skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We tried a luxury tax in the 90s.

Yachts were more expensive and due to highly elastic demand, the industry plummeted. Companies went under or laid off thousands.

But don't worry. Guess who works at yacht manufacturing plants? Not rich people. They weren't hurt, and they were fine with taking their money elsewhere.
At least in theory, agencies also do a lot of account management legwork. Of which there is a lot for large clients. Which merits critical attention, but there it is for now.
While I agree about your general tone there can be arrogance with competence.

It is all about how one presents oneself. Are you open to new ideas? Do you treat other people not as morans that didn't think through their problem somewhat?

So yeah, pretty much your point about being humble.
It did all the work the way computers do all the work on jet planes today, yet pilots still made a big difference. Neil Armstrong saved Apollo 11 from catastrophe, flying the LEM by the seat of his spacesuit.
The third is refraining from posting this quote when one of those two issues comes up.
I never never even used the word "theft". I said that taxation is taking, as opposed to earning.
This. I'm sorry to say that I agree. What is really astonishing is the low quality of the police forces in cities in the United States which pay police very very well (when all of their benefits are taken into account).
Pretty much. And there definitely are jobs like that out there. I once had a job where literally no one would have complained if I didn't do any work except for sitting at my desk, replying to e-mails, and attending meetings (which I don't consider "real" work). Because I was part of a management training program, I was not expected to produce any output, I was just "there to learn." In reality, that meant I was a professional internet surfer and no one cared. I was miserable and left that job as soon as I could afford to.
> Witcher 1 is not available for Linux.

It is playable in Wine, so running Linux on PS4 can enable tons of games both native and Wine compatible (the demo even shows an emulated game which isn't native for Linux either). No idea how good 3D acceleration there will be of course.
been riding bikes for 33 years daily (up to 65km/h every morning last year (ok 50+km/h for 1 km on light slope on the journey to be honest)) and I am as clueless as you.

Displayed information is basically the speed you have for given the size of the wheel, given the rpm (turns per minutes) for each gear and plates.

In school you learn stupid stuff like C = 2pi(R+dr) (R=size of wheel (70cm) + tire (2.5cm) you take the ratio of plate/gear and deduce your gear by making rpm * 2 * pi * (R + dr ) * number of teeths on front / nomber of teeth back. It is basic math.

You can express everything in SI and apply (m/s) x 3.6 to get km/h.

If you do a bit of mental calculus it is easy.

If you actually ride bike it is useless, after some years, your legs know stuffs.

Like the fashion of compact pedalier is freaking stupid and it is impossible to find a decent bike that is not overpriced in north america since lance Armstrong won the tour de france, and that it has put a lot of douchebags with too much money and not enough civility on bikes.

But I guess this if off topic...

Like the fact my wife and I nearly die every day commuting on our bikes and that we have at least 2 accidents a year.

Sometimes with people in SUV going out of town with their 11k$ bikes attached at the rear.
It looks like it is hard as hell to balance on. The riders in the videos are obviously having a hard time. And there is no video of any forward motion.
"Conscious Taxpayer Award", aka "You're completely out of your fucking minds but we'll take the money"

Focusing on the largely theoretical concepts of tax and law is an extremely inefficient way to try to understand Moldova, as well as a number of other countries.
MacinTalk predates the Amiga release (it was released alongside the Mac in 1984, but not officially supported -- it worked fine; Plaintalk became an official component of the Mac in the early 90s and included [terrible] speech recognition).
1) Wages and bonus income aren't taxed differently.

2A) When you take into account corporate taxes, inflation, and risk the difference between tax rates on wages and cap gains aren't as big as you might think.

2B) Many economists argue that there should be no capital gains taxes at all as they create a distortion between consumption and saving behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_capital_income_taxatio... is as good of a place to start as any on this discussion. I also like http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/01/27/a-quick-economics-... if you prefer things in parable form.

3) With respect to carried interest I generally agree with you but this piece will make some people question their opinions on the matter:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/business/capital-gains-vs-...
1) We have no idea what this person does. He could be a tobacco company executive (or substitute some position you find immoral).

2) You have no idea what I do.
The top AI breakthroughs of 2015
Likewise, innocentoldguy. Happy to continue. Send me an email.
How brain architecture relates to consciousness and abstract thought
I remember reading an intuitive explanation of this effect. Separate from the three reasons provided in the article.

Basically it goes like this- our perception of time is relative to the memories we have. At any given moment, we have a finite space to conceptualize time, and the size of this space is fixed our whole life.

As a two year old, you have only two years of memories spread across the entire expanse of your fixed time-space, but as a twenty year old you have ten times as many, crammed into the same conceptual space so to speak. So when youre older each memory occupies a shorter piece of space and with shorter memories time feels faster.

