skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand what you're getting at, but he lives in the US, and as far as I know grew up here. It'd be nice to learn more about exactly what happened before making judgement, but if he really demanded an unsolicited bribe I don't think his age really excuses it.
Of course they can "afford" it. But so what? Every single billionaire can "afford" to be taxed at a 99% rate.

The bigger question: is it in any way fair, just, or moral to tax society's most successful more heavily just for being more successful?

EDIT: The other salient question that I forgot to mention is: "why do we need more taxes?" Our government already can't manage what they have with any sort of reasonable efficiency. Are we really supposed to believe that they'll do better if we give them more money?
Why is Politics such a predominant topic on HN?
Ning is hiring. We have some Apache guys, some PHP guys, etc. We need more people in Ops!

http://about.ning.com/careers/index.php
Could you justify why you think Mono is a 'steaming pile of crap'?! I've found it to be rather wonderful, not to mention that F# itself works perfectly fine under Mono.
Or they might mask their income, or elect to receive it in other forms like stock options. I think capital gains get taxed at 15%, soon to be reverted to 20% (still less than 39%).
There was an old post on here with complains about memory constriction on the iPhone. One of the problems was not having a consistent amount of memory available to things like games. Sometimes there was enough memory to run the game, sometimes not. (Things like Safari are allowed to multi-task and eat up RAM outside of the currently running program)

[edit] I should add that another complaint was that the iPhone kills off processes that are using too much RAM (so if a game starts up and fills too much of the available RAM, it dies with no feedback to the user as to why this happened)
My 10 Inspirational movies
A recent FTC ruling actually made "paid" endorsements without disclosure illegal. TechCrunch could be hit with considerable fines if they didn't take action on this.

Relevant excerpt: "The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service."

http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm
Pooches and people: what our dogs reveal about us
You should really look into what can actually be copyrighted before getting too alarmed. The tactic you suggest would be the same as trying to copyright the phrase "it was a dark and stormy night..." and suing anyone who used it. If they use only that phrase then you might have a case, but if the phrase was incidental to a larger work then the case is weaker. No one is going to get away with copyrighting for loops or various standard design patterns.
The US federal income tax exists to raise revenue for the federal government. It does not exist to level the playing field, make things fair, or to hinder high-producers.

This whole debate is framed wrong, on both sides.
Why does a married couple still have the same 250k threshold? Does marriage immediately cancel out all the expenses one person in a relationship might encounter?
Nice analysis. tl;dr version: Apple sells hardware, Amazon sells eBooks, and publishers sell content; by seducing the publishers with the promise of variably-pricing their content, Apple sells more hardware and knocks Amazon off its pedestal. Amazon, consumers, and possibly the publishers lose; Apple wins.
Take zerohedge with a HUGE grain of salt.
> Cutting back to be under 250k would probably make more sense than making 255k and paying a lot more

What kind of job do you have that makes >$250K and doesn't require you to understand how income taxes work? I'm skeptical.
Authors Guild: ‘To RIAA or Not to RIAA’
F# really is a wonderful programming language; I do think that the F# team, not to mention many F# developers undersell its beauty and usefulness simply as a general programming language, there always seems to have to be a mitigation such as 'it's complimentary to C#', etc., pity the language's creator goes along with that.

F#'s pattern matching and type inference alone are easily superior to equivalent C# code, pretty well objectively, not to mention natural immutability and inbuilt tuples; all of these features very quickly feel vital and are missed in other languages; not to mention the inherent usefulness of F# for concurrent programming.

With Mono you can use F# perfectly well in linux + on mac too, so there's no excuse for not trying it :)
Source code is already copyrightable and this doesn't seem to be an issue.
Why shouldn't the people who benefit the most from how society is structured be expected to pay the most for its maintenance?
Ask HN: I want to host a HN Meetup...
I live in a good area for HN meetups, but no one hosts them. Since I haven't been to one I don't know what they're like. The networking and potential for goood discussion interest me most.

