skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Canadian figures seem insanely low. 11.5% total? When I lived in BC making an approximately average income, my effective tax rate alone was 21% [EDIT: originally put 23%]. I paid pension, health insurance, and unemployment deductions on top of that. And that only counts the employee side of deductions.

This example is "married with two kids", so it's possible that there are massive offsets that I didn't have access to as a single person, but 11.5% still seems very low.

I would expect Canada to fare favourably in this comparison, though. The taxes are not as bad as most Americans think. Although they do ramp up very quickly for higher earners, which was an incentive for moving to the states as my income increased. Also, pay is higher in the US (by a factor of about 2 or 3) for the same job.
I've envisioned something like this even for written code. Basically unify the language and the editor, so that you could (theoretically) right-click on main() and say "add loop" and have the correct code auto-generated. Not because a mouse is somehow better (it's much worse in fact), but basically an editor/UI that only allows you to produce valid code.

Currently for most languages, we have: "type productions of a particular syntax and try really-really-hard to color between the lines, and subject yourself to the chinese-water-torture of syntax errors till YOU get better at it".

Why not invert that, whether via mouse input, a visual (as in literally, visual, not microsoft-visual) connection, or a text editor that simply doesn't let you type invalid productions. Like Intellisense, but taken to the function or block level. You cannot save the file or even leave insert mode until the code compiles. Or even better, you cannot even temporarily input invalid syntax. From the first keystroke, it inserts a variable declaration, click/type up or down to choose a function call, conrol structure, etc.

Some vim-like integration would go as follows:

command mode:

* <space>+F outputs a function called func1, auto-highlighted for you to rename (or accept default).
* <space>+R on the func name lets you set its return type
* <space>+A for args,
* <space>+B to edit the function body

At no point would you be allowed to input non-compiling syntax. Things like indentation would be non-issues, set uniformly by defaults.
> Explicitly passing on fees to the customer for a capability that may (or may not) help them see lower latency erodes trust and makes NN look like an insurance scam. As mentioned, not all users will definitely see performance improvements, so your proposed $5/mo is more of an insurance policy than a defined capability -- it could even be pure profit (who would know?)!

Plenty of things are offered as value-added services for products all the time. Sometimes you get a free skin you might never use, or a coupon on something else you'll never buy. Players are free to buy a similar service themselves through other providers, but as part of multiple incentives for pay, I don't think it's that bad, and really, when it comes to the current status quo of paying for products with advertising or with cosmetic enhancements that are designed to have no upper limit in purchasing amount and advertised in a way to make children go crazy over them, I'm happy if the payment alternatives include more options that don't include that, even if they aren't ideal in some other aspects.
Or really any public pension. I feel like if you're <40 then you should be planning for Social Security to not exist when you get old, anything else seems overly optimistic.
What is the market, here? What good or service do you get from insurance?

For their real value prop (covering the unlikely need for catastrophic healthcare), you 1. most likely won't ever use it. 2. have no idea how good their service is until you have no other option but to exercise your coverage.

Market-based capitalism works best when consumers can shop around, and take their money elsewhere when the good or service is not a good value. This is absolutely not the case with health insurance.

Meanwhile, medicare is pretty beloved in this country. And the public options in other industrialized nations outperforms US healthcare in most respects for significantly less money.
Fun fact: one of the single most effective interventions for homeless people who take drugs is to give them a place to live. It's an amazing example of how giving people resources helps them stop relying on unhealthy coping mechanisms.

What you describe is quite literally a textbook cause for removing the child from the mother in German law - an immediate risk to their opportunity to develop cognitively or emotionally. You may well be describing an amazing case where some half dozen welfare professionals have all seen a case that clearly evaluates to 'this child needs to be removed' and all done nothing, but ... the odds are low. And the idea that you can't be misinformed because of the frequency of updates? Oh dear.

