skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was interested in some of the mechanisms that they use specifically. Here are some examples from the article:

1.

Mr. Loeb, for example, has invested in a Bermuda-based reinsurer — an insurer to insurance companies — that turns around and invests the money in his hedge fund. That maneuver transforms his profits from short-term bets in the market, which the government taxes at roughly 40 percent, into long-term profits, known as capital gains, which are taxed at roughly half that rate. It has had the added advantage of letting Mr. Loeb defer taxes on this income indefinitely, allowing his wealth to compound and grow more quickly.

2.

One aggressive strategy is to place income in a type of charitable trust, generating a deduction that offsets the income tax. The trust then purchases what’s known as a private placement life insurance policy, which invests the money on a tax-free basis, frequently in a number of hedge funds. The person’s heirs can inherit, also tax-free, whatever money is left after the trust pays out a percentage each year to charity, often a considerable sum.
Personally I think tax and welfare should just be simplified to a flat rate of tax and a universal basic income to all citizens.

That way we avoid welfare being a trap (no welfare is lost when the claimant gets a job). And we simplify both the collection of tax and the payment of welfare, saving significant cost.

Finland are going to pilot this:

http://finlandpolitics.org/2015/11/05/710/

I think it's an idea that could appeal to both the Right (like myself) and the Left.
It's relevant for at least two reasons, in my opinion. The first is that video games, like novels, are stories told through the the protagonist/s. If this character is always male, you miss out on a whole class of stories which are women's stories. Just as literature rarely told women's stories upon a time, video games up to the present time rarely tell women's stories.

The second reason is that having a female protagonist changes the entire meaning of the story. Consider Pierre Menard, author of Quixote (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the...), which discusses how the particular context of the author effects the meaning of the work.

Wikipedia had an excellent article about gender representation in video games https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_representation_in_vid... . One part of the article notes:

> 60% of girls but only 39% of boys preferred to play a character of their own gender, and 28% of girls as opposed to 20% of boys said that they were more likely to play a game based on the character's gender.

So it may not matter to some people, but it matters greatly to others.
licensing the tech, plus no competition = charge what the market will bear

http://labiotech.eu/crispr-patent-war-end-discovery-new-edit...
Reports of Rape Rise on College Football Game Days Business
I will pay you to do upvote.  Reach me on Skyp: cobalmx
Taxing consumption doesn't work unless it is somehow international.
If the US crime rate were 79 times higher than the British crime rate, then you'd be absolutely correct. However as far as homicides are concerned, it's only 3.8 times higher[1]. A 4-fold discrepancy would be completely understandable, and one could probably make a valid argument for a 10-fold discrepancy, based on a theory of necessary force multipliers or something like that, but a 79-fold discrepancy is utterly indefensible.

Let me repeat: criminals in the US are 3.8 times more prevalent and/or violent than their UK counterparts, but police in the US are are 79 times more violent than their UK counterparts.

(I'm using homicide as a proxy for overall crime, because the definition, record-keeping, and rate of reporting for other crimes varies wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, whereas homicide is defined relatively consistently from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and is almost universally reported.)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
recruiting is very often a shit show for all kinds of reasons

I never before experienced the kind of rudeness and incompetence during hiring I had encountered while being interviewed in the Bay Area tech scene. Interviewers not keeping phone appointments. Interviewers blatantly not listening. Interviewers basically (incorrectly) implying that I'm lying. I will observe that the YCombinator companies fared much better than the above, however. Much, much better!
This is a failure of both the So Cal Gas Company and government regulators. And it will be interesting to find out:

1. How much does So Cal Gas have to pay to the people of nearby Porter Ranch (who've evacuated their community).

2. How much does So Cal Gas raise rates on its millions of customers to pay for this (because their $1 billion insurance policy won't cover the damages and because insurance rates will go up for the next term)

3. Which So Cal Gas executives will be disciplined or fired, if any?

4. Perhaps most intriguingly, will anyone in any government regulatory post be disciplined or fired?
It's a fundamental failure of journalism posted on the Internet to not actually link to the subject of your reporting.
Agreed - but there are a lot of family businesses that do billions in revenue.

A few off the top of my head are Cox Enterprises which does 17B in revenue and is owned 99% by the family, SC Johnson which does 11B and my understanding is it's mostly held by the family, and Hallmark which does $3.8B and is held by the family.

We also could trace back family shareholders of large corporations who have gone public - Wal-Mart, Ford, etc.
If you tax income, then people will take their compensation in a corporation.

