skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 2009 deficit is an outlier, because it's being sampled immediately after a sharp fall in revenue. In fact the budget was (briefly, before tax cuts and two wars threw it out of whack again) balanced as recently as 2001. There's no reason to expect that it's an impossibility.

But no, you can't enact a sudden tax increase (or spending cut) in a down year and expect it to close the gap. Budget planning is done over decade-scale timeframes.

Also note that the deficit is bad not because its immediate cost is unbearable but because its current scale is unsustainable. The marginal cost of any extra borrowing is actually quite low; the US Federal Government pays very low interest rates on its debt (check the federal bond rates for current numbers), and no one is suggesting an inability to pay this year's debt -- it's a drop in the bucket. So the goal is a steady reduction of deficit spending to a sustainable level.
It is because of tournament theory that people are requesting billionaires to be taxed more.

http://ingrimayne.com/econ/resouceProblems/Tournament.html

The differences between individuals (say top 10,000) in certain skills becomes negligible due to the sheer amount of people in the world. However, due to winner take all systems, it is possible for someone that works 0.01% harder or luckier to take 100% of the reward. This is why it is possible for wage disparities to increase beyond ratios of 1000 to 1 without someone having to work 1000 times harder.

The reasoning behind increasing the tax rate on the super wealthy is for several reasons

1) It is easier to accumulate money the wealthier you are. This creates a negative incentive for the super rich to work as hard since it becomes easier to simply buy out competition and form monopoly status. Or crush everyone else due to economies of scale rather than true innovation.

2) This conundrum is well known in many companies where they try to pay their employees as much as they can, but not too much, or else they retire early. If you believe in the mantra that the richest people are the most productive, then it is obviously in society's best interest to keep them productive.

3) The more percentage of total wealth you have, the more US infrastructure you use and rely on. For example: Exxon heavily relies on the US military and government sponsored roads. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft heavily relies on the nationalized electric grid, subsidized education, the invention of the Internet, and subsidized telecoms that allowed people to use it. The average Joe does not have as much to lose if these tax subsidized services were to disappear tomorrow.

4) The tournament theory I mentioned above. The vast differences in wealth are due to situation or luck, and not because someone truly works 1000 times harder than you.
ITA software is hiring an implementation engineer in Cambridge, MA:

http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/jlisting.html?uid=718870

ITA's the place to be if you're into the air travel industry. The job is to be a technical go-to guy for airline/travel IT folks while they get up and running using an ITA product, like our search engine QPX. There's a lot of freedom, management gets out of your way and you just do whatever needs to get done. You can use any language for personal projects, web app demos, etc. Knowledge of lisp is a plus. Also we get catered Friday lunch, free snacks, great benefits, and a surprisingly good tea selection. You can ask me questions or shoot me your resume (email in profile) but along with your resume, do one of those programming puzzles we have up on the site.
It's not clear how some of the services would work if there were opt-in though. If I opt out of the government-provided property-rights system, for example, but someone else doesn't, what happens? If we have a dispute over who owns a particular piece of land, usually a court resolves that. But I've opted out of the government court system, so how do we resolve this dispute? By force of arms?
People who make $250,000 or more a year can afford to pay more for a lot of things. But if you tried to charge one person more for an identical candy bar or television or movie ticket just because they make more money, everyone would instantly see this as unjust. Why should government services be any different?

I'd be a lot more content with differential tax rates if the money I'm saving to start my next business - and create jobs for Americans - was exempt. Every dollar I give the government is a dollar they're going to spent a whole lot less efficiently than I will.
I'm not saying they might leave. I'm saying that rich people have a good life in any kind of system. This includes being mobile.

Your point was we should take money from those who got the greatest benefit from our society. By that reasoning, people who are alive now and would have died otherwise have it the best, right? Or does that extra boat or summer house so important that it's a better benefit than living?

Listen very closely: whatever system you set up, there will be rich people. If you tighten the tax laws, the rich will be criminals and politically-connected people. But there will always be rich people. It's true in any societal construct. They will always have a better lifestyle than the average person. Given the criteria you have presented, you will never end your quest to find rich people and tax them.
Why do you say VMS is "shitty"? Linux is 15-20 years behind it on clustering alone...
Rich folks are only as rich as the society they inhabit recognize them to be. Ask white Zimbabwean farm owners how wealthy they are now (only one recent example). The wealthy benefit the most - by far - from how society is structured, if for no other reason than that societal structure is what's holding them up as "rich" in the first place.
If you make nearly $250k and do not understand even the basic progressive income tax system in this country, then I just don't know where to begin...
much to the detriment of those people who had bought all that highend firewire hardware

What detriment? Apple only ships two models without FireWire, neither of which cater to the sort of person who owns a lot of high-end FireWire kit anyway.
Yes, I'm well aware of trickle down effects and how it would feed money from the federal budget back into the economy. Yes I've read a couple macro textbooks and even taken more than a few college macro courses in my time, you can cut the condescension and stop appealing to authority, thanks.