I am sorry that hearing about this woman has impaired your ability to think about welfare as a system. Perhaps you should avoid the topic until you recover your ability to think beyond her.
> 1) WhatsApp didn't make too much revenue out of those 1 dollars. Most people never paid.

They made enough to be sustainable: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/04091...

> 2) If you're willing to pay a dollar per month for search then you are much more valuable to advertisers than most people, so 1 dollar won't be enough.

No. It seems as a Google user I am worth more to them when I am tied to advertisers https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-worth/ or https://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/heres-much-google-fa...

I don't get your point though. I want to be valuable to people building a search engine without adtech baked in, how much I am valuable right now to advertisers doesn't matter.
No explanation of what that cowless cheese is made of.
I moved to the US from a country with socialised medicine. When you include premiums then taxes in both were roughly similar if not a little higher in the US (ignoring cost of living differences).

But even that doesn't include the real sting on the tail of US medicine. You pay a fairly high health insurance premium, but if you actually need health services you then pay again through the nose even with insurance "discounts."

For example my under one year old needed to go to the emergency room due to a high fever for several hours, we paid over $300 on top of paying over a thousand in combined employer/employee premiums each month. That's with insurance picking up at least that much.
Open source both won and has died. Despite my ability to dig into big C/C++ codebase and fix a bug, I don't do the Linux kernel, KDE, LibreOffice nor a browser anymore. My eventual fix (regardless if accepted by upstream) is doomed to become obsolete quickly because of all the complexity and the rush for new shiny things.
AWS is by far the market leader in cloud ... this is a good reason to switch to its main competitors: Azure & GCP. They only got to be No! by network effects, not by being better.
Doesn't matter. The actual discussion on blink-dev is pretty clear about the plan being for lack of that attribute to mean "use some heuristics of Google's choice to decide whether to lazy-load".
If it's employer-chosen, you're not the customer and they're not listening to you either.
Highly Configurable SQL (Clojure Lib)
Possible contrarian insight: in the era of recommendation systems, hand-curation is due a big comeback.

I’ve been listening to the BBC’s Introducing Mixtape podcast for a while. I also use Spotify and really enjoy its recommendation but the 6 Music podcast is just stellar.

As paywalls restore quality journalism, I believe a renaissance for curated content is possible.
Life expectancy was also a lot lower when these rites were introduced.
> they can make it effectively unreachable.

I think you mean "unfindable", not "unreachable". It may seem pedantic, but I think there's a critical difference there.
It being harder to embed is definitely true, but there's increasingly will within Mozilla to change that, and if someone (e.g. MS) was willing to step up and help provide engineering resources to make it possible it's definitely doable. GeckoView is slowly changing this on mobile, and resultantly something for desktop is easier than it was five years ago.

Servo isn't replacing Gecko, though. There's nowhere near the level of resources being put into Servo for it ever to become a viable browser engine, and there's no sign that Mozilla are moving in that direction. They're still very much using Servo to experiment with new things (WebRender, parallel layout, etc.), but the approach is clearly moving modules from Servo into Gecko if/when they become production-ready. As such, Gecko isn't going anywhere, even if parts of it are getting rewritten/replaced (and that's no different to Blink!).
I was 33 before I really got over the shame I felt for doing the things I enjoy, like video games. Because of that experience, I hope I will be a better parent in this regard than most. The cries of moral bankruptcy in video games seems to be relegated to a segment of adults that are only getting older, which is as it should be.
Maybe federal tax, but that starts at 15%.
I mean when they say effective maybe they're talking about the average people pay after deductions?

Who knows, 11% still seems incorrect.
"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread"

You can't average averages in this way. You'll get easily manipulated data.

He's using a single average data for a married, single income worker, and combining that with the average for health insurance.

You can't do that. You need to calculate each individual person's income and share of healthcare costs, and only then average the results.
I worked as an undergraduate in a academic research lab trying to develop this exact stuff. I would also hazard a guess that we were funded by the same ARPA grant as niron was.

