skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Take a look at 1953. Top rate, 92%.

Consider the 1950s. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general in charge of winning WWII in Europe, a Republican, and very much into heavy defense spending. That administration developed, mass-produced and deployed nuclear submarines, B-52 bombers, ICBMs, aircraft carriers, A-bombs, and H-bombs. Bases were maintained all over the world, with large numbers of troops. Plus, the US paid some of the costs of putting Europe and Japan back together, and the interest on the national debt from WWII.

Financial regulation was tight. There were commercial banks, which could take deposits and make loans, but couldn't trade in the stock market. There were savings and loans, which could make loans on houses and take deposits but not much else. There were stockbrokers, which could deal in stocks but not trade for their own account. Most stockbrokers were partnerships, such as Merril Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Beane, with the partners personally liable for losses. There were a few investment banks trading for their own account, such as J.P. Morgan. They were using their own money, and if they went under, that was their problem. Finance was very clearly subordinate to doing real stuff.

The CEO of United States Steel made about $42,000 a year. The first billionaire had not yet appeared; John Paul Getty, a Texas oilman, broke through that barrier in the 1960s.

Yet this locked-down economy produced the greatest economic boom in American history.
Current discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831261 (76 points, 1 hour ago, 23 comments)
Ignoring useful information because it's conveyed using crass language is incredibly foolish. Do so at your own peril.
Haven't you read Paul Graham's essay yesterday? This seems a direct answer. The abuse thing is, among other cited circumstances, what could make a person not develop natural talents. In other words: some people are set in the bad part of the deal since their childhood. So there's a lot in the inequality problem that's not caused by relative merits.
Current discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831261 (76 points, 1 hour ago, 23 comments).
Is that an argument for higher tax rates or lower ones? After all, if you are anti-war, would you really say tax rates should be higher so that we can have more wars?

The weird thing seems to be that the people who are most anti-war want higher tax rates for things that are not war, and then when the money gets spent on war, they want even higher tax rates for the things they were originally promised but didn't get.

Looking at tax history it seems like a repeating game of bait and switch.
A Colder War by Charles Stross
Or in this example you could have a device that only recorded when a button was held.
So I just created an HN account to answer this. I'm in Accra, Ghana.

> Mind if I ask how you usually access HN?

My PC, with WiFi at home.

> Do you know anyone who would consider something like free basic?

I would. Already, mobile networks have Facebook and Wikipedia (iirc) zero-rated. Meaning you pay nothing to use those services. My startup is trying to get zero-rating on Vodafone to encourage our customers to use our service.

Having free access to some useful sites is a plus. Having my Internet restricted to those sites is a minus.
For those interested in a historical example of a dysfunctional military, I recommend reading:
http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/07.html

Small passage to whet your interest:

>It is also essential to mix all the nationalities together in divisions, regiments and battalions. If one regiment contains too many Lithuanians and another too many Tatars, this must result from a slip-up by some military bureaucrat. The punishment for such mistakes is harsh. The movement of such colossal numbers of men takes up two whole months. Surprisingly, the machine works extremely smoothly, rather like a sausage machine-all sorts of pieces of meat, some onions, some rusks, and some garlic are put in at one end and out of the other come solidly compressed rolls of well-mixed human material.

The author is an excellent writer and the rest of this book is worth a read. Some facts are a little iffy, but I believe that's mostly it was published prior to the Soviet Union opening up its archives/making primary sources readily available.
Yeah, that was my read of it as well, although honestly that distinction seems like it'd be an enforcement nightmare. Just figured a link to the official policy would be useful to someone.
The IDE itself uses Java 8. You can still work on projects that utilize previous versions of Java.
I hope you are right.

I would make a great ted talk. How cheap mobile communication is changing life in remote villages.

From own limited experience, I was struck by how expensive slow internet access was in the third world around 2008 (two years backpacking South America and South East Asia). The average local could not afford it. I could barely afford it. I remember for instance a Internet cafe in a small mountain town in Bolivia charged about $10 dollars an hour in 2008 (I guess it was internet by satellite).

I hope things have changed. Any internet access (however limited) would make a big difference to the poor.
See also: The newer flat assembler g, a generic assembler not tied to a particular architecture. Download http://flatassembler.net/fasmg.zip and read docs/manual.txt. There are examples for 8086, 8052, AVR, and Java Virtual Machine. http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=17952
Fighting for your life is a better incentive for productivity than money, who would have known.
If you know you are going to be misunderstood and offend people with the words you choose, and you use them anyway, that is the exact opposite of empathy.

