skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
where the definition of confirmed = "an anonymous source says to a semi-accurate publication".
"Centralized planning"?

I don't think you can "tune the level" because the thing is not algorithmic. Every town / situation is unique. That's why every project is managed at the local and state levels, gets political, some interest group wants discounts, etc. In the meantime, all a company wants to do is to recoup its billions.

Maybe this is a problem where over time the government takes over and gives ok service for a while, then it sucks again (as many government initiatives do), then it gets privatized again, etc., all over a few decades (so irrelevant for today's consumers).
The FICA cap is 115k.
two dashes and a space before your ~/.signature :)
> Thankfully my city is replacing as many stop signs as possible with traffic circles, where you'd have to be a complete idiot to yield to someone who got there after you.

In Seattle, we have traffic circles in many of our residential neighborhoods. People still do this here. Another common thing is people taking lefts by just driving on the left side of the circle (I've had people honk at me for taking lefts the correct way)
Denver Water coined the term "xeriscape" (xeros is Greek for "dry") to describe this. They have extensive documentation on how to make it happen, as well as a xeriscaped garden you can tour at their headquarters.

http://www.denverwater.org/conservation/xeriscape/
Capitalism doesn't require free markets. As long as the ISPs are privately owned and operated for profit, it's still capitalism.
The Internet isn’t as transparent as you think
Last time I was in San Jose, I was surprised by how terrible the WiFi was at the hotel I stayed at. You could tell most of the guests were programmers, yet I could barely get 96k. And I specifically asked for a room close to the router. I guess maybe the boom in Silicon Valley means hotels can fill rooms without having competitive WiFi?
If you're not home, then how can you be robbed?

Robbery != Burglary.
Playing music on streams isn't stealing music. If the people listening to the stream like the music they hear, they're likely to try to find out what it is they're listening to and go listen to more of it. That means more music sales, not less.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
As internal counsel for YC, it was very upsetting to learn about the ongoing troubles at Amicus. It was particularly distressing to hear about the payroll tax issues, given that YC has funded excellent companies that specialize in accounting and payroll for small businesses, such as Indinero and Zenpayroll. The tone of Seth's post suggest that YC has supported Seth in all of his recent actions. That is not true -- YC supports its companies through good times and bad, but we do not support illegality. For example, in paragraph 3 Seth writes that PG looks for founders that are "naughty" and writes about levels of rule-breaking. YC's principal tenets are to "make something people want" and "talk and listen to users/customers" -- YC may promote a culture of disruption, but that does not mean neglecting payroll taxes and breaking rules.
I remember the Accupay name because a friends business got caught up in that and unfortunately his company did not survive.

Having a ton of friends in the US means that sometimes I get requests if I can help someone out on short notice, in that particular case there wasn't anything I could do. (I was relatively short on cash at the time but even if that had not been the case I probably would not have stepped in.)
The New VP of Product Management Is A Wet Noodle
I've actually been thinking about it from the other perspective. Why exactly do companies want Bay Area VCs? I get it when you have exceedingly expensive up front costs like R & D, but in the current age of ultra cheap internet infrastructure and what appears to be zero stigma about asking your employees to work at lower than market rate, VC money seems like an overvalued property, especially when how paltry that money is compared to other industries.

So the obvious answer is that VCs are not there to provide money. They are there to provide a process/leadership to acquisition. So if you are a founder who is more interested in building something than an equity event, maybe there is a better way to do it than the VC funding route.
There's also uzbl which is a browser that natively supports vi-like browsing http://www.uzbl.org/ but beware, there were some bugs with the TLS validation process iirc, not sure if they're fixed yet.
It's a way of using multicol to save screenspace. For Wikipedia references, this works well even in scrolled environments. It would not work so well for body text du to columns then being longer than the height of the screen. For longer articles, pagination is required.
I think McKinsey & Co might be bootstrapped. They made $7.8B in 2013, but it was founded almost 100 years ago. They reached $1B in 1991, which was 65 years after it was founded.
A very good point. But most agriculture water in California is used in livestock production... esp. Alfalfa.

If water for agriculture were not so heavily subsidized by taxpayers, the market would likely correct the shortage fairly quickly with changes in diet (which arguably might have some health benefits as well).

http://www.publiclandsranching.org/htmlres/wr_guzzling_water...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/meat-makes-the-pla...
I find anything with words distracting. Even people talking around me distracting. I listen to deep house form soundcloud or trance on spotify. These allow me to fall into focus.
It's also much cheaper, since it has per-minute billing rather than per-month billing, and no setup fee. Getting temporary access to 100 Hetzner servers would cost you ~€10,000, because you have to pay a setup fee plus a minimum one month rental for each one, while it looks like it'd only cost you ~€100 to get 100x OnMetal servers for an hour. If someone stands to benefit enough, you'd be screwed in either situation, but it lowers the cost of opportunistically sowing some malware.
This language is only used by GuideWire people. And whoever talks about it positively are GuideWire employees.

