skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Voluntary gifts of money can be sent to the U.S. Treasury at this address:

http://www.fms.treas.gov/faq/moretopics_gifts.html

One has to ask, if any super rich person really considered the U.S. Government a worthwhile investment, why are they donating to various charities instead of to the Treasury?
Peer pressure is a powerful thing.
I didn't say the Republicans' involvement was untrue, I said it was irrelevant. When an article points out a political party in this way, the publication is implying that the outcome is because of that party (something that simply can't be known from the facts). I suggested that they leave this out because it is more important to report on exactly what the FCC did and exactly what the outcome was. It allows people to have reasonable debates without becoming heated over their politics.
Back when you did the initial validation with the first two MVP's, did you measure clickthrough rate? If so, how did it compare with the 4% conversion in the real product? (we're looking at ways to design MVP's to predict actual market performance.)
Pretty Little Liars Season 2 Episode 10
Pretty Little Liars Season 2 Episode 10 "Touched By An 'a'-ngel": will be aired on August 16, 2011 at 8:00 PM on ABC Family. So stay tuned on ABC Family.

At this time, we will provide a summary of the Pretty Little Liars Season 2 Episode 10 "Touched By An 'a'-ngel":
If you are acquiring a 39+ billion dollar company, money is a factor.

Considering Apple's capital structure, interest rates aren't really a key consideration here. "Apple's stock value" reflects the fact that they invest in relatively high return projects and that investors expect them to continue to do so. This type of acquisition would not be satisfactory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weighted_average_cost_of_capita...
I'm pretty sure this has happened lots of times. Matt Damon said something along those lines recently.
The interesting bit is that I'm not sure in many cases it matters.

I'm lucky to have FiOS (25down/5up), and I have many times the bandwidth I can manage. I can be downloading a couple torrents, my wife and I can both be streaming a movie, our phones can both be updating, I can forget I left Pandora running, and a friend can be in another room doing goodness knows what, and web sites still load more or less the same as normal.

I'd don't think I've ever come close to saturating my connection mainly because the sites I'm connecting to...even major sites...can't serve me data fast enough. For example, I routinely wait for youtube to buffer (though oddly 720p appears to load faster and more smoothly than any other resolution)...often I'll watch something on hulu while a videoclip buffers on youtube.

I've been on 100mbps connections in East Asia and didn't notice any perceptible difference...I did about the same amount of stuff in about the same amount of time...the sites I was connected to simply weren't servicing me any faster.
Reading this just makes me think of all of the lobbying dollars and campaign contributions that must have been paid by the super-rich to get these tax breaks.

Am I the only one that feels some populist rage welling up when he hears how much money is wasted on campaigning for office and influencing people in office? Aren't there more worthy uses of wealth and scarce resources?

And it just pains me that so many people think that they "have to play the game" to get things done by politicians. Non-profit organizations that use large percentages of their spend on "wining and dining" elected or appointed officials to try to make things beneficial things happen. Ugh.
I've always enjoyed reading Buffett's remarks in Berkshire's shareholders reports because of those very reasons. There's no BS; he just tells it the way it is, covering both successes and failures. And when he talks about the overall economy, he puts it in terms that people can readily grasp the concept without being swamped by gobbledegook.

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/reports.html
not being able to reproduce.
This reminds me somewhat of a visual field test, which I cannot pass to save my life.

I expected this to affect me either 1) Not at all, since I have monocular vision and a lot of optical illusions don't work for that reason, or B) ridiculously well, since I have a visual field of only about 15 degrees, a rather significant, centrally located cataract, and severe nystagmus.

However, it seems the reactions I was having to the dots pretty much mirrors others' experiences, which is, to me at least, rather interesting.
Buddy Media Raises $54M For Brand-Focused Social Media Management Platform
People always say stuff like this, but I think quite the opposite.

Buffet, and people like him (Gates, Jobs, Welch, etc...), while great businesspeople are used to being able to say something and everyone jumps. In business, everyone is working together to make the company more money. With some exceptions, you can create an incentive structure that rewards that.

Government, in the US at least, is very different. Buffet would be dealing with people, congress, who will certainly not jump when he says something. In fact they'll often make themselves completely unavailable. He'll be in a situation where people will actually do things that harm the country if they could remove Buffet from office (to get someone from their party in office). In government, you don't negotiate in good faith.

And Buffet wouldn't be able to fire anyone in congress. I suspect one of the first things Buffet would say after working with congress is, "I'd fire half of these bozos if they worked for me!" Unfortunately, these are the people who will decide what legislation lands on his desk.

