skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most heavily debated tax issue is the rate that the richest pay. Progressives argue that they should pay much higher percentages than they currently do. They fail to account for the added incentive to avoid such taxes and subsequent loophole creation and usage.

So the core issue of tax policy has been the marginal tax rates verses total revenue. It isn't the WSJ.
Reminded me of this old article about how the effective tax rate in the U.S. can be argued to be virtually 40%: http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/Advice/YourRealTa...
Teaching, Playing, and Programming: Designing a Data Structure
In languages that can mutate data structures using side-effects, linked lists are rarely the best choice of data structure. Note, for example, that Python and Ruby have built-in array-based lists, but no linked lists. Similar structures are the default for lists in C++, Java, and C#.

That said, I'm pretty sure people use linked lists a lot in Common Lisp.
http://www.amanet.org/performance-profits/editorial.cfm?Ed=3...
"90 percent of workers believe that better office design leads to better overall performance and gives the company a competitive advantage, and 90 percent of senior executives believed that a better physical working environment would have a positive impact on the bottom line"

http://www.management-issues.com/2006/8/24/research/poor-wor...
"even simple things such as good lighting and having adequate daylight can reduce absenteeism by 15 per cent and increase productivity by between 2.8 per cent and 20 per cent."

http://www.cabe.org.uk/default.aspx?contentitemid=659&fi...
"In a 2003 survey by Management Today
magazine, virtually all (94 per cent) of those
responding said that they regarded their
place of work as a symbol of whether or
not they were valued by their employer.
Yet only 39 per cent thought that their
offices had been designed ‘with people
in mind’; and in another study no less than
a third said that they were too ashamed
of their offices to bring back colleagues
or clients."
Netflix Roku box is a step in the WRONG direction in my opinion. Integration in existing tech (360, ps3, wii) would be much better/cheaper for both consumers and Netflix. As a consumer I don't want to spend 100 bucks on a box just to rent movie. Netflix needs to target consumer hardware vendors and partner and integrate their software/service with them.
Computer Random vs. True Random : See the difference in how random numbers are generated.
And flat!
Santana row is a cheap immitation of a city street. It is made in a way to make people feel like they are in a urban enviroment, mainly b/c there are no true urban enviroments in SJ.

Yes it is a mall, but it takes this form mainly b/c SJ lacks proper city streets, with thriving retail, where you can actually enjoy walking, meeting people, dining, working, and shopping.

You don't have to go out of the country to see where proper urban areas mixed with retail can be great enviroment.
Go to Boston's Fenaul Hall, or Harvard sq. where there is a very healthy mix of PUBLIC space, retail and shopping, some offices, and condos or houses.

If people did city planing in a good way, these garish malls would be superflous.
Yes, but not every idea turns out to be a good one.

Based on the unanimous jeers every time a PDF submission gets autoconverted, scribd appears not to be one of the good ones. Maybe it's time to try something else.
Um...The article was pointing out that those two curves are independent. Isn't that what you're saying too? That even large fluctuations in the highest tax bracket have no material effect on the bottom line.

However I agree with you that journalists should provide actual statistical analysis alongside charts, instead of adding sensational writing and letting the masses draw their own conclusions visually.

I would like to see a chart that plots (/ tax-revenue GDP) to the early 1900's.
Have you folks looked at what's actually available with the AppleTV for rent? Not a strong selection either - and they're hitting you every time you want to rent a movie or buy a TV show. For a series, that really adds up. I think the all you can eat, one time fee for this additional point of consumption is great for prior members. I for one am happy to add it alongside our Tivo and AppleTV.
57 Habits of Highly Effective Gmail Users
Here are some of the habits that Gmail users have employed to make sending, receiving and organizing their emails better and faster than before.
Yeah, hilarious. Implying causation where there is only correlation is probably the most frequent logical error in print.
Good article sucky headline!
I think you're missing my point.

> I seriously question the economics of Zappos... I really feel like any day their prices are going to go up to MSRP and they're going straight out of business.

