skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"While continuing to point out that the US has a lower tax burden than Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, ... Canada"

As far as Canada is concerned, this statement is false in certain cases. For example, the small business (income < 0.5 mln) corporation tax rate here in BC is 13.5%. This is combined state + federal, and will go down to 12.5% in 2011. The corresponding rate for the US is 40%, I believe.

Income taxes rates are also lower for certain income brackets. When they lowered taxes here a few years ago, the claim was that people making $90K/year face the lowest tax rates in North America. Here is a somewhat informative table of taxes paid for various income brackets: http://www.wolrigemahon.com/txrates.html.

Where the US makes up for lost ground though is through the myriad tax deductions that are sprinkled to various special interest groups, e.g. mortgage interest deductions, etc.
You might want to check out two threads on Ask Metafilter with similar questions with some good answers:

A job in computers that lets me travel a lot?
http://ask.metafilter.com/88578/A-job-in-computers-that-lets...

Jobs with heavy travel
http://ask.metafilter.com/151141/Jobs-with-heavy-travel
Well, most of those queries are just to look up the "name" for a given ID. And of course we use memcached to cache almost everything. But it still requires a bunch of round trip requests to either the database or memcached.

Before anyone asks "why don't you just use a join?" it's because we have tons of different types of data stored in a couple of summary tables. It's 100x faster to just grab all the IDs and values, and then grab the names one at a time (most of which will always be in memcached) than to do it as a join. Don't believe me? We used to do it that way and the performance sucked.
I mean Mankiw.
calling the south (I've assumed) the hate states tells me all I need to know about this idiot.
We're monitoring traffic for 260,000 web sites with over 200 million daily page views. We have almost 10TB of data stored. That requires a lot of servers. Yes, it's sharded. There are no slave servers.
Very possible, but now the requirement is you have to fight back and win, not just fight back, which is probably asking a bit much in some cases. Some kids that get bullied even have handicaps, so this probably won't work for them.
Android's success is due to pricing and availability. Would a consumer pay $100 for a great Android phone or $200 for iPhone 4? How about if they get ANOTHER Android phone free for the same Ben Franklin?! On networks where the iPhone isn't available (Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobs, etc), are you going to buy an Android phone or a Motorola Razr? There aren't many other options (except Blackberry - no touch screen, no fun).

WP7 will dominate for a few reasons. The UI is slick and snappy. Its touch sensitivity is fantastic. Microsoft is putting God knows how much money behind its marketing campaign. They're gonna have tons of those "buy one get one free" deals for crazy prices. They're really putting a lot behind this release...I will be really surprised if they don't chomp up at least a quarter of smartphone market share within the next few years.

Android is great for tech geeks. I honestly do like Android, I don't hate it. But WP7 is a better phone for the non-tech geeks out there because of its ease of use. Not saying that WP7 isn't good for tech geeks too! It comes with an array of enterprise features that are fantastic.

As far as the "next Android" with the same UI, its vaporware right now. Not worth wasting keystrokes arguing over.

And yes, the OS is upgradeable directly from MSFT, not the carriers. The second that a new update is available you can download it straight from MSFT's servers. The core of WP7 is maintained by MSFT; the miscellaneous drivers and applications provided by hardware manufacturers and carriers are maintained through their own updates.

Snarky today, aren't we? ;)
It's not false in the aggregate; an equally fair argument would be to find locales in the US with miniscule property taxes and no state personal or corporate income tax (somewhere in Wyoming, presumably).
Couldn't he use a LLC to avoid the estate tax? His whole argument seems overly simplified to point of being incorrect to me.

Is he talking about investing in a company that's growing 8% or is it his investment in the company that grows at 8%?

The corporate tax rate of 35% is another example. Does revenue from Google UK count towards the total revenue for Google? If so, then since Google's UK headquarters are in Ireland, the corporate tax on that revenue is more like 12.5%, unless it gets taxed again by the US.
You can make borders as thick as you like. The "1px border" disease is a theme design problem.