Canada addresses the personal/corporate problem with an integrated tax system: To a first approximation, individuals who receive corporate dividends get a refund of the taxes which the dividend-paying corporations paid on that income. It never works out exactly equal, but as long as I've been running Tarsnap the difference between "pay a bonus" (employment income for me, deductible for the corporation) and "pay a dividend" (dividend income for me, paid by the corporation with after-tax dollars) has been less than 1%.

I really don't understand why other countries don't use the same system.
If they price it like cheap insurance, they will make a lot of money and offer a worthwhile service. Pay them a low monthly rate (X) to have the service active and then pay hourly at Y rate during an attack. You can play with X and Y to maximize your monthly revenue while still offering a cheap (but very valuable) service that retains your customers.
To Be Continuous Ep. #10 – Programming Languages and Why They Continue to Evolve
> Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.

Yes, because she chose to try to reproduce the experiment. That's her point. She didn't just have to wait for it to happen: she chose to see if she could replicate it, and she did replicate it.
Unfortunately we still don't know where that sweet spot is. In a world where it is really easy to move money to avoid taxiation we may very well find out that the "sweet spot" is at 0%. Then we only have to find out how a country can survive without taxes ... another unsolved problem.
Maybe we're just misunderstanding what each other means by privilege.

> why can't coal miners just start writing single page apps in React.js over a few weekends, why can't this part time middle aged mom from Walmart who was laid off as an HR person just write Android apps and make more money

Absolutely, I don't think they can. They don't have the free time, and they're worn out after a long day of work. That's not the same thing as privilege though.

> privilege - a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people

My point is that we didn't grow up in some special group that gave us more access than others.

> The privilege mentality is thinking that you made the decision to go into tech consciously because you knew it was going to be hot in 20 years and will end up with a well paying job.

I'm not sure what the "privilege mentality" means (genuinely -- not trying to be salty), but of course I didn't have some master plan to make money in 20 years. I got into computers because they were the most amazing and powerful thing I had ever seen in my life. Does that make me less or more privileged?

I guess my point is: if a person wants to say I got lucky by being interested in something that ended up being world-changing, absolutely, and I recognize that. If a person wants to claim my background is privileged and that's what enabled it all and stake claim to what I have as a result -- well, they don't know anything about me, and there's a good chance they're wrong.
I will pay you to do upvote. Reach me on Skyp: cobalmx
If they included unlimited video storage this would be more interesting. (This was announced November 4th)
The Laffer curve is a gross simplification of reality.

There is no evidence the tax income "curve" has a single turning point (given multiple differing sources of of income that are earned in different ways this is almost self evident). Even if that assumption about a single turning point holds there is no evidence that the US are on the right-hand side of the curve.
Democracy has failed.

Nobody likes what's going on here, yet, somehow despite democracy we cannot produce change.
You can if you want, simply ask your bank to require 3D secure for all transactions. Can't say it'll always go through as not all websites/apps will support it.

All I'm saying is it would be good if there was a choice to it as a customer holding a cr/dedit card
AMD was in the lead with the semi-custom processors that combined their CPU's plus custom logic for customers. That apparently was a huge business. Intel started doing it, too, IIRC. There's an overlap between those buying high-end CPU's and semi-custom stuff that might appreciate reconfigurable logic on-chip. It's a nice alternative given you get huge speed boost without capital investment of ASIC's and can keep tweaking it to optimize or fix mistakes.
But the atmospheric residence time of methane is short - a decade or something. Nothing to worry about in the grand scheme of things, once the leak is plugged.
I agree with you but the NYC tri-state area is a strange place and not a great example for the stratification effect. You're worse off in the NYC burbs in in many cases, one would think it would be the opposite but it's not. The amount of money it takes to break out of the middle class quality of life is more around 400k per year for the NYC tri-state area. In the burbs the houses are not nice or good for the price, they're overpriced and property taxes are outrageous- property taxes can actually be worse in the suburbs than they are for a Manhattan condo or coop. The commute is also a killer, while Metro North is somewhat reliable and on-time relative to other rail systems, the length of the commute is just brutal. At least while you're paying more per square foot in NYC you do get some convenience out of it, although this gets more complicated if you have kids. If you've got to worry about education for children, you MUST buy a coop/condo in a NYC district with good zoned schools, this isn't common and those district command the highest prices per square foot. If you can't afford those districts your looking at private school for the kids, and that runs 30-40k, somewhat less if you choose a Catholic school but still a huge chunk of your budget. Trust me, there are places you don't want your kids going to public school- and I'm not talking safety, this is in regards to the piss-poor quality of the education. You'd be better off home schooling in some places. The burbs do have better schools overall, but you're still stuck living a middle class lifestyle with a soul-sucking commute in the NYC burbs on 250k.
Bitcoin is now effectively a federated system anyway. Miners coordinated to fix a hard-fork situation, which means they have the power to favor or disenfranchise certain people. They don't seem to have that motivation at the moment, but it's very possible. E.g. https://twitter.com/Datavetaren/status/631080568487342080
Manufacturing quality time
You haven't been trolled, you've been failed by your lack of control over your own emotions. Try using reason, next time when you're faced with an opinion you don't agree with.
Not to mention that the top 5% by salary have other forms of compensation not included in the analysis, like stock options.
Is there no correlation between points and number of comments? That would be interesting to have some analysis on this, drilling further down and raking the quality of the comments. Or maybe this is too much? ;)
Michael Scott inspired Hubot script
High-Speed Flight in an Ergodic Forest (2012)
Same experience here. I asked Support once about an ongoing outage and was told that "there were some network related issues". Really? I wouldn't have guessed...
Scott Sumner (commenting on John Cochrane) hinted at something similar recently: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/12/heres_john_coch....
Ok -- I'm following your argument now. I'm surprised that you think 100% blanket surveillance is not ok, but partial surveillance -- limited only by its expensiveness -- is OK.

