skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not denying that there are relevant problems that should be addressed, but why are all these families having kids, multiple even, if they're not fit to raise them? I'm not saying they deserve it, but is it really all that surprising that one or two low-wage adults aren't able to provide for themselves on top of growing children? I'm sure there are families with no kids also facing difficulties, but damn, people!

Also, I'd like to see the breakdown of these families' budgets. Where is their money going? If they're like most Americans, they're likely pissing money away needlessly.

The cynic in me is showing again.
Several of the people pictured in the story are overweight. The cruel irony is that if the price support for wheat/corn/soybean processed food was removed these people would get to feel what physical starvation was like.
According to the article, it's one of five biotech startups in this batch.
I don't understand why profits of a company need to be taxed. Either the money gets re-invested in the business or it gets paid as a dividend. Why does there need to be a separate tax from the dividend?
I've also found that Downcast has given me the most control over my podcasts.

One thing I haven't found yet, though, is a client that offers a playlist or podcast level setting where I can say I want to download the oldest unplaced episode for a show. iTunes has such a sync setting for TV shows, for example, and it would be very handy for podcasts where I'm working my way through an archive.

There is probably a limited audience for such a feature, however, so I'll probably have to keep waiting.
They are called placeholder selectors if you are looking for them in the Sass documentation.
I can get just about any book I want through the library: http://www.georgialibraries.org/public/pines.php

There's no catch. You order the book from whichever library has it, and they deliver it within a few days. Plus, the eBook loan program's collection gets bigger all the time. More states should adopt a system like this. The software behind PINES is free and open source: http://evergreen-ils.org/
I just tried to sign up for a UPS account and the questions they ask are scary
I was trying to sing up for a UPS My Choice premium account from Techbargains. They asked me to verify myself through some security qusetions; IS THIS THE HOUSE NUMBER YOU SHARED WITH X?, IS THIS WHEN YOUR HUSBAND WAS BORN?, HAVE YOU NEVER LIVED IN ONE OF THESE CITIES? The scary thing was that the answer to these questions were more than 20 yrs old in some cases. They have some deep data. I would be scared.
https://twitter.com/OvercastFM/status/489448132556509184
- Streaming coming soon
MPAA files DMCA Notice to shut down PopcornTime on GitHub
Why do you think AWS is a poor fit for your workload? There are customers who churn petabytes in S3. If I was running a crawl and indexing operation, I'd put the bytes in blob storage like that, and aggressively negotiate better pricing with Amazon.

There are some pretty obvious reasons mainframes aren't the server format of choice for today's cloud. The people who are building to today's cloud grew up in a world where fast desktop computers running linux were ubiquitous and cheap (important for poor students learning to ship code on a budget) while mainframes were something you couldn't easily get access to even while waving large sums of cash at IBM.

No doubt there could be warehouse scale systems that were more efficient, overall, compared to the current designs that the cloud providers use. Every bit of the stack could be squeezed to provide exactly the hardware you needed for a particular problem. It doesn't seem like the economic incentives exist at this time, for a provider like Amazon (I imagine they make far more money on modest VM configs with no GPUs or Infiniband than they do with the high end stuff even if the latter has a higher profit margin, because volume wins in cloud)

Multi-core-large-memory-SSD is just the latest architectural evolution. We've just been pushing the bottleneck between the various parts of the computer, and custom manufacturers have grown rich and then out of business producing a system that had 30% more "X" than what you could buy top-of-the-line from Dell (Bull will sell you an x86 system with 24T of RAM!). Right now the pain point is having many memory spaces across machines, rather than a single super-fast RAM you can access from any processor (the laws of physics and cache coherency suggest this is a pretty hard problem), because multicore and SSD got so big and fast.
How shocking. OpenBSD guts OpenSSL, breaks something while doing so, then the top comment is "well, Linux is broken, use a BSD."
This is my personal view and it may not be popular but...I think any service that reduces legislation to a summary and asks for an upvote/downvote is doing a disservice to all but those who would only get superficially involved anyway. It's not a thumbs up/thumbs down situation. We should have line-item outrage and still suggest the death of the whole bill ONLY if alternative language can't work.