It wouldn't matter if bottom-right resize handles were standard, but as it is only a few windows have them.
You've Won The Nobel Prize -- Wait, Don't Hang Up
Most fuel efficient car (285mpg) is not a hybrid
American Pie ostensibly takes place in the real world. That's no use to a geeky personality--if a geek wants to get into the real world, he does programming or learns about science or gets into trainspotting or something. But a fictional world means you get to speculate about physics and categorize all the different alien races and starship types you see and so forth, and build vast databases and just lose yourself in what is ostensibly an entire world. This is the type of person who watches Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and makes a mental note of each time they see an Akira-class starship, and then complains when Enterprise comes out because they anachronistically made the Enterprise look like an Akira-class starship. American Pie doesn't have anywhere near this kind of depth of subject--it's just a bunch of dumb teenagers in the real world. (Which is exactly the kind of setting geeks are escaping from in the first place!)

(There's another, largely unrelated appeal to Star Trek and Star Wars: they have genuine heroes. It's very hard to find a TV show or movie today that has genuinely heroic people, it being considered "more realistic" to have flawed heroes.)
This is number ONE on hacker news? Way to go seriously down hill guys.

The only reason I can imagine anyone cares about mongrel2 is that it's written by a 'celeb'. Do we really need endless posts about this? It's a webserver. There's millions of webservers. It's a solved problem.
I am not sure how they come up with their numbers. Wikipedia says that in the US an electric car would emit less than half of the CO2 of a gas powered equivalent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Carbon_dioxide_emi...

And it seems that the UK uses less coal power than the US. Thus, the emission reductions in the UK should be even better, i.e. more than 50%. But the article says the emission reductions are only 20%.

I wish they would tell us more about their calculations. With these types of estimations, one can bring about drastic changes of the conclusion with subtle changes of the assumptions in the estimate.
Isn't it easier and cheaper to desalinate ocean water using solar energy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_desalination
To truly become rich, you need to stop acting like it
Working in a Start-up, Is it right for you?
McLuhan's Laws of Media
Ok, a couple points here:

First, he's talking about the total effect of the taxes, not the marginal effect of the new taxes. Aside from being against the economist's gospel, it's also disingenuous. His tax rate isn't Zero now, it's 36%. He gives some lip service to this later, throwing out the $2000 number without really justifying it, and he doesn't mention the degree to which those taxes have gone up, just what their new value is.

Second, he gets REALLY sloppy when talking about the corporate taxes. It's along the same lines as the first problem - he's talking overall rates, not rates of change, but it's really egregious there - the 8% returns he's talking about at this point are total fantasy.

Third, and this isn't necessarily a problem with the article, just its overall premise - As a society, we may get more use out of taxing Mr. Mankiw more than we would out of his limited-reach speaking engagement. Assuming he makes $500k, a number I'm not even going to try to justify, except to say the other poor bastard of a professor who jumped into this arena was making along those lines, increasing Mr.Mankiw's taxes by 3.6% yields an additional $18k in federal income, which can be diverted to more broadly useful expenditures than hearing an economist talk. The question to me isn't "Will Mr. Mankiw work less?" - let's assume there is something of a depressing effect on his outcome - the question is, "Is this a tradeoff we should make?"

Finally, I'd point out that Mr. Mankiw's kids will also be able to make use of the services and institutions paid for by his tax money - this isn't a zero-sum game. He and his kids live in the country where his tax money gets spent. If he doesn't like what it gets spent on, well, join the club, buddy, but that's a different argument.
Try holding down <Alt> and middle clicking anywhere near the window corner, I find that far faster than trying to grab any kind of corner or side, and I get frustrated when I have to use an OS (eg. Windows) that doesn't support this.
The comments in this post made me finally switch from bash to zsh (including integrating it with autojump).