>> It's not a hassle at all with Zappos, it's trivial. I'm the kind of guy who would just eat the $50-$100 if it required more than 10 minutes of my time.
Why Raising VC Funding Does Not Equal Success
Ask YC:Guidelines for submitting interesting (for HC) articles
Are there set of guidelines for submitting links to interesting articles to HN? I am asking this because some of my submitted links to articles are not at all interesting to HN community, where I thought they're interesting and align with the goals of HN. I would like to filter out uninteresting links myself without polluting HN.
For the last few weeks, I've been watching streaming Netflix movies on a 100 inch screen. The quality is better than expected, although your mileage may vary depending on how big a pipe you have. I just pull up Netflix in a browser, choose my movie, and put it on full screen mode.

The Roku $100 price is amazing. If I hooked it up to my DLP projector, the video quality would be similar to my current setup since it's mainly bandwidth-dependent.
yeah, we'd be much better off if all these programmers we hire from state schools weren't able to afford an education.
Perhaps. Though for me, trying on a pair of shoes in the store and putting them back on the shelf is a much different experience then ordering them online, waiting a few days, trying them on, and then re-packing them up and going to the post office to ship them back. When I buy stuff online, I usually want to keep it.
it is a very blog entry, from the creator of Freakonomics.
There is no real study, no real data, and wikipedia is quoted.

Not worth the read, insubstantial and borderline trollish. Disapointing comming from somebody like him.
Andrew, we get that you're trying to promote yourself. Really we do. Your name is in your URL. It's prefixed to all your story submissions. Showing some restraint you only used part of it for your username.

But really, it's getting to be a big turn off. It wreaks of a kitschy trick. Would you try, from now on, to let your work speak for itself? People, especially your intended audience, aren't stupid. If your work is good, they'll know it is yours and you'll earn their respect.
Parser Fear (Martin Fowler on Domain Specific Languages)
What is the market? We could help out more if we knew the specifics.
Thank you, Xichekolas! Whether you remembered or figured it out doesn't matter - either way, you have the makings of a great hacker. Sure hope to see you again before 5/19/09.
Oh I remembered from when you mentioned it at startup school. Sadly I was so busy yesterday playing with javascript that I forgot until today.
A classic case of "lets find a graph to bolster our opinion". They may indeed be right. Raising taxes may produce a disincentive for capital to work and reduce GDP, actually reducing tax revenues. That fits in one sentence... what shall we fill the article with?

Comparing this wacky correlation with Boyle's law is just shameful. There are examples in the former eastern-blok countries where low flat taxes actually cut corruption and raised revenues. They would have done better just presenting these anecdotes than this!
Wowsers, that's a good point. I didn't know he's on YC, that's great.
it's not rendering a font, it's a non-vector image, stored with bad comrpession, therefore it will get blur if you zoom it.
As thrilled as I am that you remembered, I'm even happier that you were so immersed in your code yesterday that you forgot. Nothing to be sad about. I bet a lot of people here would love to be able to focus like that a little more often.
Excellent visualization!

It would appear that there is some kind of flaw in the pseudo-random generator used, since once can see definite patterns in the output.
Choose Your Manager
<brag> I wished him yesterday ;) </brag>
"If you read the Jonathan Ive cuttings file not a big book, he rarely gives interviews you'll find the same few scraps of information over and over: Jonathan is shy, he's modest, he's private."

What?
That's why they pay you the big karma.
Not an example of the Journal's finest reporting.
I would also add that you please not try to post the exact same news here that we're already seeing on digg/reddit/slashdot/etc. Most of us read those sites as well and, if we don't, the reason is likely that we're *&^%ing sick of the stories posted on those sites lol.

Thank you for asking.
Of course, he's trolling in response to similar behavior from the authors of the Lancet article.

