skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of the least enlightening articles I've seen in a long time. I understand that it's a challenge to succinctly summarize a 73 page paper in 300 words, but here the author seems to be happy to use the paper's "findings" to support a extremely simplified "fact" about the current tax system.

The numbers cited in the article are based on a wide collection of parameters/assumptions, but that is ignored in the summary.

Interestingly, the paper on which the article is based was directly supported by fairtax.org- an organization solely dedicated to a drastic restructuring of the tax system.

The all in tax burden at different levels of income is a very interesting concept to explore. But here it seems like both the journalist and the paper's authors have addressed the issue with a bias which takes away from what could otherwise be a very interesting subject.
Agreed, one of the ironies of school is that one of its sole conceivable benefits is socialization, which is heavily punished and restricted. I have no idea where it was agreed upon that sitting passively listening to middle-aged people lecture for six hours a day is in anyway helpful to a young person, but whatever.
Unschooling seems vaguely defined, but it seems to sit on the child-initiated end of the spectrum. Traditional schooling is at the teacher-initiated end. I'm a fan of the Montessori style, which is near the middle. It's a great balance of freedom and structure.
what a great way to build a 21st century business, an updated map would be useful.

http://www.workalicious.org/2009/08/interactive-google-map-o...
In all forms of sales tax, the devil is in the details. The differences are not in the concept but how one chooses to administer the particulars. Where and if you choose to credit low income, what "sales" you choose to tax or not, and the overall tax rates themselves.

FairTax, in my personal opinion isn't the best example of where to draw these lines. It is rightly criticized for that, but that says nothing about the fact that overall, taxing consumption is a better idea than taxing income - a move that was largely bred from the need to fund a massive increase in government spending.

A tax that allows for funding of government programs, encourages the creation of wealth and the growth of personal income and discourages rampant consumerism (as in buying things you can't afford - and having prices bubble accordingly) is a much "fairer" system in my books.

I discount a lot of the notions of this type of system being inherently regressive because that argument insinuates that the current system is not. I believe Mr. Buffet quite aptly supported this assertion with real numbers a few years back.
Earning 55% more, with no health care, no pre-school child care, and without whatever other benefits are afforded the Swedes, is at best a wash.
If your platform provides one, why bother?
Agreed with what marknutter says. You should start learning it yourself. Start attending other meetups. Your willingness to learn will pay dividends down the road for your startup:

1) it's signaling. Tells a developer that you're serious about what youre doing, and youre going to do it.
2) it's a start. your ideas will change and coalesce more as you code it. As well developed as you think you have it, once you write code you realize you didn't account for many things.
3) You might end up being good at it, and make progress faster than you think.

Seriously, the modern web languages are pretty straightforward. My non-technical cofounder who has become an intermediate level PHP coder finds that DNS and email is much much more confusing than writing code.
Another question would be. Is is possible to build something without focusing on SEO nowadays?
Why Apple’s headed to $350 by year end
The numbers don't add up to the macro numbers, though--- the governments at all levels added together pull in about 25-30% of U.S. GDP in taxes, not 40%.

One thing throwing off his numbers is that he assumes all income to be ordinary income, whereas a large proportion of Americans' income, especially at the high end, get classified as capital gains or qualified dividends, which are taxed at lower rates. I believe Warren Buffett calculated that his real tax rate was 18%, for example.
Please don't turn a discussion of how wiki's are no longer the free form web-based collaborative scratch pads they were envisioned to be, into some stupid political nitpicking based on some specific wikipedia article not being "neutral" (in your viewpoint's favor). The point, is that wikipedia has turned the popular idea of a wiki into a formal documentation system, and that idea has gone viral into other places where such clinical sterility of expression is not appropriate.
I'm no fan of excessive taxing, but if you shifted the source of all current tax revenue to consumption based transactions, this would cripple the poor and middle class.

For much of the lower/middle class, a significant, sometimes 100% of their income goes to consumption. For the wealthy, consumption as percent of income can be very small.
I'm doing it alone, and I didn't plan to spend anything.
Thanks anyway! :)
I won't become a netflix customer until they stop using pop-under advertising.
I have also already built one...and check out stippleit.com -- they have already launched and have a good product that had some recent NYTimes coverage.
I know they're not fixed, but it seems there is zero information conveyed from the purchasing system to the hotel management system, which conveys what was originally sold.
Didn't they just kill this article in a different form?
Eh, the cost is that you only get a maximum of 80% of your salary. It is also capped.
The InnoCentive business model matched against things that are killing us slowly
As a father, I have to second this. One of the great values of the tablet is that my daughter can use it directly. She's already learned a lot of the gestures necessary to get to the things she wants. It fits really well in a diaper bag or diaper backpack and is an excellent entertainment and educational device for long visits to anywhere. Don't leave home without it.

