skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What it means is... The first $5000 of consumption will be tax free, the next $10000 at 5%, and the next yet at 15%, etc.

So, the super rich would indeed pay a smaller percentage of their income, only if they spend the same as an ordinary consumer, but they would pay much more tax (e.g. 60% after 1 million) if they spend everything they earn.

This would encourage them not to swap pieces of paper for real goods. It would make them have more money in the bank but less million dollar cars and yachts. The productivity saved from not producing those non-producing consumer goods can be used, e.g., on farming, so that food becomes cheaper for the general populace.
Please consider public choice theory.

Government won't lower taxes on the middle class if they find a way to tax the rich. They'd just increase taxes on the rich and keep on taxing the middle class as before.

Tax levels are just a product of a) how much there is to take and b) how tax inelastic the subject is.
http://www.noosbox.com/ (in private beta) does exactly this, without too much extra fluff. Contact me through my HN profile for an invite.
Homebrew Rails app for managing a small company (projects, CRM, time tracking, staff holidays etc). We’ve been considering productising it for a while but haven’t been willing to jump without a firm sale.
I believe that this is the bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=460374
Even though the video is focused on IBM, it very much puts into perspective the sheer amount of progress that has been made in computation in 100 years. Its amazing.
Here is the other thread about remote workers.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161368

By the way, it's 2011 now. ;)
Because he couldn't find a better place to spam with traffic.
Well, he does say 'seemingly paradoxical', and look what happens when you try and express this (naively) in English:

"The shorter stick is typically (about) 2/5 the length of the longer stick, but the longer stick is typically much more than 3 times the length of the shorter stick."

To be honest, I can't figure out how to summarize the two results in English correctly (short of saying 'the mean of x/y~=2/5, but the mean of y/x does not exist, where x is the shorter and y the longer length')
Are these all specific to Finland?

Using Opera 11 and the Open in Google Docs button placement is off for me; it's half-hidden by the text.
The question of how to value a website is always a tricky one. patio11 has really nailed it - especially in terms of how important demonstrated revenue is to your final sale price.

A few additional considerations based on our surveys of Flippa buyers: the niche that your community is about influences valuation on par with the amount of traffic you have. This is closely followed by the level of trust you establish (readily influenced by patio11's point on salesmanship).

Given the number of qualified buyers we have on Flippa, I'd be inclined to say that our auction process may be your best mechanism for establishing ultimate price for your property.

Either way, best of luck with your sale. Do not hesitate to contact us if there is anything we can do to assist - more than happy to work with you on optimizing your auction if you do go down the Flippa path.
If you look at my other comments in this thread, you'll see that I independently conceived of a slight variation of the same idea (as have several others). I still think it has amazing potential.
An entirely reasonable idea: the increased economic activity generated by Ikea success

But it doesn't work like that. We, as a society, don't let individuals or organizations decide what's best. We vote in a government who (in theory) decide the rules that apply to everyone, then they tax and spend accordingly.

I know it doesn't work like that, which is why you get situations like this (or like Bono campaigning for higher government spending, while squirreling his own money away where it can't be taxed). Hell, I reckon that a better use of my taxes would be supporting the luxury goods industry which is suffering during the recession, but I don't get to cancel my income tax and spend it on champagne and caviar instead...
I'm more a fan of an impossible-to-implement wealth tax instead. That would be fairer.
It stopped updating and allowing us to edit,any idea why?
Everyone learns from this! Now let's form a circle, colour some line-drawings, and watch a Disney flick.
I agree with you. I've never had any problems putting together their furniture.
Ask HN: Which Web Analytics Tool you use and what information you collect?
1. What usage information(like pageviews, visitor location, etc) you collect as part of your web analytic strategy and for what reason?

2. Which Web analytic tool you use for this? Google Analytics? Piwik? Open Web Analytics? or some other?
Thanks. I wish I could reveal my site -- many folks on HN are probably familiar with it, but I don't want to let on that I'm looking to sell.

Once the cat's out of the bag, it's hard to go back, and the community may not like the fact that I'm obviously in it for the money.
Most things are extremely easy, but there are some individual packages that are horrible. I remember putting up a wardrobe that seriously took a whole day to assemble. All parts were there though!
What's terrible about IKEA's whole tax avoidance scheme is that it gives an unfair advantage to IKEA over Target, Walmart, etc. who are all presumably paying expected amounts of corporate tax and additionally, by virtue of being public companies, provide a great amount of transparency versus IKEA.

Another example of a business built in part on a tax loophole--Amazon.com and its online brethren whose customers generally don't pay sales tax. That's a huge, unfair retail advantage compared to Barnes & Noble and other brick-and-mortar stores, especially since retail margins are generally so thin.
The clicking on method names is pretty neat. Just a little over designed.
I'm not sure how shutting down Porsche factories is going to make food cheaper? In western countries only a few percentage of people are in the business of producing food. By moving workers from building yachts into food production will not make food production cheaper.

