skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What part of the US tax code retards startups? From what I can tell, for people who are aggressive about taxes, it helps them: search YC for "S-Corporation" and "reasonable salary".

I've never heard someone say "I was going to start a company, but the tax situation is all screwed up." On the other hand, I have heard "I was going to join a startup, but I can't give up my health insurance" several times in the last few months.
I'm a huge Inconsolata fan. I prefer it big (16pt) and use it pretty much everywhere.
This seems like a confusing user experience. Even users who weren't trying to game the system would see they could click it as many times as they want and might try.
OK, I'll bite and say it...

...no you can't make a credible voting or rating system without a login.

It's too easy to game the system to create repeat votes via cookie burning, ip rotation, etc (see the other responses).

Forcing someone to be logged in and then only allowing one vote per poll helps keep all but the most persistent griefers.

To that end, be aware account creation can be automated and unlimited unique email addresses created from one domain.

However, the difference between gaming the system by creating lots of fake accounts and gaming the system via cookie destroying/IP rotation is that the former is easy noticed within your system - assuming you have built such checks in place. It's also lets you easily remove the offending over-votes to restore calm to your survey/poll/etc.
caches well.
I am that friend.
Yep it might be worth the tradeoff. Or incorporate the fingerprint mentioned above, to mitigate the IP problem.
Don't have anything in place right now, that is a good point.
I emailed him several times at nickb.yc@gmail.com about getting newmogul.com back up before starting moniedinterests.com, but he never got back to me.

He is likely doing well. He disappeared for a month (or maybe longer) before and showed up to leave a comment at NewMogul (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=784284).

I suspect he simply moved on. I also suspect he'll be back.
This should be breakdown into age groups to make it more accurate in a sense.
Uh, right. Now visit the page and click on "Borsheim's", which is the furniture store Berkshire owns. Compare web designs.

Berkshire Hathaway spends a lot --- probably hundreds of thousands annually --- on web design. They just don't use it for the Berkshire Hathaway corporate site.

A single Berkshire B share costs over $3000. Nobody buys them on a whim. There is zero business value spiffing up their web presence.
From what I understand the guy who wrote this has some connections with the contractors who are doing the work... point is, he's probably not supposed to have written this (despite it being a public bridge, public property, state tax-funded project).
I think you're talking about a different problem. And this problem specifically deals with responses to threaded comments that are on top.

I think in this case simply flag it if it seems trollish. Or only allow down votes on responses. Because allowing down votes on all comments introduces a whole new set of problems like majority induced silencing.
I think the funniest thing is that you called a link to GEICO from Berkshire an "affiliate link".
Seriously, Aaron? GEICO accounts for almost half of Berkshire's insurance revenue (after their Re operation).

What was it you thought BRK did?
Hey NewMogul enthusiasts,

I missed you, so I made a substitute: http://moniedinterests.com.

Please stop by.
James B. Hunt http://jamesbhunt.com/
This in my vimrc helped tons:

map <down> <nop>
map <left> <nop>
map <right> <nop>
map <up> <nop>

But the big thing that really made it click was just that I used it for real work, not small quick editing tasks. You have to really live in the app for a while before it feels like home.
Product Review: Das Keyboard Model "S"
Deja Vu Sans Mono is highly superior to all the mentioned fonts there. It works perfectly clearly with anti-aliasing. I honestly wonder if the people praising other fonts are just trying to be different. I'm probably being subjective. It would be cool to see some research into the top programming fonts to find which are least tiring to the eyes, most legible when tired or scanning, etc.
Do want. Hopefully we get it up here in Canada :|
I love it, except...

align = center?

Must we?

I guess everyone has their pet peeves...
One of my college professors put that suggestion like this: Write to an audience of intelligent 17 year olds. Ignorant of your topic and unwilling to put up with confusing writing, but curious and capable of understanding complex ideas.

When I followed that advice my writing was clearer and better balanced. I also found that the narrative in every piece (even technically orientated stuff) became stronger.

I don't write essay's any more, but it's still the standard by which I measure every email and comment I write.
In some ways, the author is describing problems similar to those Julian Sanchez discussed in The Perils of Pop Philosophy (which I discuss in turn here: http://jseliger.com/2009/06/01/highly-recommended-the-perils... ). As Sanchez says:

"Those are real enough, but there’s also the problem that the general glut of information and opinion makes it disconcertingly easy to kid yourself about how well you understand a particular topic."

Skimming vacuous websites won't get us to knowledge, and at this point, reading books more often will. The trick is being able to find the pointers to the books you should read, which I think the web is very good at, and which I try to contribute to in my own small way.
Sometimes a response is not worth writing.

