skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The SCotUS struck down poll taxes

True...

> because the exercise of a right--in that case, voting--cannot be taxed.

False.

The Supreme Court struck down poll taxes because "A State's conditioning of the right to vote on the payment of a fee or tax violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment" because "[o]nce the franchise is granted to the electorate, lines which determine who may vote may not be drawn so as to cause invidious discrimination", "[f]ee payments or wealth, like race, creed, or color, are unrelated to the citizen's ability to participate intelligently in the electoral process", and "[t]he interest of the State, when it comes to voting registration, is limited to the fixing of standards related to the applicant's qualifications as a voter", finding that "[t]o introduce wealth or payment of a fee as a measure of a voter's qualifications is to introduce a capricious or irrelevant factor."
Harper v. Virginia Bd. of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966)

It did not at any point make the argument that "the exercise of a right cannot be taxed". It only
made the argument that poll taxes were an unacceptable burden on the right to vote because they impose a burden on a fundamental right that is not sufficiently justified by any state interest relating to the exercise of that right.

> Sales taxes and income taxes imply that there is no right to engage in voluntary commerce.

No, they don't. The Supreme Court tolerating them when it has struck down poll taxes for the reasons described above indicates that the burden that such taxes pose on the right to voluntary commerce, presuming such a right exists, is not unjustified by legitimate government interests related to commerce, it does not imply that the right does not exist (or even that it is not a fundamental right like voting.)
What is really needed is a plugin for turning "beautiful" into "ordinary"... It really distrupts me when companies/people puts " beautiful interface" as one of the features of their app/site/whatnot.
Introducing git webdiff
Background checks are already pretty standard in the sharing economy
For anyone trying to make sense of this post in the future, the permalink for this blog post is http://www.thetwoweeker.com/blog/2014/6/30/kkbbwyicx0nwlprkn...

(I actually had to view source to find that - it's not visibly linked anywhere on the http://www.thetwoweeker.com/blog/ page)

(stable links are important, people!)
It uses your finger though, not the right source material.
Looks really cool.

Why are your prices defaulting to Canadian dollars? I imagine it's pretty off-putting to the (much larger) US market just south of your border.
6 Amazing Project Management Tools For Startups, Under $25
Funny how they want to investigate Evercookie persistence and use it to identify Tor users.

For those of you who doesn't know about Evercookie :
http://samy.pl/evercookie/
https://github.com/samyk/evercookie
Such a bias may be the result of the community's opinions and consequent voting.
To summarize tptacek's link, the Amish generally refrain from using the public power grid, but they use electricity from their own generators or even solar panels. The idea isn't to ban things that are modern or things that save time, but rather things that make members more influenced by the world and less dependent on their own community.
"Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux."
Define "mid-Atlantic"? I could imagine that covering everywhere from Spain to Africa to the West Indies to the American South.
Some companies seem to believe that the "losing the safe harbor provisions" risk is in respect to that particular dispute rather than in general. If so, they can knowingly take that particular risk by questioning a particular notice.
Microsoft wants Visual Studio to be your one-stop cross-platform dev shop
Recently I enjoy Abstroose Goose http://abstrusegoose.com/ a bit more than the recent XKCD strips. If you enjoy XKCD it's probably worth for you to check Abstroose Goose out.
There's an important distinction that needs to be drawn here.

It's perfectly okay to say 'we support modern standards, older versions of IE don't comply with modern standards so if you use IE, you need to upgrade to a recent version'.

It's not okay to say 'you can't use even recent versions of IE because we don't like the brand name'.

(I think it is the former rather than the latter that people are generally doing, but it's worth clarifying the distinction.)
This would be a reasonable view if there weren't a systematic campaign by the NSA, FBI, and DEA to lie to judges and prosecutors about the actual source of underlying evidence.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...

The EFF calls it Intelligence Laundering. The DEA calls it parallel construction. Either way it is sinister and immoral and a court hasn't had a chance to rule on it precisely because it is very difficult for defendants to prove that both the prosecutor and judge were lied to.
Cloudier Joins CloudApp
High Availability WordPress with 3 Nodes and round-robin DNS
What has your website done for you lately?
While I think that's part of it, I think it ultimately causes more loopholes. I really struggle when it's time to do my taxes because I can't understand all the little intricacies that were added to give people exceptions. Yet the same complexities allows people with a disproportionately larger income to have dedicated resources getting out of paying taxes. I'm against the use of so many tax incentives to manipulate behaviour. If you think it's really worth losing tax revenue over, use the money to prove the benefit and let people make their own decisions. Don't introduce a loophole at the request of those who benefit from it.
>San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera has just sent a cease-and-desist letter to MonkeyParking a competing company that offers another mobile application related to parking.