The outrage over CISPA for example was not outrage over a 100% bad piece of legislation. Pieces of it were horrible to be sure. Services should be about picking out the bad from the pile, holding up the good, and educating users on the differences and suggesting alternative language. One bad line can corrupt a significant piece of longer legislation. Would you suggest people should only be able to choose good or bad to label it? You might say it's 99% good or that it's wholly ruined by the 1%.

Full disclosure: I'm working on a legal edtech startup and I proposed something similar a while back called GenAssem
I work in silicon valley and it seems like there is a huge shortage of people with software development skills. I am not talking about geniuses, just people with skills. I work at a company that isn't the sexiest (but a good stable employer) and man, it is hard to find people.
Not to mention that Debian consistently supports "in-place" upgrades when moving between releases, minimizing admin time doing the upgrade, and actual server downtime. Whereas Ubuntu... I tried using it on a few servers, their complete lack of in-place support meant the servers had to be rebuilt from scratch on a near-yearly basis if we wanted the latest release. Just not feasible.
I think the failure of this idea starts with the assumption that it's perfectly reasonable to have a trigger-happy camera constantly at the ready, strapped to your forehead, "just in case" but "trust us because we swear we won't point it at you in your most compromised, yet entertaining moment" only everyone else.
I would propose that if Linux were truly broken, then LibreSSL portable (the "safe" replacement for OpenSSL) shouldn't be released for it. Plain and simple.

If, on the other hand, an actual official release of LibreSSL portable does show up for Linux, that is an implicit acknowledgment that it should be safe to use on Linux (though perhaps with restrictions, such as "must mknod /dev/urandom in a chroot environment, otherwise LibreSSL will abort and crash your app").
I was just wondering last night when YC was going to build a free Mint-like money tracking app for portfolio companies that had the secondary effect of reporting back how they were doing financially. That way there'd be no bothersome reporting obligations for founders beyond checking a box to let YC pull reports or get read-only access.
These are all valid reasons. I read a lot of ebooks because I'm travelling a lot but if I move somewhere to stay there permanently I'm going to go back to buying physical books. As much for myself as for my kids to grow with books around.
You can, of course, always remove/unwire the LED if you're that desperate to discretely film people.
You hear layoffs and you think about the company but ignore the people in the company? OK.
A related interesting drive:

Take a ferromagnetic negative-mass object of the same mass as your spaceship. Suspend it within your spaceship with electromagnets around it. To accelerate forward, try to pull the negative-mass object backwards, and vice versa. You can do the same thing if it has an innate magnetic field, or with electrostatics. (You can also do the same thing with gravity, but your acceleration will be annoyingly small)

Voila, a quote-unquote reactionless drive! (It isn't actually, the net momentum/kinetic energy of the system does not change)

But yes, there are a number of problems associated with negative mass.
Well, food in general. It doesn't get much more basic need than food, but there's not much government regulation guaranteeing my right to buy food.
They usually don't choose to conceive. Another factor is poor planning. Many people don't budget in the fact that one parent could be unemployed for months on end.
If you're willing to say sales figures doubled, but not from or to what actual figure, then it's spin.
Very nice! That's a thoroughly earned upvote.

Measure theory is super cool.
Yes, not to mention that some of the best books (e.g. by author R.A. Lafferty) are out of print and only available in libraries or for hundreds of dollars on the used market.