I feel like gang leaders are the people who best understand what it would be like to be President.
It's also worth checking out GWTBox2d, which is actually Java code run through GWT, and runs surprisingly well: http://gwtbox2d.appspot.com/

I'm really impressed with what JS can do these days...
Good, he practices what he preaches. The point remains, paying higher taxes is not an efficient way to help your fellow man. You'll get much better bang for your buck donating to a worthy charity. Thought of this way, it's a simple question of utility.
If we want shared sacrifice, maybe we should ask people at the bottom to share as well. Anecdotes of Warren Buffet's office aside, in general the richest people pay the largest proportion of taxes.

We already lean quite heavily on the top 1% - the top 1% actually pays more in taxes than the bottom 90%.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/22652.html

A graph of the data in that article:

http://i.imgur.com/wa8uu.png

In terms of taxation of the top 10%, the US is the most progressive country in the OECD.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/27134.html

Maybe the tax code needs tweaking at the level of the top 400, but it's very progressive up to the level of the top 1%.
The problem is getting low to middle income people to stop voting against themselves. Good luck with that, they all seem to think they are going to be billionaires someday so better keep those billionaire taxes low.

Either that or by bribing the wealthy with low taxes they might only ship out half the jobs overseas instead of all of them.

It's just dumbfounding. Election after election, over and over.
Here's to Today's Thinkers
Yes, they can ask you all kinds of questions about what you said and make you appear quite talkative.

Say nothing and you can truthfully say repeatedly that you said nothing. You'll be able to consistently tell the truth on the stand without having to explain any of your statements, statements that the prosecution will attempt to twist into incriminating statements.

Of course, if you do the same to the prosecutor before trial, the chances of you making it to trial go down. Prosecutors like to win their cases.
As a freshly minted middle-class American, I disagree with Mr. Buffet's argument here. Though his eagerness to share the tax-burden is laudable, I hope that tax rates stay low for him. I would pay higher taxes to keep it that way.

Simply put, I don't trust the government with that money.
A lot of people believe in it - and it's the basis for a lot of woo. The hypothesis is generally referred to as the Quantum Mind, if you want to read more about it. Its supporters generally don't think that that the entanglement effects are being used to transmit information; rather that the brain functions with quantum computing as a basis for consciousness - so, if this is true, you would have quantum effects determining, on some level, whether neurons fire or not.

Anyways, while this is an interesting topic, I'm not quite sure how you got to it from Photosynthesis. This article isn't putting forth the possibility that quantum entanglement is involved in the brain, although the last sentence does suggest that the reporter thinks that it might be.
If you just count the top 400 income earners in the US that he mentions in the article, and they restore the the 1992 rate of 29.2% (as opposed to the 21.5% of 2008), then we're talking about 7 billion dollars
JDK 7 GC behavior
Why does Buffet donate to charity rather than the treasury? Does he believe that the government will use his money less efficiently than the organizations he donates to?
Most decent charities deliver far more per unit donated than the US government could ever wish to achieve. If you're interested in pure charity, you're not going to get much bang for your buck at the federal level.
He also puts on a great shareholder's meeting every year, where he and his #2 Charlie Munger spend a lot of time just answering questions. And of course, there are the discounts at Dairy Queen and Nebraska Furniture Mart. He even supports local independent businesses like The Bookworm.

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/meet01/VisGuide2011.pdf
It is interesting. On the one hand, very few people argue that a person with measured IQ of 80 won't have a hard time in life. On the other hand people dismiss 120 people and pretend IQ doesn't matter. (And it seems a lot of this group is made of 120+ people.) I figure it's just a form of social signaling, a signal of false modesty so the 100s still like you.

Though personally I don't see that much difference in the intelligence level of a village idiot and Von Neumann, they're both humans and both way beyond an ant. I'm looking forward to a species that makes modern humans as a whole, from dumbest to smartest, appear as an ant to them.
I don't trust capitalists with it.
Ask HN: Best resources for learning to build good products?
What are the best books/sites to pick up knowledge on building good products?

I am mainly interested in decision-making and details of product UX. Basically answers to questions like...

Do we build out this feature? If so, how should it flow?

How important is this new form style versus the default textbox style we have right now?

Tips?
>Maybe the tax code needs tweaking at the level of the top 400, but it's very progressive up to the level of the top 1%.

If you read the whole piece, that's exactly what he says.
Mapping stereotypes
In my experience, Markdown is easier for just words and for things eventually going online. But as soon as I need tables, references, non-trivial layout and especially equations, I pull out LaTeX.
Could everyone make sure every Republican and Tea Partier they know reads this? Republican concerns are critical to this country, but the current incarnation is deeply harmful.
The caffeine nap works. Well for me anyway.
Also helps with stopping you from sleeping longer then the recommended 20min (give or take) and falling into deep sleep.
exchanging word for libreOffice is like saying <insert analogy for lesser of two evils here>

Both give incentives to the user to highlight every title and select Times new roman, 24pt, click the B button for bold etc.