>In fact there seem to be nothing illegal about sharing or even selling parking information.

Way to side step the fact that MonkeyParking was basically a service that encourage people to hoard parking spaces for money. That's less about selling parking information than selling/leasing public property.
social marketing (twitter, blogging, facebook page etc), adwords, reddit ads. starting to see a trickle of organic search traffic.
The academic term for this area of economic study is Marginal Propensity to Consume[1]. It's defined as:

"The proportion of an aggregate raise in pay that a
consumer spends on the consumption of goods and
services, as opposed to saving it."

I don't think it's very controversial.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_propensity_to_consume
Hah! I have a name which I have literally never heard a non-native speaker (of my first language) pronounce correctly.

As far as I understand it, the problem isn't so much that people haven't heard you pronounce your own name, it's more to do with the fact(?) that -- unless they've been raised in a similar "sound-environment" -- they literally cannot hear the subtleties of the pronunciation (e.g. tongue/lip positioning, etc.). I've had this experience (in reverse) when trying to pronounce Chinese and Arabic which have subleties which are very foreign to my native language.
Yeah, and if you don't even have an internet connection, NSA is putting you on their most wanted list. Give me a break. Not doing something can't make you more suspicious.
Anyone have a mirror, it looks like Google was not happy about this being discusssed:

> Down until I'm done talking to Google about this post.
I started http://skyul.com and it's been profitable since it's first month when I released this service. The main reason why is because I'm keeping costs low and I re-invested most of the cash into advertising and more product development :)
Ctrl+r is fine when you're looking for something recent, but this one is useful when you're looking through a long list of similar commands.

alias hist='history | grep'

Use it like this:

$ hist git
9543 git add toto
9544 git commit
9545 git log
9546 git log
9548 git add -A
9549 git commit
9550 git log
9633 git pull
9955 cd dev/git
9957 git grep copyof
9958 git grep copyof
9959 git pull

By the way, do you know you can call back the 9633rd command in the history with "!9633"?
I gather you must not be a native speaker of English. "Perfectly good" does not mean perfect. It means something like "serviceable" or "adequate for the purpose at hand":

http://www.theonion.com/video/nations-parents-release-annual...

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=perfectly%20g...
Ask HN: How to find a copywriter/copyeditor?
Hi HNers!

I've started blogging a few months ago, and it's working out pretty well for me. I'm planning to invest more time and energy into my blog for the coming months.

However, writing is really hard for me. I'm not a native english speaker, so it takes me hours to write a short blog post and I probably make a lot of mistakes.

I think both of these problems could be fixed by working with a copywriter/copyeditor. What is the safest and cheapest way to find a good copywriter/copyeditor? Should I look into websites like odesk.com?

Thanks!
Kinda funny that the post bemoans regulation then says: The truth is, incumbent rent-seekers do have powerful lobbies even in the US. The oil industry tried hard to stop Governor Schwarzenegger from passing more stringent green air legislation in California.

One person's responsible legislation is another person's gov't innovation killing regulation.
I'd like to focus on:

Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search.

Again the media makes it sound like there exists a dragnet on (Google) searches. But this time one of the authors is J. Appelbaum.

So which is it? Terrorist Scores based on search engine searches sounds fantastically insane to me. But unencrypted it is possible to intercept. So perhaps it is something in between: All accessible searches are monitored, and search engines do not cooperate with this directly, unless they have to legally comply with the request?
I don't know. I've always been confused by open carry activists.
What is Massdrop? Website doesn't say much.
The law’s basic position on corporate social responsibility famously was articulated in Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. In 1916, Henry Ford owned 58% of the stock of Ford Motor Co. The Dodge brothers owned 10%. The remainder was owned by five other individuals. Beginning in 1908, Ford Motor paid a regular annual dividend of $1.2 million. Between 1911 and 1915 Ford Motor also regularly paid huge “special dividends,” totaling over $40 million. In 1916, Henry Ford announced that the company would stop paying special dividends. Instead, the firm’s financial resources would be devoted to expanding its business. Ford also continued the company’s policy of lowering prices, while improving quality. The Dodge brothers sued, asking the court to order Ford Motor to resume paying the special dividends and to enjoin the proposed expansion of the firm’s operations. At trial, Ford testified to his belief that the company made too much money and had an obligation to benefit the public and the firm’s workers and customers.

The plaintiff Dodge brothers contended an improper altruism towards his workers and customers motivated Ford. The court agreed, strongly rebuking Ford:

"A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits, or to the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes."

http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/20...
Perhaps you should tell them since you are so attached to this definition. That isn't the definition they used at Google I/O so it would seem that you are out of date.
Limited typefaces can still be useful for logos or titles/headers. For instance, it's very common for stylized Japanese typefaces to only support a small fraction of common characters.
http://web.archive.org/web/20140703013829/http://ambivalente...
> Hopefully I'll be gone before they start going door to door.