The authors propose solving a health problem with economics, giving climate change as a motivation. Levitt is pointing out climate change is a poor motivation for what they are trying to accomplish, and, if you follow their reasoning to its logical conclusion, it will actually encourage worse health problems.
I think that's the point this article is trying to make, is it not?

The point is that higher taxes lower TOTAL GDP. So that even if taxes are raised, taxes collected as a percentage of GDP remain the same.

So the only way to increase the actual amount of collected taxes is to increase GDP as top marginal tax rates don't matter.

Hence, if higher marginal taxes on the rich really do hurt the economy, they will effectively lower tax collection not increase it.

Now, do higher marginal tax rates hurt the economy?
TechMeme Finally Adds Search
:-) I wished him by email. I wanted to post here but then remembered the heat I got for being (genuinely) concerned about missing nickb. Thanks for posting - we can have a close knit group.
Thanks. My question is about filtering within the boundaries of ontopic area. Sometimes I feel HN community has mood swings, for example community sometimes likes entrepreneurial oriented articles, startup success stories and sometimes it doesn't.
Aw, shucks.
I'm talking about power and not about voltage; the diameter of a conductor is mostly defined according to the current (hence, power) it will carry through (we're talking about a 300 MW line, at peak time). You simply can't have conductors as large as trunks in the air.
Ask PG: Can you do more to make it difficult for political articles to reach front page?
Over the past few days, I've seen more inflammatory articles on politics, global warming, and so forth. While in moderation this may be fine, I think my peers on Hacker News will agree: that does not qualify as "Hacker News." Could you guys adjust the algorithms in any way to make it harder for these articles to reach front page?
"the exception that proves the rule" - a quote that can pretty strongly demonstrate idiocy of an argument.
Nice strawman argument.
I haven't noticed too much of this, but I definitely don't want the HN front page to go the way of Reddit.
The top tax bracket was 90% in the 1950's?!
By my read, this means that we should raise the top marginal tax rate to 90%. Why? If it doesn't matter, then you might as well make the unwashed masses (like me!) happy that the rich are "doing their fair share".

Hauser fails to see that savvy political policy does not flow from "rational" economic policy.
The problem is bigger than just mood swings. I have seen the same exact story around the same time (but not on the same "new" page--say, a day later), and one gets voted up and the other doesn't.

I think a lot of the problem stems from the new page to front page algorithm. Only a small subset of readers on HN upvote stories. And only a small subset of those upvoters ever look at the new page. And both groups are self-selected and not necessarily representative of the whole group. And when looking at the new page, the top stories on that page get looked at more. And when people actually click on a link, the majority don't actually read the story. And on top of that, stories only show there for a fixed amount of time, and in some cases, it isn't that long.

The result of all that is stories are looked at by very few people before a decision is made (algorithmically) to promote it to the front page or not. Often it only takes one upvote. I've submitted a lot of stories, and some from my own blog, so I know the amount of traffic you get from the new page, i.e. the # of people actually reading your story while it is on that page is quite small.

One idea would be to randomly give x slots of the front page (under say, the top 10) to new stories. These stories would be randomly chosen from the past y hours to give them more exposure. A different selection would display on each page load. Presumably, once a story gets one upvote it would stop showing in this random process. Perhaps such an algorithm could also take into account how many people clicked on the article, and also do something with that information as well.
I'm a software trainer and .NET/SQL consultant so, Yes :)
Although lately I think it is the opposite, I see an article here and then 24-48 hours later it shows up on Slashdot or Reddit. I used to read Digg, but it has gotten so bad the last 4 months I don't waste my time, so no comment there. I feel like some of the power users on those sites watch here first.
Government schooling makes education less affordable. It just hides the costs well.
the upmod arrow is there so you can upmod stories you like so that they make it to the front page, my assumption would be that the stories you see are on the front page because multiple people did want them there.
Or am I totally missing the point? Not sure.
Eh, hopefully we can make an exception for Eddie. He does contribute a lot to making this site what it is.
Yes, but it didn't kick in until your income got up over $1 million or so. This was actually common around the globe before the Reagan/Thatcher revolution. Remember the Beatles song "Taxman"?