I was curious: what location are these things usually at? Bars? Event rooms? Do people give lectures or do they just mingle? What about food? What else should I keep in mind?
You're conflating HTML5 support and plug-in support. For instance: that Flash supports Vorbis does not mean that Flash-supporting clients can play <audio src="foo.oga">. It just means that the site can choose to deliver <audio> to one client and <embed> to another. The same situation happens with h.264.

Which goes to say: this is a good thing for Theora, but it is not a victory over h.264. Even in the most optimistic estimate, including this kind of plugin-as-equivalent conflation, it would be a tie, and only in the single domain of playback in desktop browsers.
Can you post your email please
If you hate Flash so much, turn it off or install a blocking plugin. It won't bother me in the least.

sure, but it might bother someone trying to read your poorly constructed website:

http://i.imgur.com/UNpei.png

i'm on a platform that has no flash plugin available and can't navigate his website.
I make what I consider a middle class salary (around double the household income in my area), and I'm pretty sure I can afford a tax hike. While I would not be terribly happy about it, it's not going to hurt me. I'd say for most of the real middle class, who haven't mortgaged themselves to the hilt, a tax hike of a few percent will cut into their discretionary income, not anything truly needed. I'll have to wait another two weeks to get my 52" big screen television. Oh no.
I would say that the society's most successful are often the ones benefiting the most from the law and order provided by government. If the highway, mail, law enforcement, and judicial systems, for example, didn't work as well, it would be much harder to create a successful business.
First, care.
also, unlike nyc, it's rare to find those people in sf who will move your car across the street for 10 minutes once a week while the street-sweepers come. that's how I get all my parking tickets. average of at least 1 per month......
16- and 48-core monster chips on tap at next week's ISSCC
I agree. Sensationalist title that isn't even the real title of the article.
This Week in SaaS #12 with Ray Wang
This would make sense if income level actually truly scaled with job difficulty or discomfort. Even if they doubled my taxes, I wouldn't quit my job to go work some minimum-wage drudgery. Higher salary ends up also meaning your job is actually more comfortable. The kind of bullshit people have to put up with in their $7/hr jobs is amazing to me sometimes.
Your edit is the best part. I wouldn't necessarily mind paying higher taxes if the government were a capable solutions provider. Alas, if you've ever actually worked for the government, you know they are not.
I don't think it's purely that. VC demo days may not be the best place for someone with modest assets to find something they want to spend $10k on. They might have better luck talking to their friends, for example, or friends of their friends. The angel restrictions don't apply to those cases, either: it's only really official solicitations and funding rounds for which there are restrictions. If a few people get together and want to put in $10k each to a business one of their friends is starting, there is no law against that. It long predates tech startups, too; plenty of restaurants, dry-cleaners, and other traditional small businesses get their seed funding that way.
Seriously man, that's not how taxes work at all. You can't take home more by making less. 255k will have more take home than 250k even if the marginal tax rate was 99%.
This reminds me of the article a few years ago that indicated that Warren Buffett had a lower effective tax rate than his secretary, even though he made heaps more. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/tax/article1996735.ec...
Mentor spreadsheet?
I think the real question is will this tax increase make a significant dent in the budget deficit?
On Evolution, Revolution, and iPad Punditry
Aside from the larger question of why the government has the right to take people's income by force to begin with, I can think of four practical reasons off the top of my head:

1) It is a disincentive to others who might try to reach that level

2) It's hardly clear that the success of the wealthy is due to how society is structured, and not their own effort. Undoubtably some is, but is it 90/10 or 10/90?

3) It encourages relocation of talent, business, and capital to states or countries where the tax situation is more favorable.