After a few hours of cobbling together a decent config, I found http://bitbucket.org/Josh/oh-my-zsh/src/ to be a way better starting point. All the defaults make a bash user feel right at home (keyboard shortcuts etc), plus it organizes all the bazillion zsh options in a sane configuration layout.
Ask HN: Should I invest in country top-level domains?
I've heard so many successful story on people selling short, single-word country top-level domain names. I just want to find out is it worthy to spend few hundred bucks into investing those domains and sell it later on. What are the success rates looked like?
Is that with the ubuntu supplied drivers or the nvidia ones?

Everything is working well for me with the latest nvidia drivers (256.53) on a GTX 260 card.
I actually like Android, don't get me wrong! The problem I see with Android is the complexity of the UI. I can find my way around it just fine (cause I'm a tech dork), but a lot of my non-tech geek friends really do become frustrated with their Android devices. My friend Danielle LOVED her HTC Incredible...for about a week. She hates it now because it's "slow, bloated and not as responsive as the iPhone" <-- direct quote. Once WP7 hits, I think the average consumer will like WP7 more. That's just my opinion though, I could definitely be wrong. I was also the guy who preached the iPad wouldn't be a best seller. I now wear a paper bag over my head in public and I also changed my name to Juan.

You're also right about their expensive customer re-education. It's definitely an uphill battle for Microsoft but it sounds like they are funding one of the largest marketing campaigns in their history, just for WP7. Should be interesting to see what happens :D
Atif Aslam – Hona tha pyar Movie BOL
Interesting article, although it kinda reinforces a false dichotomy - just because this player had an unhealthy lifestyle playing poker, doesn't mean you can't play poker professionally while living a perfectly healthy and otherwise normal life. In fact, the article keeps mentioning the "lavish" lifestyle of the poker players as a given, when that is also just a choice they make.

I've always enjoyed playing poker. I'm pretty sure I could make a decent living at it too, if I put my mind to it. But only after reading Paul Graham's articles on Wealth, I realized why making a fortune from poker always seemed "empty" to me: you're not really creating wealth that way.
We all know that's not all governments spend money on

"Police, fire, roads, and schools" are the things that affect and impact every US citizen most everyday, so it's fair to consider them. But of course governments spend money on other things - governments in the USA spend money on welfare (using the term in it's broadest sense), military/defense, health, national park, R&D in a variety of areas, interest payments, science, search & rescue, libraries/museums, workplace safety, courts, arts, media, and so on.

Yes, any of those can be cut before hitting basic services, but my premise hasn't changed - cutting most (if not all) of these will still result in a cost for individuals that people generally don't factor into what they perceive to be their in-pocket money in a no-tax/lower-tax world.
This has to be one of the stupidest running complaints in recent memory. How is his proposal much different than the m2sh tool?
http://mongrel2.org/doc/tip/docs/manual/book.wiki#x1-220003....
parsing a config is a hell of a lot harder than just loading it out of a sqlite file

Is there really no library for that? </rhetorical> The usual INI file format has been unchanged since the 80s!

[section1]
param1=value1
param2=value2
; this is a comment
[section2]
param3=value3

And the reason it's stuck around for so long, on every platform you can think of, is it works, it's bulletproof, and everyone understands it at a glance. Anyone can come up with their own scheme, then you end up how it is Javaland right now, where the "application" is just a runtime for the application written in a custom one-off language which is the 10,000-line XML configuration...

Anyway, the people who get called at 3am when production is down won't thank you for introducing yet another config file format.
MakerBottable Ball Bearings
The fact that such a huge portion of electricity comes from coal is a much bigger problem than all the commuter cars on the road combined. Switching all those power plants over to nuclear makes sense environmentally, politically, and financially.
Unless I'm remembering wrong, isn't one of the benefits of using sqlite in this context that you get configuration persistence, live configuration modification, and customizable configuration frontends? The suggested solution, loading a dump file into a temporary database during start up time, completely defeats the purpose of all of these. It may be difficult to convince PHBs to use this because it's "different than other tools", but really, PHBs are going to complain about arbitrary things like that anyway (the manager who complaints about this isn't the one who has to learn the difference between the lighttpd and apache config file formats, for example). These are good goals for modern services to have.