If people make reasonable (and even to your knowledge correct) arguments for X, then someone replies to say nothing more than "X is wrong/bad/inefficient" with no counter-argument or evidence, why answer that? If someone makes a bigoted remark (anti-gay, anti-American, whatever), why answer that? If someone's trying to drag a discussion off-topic, why answer that?

The answer is "I don't have to write an answer." You have a channel for expressing a reaction, and just as it's unnecessary to write "That's so right!" replies instead of up-voting, it's unnecessary to give gratuitous replies instead of down-voting.
I'm not against moderation. Read my post again clearly: it's the transparent moderation that rocks.
Did you miss "Are You Online?" | watch event videos here
"the effect is undesired by most"

Says who?
hehe, it does look like an affiliate link now that you mention it.

Logically, BRK should also link to Coke, American Express, and all the companies it holds share in/owns outright. Not only as advertising, but also to give them some google juice. It would look horrifically crassly commercial, of course.
Maybe responding to single comments out-of-context is a questionable methodology.
I'm impressed by the shifting voting trends when a new, dissenting (sub)opinion is attached to a comment. A string of upvotes now is halted/reversed. And the polarity change can happen several times. An articulated position unleashes the silent thinker or is this a characteristic of mob rule? (When it happens to me, it's mob rule. :)

I'm also terribly sad when someone is downvoted in an opinion-thread (e.g. what is your favorite X). I wish one could mark a post as opinion or even upvote-only.
Well, they're good friends with Gates (who's also on the Board and sometimes touted as Buffet's successor). Bill probably installed that one himself :)
I've always wondered what Netflix does. Is their DVD handling/mailing a manual process?
I would start with the parts that have perhaps the widest appeal (e.g. fonts, code marketplace) and work your way back to an editor.

The problem with editors is that they have to compete not only on basic features, but compete with every plug-in that ever existed for existing text editors. And on top of that, server-side storage can be a deal breaker (e.g. hobby projects, who won't pay you, may put up with it, but a business would want to keep its own copies of things).

If you can think of a way to package up the server, e.g. so a business could buy the whole thing and run it behind the firewall on their local stuff, you'll be in good shape.
Any idea how big the resulting weaved product is? I am having difficulty discerning scale....
Pig continues to strike me as a beautiful little improvement in doing analytics work. I don't need Twitter-scale (one of the benefits of charging people money is that it means MySQL is probably adequate in terms of performance for analytics) but I do like the idea of arbitrarily composed questions which hurt my head less than SQL.

Hmm... There is something to think about...
There is zero business value spiffing up their web presence.

Here, something a lot of start-ups can learn. True, they need good design more than Berkshire, but it feels like form completely overtook function.
I disagree re: indentured servitude. This reminds me of Renaissance sponsorship of artists and musicians, such as Leonardo DaVinci. Why not take something that was proven to work and update it for the modern world?

I'd also look at something like Intellectual Ventures, except on a longer term, where smart people are paid to attend the sessions to generate as many new, useful ideas as possible.
I understand what you're saying, but my initial reaction is WTF! Now I need a freaking methodology to surf the net?

I like to think of users as always being right, even when they do things I do not expect or would not approve of. So in this case, even if it weren't me we were talking about, I'd have to take the side of the user poking around at the system, trying to get it to work as well as he can.
It seems like, on the one hand you are criticizing universities for focusing too much on job skills, and on the other hand for producing graduates that can't get jobs. Isn't there a contradiction?
Well...you could forge your user agent string in firefox :).

here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59

It isn't very polite, but neither is not letting you in.

(That said, I really doubt they care if you buy a shirt or not).
... except bill never said that. this is a false meme that really, really needs to die.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."
they aren't majority/whole shareholders in those, so that wouldn't be logical at all ;)

Buffet does take every opportunity to promote his holdings, though you might argue that they're superior if he invested in them in the first place.
I'm in the process of writing my thesis and one of my advisors asked me: "Who are you writing this for?". I had a few ideas, but I answered, "For him and our collaborators."

"Wrong! - You should be writing for the graduate student who will be picking up your work."

Any graduate student or even many professors will be on a similar level when exposed to something new. By explaining stuff at a relatively simple level, with enough intermediate steps to outline the method, most people can grasp how you did what you did.

Maybe not 17 year olds, but aimed at people well versed in mathematics, but not necessarily in that field.
Could be a real market for that...

"Ensure you receive at least ONE brithday card, by sending it youself! By the time your birthday comes round you'll have forgotten you sent it, and will be pleasantly surprised."

Also things like sending letters a year on, with a reminder of what you hoped to achieve that year etc.
But they will probably also sell a lot more phones! A lot of people might buy android phones instead if they can get free navigation there, but apple insists on $99. (Of which they actually keep, what, $20-30$?)
it's http://www.geico.com/geicobrk.htm so there is probably some tracking involved
Agreed, it's 11pt Incosolata for me on my linux emacs, and 13pt Consolas on my windows emacs.