4) It's not clear to me that more tax revenue results in a net benefit to society. My opinion is that the rich are better at investing their money for optimum yield than the government, and the end result is more benefit for society.
If you make $255K, you only get a higher tax rate on the extra $5K. You'll still have more money than someone making $249K. No matter how you slice it, more money = more money. The gov't just will tax you a bit extra on the 5K.
Who benefits the most from the society IN RAPORT TO HIS CONTRIBUTION: the one making 30k or the one making 300k?

Edit: just having the money in the bank is not benefiting. Using service, health care, infrastructure, education, free time, etc. That is benefiting.

Edit2: Furthermore, they are ALREADY paying the most.
Most people in the US pay no taxes at all. The $250K threshold hits lots of hard working professionals and entrepreneurs who are by no means "rich" and who work extremely hard.

I'd argue that people earning $250K who are paying off loans and working 60+ hour weeks cannot afford it... and that taxing them is a horrible policy idea, no matter how well it resonates with voters who themselves pay no taxes (or people like the author who live in Westport CT).
This is one thing that never fails to irritate me: the stigma against the wealthy. It's almost as if all the energy, effort, time, sacrifice, and risk usually taken by many who are now wealthy are completely overlooked, making them look undeserving of their money as if they were born with golden spoons in their mouths. My father immigrated to America from Egypt in the mid-80s shortly after he graduated medical school in Cairo to find a better living. When he got here, he went to school, took a graveyard shift as a security guard and worked at a gas station to make ends meet. He moved to four or so different states to join various medical programs, etc, and finally settled here in southern California as a fairly successful physician who makes $250,000+ a year. Knowing all the work that he's put into creating this life, my blood boils when I read headlines like these as if someone like my father doesn't/didn't work as hard as others to make a living. He is one example, and there are myriad of foreigners who have done the same, not to mention startuppers who literally put EVERYTHING on the line to increase their chances at success. To say that these types of people can just afford it as if it were some obligation is idiotic and infuriating.
Here is what this author doesn't understand. People who make much more than $250,000 a year rarely let that money touch income taxes. The tax game is all about creating trusts, funneling through shelter companies, long-term capital gains, expensing the heck out of everything, etc.
I tried to use Emacs under Windows, but it just took forever to render a simple window of text! This can't be normal, I can't figure out how a lengthy REPL session can fail to scroll faster than molasses.
I believe the idea for this list came from this discussion (which also pointed out what you mentioned) - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1103669

Still, a good idea! :)
To be fair, it is right up at the top of the page.
Ok so let's say I have a billion dollars.

I can live anywhere in the world I want to -- and with all kinds of luxuries.

Seems to me like the "people who benefit most from how society is structured" would be those poor folks who through no fault of their own, perhaps mental retardation, chronic illness, or birth defect, cannot make a living and yet are provided for by the rest of us. These are the people who would die under a differently structured system, right?

After all, rich folks got it good under all kinds of systems.
I recall this translation of Singapore-Chinese slang: scared to lose (ke-ya su, phonetically)

Startups are experimentation, and as in science, most experiments are "failures" (quoted, because both positive and negative results of an experiment give you information... if it's well-designed).
I believe you are conflating society and government, and I'd actually be very much in favor of the gov't providing bills for it's services so that I could cancel the "services" I don't want, and/or find alternate providers.
What do you need, exactly?
As far as I know, it is supported (get it here: ftp://ftp.clozure.com/pub/release/1.4/ccl-1.4-windows.zip).

Never personally tested it though (Mac + Linux guy), so take this with a grain of salt.
Good short essay with useful graphs. To get you a bit more interested:

"The data confirm what we see and hear around us if we are willing to look and listen. There is this "other" economy with high unemployment and a very low and still-declining employment-to-population ratio. The term "jobless recovery" doesn't quite capture it. Perhaps we will call this the "job loss recovery" because we don't seem to have turned the corner in the labor market--and it appears much worse than earlier jobless recoveries...."
I don't disagree with your point. However, my understanding is that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says the language you speak determines the range of things you can think about. But that doesn't seem to preclude the existence of a "super-language" that encompasses the range of every currently used language. Maybe we could make one? Or maybe one will evolve naturally over time?
Well, fuck you too.
That was because he's counting capital gains. Capital gains are the tax you pay based on the price of a stock, which is based on the net present value of the company's dividends (taxed at 15%), which are paid out of its profits after taxes (35%). So it looks like the taxes he's paying on the extra earnings of Coca-Cola are about 53%.