It was a cool concept and got me interested into materials science. Unfortunately the post doc didn’t seem to care too much and the work didn’t go anywhere.

Neat stuff none the less.
Can confirm. My first job out of college was building out a compatibility layer across some 14 variants of UNIX. Hopping between boxes involved an uncomfortable amount of time waiting for nroff to render your man page because common options to common commands were decidedly uncommon .
I grew up in Canada so I totally understand why people are against universal health care... Check out the wait times for MRI scans that are published by the various Canadian provinces. 90 days' wait is not uncommon.

Meanwhile in the US it can be had in 3 days or so in every decent sized suburb or city.
The Nazis had that realization :-)
Thanks for pointing that out. I was under the impression that Pelican's Markdown parser automatically used typographic quotes vs straight quotes, but that's apparently not the case.

Edit: Ah, it's an extension to Python-Markdown that is not enabled by default: https://python-markdown.github.io/extensions/smarty/
You're the one calling it obfuscated. It's exactly the same thing here.
MMORPGs (like EVE Online) inspired more creativity and entrepreneurial thinking in me than almost anything else I did in my life. I'm kind of glad I don't play them anymore as an adult, since they would likely consume a huge chunk of my time, but they were a very formative experience for me and I don't regret dedicating much of my teenage years to them.
Does Fortnite implement any of these dark patterns? I think the only paid purchases in it are cosmetic in nature, no? And the game itself is mostly skill based.

It doesn't even have the MMORPG hook where if you don't play, your character is weaker then of people that play more then you.
There seems to be at least some objective criteria for good and bad uses of time. In general, almost everyone has the same set of needs in order to flourish, and the same requirements to meet those needs. So, uses of time that better fit the general requirements for flourishing are objectively better. For example, everyone needs to be healthy, and subsisting on a diet consisting entirely of candy is unlikely to be healthy for the general population (although I did hear about a guy living only on Mars bars).

With video games, while we minimize the importance of geography due to virtualization, geographically located communities seems to be the most beneficial for our social wellbeing. From a purely evolutionary viewpoint, we cannot reproduce virtually (yet!). Sinking all of one's time into online games and relationships will diminish our ability to develop geographical communities.

On the other hand, it's wrong to write off video games altogether. As an artistic medium, they are pretty unique and their true potential has yet to be realized. I think the indie scene is great in this regard. And exposure to great art is essential for human flourishing.
Cool! I can watch Akira Kurosawa movies online again!
I actually spoke to someone today who is hiring a guy from a FANG in SV to go and work in Denmark. He told me taxes are high enough over there it isn't all that different.

Plus like many Americans he was curious about living in Denmark. Cycling everywhere, laid back lifestyle, that sort of thing.
Yikes!

You really should respond to the webhook handler immediately, by queuing it, and handling it asynchronously in another process.

It's bad enough to perform slow operations like creating lots of objects in the database, calling other web apis, sending email, before you return a success to stripe's webhook.

But for one webhook to lock out all other webhooks while it did all that work would only compound the problem.

Stripe tends to send a whole flurry of events related to the same transaction, when there's actually only one thing for you to do in one swoop (create a user and start their subscription), so to processes them one by one is very inefficient, especially if you have to call back to stripe for each event.
You haven’t actually tried using ZfS with Mysql have you? Do you know the drawbacks and performance penalties for doing so?

http://download.nust.na/pub6/mysql/tech-resources/articles/m...

Have you benchmarked the time it takes to bring up a ZFS based Mysql restore?

a) don't know what happened
b) don't have any way to fix it
And often it means
c) don't have any way to prevent it from reoccuring, potentially immediately.

Can you ensure the filesystem consistency when you restore with ZFS?

a) don't know what happened
b) don't have any way to fix it
And often it means
c) don't have any way to prevent it from reoccuring, potentially immediately.