Why care about the rest of your family that will still be here to endure the rest... or the rest of us.
You have no kids, right?
I see this faithfully reproduces that the cursor takes one pass to write the text, then flashes through a second faster pass. I remember seeing that sometimes.

Question: On the real systems where that occurred, what was the second pass doing? It never seemed to change anything. (No guesses, please. I'm looking for someone who knows.)
Ask HN: Thoughts On What The New HN Feature Might Be?
Sam Altman tweeted yesterday saying there is a new feature coming to HN. Any thoughts?
Ryan is a straight white dude, and people tend to make friends with people they share culture with.

Diversity is a cultural trait.
https://twitter.com/sama/status/484504242938331136
Yes, but investors spread their risk, as an essential part of their strategy. Employees have no such opportunity.
We launched Geocodio [1] in January 2014. It's a side project, so the definition of "profitable" is a bit different, but it's paying for itself and then some -- servers, Basecamp, LLC filing fees, etc. We're making enough that it covers costs for other, less serious projects [2][3] and our "fun" server (for testing out new projects/ideas/etc) with some to spare.

This was our first time launching a serious product as a side project and it's been a blast. I actually wrote up a few thoughts on launching side projects last week [4], largely based on our experience with Geocodio.

[1] http://geocod.io
[2] http://opennear.by
[3] http://happykitchen.dotsqua.re
[4] https://medium.com/@mjwhansen/things-ive-learned-launching-a...
I've heard people say before that usually when an article's headline is a "provocative" question, the answer is no. That seems to hold true here.
I'm not a layer, but I don't think so. IMO if they don't comply, they can be sued for copyright infringement caused by ignoring that notice. If there is no infringement, there is nothing to fear.
Spam-O-Matic®
Constructive criticism for golang web dev community
This is not "as unbiased as possible" -- it is biased towards the initial form of algorithm description.

To make the comparison "as unbiased as possible" would be to code the same algorithm but adapt it to the peculiarities of each language implementation.
This was a pretty exaggerated post from what I read. It went from a city not allowing public parking spaces to be sold, to the United States turning into Japan.

It is hard to take it seriously with such exaggerations.
We're working on a recommendation system so that people in the community can refer others to join the conversation

Don't you this just perpetuates the "bros" ethos? How likely is a solo entrepreneur in his mid-40's working on a web startup and plugged into the Digital Valley but unable to attend meetups in the city to get an email from someone in the community of your friends and their friends? I think the chances are low.

Perhaps you should allow people to request a membership. I tried to submit a cool startup I found to PH last week and quickly determined I couldn't. Before that, I'd been checking PH ever morning to see what was cool and out there. After not being able to participate in the community (or the conversation--you could easily moderate comments) its basically fallen off my radar and I've stopped visiting.
Most email these days is sent via TLS. Google could check if it was.

Of course they wouldn't just check if the email was marked as read, but the server very likely knows if the email (or the attachment if it was one?) has been accessed at all.
Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sT1c5m_...
My former employees from IndexTank would differ. Our acquisition was life-changing to them. They didn't value equity at all when they joined, yet it worked out really well.

You can think of employee equity as insurance against "I joined Facebook early and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."
Aren't common shares far down on the equity totem pole? Investors get preferred shares w/ liquidation preferences. Employees get diluted to nothing.
Seconded, although they're rarely as concise as xkcd.
I assume it's nah-mez, rhyming with the name Ramez.
1. When you're talking at the company-level, $125k seems like a slap on the wrist. For example, do you think that Qualcomm would really change their practices to avoid a $125k fine rather than just accepting it as the cost of doing business?

2. Diebold probably spent significantly more than $125k just in defending the lawsuit, so the end result of forcing them to pay out $125k is more of a moral victory than anything else.

3. The Diebold case had the benefit of the content itself (internal emails discussing issues with voting machines) being unquestionably in the public interest.
I was approached several months ago to build an app with the same business model as MonkeyParking's queue-barging-for-cash. I walked away: the world needs less Ayn Randian it's-not-nailed-down douchpreneurship, not more.
> you seem to agree that the portion of their money that the rich don't spend themselves, they're allowing to be spent by another person

Not really. If I give you 1000$ it's a different thing than when I just lend you 1000$. In both cases you have discretion to spend it, but in the latter case, you have much less freedom, because you need to return it back (and more).