"I'll tell you how it will be/ that's one for you nineteen for me/ 'cause I'm the Taxmaaaan!"

The Beatles were actually paying 19 out of every 20 cents to Her Majesty's government, for a top rate of 95%.
How's this news though ?
I doubt the algorithm has anything to do with the actual content of the articles. Short of tagging posts as "political" I'm not sure there's much that could be done.
I haven't noticed any difference either.
A bunch of the Twitter employees inexplicably began following me on Twitter last week, at first I was like "huh"? but then I just chalked it up to Zappos having a corporate culture that creates a lot of really savvy web people.
Negroponte Unveils 2nd Generation OLPC Laptop: It’s an E-Book
Though it's somewhat longer than this, "A Modest Proposal", I assume, would meet with a similar response from you, no?

For what it's worth, I thought it was reasonably funny.
The Frontal Cortex : The Hidden Cost of Smart Drugs
Twitter: Something Is Technically Wrong
Read more carefully. If you increase the marginal tax rate, GDP probably decreases and thus tax revenue decreases.
In addition to maintaining a personal blog, I'd argue that it's vital to maintain your company's blog (a point that was hammered in by Michael Arrington at Startup School this year). Both personal and professional blogs keep you engaged with the communities around you and organically draw attention to your activities.
Global Warming Alarmists seize every abnormal climate event as an opportunity to harangue us into regulating ourselves back into the Stone Age. Katrina was one such event.
Carl Icahn Already Up $120+ Million on Yahoo Bet (YHOO)
Faneuil Hall felt just as fake to me, kind of like Fisherman's Wharf. The rest of Boston is nice though.
This article drives at what may be the single biggest factor to consider when building a system to scale: sharding.

Nowadays, every time I think about an operation that the user will have to wait for, I consider if it "jumps the shard".

If so, it'll ultimately have to fire off a request to a separate server, and perhaps do an expensive join. It'll be slow. It had damn well better be worth it.
>"A review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequences of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th and early 21st centuries have produced no deleterious effects upon Earth's weather and climate. Increased carbon dioxide has, however, markedly increased plant growth. Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in hydrocarbon use and minor greenhouse gases like CO2 do not conform to current experimental knowledge."

I'm pretty sure this is non-controversial. Most of the dangers of Global Warming are _predicted_ based on _computer models_ of the future. They are not, strictly speaking, empirical.
>Let's also not forget increasing energy efficiency and otherwise reducing waste that have direct economic benefits...

Then it should be profitable to do so without $billions of subsidies and draconian regulations.
"There are some tricks to improve the randomness of the computer generated numbers... For instance, you could have the program sleep for a randomly generated amount of milliseconds before grabbing the next random number... or add, subtract, divide, and multiply the random numbers with other random numbers."

I'm no PRNG expert but I think I read somewhere that those techniques wouldn't significantly improve the quality of pseudo-randomness, if at all. You can't mix 2 bad wines to get a good one.
I would argue that in the context of his blog it's not trollish. I think satire is a lost art, certainly the works of Swift could be seen as trollish in some context as well.

Now, does it belong on the front page of hacker news? No, probably not, but that's a different issue.
It's not. I really didn't expect this to get voted up. Just wanted edw519 to catch it on the 'New' page, which I assume he watches.
You're right, more people should check out the 'new' items -- there are a lot of gems in there.
A more informed and informative source on the subject:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/random_number_...
Just bought jumptheshard.com. Too good to pass up.
Only guessing here, I think that it solves a copyright issue.
Creativity cannot exist in a vaccuum, without some contraints put on it, it explodes in a million directions like so much debris.

So I second those who say you should take the opportunity to be creative with the dull space and make it your own :-)
Happy birthday! I think if you celebrate a day late he officially will live 24 hours longer in his life right?
You're being downmodded for making assertions which are either false or meaningless. I can't quite figure out which just yet.