In the example that was given in the parent post, we know what happened:

Someone inadvertently (hopefully) did

Delete * From table

You restore the table to the previous state and you take measures to prevent human error.
It's #fff888 now, thanks for the feedback! I had #fffaaa in other places and forgot to change it in etc.
EthDAO: Making Ethereum Great Again
> Would love to see a breakdown of real estate and admin costs for private insurance systems throughout the States to understand how much could be saved by eliminating redundancy.

I would love to see the same breakdown for the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland to see how they avoid it.
Ask HN: What are some tech trends for 2019?
Past years, I've seen subscription based services, AI, privacy were top among others. I wonder if any solid trends building up for 2019 such as podcasts? Thank you for any clues.
Your health insurance company listens to you? Mine just constantly tries to wriggle out of paying.
(I work for 18F but don't officially represent it here.)

The site is hosted via Federalist (https://federalist.18f.gov/) a SaaS which runs on top of sibling Platform as a Service cloud.gov (https://cloud.gov), which is based on Cloud Foundry. (Think of cloud.gov as "government-compliant and -operated Heroku" and you're not too far off.)

One of the benefits of using cloud.gov is that it automatically brokers and renews certs from Let's Encrypt... Math is math, and there's no sense spending taxpayer money where we don't have to! Here's the page about it, including a link to the broker source at the bottom:
https://cloud.gov/docs/services/cdn-route/

Both are operated by 18F (https://18f.gsa.gov)... We're all feds! If anyone is interested in joining us check out https://18f.gsa.gov/join/
Because it's a scam all the way up. FB profits handsomely off these fake numbers.
The US healthcare system is making many people extremely rich. Someone has to pay for that.
As you expanded your database of common tasks, do you think that would eventually become a repository of “things I shouldn’t have to remember”, which could then be used to redesign languages?

Machine code instructions designed by hand are not necessarily the best fit for the code we actually generate. Similarly, might our approach to language design lack pragmatic insight as to which constructs should be favoured, adopted, simplified etc?

“Data-driven language design”.
An increased use of SSH keys is also found in our SSH honeypot: https://pmcao.github.io/caudit/ ~ plugging our paper.
This paragraph spoiled whole article for me. I fail to understand how switching Scheme for Python relates to ethics?

"A few years ago, MIT changed its intro computer science course away from the traditional (and brilliant) class that used Scheme to one that used Python..(snip).. the professors who wrote the course indicated that for today's software engineers, learning to code isn't enough. You also need to learn topics such as ethics."
This was answered in a sibling thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19608696.
As someone that started paying into SS a few years ago this sounds more like a cynical self-fulfilling prophecy more than anything else.
Point #1 is getting less true with GeckoView (at least on mobile), and point #2 is unlikely. Like most tech products that have a large number of users, a transition plan for Firefox would necessarily involve gradual changes (which are arguably already taking place with Quantum), which an embedder could ride.
> A pill isnt a physical good, its a formula. You are paying for the intellectual property not the manufacture. It's not like the pills are substantially cheaper to manufacture in Canada, its different licensing costs.

This thread is talking about reimportation of brand-name pharmaceuticals. In many of these cases, it's the same manufacturer producing the same physical goods at the same factory and selling them for two different prices on different sides of the border.

This is not an "intellectual property" issue; it's a trade issue.
A screenshot of Facebook's message that it's not against their standards, I mean. That should be easily reprintable, unless it contains the original image.
URL contains tracking device.
For better glue I recommend gummy bears as raw material. Starch-based ones are more brittle.

(Disclaimer: I am probably not the best gluemaker.)
A short seller borrows their shares from someone, and sells them to someone else. In effect, a short-seller inverts the process: they SELL... THEN they Buy at a later date.

In essence: a short-seller is betting that the price will drop in the future. The practice is controversial with TSLA shareholders because Elon Musk constantly hates on the practice, but its not really considered a bad thing by the greater investing community.