Don't so it, Zed. The bikeshedders don't need a bone.
But it still uses an internal combustion engine, which have a horrible energy efficiency. I wonder how such a bad technology has lasted for so long?
Mostly, what we spend money on is services for retirees. Then national defense.

This is highly relevant to the discussion --- moreso than fire, police, roads, etc --- because without a social safety net guaranteeing some minimal standard of living (and, particularly, health care) for our close relatives, many entrepreneurs would be forced to optimize their careers to the benefit of their relatives.

You have a point. Unfortunately it wounds the larger argument I presume you're trying to support.
Usually I do not grab borders in GNOME. I use Alt-Button1 to move and Alt-Button3 to resize (alternatively Alt-F7 or Alt-F8).
Lightweight data exploration in Excel
Except where you want to go where buses and train don't go...
Self-learning is overrated (in programming)
is 14521794174 the answer by any chance? It took 12 hrs
I know that frustration. I catch myself trying to do that in Windows all the time.
Tried it on OpenOffice http://yfrog.com/f/n76cbp/
:( Two things about this film are unhelpfully wrong, and putting those words into a cute kid's mouth doesn't change that.

One, the Oregon datacenter will use some measure of hydro power as opposed to most every other data center in the entire goddamned world. But they attack Facebook for doing it. Great, that's helpful.

Two, Oregon is cold, which means that datacenter will use a lot less power to cool down the building than if it was in, say, Texas and powered by happy windmills.

Greenpeace knows, or should know, that you can't flip a magic switch and get happy-windmill power. Not even Google can do that. This video is mostly easy point-scoring and marketing for GP. Have they spoken directly to Facebook about their power plans?
I think Star Wars has been exceptional at pulling in young boys. The story line and characters are part of it, but I think the light saber has had an outsized impact on its popularity.

As an eight-year-old in 1977, I liked Star Wars but wasn't a true fanatic (I liked reading sci-fi more, and when I was a teen became hooked on Blade Runner).

However, my best friend who was just a year younger went crazy for 1977 Star Wars. He saw the movie dozens of times and bought every piece of merchandising he could convince his parents to buy.

When I introduced my own son to the original movie at age five, he was similarly hooked. I noticed that the light saber concept seemed to be especially attractive to him. I didn't indulge him on the merchandise, but did spend $20 on Lego Star Wars for the Wii and have rented or borrowed the remaining movies and Clone Wars discs, which he also likes. We also discovered what seems like hundred of YouTube videos showing boys and teenagers acting out lightsaber fight scenes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4_qTO5Q1do&feature=relat...

A few months ago I showed my son the 2009 Star Trek movie, which he liked but not nearly as much as Star Wars. The sword scene on the Romulan drill bit did not really register with him. I wonder if Kirk and Sulu had been carrying light sabers if it would have been different?
Unfortunately, not politically. Large portions of the general public are still afraid of nuclear power plants. They often like the idea in principle, but don't want to live anywhere near one, and will fight tooth and nail to prevent them from being constructed near their cities.
Isn't that what he was implying?
for the counter argument, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777366
I never thought I would, but I really enjoy screencasts. Sometimes they are useful to just watch in an environment where I can't actually practice, so it gives me the opportunity to go learn a little... get an overview. I see screencasts as complimentary to the normal text/book format
A side-question, but does anyone have recommendations about where to buy a Sheeva or Guru plug in the US? (The primary seller I can find[1] has a perpetual 4 week wait for all items, and that worries me.)

[1] http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/
Six dollars out of every ten dollars spent by local, state, and federal governments are dead weight loss? Cite a credible source, please.
the kind of engine was picked by the market, not by government, but yes, the infrastructure is a massive subsidy for the automobile.

If we had to pay the actual costs directly, our behavior would change. I am all for ending this subsidy. We'd have higher prices at peak times and flatter demand and less need to gobble of land for highways.

But what technology people use to drive on any road is another question entirely.

