However, Dvorak's column makes me think he doesn't know what a CIO is.
"As an aside, I would like to address the whole issue brought up in the article's comments of academic credential exaggeration being a 'cultural' issue in India."

Just to make it clear, this is not an accepted cultural norm in India. There was no "issue" brought up in the comments. Some jackass claimed this was a "cultural issue" in India.

Is it a problem? Sure. Getting degree confirmation data out of a university is still a very painful process and can take weeks if not months. Some companies don't bother and some people do take advantage. If any half way decent company finds out that an employee lied on his records, the employee is fired immediately. Almost every company in India((Infosys, TCS, Wipro whoever)) takes great pains to verify the credentials of its employees. Over time the Universities have gotten better at setting up systems to help employers.

are there people who abuse this system to exaggerate their degrees? sure. Are there body shopping companies who lie ? sure.

but to suggest this is a "cultural issue " in India based on some half assed comment on a blog as a reality and react to it is a little presumptuous imho.

"That's fine, but this is the United States."

No that is not fine , and there is no difference in India either. If you lie and are found out it is a certainty you'll be fired and a police complaint registered. Just fyi.

The rest of your comment makes important points. Upvoted.

PS: and Kundra is hardly "Indian". He was born in India, sure, but left when he was one year old and never came back. I believe he grew up in Tanzania and the United States. Amazing how "Indian culture" reaches half way around the world and influences him and overwhelms the culture(s) he grew up in eh? ;-)
People reuse usernames and passwords, so even though it is painless, now they will have a database of usernames and passwords which can probably be used in a lot of places. Thus, I only sign up for new things rarely and only for things in which I suspect I will need to use frequently.
The article mentions that the Dell Mini 9 is on its way to retirement and available only with XP.

The Dell Vostro A90, however, is essentially a rebranded mini 9 for the enterprise and is available with either ubuntu or windows.

BTW, if you are interested in running os x on a netbook, I highly recommend it.
Did you know that

return { something };

and

return
{ something };

are not equivalent in Javascript?
Well if you're going to complain that a guy "[does] not sound like someone who studied computers or technology" it would be more convincing if there weren't several well-known instances of you demonstrating a lack of knowledge of computers and technology.
Definitely agree.

However, one thing to be aware of is that a lot of parents use libraries as excursions/free daycare and librarians are reluctant to yell at kids. Not that I blame either of them (good job, parents. Let's get those kids reading early!), but have some headphones for when the usual decorum breaks down.

Still, it beats the over-commercialized folk music and hissing espresso machines of the coffee shop.
:)

"Hey geeks! Ya know all that stuff you learned about subtle trolling on the 'Net? IT WORKS IN REAL LIFE!"
The details in both Daschle and Geithner's cases are fairly weird:

Daschle's mistake was in not reporting a free car/driver as a gift (and hence not paying taxes on the value). There's a whole other conversation to be had about the culture of ex-Senators getting free stuff from rich friends "out of the goodness of their hearts", but it's not like the guy just decided not to pay a bunch of taxes.

Geithner screwed up by not paying his own SS/Medicare taxes while he worked at the IMF. The wrinkle is that unlike most private-sector or government jobs (which is where he was before and after his time at the IMF), international organizations (or at least those) don't do automatic payroll deduction of those specific taxes, so you have to deal with it yourself. Again, not a super-common situation.

So, yeah, these guys screwed up, were in positions where they should have known better, and it's fair to hold them accountable. But it's a little unfair to suggest that they were acting in bad faith when I'm not sure that I at least would know the arcana of those rules off the top of my head (though it makes a fabulous argument for simplifying the tax code...)

To look at it another way: Daschle underpaid by $140K while making millions, knowing full well that he may want to get back into government (which would involve vetting). Is it more likely that he: a) was knowingly risking his future career by not reporting the car service that he knew was a reportable gift; or b) being blissfully ignorant of how those rules worked?
The Prague Pneumatic Post system (early mechanical networking)
Something like this is extremely common. After you get that first job, noone will ever check your credentials.