Short-sellers lose if the stock price goes up, or if dividends are distributed. In effect: short-sellers can ONLY make money if the company money in the long run.

--------

Long-holders (typical shareholders) win from short-sellers, because short-sellers provide more shares for the company without actually diluting the overall stock.

Lets say 1-million shares exist, but 17% of them are held by short sellers. That means the company has 1,170,000 shares in circulation (+17%), allowing more long-holders to benefit in case the share price goes up.

Furthermore, the long-holder that is loaning their shares to the short-seller benefits: because when you loan your shares out, the short-seller pays you an interest rate.

This is the classic "bulls vs bears" situation. If the stock price drops in the long term, short-sellers win. If the price increases in the long term, then long-holders win.
Yes.
I was using a bunch of tools to do so: Google Keep, Simplenote, Trello. Currently switching to Notion.
y, has anyone seen kids playing Roblox? It actually has a slot machine looking mechanic? I'm a fan of Minecraft, Fortnite and PUBG but Roblox just looks like gambling for kids. Any thoughts?
$300 is a steal.
I liked Edge because of its fantastic battery life (for browsing, Edge was like having a 25% larger battery.) I was annoyed that many sites seemed to be Chrome-specific, including some I absolutely need to rely on. I switched to Brave, and it's amazing. Chrome-based, but somehow results in far better battery life than Chrome.
You can only buy cosmetics, that’s correct. If you buy a battle pass you get extra challenges but you get no in-game advantage for spending money.
> Opensource is not volunteers.
> People doing mainstream opensource as their side task do not exist.

The vast majority of github projects prove that statement false.
There's literally no analysis that shows social security completely failing at any point. That's spin you're getting from partisan media, and it's absolutely infuriating the people allow this to persist.

In a few years, given no changes, the cash flow will go negative and we'll begin spending down the trust fund. By 2035 or so (I forget the numbers, and the projections tend to vary widely anyway because of differing models and, yeah, partisan spin) the trust fund will be spent and the social security administration will need to adjust, as it will be taking in something like 80% of obligations.

A 20% shortfall is a big accounting problem. It's hardly "plan for it not to exist".
Because there are subtle differences that make interpretation of another human different over video and face-to-face.

Has nothing to do with physical contact. When does someone in a court ever make physical contact with the other party except maybe shaking hands anyway?
> It's rare to see a real impassioned defense of gaming outside of "it's not that bad" but I'd like to go out and say it had a hugely positive impact on my life and I think it's really doubtful I'd be where I am today without gaming.

I owe my entire career to gaming. Shadowrun on the Sega Genesis made me want to be a hacker, EverQuest hacking turned me from a mediocre (at best) web dev to a competent reverse-engineer, and my first serious startup came about because I wanted to play Oblivion on OS X. Every huge leap in my technical abilities came about because of games; I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today without the pushes that these amazing works of art gave me.
Sure, but it's not nearly as extravagant as "they are probably eating out twice a day at that rate" (if you don't count lunch at the restaurant at work as "eating out".)

It's a pretty normal behavior for an upper middle class family.
That's fair. I originally worded it as "is perhaps sometimes too strong," but I've been trying to cut back on my weasel words lately.
Actually every VC I’ve spoken to freely admits this. It’s “grow big, fast, or try again later”

That’s why it’s a horrendous idea to take VC funding if you’re not looking to spend it fast, and take huge risks. If you want to be capital efficient, do that, then raise when you know you can spend the money and the ROI is “guaranteed” (meaning you have a successful sales and execution engine), because then you can do it on your terms.

Otherwise, you raise, lose control, and are beholden to VCs for your next dollar. Good luck with that negotiation; they have the leverage.

Profit and revenue gives startups leverage, in nearly every way.
Christ, I hate social media.
This does not take into account the fact that in most countries with an universal health care system, you will only contribute to it during your +/- 40 years career while you'll benefit from it during your whole life.