There are just always better things to do with that money than making something useless. There are lots of projects that could actually make business more efficient and attractive to conduct in the US.

But failing finding something useful to do with it, they could produce nothing and we'd still be better off. What you're talking about with building a useless bridge is a terribly inefficient form of welfare.

Think about it this way: By having those bridge builders watch the grass grow and sending them the money you would have paid them as welfare, sending the suppliers the money you would have paid them, you get the trickle-down effects you mentioned without the future cost obligations that come with actually producing a bridge to the middle of a lake.

So my original point stands. It's worse to produce something completely useless than it is to not produce anything at all.
If he's unhappy with the world in general, is that any reason for us to be offended? The world can be quite sucky, we may as well admit it. No need to go into personal attack mode.
Ask HN: How do you deal with Big JavaScript files?
Hi,

I'm building a JavaScript engine. I used a simple function as a class, added subfunctions, strings... and used prototypes to add other objects as needed...

Everything is fine. The problem now, is that I'm using one class (or main function), because I need it to be so. It's becoming huge, to the point that I can't control it any more and debugging the code is becoming as hard as hell.

I'm a C# developer, who used Visual Studio. I never come across this problem, because I have different files/classes/forms...

I wonder how developers here deal with large JavaScript files. What tools/strategies/techniques do you use to solve this issue.

Note: I want to use ONE main function (or javascript class).

Thanks
Your example is bad because people making over $250,000 generally don't use most Government services. A better example would be if the person came in to buy a TV and you forced him to buy a TV, DVR and surround sound system for the guy standing behind him in line.
Inventables is looking for a few awesome ruby/rails engineers in Chicago: http://www.inventablescorporate.com/careers/positions-availa...
You had a good point until you turned it into a personal attack.
Excellent suggestion. Although I think design is a skill that has to be learned by practice (and there's of course natural talent involved), Non-Designer's Design Book gives you a few concepts that allow you to better understand why some designs just look better and some don't.

One of the biggest tool for me was that you shouldn't be wimpy, but make big contrasts: e.g. select large font & small font instead of two that are too close to each other.
America's population is over 300M. Do you really think 3MM+ people all 'own the government' as a collective? Do you really think 3MM+ people are responsible for bankrupting the government?

I had a good year last year thanks to the business I founded, so I'm in this top 1% of taxpayers, but I have exactly the same political influence as everybody else. Less, since I can't even vote in this country. And instead of 'bankrupting the government', my cofounder and I worked hard and created some jobs in the middle of a recession.
Your claim is that John Paulson is contributing 5 orders of magnitude more to society than teachers, social workers, police officers, firefighters, construction workers, engineers, nurses, and soldiers?
"I live in a good area for HN meetups"

You want to host a meetup, so why are you shy of telling us the exact location?
One interesting point: it talks about Perl 6. And it was written in 2000....

I didn't realize it's been in the works for that long.
This is nice, but eam's right: consumers will hate it!

Assuming it takes off, this could become <the> way to share links, basically making reddit/digg submissions profitable.

Any thought to how to handle any major backlash, like a site banning an unbig.me link altogether?
Seems to me that the only conclusion he comes to is that Apple makes quality products. Where does he imply that they're superior?
Exactly. "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." It's not as if wealth can be generated from the void. The top 1% often give so graciously to the universities that made it possible, but complain heartily about the governmental institutions that have, as well.
Iterator-based Microthreading
The issue isn't "wealth" as much as it's "more wealth". There's a classic example of a secretary who did her job really well so she got a raise only to find it bumped her into a higher tax bracket and she actually made less money. So from that point on Secretaries didn't bother to excel.

This applies equally to the engineer who makes $225,000 and who might be willing to put in extra effort but won't if the reward isn't worth it.