Failure to see that your words are offensive to some people is a direct result of failing to empathize with the listener.
APC UPS's will fit a standard battery
Should be creditors in the first paragraph parenthetical, not debtors.
I guess you can draw sweeping conclusions from your own narrow social base, but it doesn't seem like a reliable point of view from which to make generalities. By implication the comment seems to say that it's not possible to have a good time out sober, which could discourage someone from making a change they might need but feel apprehensive about making. I'm providing an optimistic counterpoint.
URL shorteners don't generally allow link targets to be updated. This is not a typical URL shortener.
You simply need to sign up and consume netflix using a VPN which terminates in the US and thus they'll see you as a native US user.
They can revoke your access at any time.
The US isn't very concerned that its literate, educated NCOs will get together and overthrow the government (although with the current political situation I'd say the risk is higher than it used to be). In Vietnam, they tried to assassinate the president [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1962_South_Vietnamese_Independ...
Actually, come to think about it, you could probably make a workable web proxy through a Facebook account, as long as they didn't throttle how many cat pictures you uploaded in a day. Have a server on the outside that will post stenographied pictures of cats to your timeline every time you ask "Hey that was an awesome cat picture, do you have any more LOL? WW8gZGF3ZyB0aGlzIGlzIGEgYmFzZS02NCBlbmNvZGVkIEhUVFAgR0VUIHJlcXVlc3Qh".
Ask HN: What are the best developer conferences in 2016?
What are everyone's favorite conferences to attend?

I had a blast at WWDC15, although its the first conference I've been to so I don't have much to compare to. The talks were very informative and I'm an iOS nerd so I was in heaven :)

How is F8? Google I/O? Any other lesser known ones?
This isn't for your URLs. It's for URLs you're linking to that you don't control and that are liable to change because other people (typically large content sites) don't understand how URLs should work.
Ask HN: Pricing strategies in a small niche market
I'm considering spending some free time making what is essentially an event planner for a sport/hobby I'm passionate about. There are two other SaaS competitors, and I believe both are clunky and antiquated. Both products are run by individuals and each are around the same age (50-60yrs). I also believe this is the primary source of income for both of them.

Competitor A:

* I consider the better product of the two. It's simpler and clean. It's typically the choice of premier events.
* Platform based on Cold Fusion. The software is mostly unchanged since 2006.
* His pricing model is a simple $10/entry. Last year he did ~300 events with 13000 entries = ~$130,000 in revenue unless he gave discounts anywhere.
* He's a nice guy who's well-liked in the community. His reputation for service is great.

Competitor B:

* The more "feature-full" product, but it's confusing to use, poorly organized, and buggy.
* Platform is PHP with a lot of c/p JS. I believe he uses contractors to build the product unlike the guy behind A.
* Pricing model is a percentage fee on entry fees (which can vary depending on the event). He also runs ads. I believe this product is considered less expensive for smaller events.
* Last year he did ~800 events. I'm not sure how many entries yet. There's no easy way to guess his revenue.

I'll be able to beat them easily on quality of product, but I'm not sure how to price myself, what model to use, and how I'll overcome the personal connections they have with event managers.

Should I pull a Google Apps and go free until they give up? Should I price higher as the "premium" option? Should I try somehow to do subscription?

Any advice would be very appreciated!
And CorsixTH for Theme Hospital!

https://github.com/CorsixTH/CorsixTH
An amazingly detailed record of military operations. Very well researched and well written. The objectivity of the overall tone adds credence.
We have used nsq to ship billions of log messages daily for over 2 years. It is very sensible operationly and easy to configure to the level of robustness your use may have. It does not allow seeking into the queue like Kafka, but we have never needed that capability, and we found it easier to design around this rather than take on the operational burden.
This is going to create some kind of meta crisis over at the daringfireball household
In my small town, there were maybe 5 people, and one or two of those were at this level. I was somewhere in there, but not at the peak for sure.

Many did explore assembly language, but there is still a difference between, say writing an assembly language program, and digging deep into the guts of the disk system.

You are right about binary data. But, I must say access to information wasn't the same either. Many of us worked from what we could find in the magazines found in the grocery store. I used to take really long bus trips to the university library to photocopy useful bits.

The books we all know well, "Inside the Apple..." and "Inside DOS" were out there, but not everywhere. Our group didn't have them for quite some time.

Access to better tools was an issue on many machines too. The Apple and BBC Micro came with some assembly language support. Other machines, C64, Atari, didn't. And stuff wasn't cheap. People who came from those two machines were a little different than those coming from the C64 or Atari, for example.

One of the first things I learned to do was write a disassembler in BASIC, then an assembler. My first home machine was an Atari. Awesome capabilities, but not anywhere near the learning machine the Apple 2 was. I missed the monitor and mini-assembler big. A friend had a 6809 computer, and we both were mentored by someone who was fairly advanced, showing us things. Took a while to get ML tools. So a ton of stuff got done from the BASIC.