Because what's most likely to happen is that the police choose to surveil an area for political reasons (like racial segregation), and are thus attacking a specific group.

Yes, by limiting robot police & robot cameras you make this difficult for police by limiting their memory, but mass-surveillance is still happening! This, myself & the other commenter (I believe) find this unacceptable.

I'm arguing that police shouldn't be mass surveilling at all -- with robots, helmet cams that track license plates or by individual human officers selecting a zone to surveil. Or that if this surveillance happens -- it becomes public knowledge. Let every citizen view the live feeds around them, perform their own tracking if they wish, to keep the playing field open.

The Tor project doesn't protect against isolated attacks (surveillance), but would it not be nice if it could?

I think we have a difference of opinion here so I'm curious -- what are valid reasons from your viewpoint in which a human officer should select an area to surveil?
In the ccc talk, the author actually talk about this. But she mentioned that their primary suspect doesn't have any code samples online, and they left it at that.

Their code should be online, but I am not sure what exactly is there though.
I'm adding this because I and colleagues found it very applicable to what we do, which is not all IT. Dedication is engrossing.

No sprint, no timer, just time (for a Maker): http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
An interesting question... How fast can a bird or drone fly through a cluttered forest?
I don't mean defined as in static. Of course if you did that you could just use an old fashioned database.
Postgres features and tips
Agreed. There are lots of other sticky issues related to the idea of switching to a consumption-based tax. Not arguing that it should be adopted; every system will have pitfalls.
you are making the assumption that a "smart enough" AI will intrinsicly value human life.

There is no reason for this to be the case. What something values is almost entirely independant of its intelligence.

At best, a human would be worthless to an AI who 100% only values paperclips (better as paperclips than humans), at worst seen as a threat to its ability to continue. (better to kill them off ASAP before try to stop me)

Thats the entire point of the paperclip maximizer thought experiment, to demonstrate that values, especially values humans care about, are not the same thing as inteligence.

Your entire ability to not "take things literally" is based off of a large amount of built in assumptions about whats important, your human nature and cultural experience. An AI would lack any of that, and if it was programmed only to value paperclips, even if was the most inteligent being in existence, thats all it would value, to the exclusion of everything else.

Consider autistic people with very high IQs, and due to their condition, very little understanding/concern about the emotions of others.
I think the actual commission distribution as well as the number of people in the position would be fairly consistent and most would assume these numbers are annualized. I'm assuming Payscale does something to that effect.
Out of 6 companies I talked to over the course of a couple of months, Amazon somehow managed to stand out.
It was easier to make money back then. The barrier to entry making a game was higher since to get good performance you needed to write in assembly language. You had to rtfm as there was no internet to ask questions on. So a smallish number of developers were going after a booming demand for games. My first game in the industry was on Amiga and PC and made a decent profit for the company I worked for despite that I basically taught myself to program making it.
you mean discussions like this (2 days ago), first comment sub-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10794951
One of the points of the talk/article is that style survives compilation, obfuscation and optimization. I think (but the talk did not support that directly) that it would survive another language, at least to a certain degree.
According to this page, you can get ~14Gbit networking on Google Cloud's n1-standard-8

http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/11/bringing-you...
Is it possible to somehow "copy" an NES game that you've compiled onto a real NES cartridge so that it can be played on a real NES? That could make this an incredibly fun hobby. Especially as a parent of kids who actually enjoy NES and SNES games.
Read the last 3 paragraphs again. She's saying that performing the experiment created a space for intimacy but that she and her partner ultimately chose to be in love.