Files generated with both applications get to you with tabs to simulate left margin! weirdly different fonts on each paragraph and other hellish things.

the whole concept of word is wrong. libreoffice is just a little better on following standards for the internal stuff. the part exposed to the user, is still a version of purgatory.
This is an extremely abstract argument. It's a matter of degree. If everyone gave all their money to charity, we'd have no government at all.
Matt Damon is rich, not wealthy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m37JkkGjAY#t=44s
Funny. Buffett certainly didn't mind a little coddling in 2008. He was arguably one of the largest individual beneficiaries of bailouts which shifted ungodly amounts of toxic debt from failed private institutions to taxpayers. See http://blogs.reuters.com/rolfe-winkler/2009/08/04/buffetts-b....

While it's now mighty generous of Buffett to invite the government to increase his taxes, he could spare us another (http://www.cnbc.com/id/40229527/Warren_Buffett_s_Letter_to_U...) nauseating and embarrassing New York Times op-ed and instead put his money where his mouth is. As another poster has noted, the Treasury will gladly cash Buffett's check (http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/gift/gift.htm).
Opportunity to choose his causes?
My point exactly. It's easy to consider who's paying what taxes and thinking about if that's fair, but the right question to ask is, "Is this a worthwhile investment?"

Who pays what in taxes is really a diversion.
The lines between a name and the meaning behind that name are blurred too often. Often in school, when studying or help was needed, I'd hear students proudly proclaiming that "that's the x principle" and then go on and write down a condensed formula for it. They wouldn't know how the formula was derived, but knew that there was a very specific formula for the "x principle" and that that was it.

I have trouble, because I'm not arguing that names are unimportant. They are necessary, they condense complicated subjects into simple words and give a common ground for discussion. But I once had a probabilities teacher who wrote down seven names for what were essentially 2 formulas (Just written in different ways). There was a quick 5 minute lecture on how to get a specific formula (usually, though sometimes none was given), but the the emphasis was on what the formula was called and when exactly to use it. Maybe I missed the point of the course, it was just a first year probabilities course, and the goal was to ingrain those 7 terms into our brains for the more complicated subjects. But there was so much more behind those equations and how they were derived. By the end of the class, I felt cheated. It was a foreign language class, not a math class.
Warren buffet pays about 17%, and the people in his office pay an average of 36%. So the solution, the way to restore fairness, is to raise taxes on him? I don't really think so. Maybe I'm a bit of a wingnut, but I find tax rates of about 30% disgusting simply on moral grounds, and I don't see why the discussion should go much further. Surely one of a government's prime constraints should be not screwing its citizens?
"The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre—what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.

-Ulysses S. Grant

People fighting or voting against their own self interest has gone on for a long time, sadly.
Pakistan let China see crashed U.S. "stealth" copter
not very related, but once i submited a post script resume (renamed as .pdf) for a webdev position, instead of the spify HTML that i usually send. (call it bucket testing:)

The hiring manager, who appeared to be clueless to any web technology or coding, complimented me by saying that my resume was the only one 'normal' without a bunch of code garbled in.

what a waste of time...
Forth examples can be more terse than C examples because Forth uses a stack for storing and manipulating intermediate values while C uses infix expressions and temporary variables. It's not just "shorter" syntax, it works in a different way. My real point with the Forth/C comparison is not that the Forth code is smaller but that it clearly has fewer "moving parts"- the for loop is simpler and provides fewer options, there's no need for special syntax to index array pointers, there's no need to specify method signatures, etc.

Language design is not simply a balance between terseness and verbosity, it's a complex series of tradeoffs between many paradigms and features- some allow you to express ideas more succinctly, flexibly or reliably.
Please note that most of the bw in Asia is to other parts of Asia. There is lots of peering and lots of fibre. Trying to get to the US, on the other hand, and you have a few, very expensive (comparatively) cables. This is why you find cloud companies in korea doing live disk replication into japan. The fibre in the region is just so cheap that it just doesn't matter anymore.

You would probably notice that if you were using local (or even localish) sites, that there would be a dramatic improvement.
Funnily enough, the Phoenix Wright series of games for the Nintendo DS, despite featuring an utterly ridiculous legal system, has this as a fairly central element. The basis of gameplay is cross-examining witnesses... and nearly every single one of them is either lying or misremembering things. I seem to recall at least one time where you were defending someone who had already confessed, for that matter.

The lying's not uncommon in TV dramas, but the unreliability of eyewitnesses accounts certainly is.
Taxing the money that moves - as it is earned - will only produce so much revenue. The rich need to be taxed, not beccause it will allow lots of lovely spending, because the gov will inevitably do a bad job of spending it. Though you could put it towards debt reduction first.