Beautiful fonts.
Why would it not be logical, because he owns a part of a business and not all of it?
"Both can be threatening."

I submit that if one is threatened by others disagreeing with or not appreciating one's contribution to a discussion, one needs to find a more harmonious discussion.
A good friend of mine is the same way. He is a brilliant brilliant investor worth many many many times what I will likely ever make in my lifetime, yet his office consists of a desk, 1 other employee (his accountant), and a computer from the 90s that he uses to play solitaire.

I offered to get him a new one, but he declined because the one he has does everything he needs.

My first reaction was horror, but after having thought about it a while, it makes sense. The guy has been doing this since before I was ever a thought in my parents head, and he is very successful, why change?
I didn't bother with that topic, but your comment seemed like a valid, even if tongue-in-cheek, proposal to me. Apparently 9 other people also had that reaction.
Grady Booch on Design Patterns, OOP, and Coffee
Turn it around: why upvote someone? A downvote is equal and opposite to an upvote; what makes the former "bad" and not the latter?
The Internet's changed the world of education. I can tell, in some of my classes, which of my fellow students were "raised" on the Internet and which weren't. There's a surprisingly large group of people that's stunning professors by understanding the subject matter on a very deep level.

There's also a professor who I doubt knows as much about her subjects as some of her students, or at least isn't teaching like she knows what she's talking about. I think it's very possible nowadays for students to know more about part of a subject than the person that's being paid to teach them.
I didn't even think of the meme.

Personally, I thought of Norm. You don't know Norm, but he's the guy who sold my family our first 386 with a 40MB hard drive and said it was more than we'd ever use. He also sold me a copy of Sim Earth and said it was the best game ever made. The bastard.
"Now I need a freaking methodology"

Sorry, I was trying to be less blunt than ending that sentence with "is a bad idea."

"I like to think of users as always being right"

Here's the problem - you weren't a user being resisted by software in that context. You were a person interacting with other people. You weren't poking at a system, you were having a conversation.
"linking to this website without written permission is prohibited." - http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/disclaimer.html
Some fonts I like that they left off:

Envy Code R
Pragmata
Terminus
Their traffic suggests that there are quite a few people that do.
"It was sea power and air power on Caladan," he said. "Here, it's desert power. The Fremen are the key."
Does it really matter if they're forging the digg count for the ads? Please forgive my ignorance as I am not a frequent user of that website, but the ads aren't things that naturally get put on the page, are they? The amount of "diggs" that an ad has is irrelevant to its placement, no?

So...who cares? This is a bit like getting angry about a diner claiming that their soup is "famous".
While many bikes are still defective, they have fixed the problem with the racks that allowed people to steal bikes (and break the rack at the same time).
There's been a push in my area to introduce a similar concept, but with cars. It's based off of the San Francisco model:

http://www.citycarshare.org

Anyone from the Bay area have any feedback?
Rob Pike's Structural Regular Expressions in Python
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf

"The current UNIX® text processing tools are weakened by the built-in concept of a line. There is a simple notation that can describe the `shape' of files when the typical array-of-lines picture is inadequate. That notation is regular expressions. Using regular expressions to describe the structure in addition to the contents of files has interesting applications, and yields elegant methods for dealing with some problems the current tools handle clumsily. When operations using these expressions are composed, the result is reminiscent of shell pipelines."
I agree, I'm planning on picking one up as soon as the local Verizon store opens up.

For those of also interested in the Droid, check out http://www.droidforums.net
I've been in Paris a number of times and used the system; the biggest issue I've had was finding a bay when time was running out for a charging boundary, as they are on side streets, rather than main thoroughfares. I don't generally have any complaints with the system; rather my complaint is with the article and its odd bias.

So, I presume you don't mean me when you say "you".
Yes. Of course you are correct. I made the mistake of not being fully informed about the conversation before responding.

But I still think overall this process works fine. I just need to take some time to check out the entire thread first.

I view the board more like IRC -- a conversation can start one place and end up somewhere else. So as long as you have 2-3 parents in mind when commenting, you're free to go in a slightly new direction. Some folks, I imagine, view the topics more hierarchically. The site design encourages both views, actually.
Awesome site! Enjoyed the kaws interview, he's one of my favorites.
Colored smoke vortices collide ... [video]
Meh. I've never had a problem with throwing out a dissident opinion on forums with up/down moderation. I've often been surprised how fast I've gotten modded up when I've done that. People do react well to interesting, thought-provoking arguments, and many will avoid down-modding them even when they strongly disagree.