At least he doesn't pay FICA taxes on that. On the other hand, the capital he invests does allow companies to hire more people, who do pay taxes.

The utility-maximizing way to tax Mr. Buffett is at 0%. He'll invest it effectively, it will grow the economy, more jobs will be created, and we'll end up with more wealth to squander through silly redistributive schemes.
Dryad - Distributed computing infrastructure from Microsoft Research
Our government already can't manage what they have with any sort of reasonable efficiency.

An assertion in axiomatic clothing, I think.

As for your opening question, more successful at what? Certainly, success in one's career or investment is one answer, but so is 'successful at minimizing one's tax liability'. We're talking about going back to the marginal tax rates of the 1990s, which strangely I don't remember as being a time of great fiscal suffering. If we had not cut those taxes to begin with, perhaps we wouldn't have such large deficits as we presently do.
Doctors, lawyers, and other paycheck people making $250k pay around the 35% rate. They get hit hard. Meanwhile, professional investors earning the same amount pay the capital gains rate of 15%, which is less than a paycheck family earning $80k. I don't want paycheck people to pay more taxes, I want the capital gains rate to go up.
And finding out who owns the copyright of a work.
This is a nice piece on aesthetics, right up to the last bit where it talks about technology and veers off the cliff.

The example simply makes no sense. In what way is a laptop with (gasp) modular panels and air vents (the horrors!) of lower quality than the apple thing? Modularity is good, it allows piecewise replacement of parts by untrained (or less trained) service personnel. Air vents are good, because they keep the CPU cool. Clean design is good too, because it makes people happy. What we have here is a collision of design goals, not a quality metric.

The author is trying to make a purely aesthetic point (Apple laptops look pretty) and extend it to one of hardware (and even software) quality. But that fails, because "quality" isn't always about aesthetics. It's about practical concerns. Maybe the Mac aesthetics are a net win, even at a $200 premium; maybe they're not. Maybe better ventilation is important; maybe it's not.
You know what... I'd almost feel sorry for these top 1%'ers... Almost, if it wasn't these very people who OWN our gov't through their lobbyists and cash contributions.

These are the people who have orchestrated public policy in this country directly and indirectly for at least 30 years.

Now the suggestion comes up that the gov't that they bankrupted might actually expect them to pay for it, and a slew of people, none of whom are actually part of this top 1% group, start whining about what's fair and unfair.
There might be an ethical argument, but the "rich people have lots of options, and might leave" argument isn't really convincing to me. Recall that to avoid U.S. income tax, you must move abroad and permanently renounce your citizenship. How many wealthy Americans do you think would really do that solely due to a tax hike? Especially one that was in the range that would actually likely be passed (i.e. not 99%)?
In the words of Betty Draper, Daniel Gross should stop counting other people's money.
From the presentation, it sounded like it generates a C++ object for each user created php object (1 to 1).
We will all know when they release the source.
Back-of-the-envelope-calculation.

Given:

- USA population: 300 million

- percentage of households that make 250k+ in a year (according to the article): 2.1%

If we assume that we have 2 people per household, that's 150 million * 0.021 = 3.15 million "households" making US$250k+.

Assuming that the average income of the US$ 250k+ group is much larger than the bottom, something close to US$ 1 million, and assuming that there is a tax increase will take 5% of your income from your pocket. In practice, we are saying that we are taking 50 thousand dollars of each household that makes more than US$250k.

Using these values, the government would get 3.15 million times US$ 50 thousand = 157.5 billion dollars from this tax increase.