What I am saying is that economy as a whole can store a large portion of money in such contracts, not really producing much of anything (because of the constraints placed to the borrower). Still, it's a rational thing to do for rich people because it allows to keep them power. So in this sense, the money are "idling" - by circulating around in contracts that have to be honored.
I think he's talking about the labor market here. Conventional microeconomics would suggest that increasing the price of labor by setting or increasing a minimum wage would reduce the demand by employers for the product, human labor.

That may be true in the limited case, but the argument is clouded by questions like whether increasing income of all of the employers' customers would allow the employer to do more business or raise prices, thus potentially increasing their demand for labor to compensate.

I can't see any doubt that this would happen, but the extent is hard to determine. How much will the average consumer's wages actually increase, and how much of that will be taken up by increased prices in other goods they buy? If they end up with more money, what will they do with it - save more, buy higher-quality goods, buy luxuries? So the overall effect on any particular business is unknown.
Oh geeze, list_heads. I remember wrangling with these when I was taking an OS class. In particular, my partner and I lost points on a project because we (and basically everybody else in the class) failed to recognize a subtle bug in how we were traversing lists.

Say you have a task_struct, and you want to iterate through the list of that task's children. You look through the code and you see

>struct list_head children; /* list of my children * /

>struct list_head sibling; /* linkage in my parent's children * /

And because it's late and you've been working for hours, you say "Ah ha! We'll just iterate through the children list_head, which is the list of the task's children, and that will give us what we want!"

But it turns out that's not how it works, because list_heads aren't linked lists like how you're used to thinking of them from your class on Data Structures! Here's what happens when you run your naive code iterating through children!

You start at task_struct foo, and you follow the pointer to a child of foo. Now, you follow children again, because you're still thinking that children is the list_head of foo's children. But you're wrong, because now you're in task_struct bar, and list_head children is now a list of bar's children; what you should be doing is iterating through list_head siblings!

We were pretty salty about losing the points, as I recall. On the other hand, after that experience we were very careful about keeping track of which struct we were in during any particular operation on a list_head, and I can remember how how they work (and how angry they made me) long after the class is over.
I believe there's only a perjury penalty if you misrepresent the fact that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder.

So if you say, "I'm requesting you take this down because it infringes on Star Wars and I'm an authorized agent of Disney" when you have no relation with Disney, you're up for perjury.

However, if you say, "I'm requesting you take this down because it infringes on blahblah.avi and I hold copyright to blahblah.avi" which is true, then no perjury penalty. Even if blahblah.avi has nothing to do with the github repo being taken down. "Oops, my bad, honest mistake, wink wink." The person on the receiving end of the DMCA still has to jump through all the hoops to get their own copyright material reinstated.

So if you do your bot right, there's no penalty. None at all. If there is, I'd love to know about it, because these bots need to die in a fire.
It's a mathematical formalism for minimizing the number of distinct entities in minimalistic theories of numbers, and providing definitions of "number" that are as well-defined as possible, which turns out to be harder than it appears at first blush. In practice, it isn't generally directly used, except in places where proper facilities for using integers haven't yet been created (C++ templates at a certain point, some older Haskell type code before ints become promotable to the type level, etc). (And just to be clear, I'm not saying they've never been used in real code, but that it's a serious code smell to need to use them in real code. They get inefficient, fast; given that they're often showing up in type checking algorithms they can get inefficient superlinearly in their size.)
Certainly. Though it may be that you only have a single offset due to whatever business rules, and you never use HOURS_IN_MILLISECONDS, it's always either 6*HOURS_IN_MILLISECONDS or some other term. I didn't want to have to think of an actual domain case, but just show an example of when having a clear, named constant rather than a, yes, unchanging, but ultimately not intuitive and easy to get wrong value, is a better choice; I readily admit you can run that down further once you have a real domain. :P
I agree with CocaKoala - it is not about making people say my name right; it is about avoiding making people uncomfortable, which is considerate. You do raise a good point that one has to be careful with the presentation, though.
>People miss the whole point of companies. The goal should never be providing jobs but creating value.

"creating shareholder value"

Even if we're ignoring "social good" (which is a perfectly valid "shareholder value") one way to chase profit is to look for inputs that are cheap, and figure out how to turn those inexpensive inputs into expensive finished goods.

Right now, low-end labor is quite inexpensive. If you can figure out how to produce something useful using that inexpensive labor, there is profit to be had.
>Not doing something can't make you more suspicious.

That's just stupid.
I'd love to see someone make a smaller, inexpensive stirling engine that can be used to recapture waste energy, eg turn some AC heat into electricity.
When have any of these agencies ever done the cheap space mission equivalent of leaping over a building?
The most interesting thing is that this website is licensed under GPLv2. Seems excessive.
You can't ignore a request. But you can make them work for it. For example:

http://www.diynetwork.com/about-us/dmca-digital-millennium-c...