So the issue is shifting the cost/benefit equation over to where there isn't enough benefit for people to put in the effort
I can comment on all of your statements, but I just want to say that you have to realize that there are other channels to point people at interesting content other than the /new link. Whether you like it or not, there are people who link their submissions on any of those channels and might ask to upvote it. Just like it happens on all other communities. #startups is not an organised voting ring. The regulars only upvote/flag/downvote people/submissions if they would do the same thing as if they stumbled on that content in "the natural" way.
Just some random pieces of info:

* Sketch.

* Begin your designs in greyscale. Introduce colour at a later stage once you've worked out your design whilst only being aware of tone.

* Like many have said, good typography is essential. "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst is pretty much the bible here. Some find it too dry, some find it fascinating -- either way, it's definitely worth a read.

* "Don't Make Me Think" is a brilliant book. Each page is almost worth the price of the book itself.

* With usability in mind, definitely read "Web Form Design" by Luke Wroblewski.

* When you notice a piece of design that you really appreciate, take note of it and think about why that is so.
This would be cool if it actually offered something tangible that the existing distributed computing infrastructures lacked. It's like they've basically invented Hadoop.NET, so now it's something new and great. Congrats Microsoft, you are once again late to the party.
I don't understand. WHY do you want to use one main function or class? Why not break things up into modules, classes, and functions similar to the way you do in C#?

Look at the source code of any well-written JavaScript library or app and you will find quite a bit of modularity. Some examples, from small to large:

http://osteele.com/sources/javascript/functional/functional....

http://github.com/jdalton/fusejs/tree/master/src/

http://github.com/aptana/activejs/tree/master/src/active_rec...

It makes sense to use one global object as a namespace, but within this namespace you can have as many classes, objects, and functions as you like. Look at the source of jQuery, for example: http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.1.js

Even if you have a single class, you can define that classes' members across many different files. You can concatenate all the files together at build- or deployment-time (for performance reasons) but keep them separate in your source tree. For example, the jQuery source code I linked above is actually a concatenation of half a dozen different source files. Just use the "module pattern" to wrap each file in an anonymous function, and have it export its public interfaces to objects/classes in your single global namespace: http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2007/06/12/module-pattern/
Yup. It's changed design pretty drastically in that time, though. Now it takes a lot more from Haskell than it used to, for instance.
You don't understand Lessig's argument. The problem is retroactively extending copyright -- that is where they made the mistake. They ruled that it was up to congress to decide how long copyright was and as long as it was for a limited time it was ok -- this is the correct judgement.

Hopefully they'll have a similar ruling -- if we want patents to apply to business methods and software we will have to explicitly pass a law to allow it.
In reality humans are not so different from each other in terms of production and skill...

Perhaps you simply don't have experience, but this is certainly not true. There are clear deviations from the norm. Once you start your own business or start to manage groups this becomes quite clear.
This is a post for entry level jobs.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1104493
A look at the comp.risks archives for the history of Airbus's difficulties getting fly-by-wire right could be informative here.
So you're saying that a person intelligent enough to make $250k per year wouldn't sit down and re-evaluate their job choice when they get an (effective) pay cut?
History of Lambda-calculus, Combinatory Logic, and Types
That story about the secretary? That is completely contrary to the way a marginal income tax actually works.

There is no way, in the American progressive tax system, to get a raise, be moved into a higher tax bracket, and end up taking home less money. It's just not possible.

@ryanwaggoner - correct, ty.
That's called a consumption tax, which has a lot of intellectual advantages over the current regime.

Income = Consumption + Savings. Right now we tax income, but it's possible to tax consumption instead. That would encourage more saving and less consumption, which is probably a good thing for the country (but probably won't happen any time soon because in the short run businesses wouldn't stand for it).
Your rather extreme libertarian views have really well thought out rebuttals and it makes me think you haven't actually read much to challenge these ideas of yours. I have major libertarian tendencies and I find your arguments extremely wanting. This is like level 1 libertarianism, where all the arguments, if taken to their natural conclusion, result in a tax rate of 0%.

Aside from the larger question of why the government has the right to take people's income by force to begin with

Because the government provides services that you cannot "opt-out" of. You benefit from services (ie, defense), no matter how much you try not to, by merely living within the borders. This is our "social contract". The free-rider problem makes this an essentially necessary part of any modern society.

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

And your argument ignores the incentives to reach that level (ie, being rich). They are two forces that MUST be balanced. Ignoring the incentives, I can see how you'd view all taxes as ONLY disincentive. This ignores the reality of the situation, however.