It was called GScript before. The creators of the language did it because they could, but then some consultant dude gave them the idea to write an insurance application on it. They wrote Guidewire claims center, plus a bunch of proprietary development tools to support the language. Do I have to say what went wrong?

Anyway, eventually they found it was too hard to maintain the language and keep any traction on it, so they open sourced it and called it Gosu.

I spent a lot of time with this thing. My best advice is: stay away from it.
Valet parking gets similar benefits to capacity (since you don't need lanes between the cars if you can double/triple/quadruple park)
Google's lack of support for WP is WP's biggest weakness.
I find the dismissive tone and holier and thou attitude that Aaronson has garnered more that bit of notoriety for really detrimental to the growth of both our collective understanding of QM and our understanding of computability. if knowledge is truly power, lording your knowledge over a peer is paramount to oppression. A bit dramatic, of course, but not completely without warrant.

This maybe a bit of a kumbaya, everyone hold hands argument, but I'm going to make it. Its not as if the number of people that have the ambition to collect the wealth of knowledge required to characterize(even incorrectly) any perspective overlap between computation and quantum is exactly a huge working set. I don't consider it reasonable to shit on someone's work so indiscriminately in this space where its rather hard to be right and quite easy to be wrong.

Prima facie, the paper was accepted for publish in a peer reviewed journal (Physical Science International Journal), and. from all the terse looks of it I've encountered, is likely erroneous on a fundamental level. Highlighting this is not meant to imply that peer-review is a good/bad measure of academic muster, but rather an indicator of how complex comprehending and qualifying such theories might be.

My point is, even in its incorrectness, a bravo for thinking so wildly is likely in order.

Disclaimer: I'm a quantum chemist and computer scientist. I'm also not the biggest fan of Scott Aaronson, so I might be harder on him that is likely deserved.
And I have my fingers crossed for Chromecast support.
But, once the municipality is done with the fiber, then running the service is "relatively easy." Since the primary asset you are selling is bandwidth, what would be left to let more than one competitor compete for/differentiate? Service? Possibly, maybe faster setup times, etc. But those are "one time" things only.

I think bandwidth is becoming a necessity and local government can deliver it (for the record, I did not vote for Obama last time! ;-)
Jeebus that thing is huge. That wasn't a small bulldozer. It's not the biggest they make but it's definitely no joke. It weighs 18 tons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterpillar_D6
True. However, current drone usage is to fly over interesting areas. These areas are interesting because of natural beauty (ocean, lake, mountain etc) or because of people. Crowds, Times Square, sporting events, etc. For example me using a drone at Park City filming my friends snowboarding has a much larger risk of hitting someone that on the empty desolate mountain 1 mile over. But no one flies drones over on that empty mountain because it is boring. I don't know what the percentage of hitting someone might be but certainly higher for current drone usage than flying a drone over a random city with equally spaced inhabitants. :)

And kudos on your calculations, I had never seen this done before. This is the type of math that "news" stories need to have.
Glitch crashes global US passport, visa operations
Turn-only lanes (using a turn-only lane to go straight) is where I see the worst cheater/vigilante behavior. (It's always BMW's who do it, too... )

Those turn-only lanes are just wasted capacity that could be used to carry more traffic into a zipper merge. I'm guessing that at some peak hour the turn lane has utility, but at reverse-peak they should be able to switch to a regular lane leading to a merge point.
I'm confused as to why I wouldn't teach students how to use a text editor. What else would you suggest they write their code using?
Sure. Software patents are an obvious case of State enforced monopolism.
We obviously have different points of view: I find that the best presentations on mobile devices often borrow more from paged designs than from scrolled designs. As such, I believe that being able to paginate content on dynamic screens is important for the future of CSS and the web.

Pages and columns have been basic building blocks in typography since the Romans started cutting scrolls into pages. This is not why browsers should support them. We should do so because they help us make better, more beautiful, user experiences on mobile devices.
These Smart Shoes Work With Google Maps To Make Sure You Never Get Lost Again
Here we see in a smaller scale what a lack of ISP competition does to a region. This is basically what many municipalities bought into in order to afford Comcast's infrastructure 15 years ago.
As expected there's a ton of negativity towards Google in the comments here. Congrats to the Twitch team and I hope that Google and Twitch do some interesting things with this acquisition.
Thank you for this note, good to see YCs position on stuff like this.