Put another way, if we were to allow ourselves 60 seconds (or some fixed amount) to conceive and flip through all our memories, time would seem to pass a lot faster the more memories we had.
thrway has pointed out quite thoughtfully elsewhere that another more efficient way to get out of this situation would be to pay the right "tax" to the right "government department". Crowdfunding ransom money instead of international pressure is a far more reasonable approach.
Changes Made During California’s Drought Could Help It Survive the Next One
In some cases, that's all that's needed. higan (formerly bsnes) is essentially perfect as a SNES emulation engine, and openemu makes it really easy to install and use.
The 750 GeV Diphoton Bump: What It Cannot Be
Given that, at least back when I still used the Amiga, the community Amiga Resource Project (ARP) was free, open source, and superior in all respects to Commodore's "official" AmigaDOS, so much so that it was adopted by Commodore at one point, why would one want this?

I find it hard to believe Commodore got better at writing system software as it got worse at everything else and then went bankrupt.
money are gone, it was a typical KS scam
There may be awesome companies out there where anyone is empowered to just go fix some practice that's not productive, no matter where they are in the org chart, but those companies are few and far between. I'd love to see one.

One thing I would consider doing, if I ever start my own company or rise high enough up in someone else's company to implement this, is to give every single employee some sort of discretionary budget to spend on things that make the workplace better. The more experienced and trusted you are, the bigger of a budget you get. I think this would go a long way in fighting the learned helplessness dynamic.
Jesper Louis Andersen Interview: Languages, Software and Protocol Design
Why is this all in pastebins? As opposed to company website, personal blog, Kickstarter, something even vaguely reputable...?
With Taps on the Wrist, Apple Watch Points to the Future
Everyone is always fine spending other people's money
> a potentially problem-riddled organization that by-and-large accepts, even embraces, a high rate of failure

It seems like a huge leap to go from having one slow month of growth to "problem-riddled" organization that "embraces a high rate of failure". That's not something I took away from the blog post.

Also, I've used Keen before. Their product and engineering is really great, and I've never had issues with the API itself, the dashboard widgets, reliability, quality, etc.
We currently have no legal system that can operate in a world without privacy. Maybe in a future someone could invent one, but current judge, jury, lawyer and prosecutor system require that each role has sufficient amount of privacy to be functional.

Imagine being in a trial against Google, knowing that they have access to information for all the participants and their family and friends. Internet searches, phone calls, purchases, browser history, location data, voice recordings, and all the analytic tools to analyze and extrapolate what details can be used for manipulation and sell an argument. How could such trial ever been conducted in a fair way?
it didn't occur to me but you're completely right: probably the best way to get out of the situation is to crowdfund ransom money and figure out who to give it to (and get the company the fuck out of there in medium-term)

Crowdfunding international pressure instead is a waste of time and their supporters' very scarce attention and interest.
SAM (the Software Automatic Mouth) was available in 1982 for Apple, Commodore, & Atari 8-bit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth
Thanks for pointing out my mistake, I have corrected the code to simply return from the stack.
People were not running Linux on PS3 for desktop/server usage. They were running it there for scientific computations. This was before GPGPU (cuda/opencl) became better price/performance choice.
Did anyone here manage to snag the code before the open source program was shut down?
The US Marines are often cited in management literature as an example of an organization where the leadership communicates high-level intent and purpose to achieve strategic alignment, and then totally decentralizes tactical decisionmaking to the people doing the actual work in the field. The stereotype that they are just all about top-down decisionmaking and following orders, is false. They recognize that individuals need to be able to make decisions on the fly in order to react to volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
But the parties they sell it to, for substantial combat-enabling cash, will.
(I wanted to add this to my other reply, but it's too late for that.)

Is there a method naming convention in Objective-C where the phrase "withExceptionXYZ" in the method declaration means "this method may throw an instance of ExceptionXYZ"?

This is from https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/... :

public static void readExceptionWithOperationApplicationExceptionFromParcel(
Parcel reply) throws OperationApplicationException {
int code = reply.readExceptionCode();
if (code == 0) return;
String msg = reply.readString();
if (code == 10) {
throw new OperationApplicationException(msg);
} else {
DatabaseUtils.readExceptionFromParcel(reply, msg, code);
}
}

I don't know Objective-C at all. Would this method name truly feel correct in that language?

Thanks.
> There is no basis to conclude, then, that Deputy Burns or Deputy Blake should have known that the field test kits they were using tended to yield false positive results.

How does the deputies claiming they had "no knowledge", were "not aware" or have had "thousands" of other tests used with no issues absolve them? How is the burden of knowledge not squarely on their shoulders as they are the agents administering the tests and submitting them as evidence to the court?
While you can always find the degenerate case; it is somewhat of a strawman.