This plan would see the rich hording money, rather than spending it on luxuries. The kind of luxuries that are produced by western economies. When the rich spend their money on frivolous luxuries, it helps redistribute their wealth to the workers producing those luxuries.
Because many of those markets aren't really markets.

In all likelihood, the market of Facebook for cat owners is no different than the market for Facebook. Why would a cat-owning user prefer a dedicated site over Facebook itself? They lose their social network, they have to check multiple websites to stay up to date, and the website owner doesn't have the benefits of scale that FaceBoook does. There's no competitive advantage to that particular idea.

The characteristics that Suster list are important because this is the norm in winner-take-all markets. The vast majority of things that you think are viable markets aren't really; if they were, a competitor would already have gotten to them. So you have to strike out and do something new over and over again, until you finally hit on something that actually works. That's really stressful, particularly when you're doing it without knowing where your next paycheck is coming from.
Why not PostgreSQL?
I think the main reason Amazon chose Oracle was a deal between them.
Fucking useless! You really think Twitter is any better than any dictator...?

Go make real software!
Doesnt hang Ruby 1.9 (MRI) and python 2.7 and python 3.1
this is lovely, and I can _feel_ the kiddie in some irc channel going on and on about X not working while the wiser people tell him to download rootkit X and then go to the directory and the kiddie is replying that it does not work and he's working on windows and the older cr3wzorz tell him to set the permissions and he's replying that the tool is broken and it does not work and why doesn't it and so on and so forth.
Just lovely :)
Forrester: Banks Must Innovate for Mobile Banking Growth to Continue
In that case, Mallory was a fool. Mallory should have installed the MITM cert in the browser's certificate store, to prevent warnings. How many people routinely audit their browser's SSL cert list?
The Leap Year Problem
Deep Media and Transmedia - Henry Jenkins and Frank Rose
30+ Newsletter Designs
Companies are continously sending newsletter to their customers about their latest products or any other news which they want to share with their customers. Many companies designed thier newsletter very interesting and good looking in order to attract their customers towards their new products. Today i have compiled 30+ Best newsletters of these companies for your inspirations.
with all respect, how come you did not think to quickly search with Google or Wikipedia?
Rasmus just tweeted about it:

Java's turn to deal with the x87 register issue. Here's a hint Oracle, "volatile"

http://twitter.com/rasmus/status/32365768603602944
Vint Cerf LCA Keynote
IMHO the problem here is that there isn't much of a software scene in Canada to begin with - at least, not compared to just about any major US city.

I've moved from Canada to Seattle, and the cultural difference is pretty immense. You have giants like Boeing, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon constantly feeding fresh talent into the city, and a number of these people will spin off startups. You have a large number of extremely talented people, working on hard problems, who can hop out of big-co life and work on a startup. Or you can crash and burn and hop right back to working at big-co. This sort of possibility doesn't really exist in Canada.

The Canadian software scene leans closer to enterprise IT than it does innovative cutting-edge work. There isn't a sufficiently sized pool of eager hackers - too many salarymen, not enough trailblazers. Without innovative, big companies feeding the flywheel a vibrant startup scene simply cannot exist in any appreciable scale.

It doesn't help that every keen software engineer I know from Canada is like myself - having moved to the US to pursue greater opportunities, more challenging and rewarding work, and let's be honest, about double the pay that any Canadian company is willing to offer.
Depends how tech-savvy are you customers and how big rewards are for referring.

* You could try flash cookies if enough prospectives have flash enabled

* Require a minimum of activity before earning rewards (e.g. 20 posts)
Strong counter-intuitiveness is a widely accepted use of the word “paradox”, even by logicians. (See, e.g., W. V. Quine’s The Ways of Paradox.)
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probably a steaks and strippers thing
Intel's recall explanation doesn't hold any water
I like it too, it is how I imagine real men spend their time.
This is pure semantics but are you really comfortable calling anyone who doesn’t want a flat tax a socialist? Someone who doesn’t want a flat tax could have voted for any party in my country.
Windows Phone Marketplace: More frustration
Gigabyte H55N-USB3: Overclocking Mini-ITX board?
"This itself is a rather surprising result: Euler’s constant e comes out of nowhere!"

Is it? There's an integral with a 1/x term[1]. How exactly is it surprising that logarithms start showing up? I realise integrating by hand is a pain, but surely it's a good idea to at least think about the integral expression before typing it into Wolfram Alpha. (EDIT: to clarify - the author takes integration for granted, yet is surprised when the integral evaluates to a logarithm; this makes little sense to me, integrating polynomials is the first thing they teach you)

[1] 1/(1-x) is transformed into 1/y in a pretty straightforward substitution. When you do that with our actual integrals, you find yourself with 2 identical integrals, as you well should, given the symmetry. My solution was actually to look at the distribution of breaks already sorted into short & long, which means doing only one of the integrals (short sticks are 0..1/2) and divide by the range, since we're taking an average (i.e. multiply by 2).
This user training gets even worse because git, when refusing to perform an unsafe operation, trains the user to force instead of training the user to fix the problem.