But to clarify the point the OP made about being 'naughty' had to do with a different part of the narrative, the one where promises were made to customers, not the part where they do not pay the withheld payroll taxes (the illegal component).
The biggest advantage to self-driving cars is that you don't have to buy a car, so the car doesn't wander aimlessly, it just picks somebody else up and taxis them around.
"In NL we actually do have such a 'bright line', a very reasonable amount that anybody in the hot seat is required to pay out of their business on an annual basis as a salary."

That is the floor, it's not a 'bright line'. If the field of that particular business the 'usual salary' is higher, you have to pay yourself that, and you're at the mercy of the tax office in the same way, because they decide what is the 'usual salary'. Also, a director is not allowed to pay themselves less than their employees, for example.

That said, it is true that it is fairly easy to get into contact with an inspector and get advice on how to proceed.
> 30 years perhaps?
No, 2^30 is 1,073,741,824
Monopolies or Oligopolies are the epitome of capitalism. Your choice of providers is thus already optimized.
To be fair, for what I understand the lawyering up was more about it violating the terms of service and being able to save the videos offline and skip ads. Google can't be expected to support every single native mobile market out there. What is windows phone's market share these days? A few percentage points?
This launched last November. Haven't heard much news about since though.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/introducing-helpouts-...
It probably self-selects a better client base. Not so sure if switching would be an advantage.
It didn't kill the whole article for me, although it seems to be a consistent misconception rather than an isolated typo. To be fair, the naming convention is pretty tricky, considering NP-hard contains things outside NP.
Have you tried clearing your cache and cookies?
Facebook shares hit record high as market likes earnings
(2^30) / 100 = 10737418.24
Will ycombinator receive anything from this as they initially funded justin.tv (where twitch spun off from)?
From my experience, South America, Africa, and the Middle East have horrifying traffic behavior, but at least everyone follows the same unofficial rules of the road. Eventually, you can somewhat reliably predict how someone on the road will behave.

Different areas in the US have very different driving cultures, and the transient nature of the DC area means that drivers bring their habits from wherever they came from, and so everyone is obeying slightly different driving cultural norms. It's a mess.
I understand that they sent some mailings, but at some point...months in, or even years in...you would expect an investigator to be tasked with hunting this company down. That ultimately is not a difficult task (aside from obvious and trivial web searches, contacting one of the employees who claimed to have paid tax, the government getting none of it). This seems like the sort of oversight that in most cases would leave the government holding the bag.
Road capacity and driver efficiency are related. Roads have a theoretical capacity that is rarely reached due to inefficiencies in driver's habits.
that is actually awful.

their ratio of infrastructure cost to revenue will never look good.
A few water and the southwest related articles:

Water and Texas:
http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/print-view/who-stole-the...

Arizona and wildfires (and water):
http://www.azcentral.com/news/wildfires/yarnell/arizona-wild...

SoCal's current water management (shorter than the other articles):
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-famiglietti-south...
I think it's pretty important to convey or at least have a clear definition of the concept of the Universe being a simulation.
Designing exascale computers
I had the idea a long time ago for a decentralized network with really small object size limits and bandwidth caps. It dodges a lot of the scalability problems. The idea would be for people to use it for communication, not big file transfer. If someone wanted to send a file they could post a magnet: link or a regular http: link, etc.
Well that's rather useful.
Wisest advise in this thread. My mind boggles at the idea that apparently there are investors who give money to people who do their own taxes.
I believe that AWS account creation requires unique emails & card numbers, but I'm not sure. There is definitely a telephone call with voice PIN, so I highly doubt that they used AWS accounts directly.

I think the "Amazon" spin in the title is from many other services running atop of EC2 and effectively reselling EC2 instances or access to VMs that run on EC2. They could more easily create accounts with these services and technically still run "within Amazon's cloud".
The way the tax office works is simple: the biggest holes get plugged first, the smaller ones can wait until they've become either big holes or until they've been resolved.

Usually they are resolved. By the time a small company has developed a big enough hole for the tax company to start tasking people with plugging the hole you're in very very hot water.

It's a resource allocation problem like any other.
I had a similar situation and I either wrapped them in really simple tkinter interface or used py2exe. Sometimes I wrote up some dialogues to get user input to control the script wrap it up in a folder with a .sh file that runs the python script and just tell them that the .sh file is the program. Double click, opens program, follow instructions (hacky and fragile but got the job done).

They were usually limited in scope enough where I just let the script crash on most errors and just warned the users about it.
Tax dollars paid for a lot of the work done to install the basic infrastructure. The telecoms still have a lot of skin in the game, but they've had lots of help along the way.