I personally don't get too hung up on whether a given test is a unit test, a system test or an integration test. For any reasonably sized project you're eventually going to have all of those. And sometimes something that was a unit test will suddenly become a test that crosses multiple units as requirements change and as dependencies get added to the project.

The viewpoint I take is that tests are an integral part of the software, they may not be part of the final delivered artifact but they are part of what defines the software.

You should be thinking as much about how to test that your code is doing what it should as to how to make it do so in the first place. If you do that you will have a far better understanding of the intent of any given piece of code and you will have done half the work of debugging before you write the bugs.
So what did your boss say to that? Guessing the latter, because it sounds like you don't work there anymore...
I agree with your sentiment as far as marijuana is concerned (and really all drugs), but the "it's just a plant" argument isn't solid in general. For example, if the police had evidence of a surreptitious castor bean grow room, and evidence of something being chemically extracted from the plant material, I think that may be enough to justify a search warrant to determine what's going on. Of course that evidence would have to come from someone capable of telling the difference between castor beans, tea leaves, their ass, and their elbow.
Top Things I Learned in 2015
The OS should still allow users to install and run applications without going through an all-or-nothing permission approval process.

The API should just provide the application with blank data for each data source for which permission has not been explicitly granted.

Ex: address book with 0 people for contacts, silence for microphone, black screen for camera, north pole for GPS location, etc.

That way users can opt out of specific functionality of an application which does not provide them with any value while still opting into and utilizing the functionality of an application which does provide them with value.
And if you ever run out of things to do, you can shave your yak.
I agree, I wasn't saying I'd prefer it the other way, only stating what I thought the consequences would be.
That example is over the top, but yes any salesman will tell you that a good sales pitch is more likely to win customers then a list of red flags.
I think there is an often overlooked proportionate argument. Which is not only should punishments be proportional to the crime committed. But enforcement efforts should be as well. Personally I don't see why the courts should shield the cops from liability when they are obviously being sloppy. Seriously if cops going to bust down someones door and point guns at them then they need to dot their i's and cross their t's.

Personally I think a lot of Judges came of age during the Dirty Harry era. We won't see much change until death and senility removes them from office.
> You earn $1MM per year.

That means that someone valued my time, ability and labor enough to pay me for it. That is, the exchange took place because given the circumstance of my employer, my time, ability and labor were worth more to them than $1MM. I was just able to capture the $1MM portion.

The idea assertion 'I spend too much' absent any context is as meaningless as the assertion that 'the government spends too much.'
I don't know it by name but this quote reveals it pretty soundly: "We shall approach astronomy as we do geometry, by way of problems, and ignore what is in the sky." (Plato's Republic) This kind of thinking is likely the same sort of thinking that got Kepler off the track trying to force the Pythagorean solids into planetary orbits in his Harmonices Mundi.

(maybe call it "Pseudoscientism" a belief that merely scientific-looking commonalities are in fact universalities)
I don't know if anyone has made a serious attempt to tackle that question, but I would also be surprised if many people genuinely believe that donating a dollar to the US federal government is better for society than donating it to any remotely competent charity.

If you're donating to specific government programs, sure, some of those are pretty similar to charities (although you can probably find a more efficient charity in nearly any area of focus). But simply donating a dollar into the funding of the US government, and having it split the same way that all US government revenue gets spent, seems to me like an obviously poor choice.
I've read the 25x conversion number is low and out of date. Is the following source more credible than EPA?

> In the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, methane has a lifetime of 12.4 years and with climate-carbon feedbacks a global warming potential of 86 over 20 years and 34 over 100 years in response to emissions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global-warming_potential#cite_...
> It showed that the effective tax rate paid by those Americans jumped in 2013 to nearly 23 percent.

As a data point, my family paid 28% average federal tax, on AGI of $355k. We are California residents. Taxes are regressive on the higher incomes, and that doesn't seem right.
Once someone dies anyone can submit a FOIA request for their records.
If you just dropped the Einstein part, it would be a perfectly fine comment.
It's not a terrible solution. Ideally a flat tax (which pretty much always means a lower rate than high earners pay) simplifies the tax system, and makes high earners less likely to evade taxes. However it doesn't change the fact that really high earners get a lot of their wealth from investments, so in the end they'll still pay a lower total 'rate'. The highest tax burden will still be paid by upper middle-class professionals who have a high salary but few investments.

If governments really want to collect taxes from the ultra-rich, a wealth tax is what is necessary. However that alone poses problems because 'wealth' is not always liquid - do you tax the old lady whose house has appreciated significantly but who doesn't have an income? Do you tax an entrepreneur whose firm is worth several million but hasn't actually realized any significant income?