For example, the developer who overwrote the commits in the case in question probably did so after seeing the following error message:

abort: push creates new remote heads on branch 'default'!
(did you forget to merge? use push -f to force)

While it mentions merging, the only recognizable command line ("push -f") is for a destructive operation, instead of the operation (pull or merge, depending on the situation) that will actually fix the unsafe condition. Putting an even partial command line in front of a developer is like putting an OK button in front of a non-technical user - they tend to just use it to see if it (superficially) works. When it (subtly) fails, a novice user will not notice, and will just remember "push -f" as the Right Way to Use Git.
I doubt this is actually true. Apple has always required in-app purchases to go through Apple. That's why the Kindle app pushes you out to Safari to make purchases.

Despite what the article says, I bet Sony tried to implement their own in-app purchase process instead of bumping the user out to Safari. Apple rejected the app for breaking a well-known rule, and now Sony is whining about it for publicity. That's my guess anyway.

In fact, the article says "Apple told Sony that from now on, all in-app purchases would have to go through Apple, said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division."

This isn't a change. In-app purchases have always had to go through Apple.
The first thing you’ll notice is that magical comment at the top of our test. jsTestDriver takes a comment beginning with ":DOC +=" and adds the contents of the comment as a DOM fragment to the page, allowing us to test against it. It’s a simple and effective way of providing DOM fixtures to test any code that does DOM manipulation.

OK, that is just gratuitous "magic". Nobody picking up that code to look at is going to realise that the comment is meaningful and necessary for the test. What is the advantage of doing that instead of calling a function to do the work, passing the DOM fragment as a parameter. Even if the parser that currently uses the comment has to identify the function call and treat it in the same way as the comment, at least by doing it as a function call, you have signalled to any user that the comment is significant.

/rant
Take any prefix thats currently unallocated and make it so that you slap that in front on any ipv4 address.

Volia now everybody has an ipv6 address.
The consensual exchange of goods or services among adults cannot be malum in se.
Ruby 1.8.7 appears to be fine too
I only use it as a cheap way to mentally background apps that won't be looked at as often (e.g. iTunes, running a server in Terminal).

I find that the focus model tends to break down in Spaces for any multi-window application like Finder, Chrome, Emacs and Terminal. If every window of an application is going to jump to the top then that just adds extra work to switching desktops.

That being said, I do like the Application->Window switching model on it's own and wouldn't trade this for Virtual Desktops.
The only problem is when I'm on my own, but the item is too large to handle it by myself comfortably (i.e. a bed or similar).
This is incorrect, Google's CDN is cookie-less too.

$ curl -I https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=UTF-8
Last-Modified: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 20:40:52 GMT
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2011 20:03:57 GMT
Expires: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:03:57 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Server: sffe
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000
Age: 51530
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Sun wasn't much better in this regard
People's ideologies do make other people angry though. Which is why they should be aired on other sites.
There's no question that smut peddlers basically slimed their way around local obsenity laws throughout their industry's history. It's your opinion whether this is good or not, but the fact is that those laws were, and are, perpetually being violated, just as copyright laws are.
Overloaded to Death, “Cloud” Computing is Dead
I've bought some flat-pack furniture from some of IKEA's competitors. After having struggled through putting that together I have to say I have new found respect for the amount of thought and design IKEA must put into how their furniture goes together.
Switching from employee to entrepreneur, day 1
They should come to Belgium. We have something called 'notionele interest aftrek' (http://www.kpmg.com/BE/en/Whatwedo/Interests/NotionalInteres...).

As an example:

Suez Tractebel, Energy Europe Invest en GDF Suez CC had a profit before tax : 4,8 bilion euro.

Together they payed 2,3 milion euro tax. This is a tax rate of 0,049%.

Oh these are the Gas & electricity companies in Belgium.
Had to look... but the steaks and strippers thing is from Zed Shaw, Example 2 in this: http://zedshaw.com/essays/control_and_responsibility.html

I too think PostgreSQL should be in there... and I can't see why it isn't given that Amazon have the EBS already and are probably putting Oracle on that already. The same technique could easily take PostgreSQL.

Note: EBS = Elastic Block Storage which is Amazon's low level raw block storage solution: http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/
The Psychologist's View of UX Design
Are you confusing Windowing System with Window Manager?

I'll give you that Linux has a few better WMs than OS X. (I'm particularly fond of Openbox myself, and was always excited about the elusive 'Enlightenment e17'.)