I have an Archos 7, and my daughter's going to be 2 years old tomorrow.
"...un-schooling is learning without the trappings of a formal schooling arrangement. It is the act of trusting your child’s natural curiosity to teach them what they need to know. This is not to say that you abandon your children at the playground and pick them up at the end of the day, mind you. Instead, the parent plays a critical role as a resource who is there to answer questions, to talk with and to provide support."

I like this article. It's an explanation of one of the many ways in which people are decentralizing their lives (Other ways include the returns and growth of local food and entrepreneurship).

Of course, decentralization of education means that parents and/or local communities have to be more involved in their children's educations. But I think the larger point is that in order to do that, people need to be less involved with other things. I hope I live long enough to see the culture shift towards smaller lifestyles with an emphasis on more diversity and creativity.
Allmyapps grabs 1 million euros for iTunes-for-apps
In Sweden, the employer can not deny a request for part time work (75%) if the child is 8 years or younger.
There's an odd effect where a high-price area spills over into the neighbo(u)ring areas. I haven't quite figured out an explanation.

Price gouging.
Apple's Jobs says 'onerous terms' kept Facebook ties out of Ping
I try to stack another buck on any time the tip will be <15%. You don't wanna be the schmoe tipping a buck for a $9 drink.
Fact is that beyond a small group of influencers nobody gives a crap what anyone is saying on Twitter.

If, by "small group of influencers," you mean "my friends," then sure, I agree.
Or better yet, try not to use a PDF (I know there are some practical examples of why PDF's are good, but in general they could be avoided most of the time) and use markup instead.
The US is less competitive than it likes to believe in the tax wars, when all is included. We just spend an incomparable amount on military instead of social services.
Governments should look to Logan’s Run for a sustainable solution.
woops, would edit if I could. In my defense, English isn't my native tongue :)
The cable/satellite providers control the DVR set-top box market. Resources poured into marketing and distributing the WMC boxes would likely be largely wasted.
Great post-- Ping really is a waste of a great idea. This should have been the death knell for last.fm by letting you connect with friends through the application you use to listen, but they didn't put in the most important feature! The entire 'like' feature lives in the store, not in the part of iTunes where you actually listen to music, which is where I would want to be able to communicate that I like something. Maybe olefoo is right, Apple just can't find any room in their 'walled garden' for user-generated content...
If you think that's high you should be happy you don't live in Denmark.

"The large public sector (30% of the entire workforce on a full-time basis) is financed by the world's highest taxes. A value added tax of 25% is levied on the sale of most goods and services (including groceries). The income tax in Denmark ranges from 42.9% to 63% progressively, levied on 4 out of 10 full-time employees. Such high rates mean that 1,010,000 Danes before the end of 2008 (44% of all full-time employees) will be paying a marginal income tax of 63% and a combined marginal tax of 70.9% resulting warnings from organisations such as the OECD"

Oh and if you want to buy a car you'll be hit with a 180% taxation of your new car on top of the 25% valueadded tax.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Denmark#Tax_Burden_a...
Is it just me or the writing style of this article is really weird? It's as if different people have written different sections. Some of it sounds like a pre-flight briefing manual sans the helpful illustrations and other parts sound like a PR fluff piece. For example;

>>>But here's the catch. When a helicopter flies forward, the rotor blades experience a dramatic variation in airspeed. That's easy to see if you imagine a miniature version of yourself perched on the tip of a helicopter rotor blade. If the helicopter were hovering, you'd feel a constant 800-km/h wind in your face as the rotor spun around. If the helicopter were to fly forward, you would note that the wind was stronger on what's called the advancing side, when the rotor was moving in the same direction as the helicopter, but that it would be noticeably weaker when the rotor was on the retreating side. By the time the helicopter reached 150 km/h, you would feel a wind speed of 950 km/h on the advancing side, versus 650 km/h on the retreating side....<<<

I had to re-read this paragraph at least 2-3 times to understand what it exactly meant. It was just too vague. What direction should I face? Am I moving clockwise or counterclockwise? What does it mean that the rotor is moving in the same direction as the helicopter?

Then there was this paragraph, which sounds... fake considering the tone of the rest of the article.

>>>With everyone's nerves on edge, the X2 started up its engine at 6:30 a.m., and the helicopter took off. Within a few minutes the X2 had reached a speed of 350 km/h. A dozen people watched from the ground as the airspeed crept up, first to 400, then 410, and finally topping out at 435 km/h—not quite the goal we'd set, but good enough for this round. Cheers and applause broke out on the ground. The pilot slowed the X2, turned it around, and flew back to land on the runway.<<<

The same person who had trouble explaining the simple imagery of a rotating blade can't write something as flowery as that. It's just too unlikely.
We linked to the product page in an earlier submission and it was killed, which seems odd to me—people link to their iPhone apps all the time, and honestly this is a pretty nifty and interesting one. If someone feels this is inappropriate for HN I'd love to hear why.
How P&G Checks Your Pulse, For Pennies On the Dollar
The site is up now. On my own Wordpress installs I usually run SuperCache but it interferes with some of the custom hacking I've done on this template.