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?

It's actually quite clear on issues that take very much for granted. Like binding contract law, law and order, due process, and so on. Even still, no matter what the split, the rich -do- benefit from these more than the poor. This is a rather poor argument, though, because even if the rich didn't benefit more than the poor, the progressive tax system is moral for other reasons (decreasing marginal utility of a dollar, most importantly).

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

Yes, an economic factor that MUST be considered. Again, pretending that all tax raises are bad for a reason like this implies that the optimal tax rate is 0%.

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.

Is -any- tax revenue a net benefit to society? Or is the optimum zero? If you believe that the optimum is above zero, then you MUST acknowledge that taxes can be too low, and must raised.

Any (libertarian) argument that tends to natural conclusion in an optimal tax rate of zero can be discarded as poorly thought-out. On the flip-side, any (socialist) argument that tends to the natural conclusion of an optimal tax rate of 100% can be equally discarded.
Would love to attend but 7:30 in the morning is way too early.
The Internet has ads?
Cool; always free ?

Just noticed something funny: go on http://www.franz.com/ and click the Korean/French flags...weird effect!
There's also ClojureBox, if you're so inclined.

http://clojure.bighugh.com/
Previously submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1084690
How to dual-boot Windows Mobile and Android on your phone
On a related note - for windows users, if you want to play with Clojure - Clojure Box - http://clojure.bighugh.com/
Yes, absolutely. In this country your political influence is directly proportionate to the money you invest in attaining political influence.

The fact that you chose not to spend your money and use your connections for political gain doesn't make your ability to do so any less noteworthy.
Not when there are billions of people in the world in you are looking at the top 100,000 or so. The differences are quite small. This number is far larger and uncorrelated with the number of billionaires in the world.

And even when you cite coding studies, the magnitude is somewhere between 25:1 not 1000:1.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000072.html
Travis keeps the sites confidential, for obvious reasons. It's plausible that there was another shift in sites sampled recently, similar to the doubling that it reported for Silverlight starting one week in November:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdowdell/4180222368/

I saw Alp's post last night... plausible, a good engineering challenge. Not sure how it will play out in the world though. But it sure added some spice to this morning's Theora-vs-H.264 wars.... ;-)
Flash in Firefox on OS X 10.5.8 never crashes on me. Bogs down the cpu: sometimes. Usually when I have multiple videos open playing simultaneously. What are you folks doing?
Well, the United States government has it because it ratified an amendment to the Constitution saying it does, via the Constitutionally defined process to do so.

1.) Right, I'm going to give up on my dream to get rich because I'm paying a 4% higher marginal tax rate. Nevermind that I can afford an accountant to figure out how to minimize my tax burden and will effectively end up paying a smaller percentage of my wealth.

2.) 'Wealth', as a concept, does not exist except within the structure of the society that recognizes it. Ours happens to be structured so that to some degree you can earn your wealth. It's a Randian fairytale that anyone is wealthy from solely their own effort, though.

3.) That's true. But the U.S. actually has a pretty average tax rate compared to a lot of other places, is more or less stable, and has the largest paying market in the world by far. It's not the only consideration.

4.) That's also true (or at least debatable - a lot of wealthy people invest super conservatively so as to maintain their current wealth, oftentimes right back into the government itself, and are hardly engines of innovation), but you were asking for a basic moral justification, not a full exposition on the effectiveness of the current tax code and budget.
Actually, it's contrary to the way a marginal income tax works.
This explains a lot of anecdotal evidence I see around me. The people I know who are employed continue to be well employed, wages are fine, hours and benefits haven't gotten as bad as they did after the tech bubble burst.

But if you're currently unemployed, you seem to stay that way for quite some time.
> Will people create wealth if they can't get paid for it? Only if it's fun. People will write operating systems for free. But they won't install them, or take support calls, or train customers to use them. And at least 90% of the work that even the highest tech companies do is of this second, unedifying kind.

http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
While economies are quite complex, employment will generally always lag behind investment. Just as layoffs were delayed until some time after the actual evidence of collapse was seen in the markets, it will take some time for the recovery to show in employment figures.
Watch porn with the xxx rubygem
Most people don't think it is. That's why everybody uses it.

Crashing seems to be mostly directly correlated with pseudonymous Apple-polishing on webforums.... ;-)

(btw, if you're sincerely trying to improve your own experience, there's a quick set of diagnostics here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2010/02/troubleshooting_player_sta... )