This is small town perspective. I think we aren't in disagreement as much as differences in perspective are in play. If you didn't live somewhere with a notable population, information often came from the school of hard knocks.

One other thing... those assembly skills varied. I still struggle with larger programs in assembly, though I'm good at hacking something, or doing little helper routines. The people showing real mastery often had tools, or were able to put bigger projects together. They ended up doing those bigger projects.

In any case, awesome times.

One thing I do find notable is those skills did have an impact. I'm on a project right now that requires some bootstrapping, and or low level development. At one point, a system monitor was discussed. A lot of people today are just used to pretty awesome tools. You use your PC to target whatever it is and go.

Not a thing wrong with that.

But, say you want to do it on chip, or piece together a big project, test, or do other things. A monitor can be used to run things from RAM, move stuff around, and of course, if you've got an assembler, you assemble to RAM, stash it somewhere, ideally storage, get all the pieces done, link 'em, or page / bank 'em, jump tables, etc... and eventually write it all out as a larger project.

Those kinds of things are foreign to many today. And that's fine because of where computing is. But you can tell who was there early and who was not, just by how they may attempt things, or the tools they use, or create.
I had bought and read the 1st edition of About Face years ago. Thought it good generally. Might not have understood everything in it at the time. I remember him talking about "affordances". One point I thought was good, was his idea for a scroll bar with both the arrow heads at the same end of the bar, instead of at opposite ends. This saves you from having to move your mouse from one end of the bar to the other, to reverse scroll direction (since you have to click on either the up/left or down/right heads).

Like this (for a horizontal scroll bar):

<||> =============================

instead of this:

<|==============================|>

Cool. Later I heard from someone that some OS/GUI platform actually has his improved version - I forget which.
This breaks the HN guidelines. Please comment civilly and substantively or not at all.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10828763 and marked it off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The solution to that problem is not making selling organs legal, but getting a better safety net in place. Jeeze.
Great list!
Extensibility via Python scripts instead of custom config syntax maybe?
Yes you can, that's the entire point of the domain name system.

Regardless, the point of this system isn't to alias your URLs, it's to alias others' URLs you want to link to. Sort-of like an archive.org that doesn't host content.
I thought it was about experimental startup providing echo service for $10/month subscription :)
This breaks the HN guidelines. Please comment civilly and substantively or not at all.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10828285 and marked it off-topic.
I'm not sure about the "pay fors" you're talking about, but I believe your sentiment is correct-- and effectively, that $2T came out of the economy via the hidden tax of inflation.

While people would be mad to see the $2T in direct taxation (what you called "Absolutely insane") they do not realize it when it is done via inflation. (Eg: your gas prices, food prices, everything else is higher, because the government just printed the money to spend on the war, increasing the debt and devaluing the dollar.)

From The Economic Consequences of the Peace:
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.”
John Maynard Keynes
>Both phrases are disliked by anyone who also wants to increase the diversity of the people working in the field of "computers".

I want to increase the diversity in the field of "computers". I do not dislike either phrase.

There's a huge difference between wanting more variety and political pandering. They're only tangentially related, in fact. I actually don't want to work with the kind of people who get really upset at vernacular.
I'm being a pedant but doesn't an Echo have a mic built in? Buying an equivalent one would be ~£75 I think.
Ask HN: Things to do in San Francisco?
Hi HN,

I just moved to San Francisco and was hoping you could recommend meetings to attend, places to visit and things to do.
Side question: wasn't Rockefeller the first billionaire in the early 1900s?
said right
Unless you think that there should be a totally unregulated market in human organ though, you still agree with my main point? That regulators have a role to play in preventing people from making coercive offers to the poor?
>But features that eclipse rules are more substantial (like performance, ability to work on wide range of projects).

In my opinion, and every other dev at my shop, our switch to Intellij IDEA was the best thing we ever did, specifically for performance reasons.
I've no experience with Arab militaries, but have worked in the Middle East and with Arab telecoms companies. Quite a few of the anecdotes and observations in the article ring true, in particular as they relate to attitudes to training, power hierarchies and sharing information. In particular the politics of test scores in technical training for trainees of different ranks for a Saudi company was a difficult issue which meant in the end we had to fudge it completely. So while I can't verify much of what is said here, enough of it matches my own experiences that it seems pretty credible.
> Top Gear will not be earning them much anymore - Clarkson, Hammond and May have left.