There's an entire corpus of literature between 1920 and 2014 that is out-of-print for licensing or estate reasons, rather than quality, much of which can be found in libraries.
Andrew Holme explains a some of these things succinctly on his home made GPS receiver project page[0]. Search for "Solving for user position", where he even mentions ionospheric propagation. He also has an appendix showing his math[1]

[0] http://www.aholme.co.uk/GPS/Main.htm
[1] http://www.aholme.co.uk/GPS/user_position_solution.pdf
Eh, most Japanese people don't know/care about the problem of Han unification. It's mostly because of the legacy data. The thing is that ASCII and UTF-8 is kinda compatible with minor annoyances, while Shift JIS and UTF-8 are entirely different. People don't want to convert a trove of documents to another encoding which might not be supported yet in some apps. Slow software upgrade is another reason. As someone else pointed out, the default encoding of Windows is still Shift JIS, which is totally understandable for compatibility sake.

Edit: Besides, a TTF font doesn't have to always use Unicode internally. It supports an arbitrary mapping from bytes (could be in UTF-8 or SJIS) to a glyph number. People who really care about the looks (i.e. printing) have been using a charset for each specific language, such as Adobe-Japan1, which is different from both UTF-8 or Shift JIS.
If you receive many mails from a form in a web page, and all of them have the same subject and have a small time difference, the Gmail puts all of them in a single thread. If you need to track the answers of each user individually, it becomes a mess.

(One possible solution is editing the formail.php to hnge the emails subjects and make them different, for example add the submitter name, the submission hour. Last time, I just added a random number, it's slightly confusing but it solves the problem.)
The only argument you'll tend to get is a strictly emotional, highly irrational one. Namely that without an income tax, corporations will just pile up cash forever, and somehow magically that'll make wealthy people wealthier. This argument will include the notion that only CEOs and uber rich investors control all public corporations, and they'll find a way to steal all that cash without ever paying taxes on it. That 'somehow' the rich will game the changes and all that will happen is the corporate income tax revenue will disappear.
I'm broadly in sympathy with the article's arguments, but:

Depreciation of corporate jets, meanwhile, is not some special loophole. All assets depreciate, which is to say they become less valuable over time as they become outdated and suffer wear and tear. Both financial accounting and the tax code recognize this. Depreciation is how the tax code handles investment expenses; if you disallow this, you would be essentially levying extra-heavy taxes on capital-intensive businesses.

There's a big difference between depreciation of your plant and machinery that form a core part of your business and that of luxury purchases for the C-suite. Airlines should certainly be able to depreciate their jets, so should companies like UPS and Fedex that run large air freight operations. So should any business for which flying is part of the business model.

But I'm not convinced that flying executives, investors, and suppliers around in a Lear Jet is essential in the same way. Rather, that seems like a really nice intangible bonus for the upper management to enjoy. And if firms want to spend money on that and shareholders don't object,* then OK - but either tax it as benefits-in-kind or disallow the depreciation.

* Not that the views of American shareholders are generally welcomed by management, but that's another issue.
My politically incorrect opinion: the same factors that cause them to be poor influence how many children they have, poor decision making and low impulse control.

That and the fact that having children makes them poor by robbing them of the time to improve themselves and earn a higher salary.
OK, so maybe you could be clearer. Are you saying that poor people shouldn't have sex?
Imagine I want to set up a package delivery service in a world where corporations don't exist. Package delivery services are pretty risky businesses: delivery drivers race through crowded streets and are liable to run into someone or someone's property sooner or later.

Now, say I want to figure out a way to insulate myself from that sort of liability. So I enter into an agreement with a driver. I'll buy him a delivery truck, and he'll deliver the packages. In return, he'll give me 75% of what's left over after his expenses. Now I'm insulated from legal liability. I'm just an investor. If he runs over someone, that person can't sue me in my personal capacity. All I have at risk is the truck I bought him. But wait. What's the tax treatment of this arrangement? The driver will be taxed on his net income (revenues - expenses). Then he'll give me 75% of what he has left over. Then I'll be taxed on that amount.