The thing is, noone really remembers college. Well at least I don't. I'm trying to think now, but I can't really remember a single teacher, or a single building off the top of my head. And I only graduated 2 years ago.

So you can't really quiz someone on their status, even if you wanted to.

And think about this for a moment, pretty much every person who's been exposed like this, was exposed at the national level.
The layout is bit odd to show the content; I prefer a site like fav.tweets: http://www.sixteenseven.com/fav.tweets
Fair enough. We were trying to replicate the text you would see on an old-school pager. We'll probably update the logo in the future.
I feel like their homepage design gets copied pretty often. Perhaps they're on to something?
> If you take any user on HN, and send an 2 or 3 IRS accountants pouring over their tax records for 3 or 4 weeks, they will turn up something. So tax issues I can see, if they were mistakes, and the person owns up to them and pays the back due taxes.

While true, that's not the sort of mistakes that Obama's people have made.

The treasury secretary signed a form every year that he worked for the IMF acknowledging that he was being given extra pay for certain taxes. He cashed the check as well. He then didn't bother to pay the taxes.

This is the sort of thing that "little people" go to jail over. It's a firing offense in the IRS, one of the Treasury agencies.

And, this didn't come out after he was nominated. It came out during the "vet". (When he was told that it was an issue, he paid, but penalties were waived. Think that you'd get that sort of treatment.)

Does anyone think that the current treasury secretary is the only person who could do that job as well? I'm pretty sure that there's someone who is tax-clean who could do at least as well.
Wanna buy (the source for) an iPhone app?
Agreed. I just bought an Eeepc that has a dual core and 2gb of RAM, which as I read it falls afoul of the limits and presumably has a higher cost license. It was only $370, and while I realize that price was probably higher due to having windows on it, that didn't exactly kill the product... I still bought it. It's annoying, since I immediately formatted and put Easy Peasy on it anyway, but it's hard to find any ready-built machine without a bundled OS, so this is nothing new.
Screw Interface Patterns
I came ready to hate, but it's actually a good idea presented well and simply in the blog post. The one statement I (slightly) disagree with:

"Strike that. You will know that you passed the class when you recoup that investment tenfold. How many other classes you took offer such direct, undisputable grades?"

I doubt you'll make $1k, or even $100, but even if you don't you'll still learn a hell of a lot, so just by doing it you pass the class.
Marvell's Plug Computing expands with no end in sight
It looks a bit retro - but strikes me as being easily recognizable and suits the topic quite well.

Perhaps they should A/B test the logo - try http://www.markiter.com (shameless plug)
If the worst thing you can say about a government site is that it looks ugly, that's one hell of a win.

I challenge you to find a site for a city, state, or municipal site with more accessible data or more interactive functionality.
Palm Pre Privacy Invasion
Actually RethinkDB plugs into MySQL, so you can keep using that, including any clustering and tooling. RethinkDB is just a backend engine.
> Geithner didn't pay taxes on-time because the IMF has a genuinely funky tax setup which made him liable for self-employment taxes. His tax status was disputed during his time at the IMF.

There's no dispute. He was given an explicit and extra reimbursement for SS. He signed a letter every year acknowledging receipt of that money and that he owed the money.

And no, he wasn't "liable for more taxes than a normal person". For some reason, the IMF treats its senior staff as self-employed and all self-employed people pay both halves of SS in the US.

And, he had the penalties waived.

And, if he hadn't been nominated, he'd have never paid. He said as much during his confirmation hearings.
I really like going to the library when I'm working with pen and lots of paper. Except for after school, you can usually get a 30" by 6 foot table to yourself and really spread out - great for trying to coordinate info from multiple papers/schedules/plans.
Ah, another "What's the point" comment, belying a blind ideology which blithely assumes that anyone using a netbook would have no need to run any Windows software such as, say, Office; clear evidence that said commenter does not have a job in the real world where OOo cannot possibly replace MSOffice, due to a massive investment in time and programming $, macros, VB code, and countless formatting and layout problems that OOo would introduce, not to mention the need to interoperate with the rest of the business world, and most home users.