And by "left", you mean that Clarkson got canned for punching out a guy because he didn't like his catered dinner, after being warned repeatedly for starting fights and making racist remarks on camera.
Taxes discourage work. In the 70's it was common for just one member of a family to work, because if another person worked, all their dollars would be taxed at the 50-70% rate. The cost of working in terms of taxes, owning a car, gas, etc., got to the point where if a second person worked, the household would actually lose money, which of course leads to economic stagnation and recessions.

I agree progressive taxes make sense. The argument that a flat tax is fair by virtue of already being proportional fails to take into account the relative value of a dollar to the owner of that dollar.
Sorry hari, I love intellij and the work you do there, but I do not believe you. Please show me an IntelliJ IDEA that looks and behaves exactly like webstorm and pycharm just with plugins. You can't. For example Pycharm doesn't even have a project settings option. What plugin gives you that?
Why I Quit My Dream Job in Web Design
I've read wget, and I am a cURL contributor as well. I know the capabilities of each very well. But when you have 1M+ urls to download and you care about proper error handling at a large scale, those tools will fall short. Not all errors need to be handled in the same way. Some need retries some don't depending on http response codes for example.

Another problem you'll hit is how to make sure that the machines are saturated. How many jobs should be running at the current time depends on what's being downloaded and how much room you have to run additional downloads.

Again, it all depends on what you need from the system and how much leeway you have.
How would you prefer poor people in your country get access to the internet? Who should implement it and who would pay?
How to Think Visually Using Visual Analogies
Again, my experience has been different to yours.

Though we might have some opinions about scrum in common.
>It's an attempt to strike a balance between the different segments of the community who strongly disagree with one another about how much NSA is the right amount of NSA.

Because dang is the one who added the weight, the blatant implication here is that dang believes that "the balance" needs to be more towards not having NSA stories overwhelm the front page.

I don't see how you can read what dang wrote and somehow think that he is not suppressing NSA stories. He very clearly states that he is suppressing them, just not to a large degree. Just because he says "we are not suppressing them" before describing their method of suppression does not mean the are not suppressed.

Why is it necessary to strike a balance between the two sides of this conversation? As he states, the NSA stories still make it to the front page. What actual effect does this have? As far as I can tell, it simply makes the stories less visible than they would otherwise be. No amount of linguistic gymnastics is going to make me think this is not a description of suppression.

The amount of doublespeak going on here is baffling. Dang very clearly states that the intention is to lessen the enthusiasm of these topics, and it's being weighted in favor of the pro-NSA side, which is pretty much exactly what I said: Dang disagrees with the enthusiasm of the anti-NSA (pro-privacy) side of the debate.
Please don't post political rants to Hacker News.

Accusations of shillage without evidence aren't allowed either.
"Sure, but I'd happily take 10% of a billion versus taking home 90% of $40k without shedding too many tears."

What does this have to do with anything? Yes, there's a difference between marginal rates and overall rates. If people don't understand that as background context then they shouldn't even be in this discussion.

The main question to ask is, "How much tax is now being forgone by the trend to lower marginal rates over recent decades?" I don't know the number but it is at least many, many billions annually. Also, there were formerly lots of different tax brackets for the ultra-rich, with only the ultra-ultra-rich reaching highest marginal rate.

The question is not whether marginal rates are different from overall rates (which is a given). The question is how much could be gained by creating more brackets at the very top and raising marginal rates on all these top brackets up a bit (though by no means to where they've historically been), because it would make no real difference to the way America's ultra-rich live their lives. In other words, how much could be raised by making our income tax truly progressive again.
> The poorest who can't afford the internet don't even have the devices capable of displaying the modern web pages properly. The cost of internet comes secondary to the cost of the hardware necessary to access it.

A serviceable used PC can be had for on the order of $50. Internet service is on the order of $50/month.
So it's a URL shortener with an added feature?

Part of the reason URL shorteners don't offer this feature is the potential for abuse.
There's also the point pg brought up in his most recent essay[1]:

"To some extent this was an illusion. Much of the de facto pay of executives never showed up on their income tax returns, because it took the form of perks. The higher the rate of income tax, the more pressure there was to pay employees upstream of it."

[1] http://paulgraham.com/re.html
But at the library API level it's a much smaller mandatory change.
Cool data source. Thanks for sharing. In case anyone is curious about the early history of the income tax, or why it is so spotty prior to 1913:

The income tax was first imposed in 1861 to help pay for the Civil War. Prior to that, the government got most of its income from excise taxes and tariffs.

In 1895, the Supreme Court declared the income tax unconstitutional, since it was not apportioned fairly between states, which is why the government added the 16th amendment in 1913, which gave it the power to impose an unapportioned income tax.
VirusTotal analysis: http://bit.ly/1OEYYW9