According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_States_federal_budg... : the net deficit for the 2009 budget was 407 billion dollars.

I know that are tons of other things in a serious model: flow of money and such. But even so, I wonder if there is any kind of tax increase that would actually be able to fix the deficit.
Do you truly believe there's anybody out there who wouldn't work to attain wealth merely because the gov't takes a higher percentage of it? I mean, seriously?
Originally to provide a justice and defense system, both of which are generally regarded as places where market forces would not provide a solution that would adequate protect the rights not ceded by the people to the gov't.

Of course, after retaining this right the gov't expanded it for all manner of other purposes.

You also have to remember that in most non-US countries rights flow from the crown/gov't to the people, not from the people to the gov't, so the legal justification would be much different and along the lines of "because we didn't cede that to the people"
YouTube Calls on IPv6
I just sent you an email, but I forgot to mention that, yeah, sure, you can pay me a lot. Consider this my P.S.
Citing "laziness" is really the easy way out -- clearly your job and my job are more "lazy" in some senses than being, say, a day laborer. So why can't the day laborer move up easily?

If you and I work full time, we both work harder than 90% of the poor. 80% of the poor spent less than 27 weeks working or searching for a job in 2008. Another 10% of them worked only part time for more than 27 weeks/year. Less than 10% of the poor either worked or searched for full time work for 50 weeks/year. (See my previous citation.)

But they're an extremely self-selecting group. That's not "average".

So basically, you are saying a group of people who are self-selected to be hardworking and show initiative [1] can break out of poverty? And they do this in spite of having low income, little access to credit/finance/consumer banking, a quality education, or even the ability to speak english?

That pretty much proves that low income, little access to consumer finance and lack of a quality education do not prevent a hardworking person from breaking out of poverty. This is evidence for my hypothesis, not yours.

[1] In some cases, they are simply self-selected to be fast runners, good at hiding, or other such non-marketable skills. See, e.g., Vietnamese, Somalian or Igbo refugees, all of whom exhibit greater income mobility than poor Americans.
@_delerium, please read again. That is NOT what Daniel said.
The longest path in a 100 GHz chip would be 3 mm or a signal travelling at the speed of light won't have enough time to reach the other endpoint.
I looked at the <title> and it says "Apple Confidential: The Acquisition of NeXT". Since the actual title at the top of the page isn't bold or a larger text size I tuned it out thinking it was an advertisement.
You may call me stupid, but after skimming this article I still have no idea what they mean with "enterprise search"...
And this answers the question how??
...and there's your problem. Helvetica and Helvetica Neue both tend to look lousy on the web unless they're used in a graphic (where you get to control kerning and antialiasing) or at a relatively small size (10-14pt equivalent), and then only in Safari for the most part.

There are fonts that are just a little less elegant than the real Helveticas, fonts you wouldn't likely use in a print application, that render a whole lot better in browsers because they were designed for the screen and play with pixels better.

Arial isn't one of my favorites, but it is a proven web font, and whatever else it may be it is certainly a Helvetica rip-off. Use Geneva then a Helvetica as fall-backs.

Verdana makes great sans-serif body copy at small sizes, but it's a bit, um, portly for headings or body copy at large sizes.

Some folks seem to like Tahoma, but I find it makes some weird word-shapes that slow my reading. It's worth a try. Other popular and widely-distributed fonts like Trebuchet, Calibri and Candara work well, but not in a design as sparse as yours (they're too, well, organic to work in a clinical setting).

If you can find it in your heart to go serif (and you should whenever the text gets long), then georgia, garamond, palatino, "palatino linotype", serif; is what you want in almost every case. (Constantia is also pretty and readable, but less likely to be installed than Georgia, and damn Georgia sets well on the web.)
I'm hiring a Jr. PHP/Drupal developer. Great gig for someone fresh outta school. http://www.fiercemarkets.com/about_us/join_our_team?job=3