You have to tax the money that doesn't move. The millions of unneeded unspent $ that the rich are sitting on, with a wealth tax. You may not even make the poor richer, but you will make the rich poorer. Good.
Be _very_ careful pulling out your card. Not responding verbally and reaching into your pocket might get your killed if the cop thinks he sees you reaching for a gun.
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They only do that because it pays off. If the government was more decentralized and controlled significantly less dollars the incentives wouldn't be there and it wouldn't happen. It's a structural problem that happens in any system. Where power is concentrated it becomes beneficial to influence it - the more concentrated the more that can be spent.
You can say "fuck" on this site. Also, the WTFPL is already quite popular.
I've had a lot of success at slowly phasing sugar out. I spent a while consciously trying to put less into my coffees (it was a struggle sometimes), and now I drink it without suger.

Likewise I mix my on soft-drinks from cordial + soda water (seltzer) and i've scaled it back to the point where I often prefer the water plain.

The great thing about it is I use the sugar as a hit for its own sake now if I'm feeling tired/whatever. It doesn't last long, but it can be a great way to get yourself going.
The whole financial system and everybody that depends on it was a beneficiary of the bailouts. If everything collapsed, everybody would have suffered. Buffett just happens to own a bigger slice of the market than almost anyone, so of course he benefited significantly. But singling him out, especially since he's stayed away from wall street's games and made extraordinary efforts to keep things above board for decades, is totally unfair.
Googlecl - Command line tools for the Google Data APIs
Without government to pay for the roads citizens drive to their businesses, and the infrastructure that gives them water and temperature moderation, and 1,000 other things that are essential to provide for functioning commerce, citizens wouldn't be making so much money as they do. And I'd wager that effect is worth a lot more than 30%.
I don't think 60-80k for a senior/lead engineer is considered competitive anywhere.
The richest pay the largest proportion of taxes because they earn so much. In the article, 400 hundred people make $90 billion, and it takes 3 million people working at $30,000 a year to collectively earn as much.
100's of Indian Government, Education and Corporate websites Hacked
I suggest you check out The Snowball, his most recent and authoritative biography.
#OpBART and #Bart-Action : Anonymous hacks myBART, Leaks BART User Info
AA美国服饰
> If we want shared sacrifice, maybe we should ask people at the bottom to share as well.

Do you actually know anybody at the bottom? I would be fascinated to hear what you'd suggest someone cut when they're earning ~10-15k/year.

For those likewise unfamiliar, I recommend sci-fi author John Scalzi's "Being Poor": http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

Both the article and the comments are worth reading.
I've come to the conclusion that the logic becomes "well if I can't have it, no-one will". People basically trying to take away assistance/help to others by trying to vote it away from everyone, since they somehow perceive themselves as better than others suffering on the lower rungs on society.

This also explains why people try to vote away unions and benefits for teachers/schools, the very foundation of society, while they are okay with CEOs having multi-million annual stock bonuses while getting paid $1 to dodge taxes.
It's a small drop in the bucket, but at least a start somewhere. Google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber
What are some broadly applicable things you learned from DSP?
So, people are writing adverts* for discovering full screen editors?

c'mon, i remember my editors of choice doing that since the late 80s. even under windows. under linux it's not even fair play to mention this.

Those people will have their heads blow away when the find out that /modern/ text-editors not only have full screen but better way to navigate the text and perform auto correction. ...just let them catch up with the progress made on the 90s. heck, vim can have word count on the status bar since what? the 70s?

* i consider the article to be an advertisement for the mac editor, even if unintentional
Interesting but all anecdotal. The office layout productivity study that sticks in my mind showed that any change in office layout improved productivity for a short time. More light, dimmer light, higher cubicle walls, no cubicle walls, etc. It all improved productivity. And then there was a return to mean.
It's a nice intention, but how do you devise that mechanism? If I keep $10,000 in my savings account for 30 years, are you going to tax it every year?
On a similar note, I'm always a bit amused whenever WriteRoom gets lots of praise, because it's actually not so much different from good old Emacs running in a terminal (no X). Back to the future!
You're taking my abstract argument farther than I intended; perhaps I should have been more careful. I'm not saying we should give all our money to charity, just that it should be strongly preferred to paying increased taxes, especially with the goal of helping people.
> The point remains, paying higher taxes is not an efficient way to help your fellow man.

Maybe true, maybe not, but totally irrelevant. Taxes solve the free rider problem. Individual charity can't.
I do find it strange that you can go and get wholesale bw in the US for $1/mbit or less, yet residential ADSL tails, sold with contention ratios in the order of thousands:1 can be sold for like $60/month....
http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2007/09/25...
I haven't tried any video on it. Check power-developer.org