However, I cannot accept any claim that X is better than Quartz.
You think Target and Walmart do not avoid high taxes through clever tricks?
Airtel Money – India’s First Mobile Wallet Serice By Airtel
It's not like Egypt had trouble shutting down its ISPs.
This is a pretty common scenario for international companies. Maybe most of them do not go as far as IKEA and lock their whole corporate structure, but most of them manage to achieve pretty low corporate tax rates. As an example Google was estimated to achieve an effective tax rate of only 2.4% [1]

[1] Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-sho...
The problem with a cube is that you will always end up with at least one upside-down screen.
Oh, was looking but couldn't find that one. Thanks!
This is an excellent idea, another medium to get the message, especially using older phone technology. I think the arabic speech recognition / txt translation is on it's way, we've come a long way with just character based text translations (i.e. mandarin, hindi, etc.).

Another thought: it actually seems like the reverse strategy of the aftermath of the floods in Australia. Where services need to keep the phone lines open for rescue workers and orgs, so people could tweet their distress msgs and location to relief orgs using broadband access over 3g.
I hope now you can concentrate better on your other endeavours. Good luck!
The iPhone killer - well, probably not.
Jason, I think this is still an open issue, as was pointed out in the comments under your Techcrunch article.

There is also another possibility - that Apple just didn't like that in the new Sony app, you could buy ebooks directly, while other apps (like Kindle app, but also some others) fire up browser. And this technique Apple did NOT banned (yet).
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I'm a packrat myself, but I guess something like S3 where you actively pay for storage and transport shows you very clearly the cost of being a packrat--there may be value in what you keep around, but it's not free to keep around, and it's not free to move it to storage.
"Wal-Mart paid 34 cents in taxes for every dollar of profit it made in the past three years."

[http://wgbhradio.org/News/Articles/2011/1/29/For_Many_Compan...]
Magnitude, not true-false.
and an opposing point of view from Anand here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4143/the-source-of-intels-coug...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161427
I like cheese. I also find your tone disturbing.
Even after innumberable discussions about this subject, I still don't get why people are so afraid of NAT.

The main concern seems to be about ISPs starting to NAT everybody and their dog. Well, guess what, they just can't do that. For starters because their users would get very angry when their torrents stop working, and would jump ship for any other ISP that announces that it either doesn't do NAT or has implemented IPv6.

There is still a huge amount of work that can be done to compress the usage of v4 address space. Maybe not much that the RIRs or the ISPs can do, but as the cost of owning a static IPv4 address goes up (and I believe that it will go _way_ up), end users will start compressing their public services into fewer addresses and giving back small subnets to their providers to reduce costs. I mean, who the hell needs to have a mail server and a web server in two different public addresses when they can just do port-forwarding over a single address? (And since most servers are on DMZs with private addressing, they are mostly doing it already, it's just a matter of renumbering.)

The case most likely to go NAT is also the most likely to go IPv6: mobile devices. These are mostly behind NAT already, and going IPv6 would actually reduce costs for ISPs. It would also put ISPs in the track for more extensive IPv6, since the major problem now is that people have little knowledge of how IPv6 works and ISPs are trying to avoid the pain. The issue is, of course, that 99.9% of mobile devices don't support dual-stack and even in a pure v6 configuration don't actually work properly.

For this I predict that in 10 years the move to IPv6 will still be half-way. Considering that we are so close to IPv4 depletion and there is virtually _no_ IPv6 to be seen, I'm being faily optimistic.
That would be a hard task and last for a long long time. See http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events/4121.en.h... , download the video from http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/27C3/mp4-h264-HQ/
Currently we are using Mixpanel.com (YC company).

Apart from usual figures like visitors, we collect information like user-engagement with a particular feature.

For example in our product we have a feature using which user can narrow results based on location and other parameters. We use mixpanel to track which parameters users select most, what combination of location selections etc.

This enables us to understand whether user is really using a feature or not, and if they are, then how are they engaging with it. We hope to iterate better based on such data collection.
It's a funny trick, but it touches on something that I can't help but feel is completely nonsensical: repeatedly picking random numbers from an infinite set.

It's basically a longer version of the following trick:

1) Pick a random real number in the range [0, 1]

2) Pick another

3) What is the probability that they are identical?

For another example, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_paradox_%28probability...
This particular value is specific to the Java implementation. Ruby has very similar code to PHP though, so a slight variation of the value may trigger it. You also have to be on a platform that actually has an x87, of course.
All abstract strategy discussions are useless
The Social Network: The Prequel
It's true, boring american porn is boring.

The bigger the movie's budget the more boring it seems to be (and the actresses more plastic)
Great video, enjoyed it a lot.

At 11:53, A man says: "I've discovered a way to build curiosity into a system". Does anyone know who he is and what he means by that?