Thanks for the comment.
Write a Process and Procedure Essay to Explain Your Concepts
Students who are unfamiliar with the process of writing a process and procedure essay may be benefited by going through some samples. These samples will provide students with exactly how to write this type of essay. If the right samples are obtained, writing the essay will be easier.
Patrick,

I think I vouch for everyone on HN when I request you to not shut up. Please keep these comments/blog posts coming. :)
I wish somebody would build a toy lisp with some sort of macro. That's the part of the implementation that is still opaque to me.

Last time this came up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1468345
That's awesome, but it doesn't seem to work for me. Maybe it's just getting hit.. or it's the clearest day in recent history for the whole USA
Yammer 2.0 To Launch As A Powerful Social Network For The Enterprise
It's too bad there's no way to assign a universal "reputation" score to the various pundits out there so that readers can better assess the value of their published predictions. Michael Pachter, for instance, has been wrong on a number of occasions (he predicted Sony would dominate the current console generation and Nintendo would languish and MSFT would be #2 -- at least he got the last part right).

Like the iPad which many pundits couldn't figure out, the consumers never wrote off Netflix and that's pretty much all that matters.
Your last statement is most likely not true for Europe.

So in the end it comes down to cultural preference. If the majority prefers a certain way of doing things, it makes sense to back it up with legislation to harmonize it and make it safe for the individual (in this case, for instance, guaranteeing you to get your old job back after maternity leave).
This socialization comment is one that my coworkers always brings up. "They're breeding serial killers" he half-jokes.

I wasn't very well socialized in school. Maybe that's why I was interested in writing this story.
Very cool, it seems the researchers took into account all sorts of things like state sales tax, state income tax, corporate tax, welfare / handout type programs, and spending + savings habits.

From what I can tell the key inflection points in the graph come from four issues.

1.) How much can one contribute to retirement accounts to avoid paying income tax that year?

2.) Where are the key discontinuous cutoff points in the tax system? (social security maxes out, certain payments to the needy disappear, etc)

3.) What is the typical marginal propensity to consume?

4.) How much wealth has one accumulated by a certain age in life, which can be invested, which is only taxed at lower capital gains / dividend rates?

My thoughts on the first are mixed. Yes, we don't pay taxes this year on money we stash into a non-roth 401k, but I hope they aren't doing the bad accounting of treating that as 0% tax... we will eventually pay SOME tax when we withdraw on it, just not this year.

The second point is very valid... there is a magic range around $110-$160K income right now where your marginal tax rate from paying social security is almost 12% lower than the guys making $80K-$110K. In the US, you and your employer each pay 6.2% of your earned income to social security, but it caps at $110K (the rationale being you won't get credit for more than that at retirement, so they won't take more).

The final points are a bit bogus in terms of providing us guidance, but they are more of the author's observations from the data they studied. Poor people consume more as a percentage of their income and hence pay more sales tax each year. Wealthier people buy more, but less as a percentage of their income, so they pay less sales tax, and save more over time which can be turned into investment income.

http://people.bu.edu/kotlikoff/Does%20It%20Pay%20to%20Work%2...
Not that I've seen, but haven't done much research.
Like pretty much everyone has said, the health care situation is Not That Bad if your employer covers it, and if you don't get seriously ill or have an expensive chronic condition.

But health insurance is one of the few ways in which the US really discourages entrepreneurship. Individual health insurance, particularly if you're older, have a family, or have some kind of risk factor, costs a fortune.

The conventional wisdom on homeless people in the US is that the vast majority of the homeless got that way because of mental health problems and substance abuse. I believe it's more of a public policy issue than strictly a lack of money.
I love Netflix. But Apple is gaining on them. At some point I might switch, or just use both.

I'll certainly never sign up for cable tv.
The theorem only works for continuous functions. Tax rates are anything but continuous. They have sharp elbows (e.g., AMT), and some taxes wink into existence and back out again within a finite range (e.g., EIC).

I'm not sure that these exceptions are sufficient to allow it to work out, but I'm pretty sure that this rule isn't the impediment.
No worries. You do so much for the New York tech scene, I think we can forgive you.

Just this one time. ;-)
In which case, Swedes find it at least as valuable as 20% of their salary.

The relevant question: do they consider paternity leave to be worth more than 100% of their salary? If not, this policy is harmful.
Actually, now that I zoomed close enough to a station I am getting some information.