Anyhow, just a few musings, but the summary is that taxes are hard. Too high and people evade them, too low and the government has a shortfall...
> I think a pure flat tax would actually be bad for the country implemented immediately

It would be bad in any form, it's regressive; marginal utility and all that, taxes should be progressive or they're not a fair burden.
My instinct is that this post being on the front of HN, along with the tenor of the comments, is evidence of it working. I'd wager that her post is serving as an incredibly effective piece of content marketing. HN is the perfectly audience for Keen's product, and getting on the front of HN for a full day is a big win both for reaching customers and new recruits. Certainly some people will have your reaction, but another significant percentage will have a positive reaction, as demonstrated in the comments.
re "Doesn't accepting that kinda ruin the whole basis of their life's work?"

Not for Newton, Pascal, Maxwell, Planck, Heisenberg, John Lucas, John Eccles, or John Stewart Bell -- all religious.

There is also a group who aren't religious but see reason to believe in a universal consciousness, e.g. Bohm, Schroedinger, and Penrose.

Biologists seem to be more prone to deny the supernatural, presumably due to the culture wars surrounding the teaching of evolution.
I have corrected the code by removing the reference.

The way the code is now structured will allow for the RVO (Return-value optimization) to occur, so the new instance will be constructed in the location of the receiving object.

Move semantics would not apply in this case, it would actually suffer from a similar problem as the version that returned a reference, except the program would not crash. Instead the return value would contain garbage.

(edit: added a link to details on how to use move semantics)
http://codeofthedamned.com/index.php/c-r-value-references

I did not use expression templates, or try to optimize any of the implementation because my intent is to demonstrate "how" to get started with the math. I also wanted to make the code accessible to programmers that do not use C++. For example, someone trying to learn WebGL.
I sympathize greatly with flood victims .I used to live in an Ohio river valley and had my house flooded many times. Some may suffer from worst-in-history floods this year.

However, I currently live in Southern CA and am very happy there might be some relief from our current worst-in-CA-history drought. I haven't read anything about this silver lining.
You still have to have paperwork on informants.

I guarantee you that a Policeman's Union is going to stop you if it looks like you're using informants as a cheap source of labor to perform police scutwork such as stakeouts and other such surveillance.
> Take one example: the fact that if I sign a contract I will feel legally obligated to follow through on it. This provides tremendous social good (billions of dollars worth), but it's very hard to quantify exactly how much.

It's not so clear how much of a service the government is providing there. Do you eagerly sign contracts with people you suspect would cheat you if they thought they could get away with it?
I get the spreadsheet. I get that there should not be two answers. What I'd ask you is where is your moral compass? Where do you think the taxes should be?
ah, sorry, that was DOS Navigator, also very useful, it even had trash bin!
Rather than badmouthing AWS while you are a Linode employee, I would suggest minding your own business and protect your network from the attacks and massive outages it faces over the last 5 days.

A Linode client for more than 2 years, but now about to move elsewhere after 5 days of outages and no hope or official word explaining if the problem will be solved for good.
> It's not a terrible solution.

It's precisely a terrible solution. Yes, taxes are hard, but a solution that punishes the poor (or the not rich) by not recognizing the marginal utility of money is terrible in any form.
That link returns 404.
Mark Zuckerberg's Free Basics argument doesn't address conflicts of interest
This is remarkable. I always find it interesting when bugs like this occur.

It reminds me of a hackathon I attended where a food ordering startup (I forget the name, but they were chosen to feed us dinner that night) had a similar bug, which baffled me beyond belief. Without going into crazy detail about my password, it typically follows a certain pattern but is never the same across websites. For some reason, the website kept saying my password was invalid. It met all the password requirements that the website asked for (length, capital letter, etc.).

I forget the exact details, but it ended up being the exact location of a capital letter, the location of a number, or some combination of both. I could never figure out how a bug like that could even be coded up. My best guess is that it was some poorly-formed regex.

> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.
Provincial amateurs. Don't have to look as far as US: every municipality, region and the federal gov't in Russia is doing the same but with more skill and elegance.

Speaking of which, any official GDP statistic is probably a number with zero significant digits. Figuring out what the off-the-grid money flows are is a difficult and personally reckless task, and there's a million reasons to suspect a great deal of artistic licence in any above-ground records.
It doesn't matter what you or he does. We don't tax people based on how much we like them?
(Mostly) Python baby!
OpenERP and Dedupe, along with OpenBR and OpenCV.

http://idtlabs.sl/how-open-source-software-helped-end-ebola-...
http://idtlabs.sl/idt-labs-providing-tech-solutions-for-ebol...