Consumers are getting screwed in both ends, regardless.
the new faux pas will be you streamning a game on twitch and it showing up on your gplus status, which also shows up on your gmail address that your boss happen to have.
“If Only We Had” On Bootstrapped Limitations
"The tone of Seth's post suggest that YC has supported Seth in all of his recent actions. That is not true -- YC supports its companies through good times and bad, but we do not support illegality."

FWIW I didn't get that impression from the post. Here's what I assume he was referring to:

"4. Naughtiness

Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination."

http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

I think not paying taxes would obviously fall in the "rules that matter" category.
Zipper merging inside an intersection will almost certainly lead to gridlock due to incomplete mergers before the light changes.
A dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6248771.
"No cliff" is wishful thinking. Everyone has had the experience of hiring someone who ended up not working out. It almost always takes more than a month to come to that conclusion, and a little longer still to act on it. And finding a viable cofounder is harder than hiring.

Having someone who worked for you for a couple months walk away with tens of basis points of ownership is a pathological situation, not something you should deliberately optimize for.
Iran invasion was in the 80s, Kuwait was 1991. Following the latter, the imposed weapons inspections and economical sanctions reduced Iraq to a non-threat. His chemical weapons were destroyed; hundreds of inspections found nothing. There were no intelligence rumblings of any hostile plans on Iraq's part, aside from a later, minor Kuwait incident.

The US and the UK ignored the utter lack of evidence and preemptive decided he had WMDs anyway, with zero solid evidence to back those claims up; the two main "defectors" who described mobile chemical weapons labs were provided by Chalabi, and nobody did the due diligence to check if their claims were enough grounds for an invasion.

Not to mention the other purported reason for going to war, the Al Qaeda connection. As a secular state who clamped down on religious extremism, Iraqi support for Al Qaeda was nonsensical. Iraq sought to cooperate with the US against Al Qaeda, but were rebuffed.
To be pedantic, if Google's goal is to eliminate Windows Phone altogether, then that would be compatible with their mission statement.
That's certainly one perspective.

Here's another one: Gosu is the life's work of some talented developers at a successful startup, who have tried hard to build a pragmatic successor to Java. It is not perfect, and of course you should be skeptical of any new technology, but it has some promise, and here are some interesting features of the language:

* Type-safe reflection with feature literals

* Embedded classpaths in programs, including maven coordinates

* Integrated type-safe templates

* Pragmatic extension methods on the core java data structures via enhancements

* Null-safe operators

* Mixin support via the delegate keyword

And so on...
What's the evidence for the link between west coast droughts in recent years and global warming? (I'm not trying to start a debate, just genuinely asking).
That's arguably true of a lot of music copyright infringement. I don't think it will stop the lawyers.
I don't see any reason it shouldn't be possible to support pre-compilation steps as part of the IDE. Unless you are actively editing the bits that are compiled, it seems like this should work, but I am not an expert on what goes on behind the curtains of IDEs.
First, I think xcubed is right about #1. Not paying taxes should be considered a criminal negligence. All companies should operate within specified rules by the law and if one company does not it gets an unfair advantage over others. As a stakeholder in a company one should learn how to run the daily operations or hire some bookkeeper that can.

The other points (2-3) I don't see any problem as that's how all the companies that I know operate. Everybody sells half-ready products. I would even consider stupid not to do that.

Regarding the employees I think that every employee that joins a company is part of the and the team fails as a one. I have been a part of a failing team and I don't hold the company's owners resposible of my future career. I don't think Enron's owners were very much interested in the re-employment of their staff either.

I was once listening to a lecture by Monty Widenius and he said that statistically an enterpreneur succeeds in the third startup he/she gets going. Failures just teach us how to do things better. A culture where a failure is considered as our only lost chance of success does not lead to anybody succeeding.
I'm looking in Portland, Oregon. Looks like your site is Bay Area-only? Looks like a fun side project!
Other things that have been worth their weight in gold while traveling: my thinkpad with built-in ethernet AND vga!
I can corroborate this. I did a network setup at a B&B that hadn't had any wi-fi since the place got internet.

We bumped up their ISP plan to proper business class and got an upgraded router to boot. I ran wire from it to each floor via existing conduit and set up APs. No middle-man slave master for internet and certainly anyone else can service the setup after I was done. No other contract except their ISP. Everyone was happy.

A neighbouring place just a few turns away had wireless quite early from some archaic monster and they charge a hefty fee too. I have better reception on my cell when I'm in a low valley than at that place - 2 bars max. All the guests were huddled in the lobby.
That's an improvement over most recent confirmations.