She's acknowledging some of the effect, but trying to give herself some wiggle room that ultimately she was in control. Seemed like a bit of denial to me that her love was fundamentally so formulaic.
The US Treasury's consumer web portal used to do this for online accounts many years ago.

They mailed you a plastic card that had a map-like grid. I believe it was mailed using USPS Certified Mail that you validated online. Once validated, you were asked to provide the code for "Column A, Row 14", and then were prompted for a password. IIRC, you could also set it up so that you can login and view your balances with just a password, but would need to do step-up auth to buy/sell/transfer securities.

IMO a nice solution from a security POV. Certainly better than online brokers -- Charles Schwab "protects" my retirement savings with some bullshit 6 character password.

Customers HATED it, and the "I lost my card" process involved having another card mailed to you. So they replaced it with another solution that is IMO less secure.
What the actual fuck.

That's not particularly unusual, is it?
Are ML and Statistics Complementary? [pdf]
2015 in Review: IPO winners and losers
It always is the appeal to fairness - if the folks at the top get away with it, it's like Soviet Dachas, Popes with mistresses etc. The top must be made to be equal if society is to be equal.

The how - is what is in the wind - international cooperation.
>For independent dealerships the only cars on the lot that they actually own are previous trade-ins.

Unless you are saying the dealer can return cars they bought at auction, I don't see what difference the floor-planning makes to the ownership of the car. When purchased off the dealer's lot, I presume the dealer's name will appear on the title as the seller.
FAA extends drone ban 30 miles outside Washington DC
You are just describing how they are lending out deposits.
I've seen articles that refer to it as "type 3 diabetes" or at least link it to diabetes.
>But other than some appeal to fairness, who cares?

You mean justice? And other than an appeal to justice, what is wrong with any injustice?
Writing code is some ways a lot like writing in general. From the "elements of style" book:

> Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style
For some context:

The Laffer curve was used by the GOP in the 1980s to intellectually legitimize[1] the policy of cutting taxes.[2] They said cutting tax rates on the wealthy would increase tax revenue (!) and the benefits to the wealthy would "trickle down" to everyone else through increased investment, etc.

The results were simply that the wealthy had more money. The federal government developed a massive deficit and while the economy has grown since the 1980s almost all the resulting wealth has been acquired by the wealthiest; incomes of 'everyone else' have stagnated since then.

IIRC, the Laffer curve was never taken seriously by any but partisan economists, and was widely discredited.

----

[1] You'll note that all parties love to create 'research' that provide intellectual ballast to their predetermined policies. They know what sells to the intellectual crowd, who see something that looks like legtimate research but certainly don't have the time to study the issue themselves. The parties have pet think tanks that produce studies for them; for example, the Heritage Foundation is a prominent example for the GOP.

[2] As evidence for note #1: Consider whether the GOP ever would consider a higher rate the appropriate level for taxation. Of course not. The results of the research are predetermined by the desired policy. The Democrats do it too, but I don't think they take it to the extremes of the GOP: Climate change denial, the evidence for the Iraq War, not regulatng the housing market before the crash, fighting finacial regulation after the crash, etc. (People want to be 'even-handed' and say it's balanced, the same on both sides, but really it would be a surprise if any situation worked out that way. I'm not partisan, I support any route to more pragmatic and less crazy policies.)
This seems to indicate that modern optimizers still have a long way to go to be as effective as they could be, since broadly similar code even in different styles would end up with the same, most efficient end result(?)
Might as well just scrap representative democracy as a whole rather than add band-aids like this.

Not that closing tax loopholes is even that huge of an issue. It's mostly a populist talking point. We're not pegged to gold anymore.
Why Alibaba Wants Chinese Shoppers to Buy American
Email yourself if you're afraid of remembering.

Works for pretty much every kind of idea.

Then, just remember.
Habits of Unicorn Entrepreneurs
The amount of 'free time privilege' required to become a developer is less than the amount of 'privilege' required to become almost any other well paying profession.

With software, you need a cheap computer, access to the internet and time to teach yourself. That can cost about $300 and $10/month in many places.

With almost anything else you need all of the above plus a college or other formal education. The barrier to getting any sort of college education, not to mention even getting admitted to one, is far higher. You usually need thousands per month and 20 hours/week of scheduled time to pay for the costs of college.

There are also other minimum wage jobs you can apply for with better conditions, like coffee shops, restaurants, gas stations, retail stores and so on. And in developed countries, you have the option of saving up for your computer with your minimum wage job and then going on welfare.
That's a Nirvana fallacy.

Money influence politics in modern Scandinavian countries much less than in modern USA.