Separate taxation of corporation arises naturally from treating corporations as distinct legal persons.
Equally obnoxious and unnerving.
Considering that Ginkgo Bioworks is a non-drug biotech company, I'd say that the answer to your question is yes.
> It can be tempting to ask families receiving food assistance, If you’re really hungry, then how can you be—as many of them are—overweight? The answer is “this paradox that hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin,” says Melissa Boteach, vice president of the Poverty and Prosperity Program of the Center for American Progress, “people making trade-offs between food that’s filling but not nutritious and may actually contribute to obesity.” For many of the hungry in America, the extra pounds that result from a poor diet are collateral damage—an unintended side effect of hunger itself.

This doesn't make sense to me. Doesn't calorie intake directly correlate with gaining weight?

From earlier in the article:

> Chances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don’t summon an image of someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight. The image of hunger in America today differs markedly from Depression-era images of the gaunt-faced unemployed scavenging for food on urban streets. “This is not your grandmother’s hunger

Is this not because the people in the depression era were actually starving? I'm not intending to downplay the issues here, but I find it hard to follow the disconnect of people being overweight not having enough food to eat.
Can you elaborate on how personal income, capital gains, and perhaps estate taxes can't cover all scenarios?

How will assets and income be hidden in untaxed corporations?
Or, the redundancy argument could be used to justify laying off dead weight.
He's saying a responsible adult should not knowingly bring a child into the world without the means to provide for that child.
Is there an online community where hackers share knowledge about library-based hackerspaces?
Contractors can be cheaper than employees, despite paying a higher salary. The reason is that they don't need to do so much legal work or pay their insurances and etc, etc. When a project is finished, they can just end the contract and avoid all of the legality. I've known many people that leave their job as employee and get contracted to the same company for those reasons (and more).
I'm on latest OS X, latest Safari (non-beta), and I tried latest FireFox (non-beta).

The 'good' test works quite well on Safari (except when scrolling), the 'tough' test doesn't run. Both tests work equally well on FireFox, but only 'OK'.
Problems like this make me feel we need two parallel governments and you could subscribe to either.

1. Govt 1: Nanny state. Will support you if you get poor, but you agree to controls on your life.

2. Govt 2: Do whatever. Don't come crying if you crash and burn.
Ask your local ISP or local authorities for your local problem.
Kindle Lending Library: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000739811
The US has the worst of both worlds currently. Relatively high taxes and a wildly inefficient government.

We spend $7 trillion per year in government expenditures, at all levels, and can't even seem to maintain basic infrastructure (we could, but our government is really terrible).
Isn't that what they tacitly implied about G+? That didn't turn out so well...
And they are also likely to be happier than you are ;) Primarily because of the same factors that you've mentioned.
The mean number of calories they eat is too high, but the variance is also too high. Some days they don't eat at all and other days they gorge.
Amazon is working on Kindle Unlimited
I think the issue is expressive power, since FP languages have more power people find them daunting, like calculus, however, like calculus once you understand it many formerly complex problems are quite simple.
I suspect that this is not actually UPS asking these questions. I believe that this is a third party identity verification service that uses publicly available information to confirm that you are who you say you are. My credit union does something similar, instead of security questions, whenever I log in from a new, never before used, IP address.
Of course it is possible to eat well cheaply in America, but it takes resources and know-how that many low-income Americans don’t have.

I think that more food education, especially at a young age, could play a big part in addressing this problem and I wish that the article expanded more on this. I don't know if schools currently have any curriculum revolving around cooking, nutrition and reducing food waste but it could go a long way to prepare these children for rising food prices and the abundance of cheap, low-quality food products.

Edit: grammar
alooPotato: Is there way to split it off to another thread while keeping the same subject?
Biotech needs a serious kick in the pants. It has always been remarkable to me just how little automation is used in the field of molecular biology. There is a huge amount of work that involves humans doing repetitive tasks and then waiting for something to happen. This increases cycle times, limits the number of hypotheses you can test, and is rate-limiting for the whole field. You already have the problem that you are working on living things which need time to grow, reproduce, eat, etc...