People do not react well to complaints that people who disagree with them are repressed or afraid, especially when the dissenter's expressed fear is that they will be down-modded. (The same goes for the "This will get me down-modded, but..." tactic.)
says whoever upvoted me.
Having used the velibs in my visit to Paris last week, I feel that the article is making the program seem bad on purpose. As a tourist, I found it a brilliant idea.

Typically, out of about 30 or so bicycles in a station, I usually found about 2 in a bad condition. And they were usually NOT vandalized. It was most often a punctured tyre, a bent or missing basket or something similar.

The most serious problem that I found was the fact that sometimes all the docks in the station near your destination would be occupied. I quite liked the bikes themselves, and found them in some respects innovative, but I can't imagine that they cost 3500€. To register in the system you use a credit card from which 150€ is temporarily kept as a guarantee. I can't imagine that the price of the bike is over an order of magnitude more than that.

I wish my home city (Athens) had a program like that.
Well, on Windows, WPF (and hence Visual Studio 2010) can't render text in a raster font, so if you're used to using a bitmap font, you need to convert it to TrueType or OpenType.
This is what capitalism is supposed to be about.

Profits, not mountains of debt. secure jobs, no govt. bailouts, etc. etc. old school.

Buffet will be studied for generations to come.
I switched to geico after progressive said they couldn't get my rate below $100/mo and GEICO did it for about $60 a month.
I have been thinking a lot about striping away all superfluous pixels and limiting the area of function. Especially with the latest idea's of fast development patterns and feedback loops. I am developing a strong understanding of what we could consider a web foundation. Just as if we were building a structure or a machine.

Every time I find websites like this, I immediately think its simple and limited, yet efficient. But I do dislike this website. This company/website doesn't align with my idea of a new communication tool. However, the latest "web 2.0" site doesn't give me inspiration either. It is full of a bunch of pretty lights and distracting content.

Some times I wonder if the web needs a paradigm shift. Starting to think we are over engineering it when we should be focusing on specific function.
This article is missing one very crucial fact. Universities are not only about teaching. For professors looking for jobs at traditional universities, they are looking for a research position. That is the primary purpose for most faculty. Teaching at these types of institutions is by and large a secondary concern for professors. That is not to say they all take it lightly of course.

In terms of learning, universities have never been about training people for careers, at least historically. We have trade schools for that purpose, where the teachers do not have the same credentials as professors at big universities, but they also do not necessarily need them, as has been pointed out by many.

The point of learning at a big university, is that people on the cutting edge of research in a given field have a moral obligation to pass on their knowledge, and teach new experts in that field. This is for the betterment of our culture as a whole. Where else can you get taught by a researcher on the cutting edge? How many research companies allow such access to their core research personal? Let alone have these personal spend almost half their time educating?

This has been the historical purpose of university teaching. It has never been about teaching students jobs skills, but rather about teaching both critical thinking skills, as well as insight from experts the public may not otherwise have access to.

In recent times, universities have been almost forced to accept that they do train people for jobs, in addition to the theory. This is because of the rush for university education for its value in getting any job, however misplaced. Everyone wants the best for their kids, thus the pressure to go for the top, even though 99% of university students simply want a decent paying job, and are not there to learn anything other than a way to get that.

To summarize, yes, university professors matter. They are not simply teachers, but researchers at the forefront of their respective fields. Access to teachers of this sort is extremely important and cannot be replaced by trade schools.

The question being posed by the original article is more a question of how do we teach trade skills, and what is the level of expertise required for that purpose. Should universities operate trade schools on the side? It is perhaps a necessity, if only because of the social stigma associated with actual trade schools. Many universities already employ non-research faculty, i.e. trade school professors, to teach lower level courses, leaving the specialized courses to those who work in those areas. On the other hand, actual trade schools are seemingly on the rise again. That is not a bad thing.
One person upvoted you, at the time of my writing this.

One person is not "most". Everyone commenting in this topic is not "most". Everyone who's ever started a thread against down-voting is not "most", as best as I can tell.
umm, I dunno... because Berkshire doesn't run the business then?
He didn't say Bill. Or it might've been someone with the same name as The Bill Gates.

And 640K is enough for everyone, at least it was enough 30 years ago :)
What the world would look like if light traveled slowly (interactive simulation)
Major points for being the Anti-Hirst, and I do really like Banksy, but he's got a limited range.

I'm glad he's around, and hopefully encouraging others to stir things up.
But Google Maps can already provide directions from A to B, and these factor in one-way streets, etc., so Google should already have that data, right?
This is brilliant. Also, interesting: the Web site said that the father abhorred silence, preferring to listen to classical music. At the bottom, they mentioned that both father and son especially liked The Legendary Pink Dots.

I've included a link to one of their songs; I can just imagine Beksinski painting while listening to this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv5khDimvy8
I personally like that trolling comments tend to rapidly vanish into light-gray text.