But it seems government can never undo any policy. It must always layer some other policy on top of it. Until the whole structure collapses under its own weight and a younger smarter country invades.
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 82
As a co-founder of Poll Everywhere, you might do your homework first before publicly humiliating yourself demonstrating a lack of basic background research and fact-checking. Poll Everywhere is in no way a spam operation whatsoever.
(Before you post in the comments about how unique your startup is, this list is not meant to capture every consumer business permutation. There are always going to be exceptions. And the breakaway companies like Zynga, Groupon, Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, to name just a few, inevitably introduce nuances to pre-existing models.)

The point of the article is to illustrate how different kinds of businesses make their money. The main exceptions I can think of are:

* Ad arbitrage. (Lots of people nobody has ever heard of.)

* Free analytics monetized through data sales. (bit.ly, lots of ambitious but ultimately failed startups.)

* White-labelable features. (bit.ly, Geezeo.)

* Email newsletter management.

* Ad networks.

But most of these stretch the definition of "consumer" startups.
It's not just 'Mankiw Happiness'; it's 'Mankiw Production'. I might be indifferent to his happiness, but I want him producing.
Maybe they consider the extra CO2 to build it. Yes, more info would be helpful.
Science of 'Battlestar Galactica' Revealed at NY Comic Con
The more education your boss needs about a new technology, the less likely he is to allow it's use.

Think of the sqlite database as a "deployed" configuration, not the configuration that you work with. Put together some process documentation for deployment procedures, you'll need it anyway.

The list of objections your boss might raise were all straw men except for this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777093

(I added a disclaimer to the post clarifying that I'm not endorsing any of these objections.)

As for a scary hexadecimal filename, that's an implementation detail. The raw text sqlite dump is the actual configuration, the /tmp/whatever.sqlite file is deleted when mongrel2 exits. No user need know it exists.
How is your application dealing with the changes?
The goal of reaching an amount of revenue instead of profit makes me think:

"Buy 20 million dollars worth of products and sell them for half-price."
I use GAE as well for all my side projects. I recommend a service such as spreedly or recurly for billing.I've used PayPal subscriptions and 2checkout in the past but they suck. For design I recommend the minimalist approach such as letter.ly until you can hire a designer.
Bullshit. Got a citation for those figures?
I enjoy screencasts, but I really can't understand what Mr. Macedo is saying in his screencast.

I enjoyed the RoR screencasts because I didn't really need to watch them, I could just listen and work in another window.

This would be a great idea if Mr. Macedo spoke in better English, it's not something he can control but it's a big deal from a final product viewpoint.
There actually are several aspects of being a poker player (online) that make it really hard, though surely not impossible, to live a normal life. You have very little interaction with other people, your working hours are partially out of your control, and it is incredibly stressful/tiring. I know a few people who managed to combine poker with a normal life, but I know way more who utterly failed.

Sincerely,
A guy who used to do this
Well done. I am excited for more. [bookmarked] (And I love the accent. The presenter speaks english very well, and the accent does not detract in the least, but it adds an interesting texture.)
That works. In my experience, 1k visitors = $1. If you want $100/month, that's $3/day = 3k visitors/day. Not impossible to get with something catchy/popular. Make four of these and you hit your goal. It's not easy but it's not impossible either.
I still have and use my first $49 256mb sandisk. Never had any issues. I now use a 8g U3 sandisk daily for 100% of my tasks. I live on portable apps.

The closest thing to an issue is I have noticed the total storage size has decreased a tiny bit, but this is supposed to be normal. After all with my email client alone I am doing 1000's of overrights and stuff.

Another thing is to always remember to eject the device properly. I have had corruption of files that way, but never any damage to the drive. I backup weekly.

Flash drives are a god send. I cant imagine carrying around compact disks anymore.
PHP Dark Arts: GUI Programming with GTK
Can we split the difference and call it "Mankiw Incentive"? I say "Mankiw Happiness" because it sounds funny to me, but we're not actually talking about Mankiw Production.
Yes had a one gb fail.