Not saying any of it is easy to automate by a long shot. But that kind of innovation is going to be what is needed to propel the field forward.
Are the rest obese?
People Hate Bankers Because People Are Ignorant
YMMV

No. Have you ever noticed the "pot-bellies" of undernourished kids from all those poverty photos from Africa?

That's because they get the cheapest crap we can send/buy them - Rice.

It's not as simple as general thermodynamics.
Kcal in and out is just half the equation.

We eat too much sugar today. Everything has so much damn sugar in it. All sorts of different varieties of carbs that eventually just become blood sugar and activating your insulin causing you to store it all as fat.
Understanding CouchDB Conflicts
Didn't Lucky Ducky [1] show us how unfair corporate income taxes are?

1: http://boingboing.net/2013/05/29/tom-the-dancing-bug-lucky-d...
It's quite possible if you understand the sense of the word "hunger" they're using, which does not comport to one's usual understanding of the term.

Pretend I routinely consume 3000 calories a day of pizza and sugary drinks. The last week of the month, I run out of sugary drinks, and substitute water with my 2000 calories a day of pizza. I am, according to every instrument ever used to measure it, "food insecure" due to the persistent circumstances causing me to consume less than I had planned to. I may or may not feel any physiological response to lacking Coke for a week (hunger as natural people understand the term). I'm quite likely obese, much like I would be if I consistently consumed 3000 calories a day of organic orange juice, free range steaks, and arugula.

The refocusing of anti-poverty programs and rhetoric on food insecurity as opposed to our now deprecated understanding of hunger is due to two causes. One is that food insecurity is more conveniently measurable in a (mostly) scientific fashion. The other is that the US has, for all intents and purposes, eliminated Depression-style hunger. (Though it has not eliminated dysfunctional parents who prefer drugs to feeding their children, which complicates the issue, but if you run into "Hasn't eaten in 3 days" your money should be on "child abuse" rather than "lamentable circumstances.")
Do they tag them with crayons like street parking spaces? Seriously, how does that work - is someone watching for unattended bag.. er kids and then calling police? What's the minimum age requirement for unattended visits to the library?
I'd say this is false dichotomy. Version 1 does not have to control your life. They would have to use more reporting on peoples' lives, (so that it's known who is actually poor and whether people are paying into the pool) but that doesn't mean controlling them. At least not in the way this sentence seems to imply.
I feel for you as a former H1-B holder. If you are past a certain stage you can work for yourself legally. Set up an LLC and get software contracting gigs. If you are in Seattle talk to Kevin Lederman, a leading immigration lawyer and he can advise you accordingly.
> And Opera is dead – it’s essentially a reskinned Firefox.

Opera is not a reskinned Firefox. It uses Chromium as the base, not Gecko.
If that's true, which is doubtful, then their problems should become a 2nd priority, since our 1st priorities should be improving the happiness of the least happy.
The nokia acquisition only brought in about 20k headcount, so one of those numbers can't be right.
As a visiting New Zealander, the one thing I've noticed about the American price structure is that food is reasonably expensive, while superfluous goods aren't. A decent-ish pair of shoes is $50USD; a board game off Amazon $35, (which I'll admit to blitzing while visiting!). Both would probably set you back a minimum of $120NZD back home. Comparatively, our food is cheaper, and generally healthier (Whole Foods feels the closest to a New Zealand supermarket; lots of fresh fruit, vegetables, bulk bins).

The other surprising thing is that debit cards are new-ish here; credit cards are prevalent. Couple the accompanying fees (?) with pricing structures that are less declarative (food advertised sans tax; tipping expected), and it's more difficult to budget. Further, having/using credit means it's always tempting to dip further into it. In comparison, we've had EFTPOS (debit) for decades, sales tax is included in the advertised price, and there isn't a tipping culture.

NZ has its own problems with growing inequality which need addressing, and this is anecdata at best, but I can see why avoiding temptation and sticking to a good budget might be more troublesome.