Not sure what '10' precipitation in the air actually means, but it's right over my head!
Books that influenced Clojure
I used to be self-employed in the US and left in part because of the expense of health insurance. At the time, I had a family of three. When you declare yourself self-employed in the US, you are immediately projected into the highest tax bracket of (if memory serves correctly) 37.5%. Decent health insurance for three cost worked out to be around 40% of that at the time. So, to be self-employed with healthcare cost me around 52% of my then gross salary. And that is just for the plan - there is still a huge excess as well as a plethora of things that the insurance companies won't cover. If memory serves correctly, something like 40% of those in the US are without healthcare. At costs like that, little wonder why.

As for poverty in the US, 1 in 8 are in poverty if you use the CIA-polished statistics. I say CIA-polished because the CIA also says the US spends 12.5% of its GDP on healthcare. According to the OECD, it is more like 15.3%. By comparison, France (top healthcare in the world according to the WHO) spends around 9.5% or so. Canada, number 6 in the world, spends something similar, around 9.7%. The UK, which is somewhere around 20th on the WHO rankings, spends 6.25%. For its 12.5%/15.3%, the US ranks 33rd - just above Cuba.

As for saving up for children's college, university educations are an increasingly well-known bubble in the US. It is not uncommon to have 70 or even many more students packed into a single auditorium for lectures. Even in advanced degrees, there is not as much small group or singular education as there is in Europe. But the costs are nevertheless huge. If I recall correctly, American University in DC currently tops the charts with tuition at $50k per year. That is tuition ONLY. It does not include, books, dorm, clothes, etc. A four-year degree thus has a base cost of $200k. It is nothing anymore for universities to charge $25-30k per year just for tuition. Given that this is the case at a time when many people are losing their houses because they can't make the payments and others can't get on the property ladder because they can't afford the down payment, I would say it is damn hard in the US to pay for things that people in Sweden take for granted.

Just my 2¢. YMMV.
HP Wins 3PAR Takeover Battle as Dell Drops Out
A database that list all pundits' specific prediction and give them a rating based on if they succeeded or not?
Yes, I'm quite sure having your war subsidized by people who made different war-mongering choices than you is nice.
From the official reddit blog: "So I guess the lesson is, there's no reason for redditors to waste comment space picking on Digg. They do their thing, we do ours, Google News and the New York Times do theirs."[1]

Wanted to call bs on this when it came out, but didn't have the proof. Take that, niceties.

[1]http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/into-lions-den.html
My wife and I are expecting in December, and we're planning on some variation of unschooling for our children, starting at an early age. Based on the research we've done, it's a straightforward way to get better educational results for your kids if done properly.

We're planning on some variation of the "Robinson Curriculum" (http://www.robinsoncurriculum.com/), which in essence is a simple daily structure of (1) a daily math lesson, from the Saxon math series or similar, (2) daily reading, based on their interest but with a few recommendations, and (3) daily writing about any topic that interests them, which is then proofread and corrected by the child.

"Socialization" is pretty much a non-issue, as far as I'm concerned. The above structure takes a few hours a day, so there's more than enough time for play and structured activities like sports or music if they're interested. As tommynazareth commented, the socialization in schools is mostly negative.

The key seems to be striking a balance between a clear and simple structure and letting your child follow their interests. It also requires some self-control by the parents - it's better to let your kids struggle at times when they find hard problems than immediately jump in and help them. The parent isn't doing the teaching - they're helping the child learn to self-educate, which is a major difference.

I want my children to be able to think clearly, learn essential skills, and be able to teach themselves anything they're interested in learning. I don't believe the public school system is capable of doing that, which is why we're looking to do it ourselves.
The article explicitly notes that when Swedes were free to choose, they did not choose paternity leave.
I think in this case they had a tough call to make, and I think they made the right one. They either keep it under wraps, and not get dev tools and SDK coverage. Or they announce early and launch with a relatively strong ecosystem out the gate.

I think they've built up a decent amount of anticipation for their devices. And on the dev side I only know slightly more iOS devs than WP7 devs right now (and far more than Android devs). That's kind of crazy since there are 120M iOS devices and no WP7 devices shipped. I wouldn't be surprised if others were seeing a similar phenomena.

And remember MS kept Kin underwraps until a month before shipping, and you see how well that went. :-)
You should blog this one too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633062
For the Silicon Valley crowd with a Surf hankering I highly recommend NextSpace: http://nextspace.us

It's in Santa Cruz, but that's a good thing..
We're unschooling, but with backstops on reading. If the kids don't want to read for several days in a row, then unfortunately we're going to have to find a way to compel them to. They're young, and reading is the predicate for everything; if we can get 'em into it, hopefully this unschooling will pick up steam.
I like the interface - how you mimic the original canvassing clipboard. Are you going to sell to the other side (Republicans)?