In case you're still under the impression that the US is a particularly high-crime country, check out http://rechten.uvt.nl/icvs/images/graph05.jpg. The grey bars show that the US is safer than an awful lot of other developed countries including the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland (!), Switzerland (!), Belgium and Australia. And that's not even counting undeveloped countries, which tend to have much higher crime than developed ones.
I agree, in terms of convenience for higher-end shopping it's nice. I'm more concerned about the erosion of true public space (as in a public plaza, square, city streets, etc) and the conflation of such space with purely commercial zones. I know of at least one dense "new urban" development (University Villages in Marina, CA) that includes a plaza owned by the developer, which allows them to outright ban people, demonstrations, gatherings, or at the very least make it prohibitively restrictive when trying to plan or hold such events.

As a shopping mall, it's great. As a neighborhood, which it certainly aspires to, it sucks.
VW Will Sell a 200 MPG Car in 2010
Fantastic read.

My son has always been allowed to swear as long as he chooses appropriate times and places. The words aren't particularly important since a person can be extremely rude and/or cruel without ever swearing. So instead he has been taught about about the taboo surrounding swearing as well as the importance of communication.

I want him to be a kid and have a good time and feel safe but I also want him to be realistic and prepared. Sometimes it's a balancing act but I never get lazy and tell him untruths.I've considered it but it seems a slippery slope. My son is also very perceptive so when things don't add up, he's quick to point it out.

At times I will give him a simple answer but I tell him it is a simple answer and that I can tell him more if he wants it, now or later. He usually opts for later. If I don't know something, I suggest that we google it and research it together.

I've read that adolescence is somewhat of a new thing (past 100 years or so) and that it is lasting longer and longer because of the way children are coddled by their parents while overwhelmed by options via media. It's my hope that by keeping things real that he will be able to utilize the world around him rather than become another indecisive, selfish, bored 25 year old years away from exiting their adolescence.
Don't you ever view source code to learn something?
Tipjoy: Rethinking Micropayments
No kidding! http://searchyc.com/user/edw519

edw519:
1436 comments, 3.51 points per comment
836 submissions, 4.90 points per submission
How Did Honor Evolve? The Biology of Integrity.
The book "the tipping point" (an old fad, I know) made a comment on this as well. Teams are exponentially harder to manage over a certain threshold. I believe there are a few companies who actually go so far as to arbitrarily limit the size of teams for this reason with some good success. (Goretex was the example in the book as I remember)
"Economists of all persuasions accept that a tax rate hike will reduce GDP [..]"

No.
I built a kick ass table for my kitchen out of stuff I found in a dumpster.
One more thing that I would add is to give incentive for checking the new page. Say if you upvote a link on the new page and if the link makes it to the front page, members who upvoted would get 1 or 2 karmas.
Digg - Video K. Heinz Duthel, Independent Candidate for European Un
If delayed birthday celebration were the secret to longevity, think how long people born on February 29th would live...
But generalizations are just that... general.

The essay doesn't apply to my parenting but I enjoyed reading it anyway because I know that it applies to many other parents. I could identify with aspects of it because I survived public schools.

You made the decisions to raise your child as you are for specific reasons. I can't imagine that this article doesn't touch onto some of the motivators behind your parenting style.
If you just want a PRNG for a game, then sending the output of a bad PRNG through a hash function like MD5 will almost always give you good results. That would've been better advice. Also, the mouse is a readily available source of randomness which can also suffice for a game. As far as PRNGs for cryptographic purposes, that's something else entirely.

(By conincidence, I am going to be writing a game which uses cryptographically secure algorithms to generate random numbers for a procedurally generated game world. (A Galaxy of 400 Billion Stars!)
The Scribd file was degraded in quality to absolute illegibility, I had to grab the original link out of the URL just so I could read it.

Opt-out? It's annoying. They should just stop doing it for everyone perhaps, or just use it as a backup in case the site is knocked off line by the influx of social news traffic.