skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Surely you'd be better off having an empty netbook and using RDP to connect to a home server? At least then nothing is encrypted, they are free to look at the hard drive and could happily confiscate it without you having any issues. Worst comes to the worst, if you use dynDNS, you could just change the URL you use to connect.
How about replacing income tax with a consumption tax?

The current tax system encourages speculative investment for capital gain and discourages investment for passive income due to lower tax rates on capital gain. Just look at the dismal amount of dividends paid out by companies in the US compared to Australia, where many companies pay out over 50% of their profits in dividends.

A person who earns a $10m a year but only spends $20,000 pays close to the same tax as a person who earns $10m and spends all $10m.

Both contributed lots to society to earn that $10m, but since the first person only spends $20,000 he only claims back a tiny amount from society resources due to him for his contribution. The second person claims back everything, equal in value to his contribution, resulting in no net gain to society. [correction: less net gain, because earning $10m would likely have provided several times that in benefits to society]

Replacing income taxes with only consumption taxes will further increase incentive for production, while discouraging unnecessary consumption. You'd get more people like the first person than the second person, and society will reap more of the rewards of more productive individuals, who use up less resources.

It'll be like society giving out pieces of paper that is put in a building called a bank in return for real goods and services, that are carefully allocated because no one wants to waste anything.

An example of a consumption tax is the VAT.
I don't really see the problem. This is not a word processor, this is - as the name suggests - a software which lets you create interactive eBooks in a proprietary format which is only compatible with the iPad.

It is its sole purpose.

Apple as a publisher provides you this software for free specifically to help you publish on their own store. And they restrict you to use it only for that. They don't own your content.

You can create ePub documents with Pages (for example), which are readable with any ebook reader, and you are not limited in any way in how you choose to distribute them.

I don't think this is comparable to restricting the use of a Word or PDF document.
Given the press is controlled by the same people pushing SOPA, do you really find that surprising? IMO, that (being able to control the distribution/slant of a story to the masses) is what is so dangerous about the entertainment oligarchy.
So when an investor pays 15% "income" tax, it's on money that his company already paid 28% tax on (for a total of 39.8% tax). But as it's capital gains, there's a capital investment - money which again had to be earned, taxed and subjected to a risky investment.

It seems to me that if the benchmark tax rate is 40% (AVC says his brothers pay 40-50% on their salaries), and the 15% rate is raised, it would be beneficial for the investors to simply take a salary and bonus instead?
To his credit, I suspect he also makes large charitable donations to the Mormon church which reduce his taxable income.
Things can always get worse, but only a fool would let them go without a fight.
CIA Tracks Public Information For The Private Eye
Sadly in my case, default driver does not work with HDMI and it does not recognize my 24" monitor. The ATI official driver does recognize and it does use 1900x1200 resolution but only with large black border.
Important takeaways:

- Use full-disk encryption.
- Secure it with a very long hard to guess password.
- Turn your computer off at least 10 minutes before going through customs.
- You don't legally have to tell anyone the password with out a court order.
- You don't have to give them any information to aid in their search.
- Secure delete everything before you travel.

Super important:

- DO NOT LIE.
- You can simply not answer a question. But never lie.
- Say, "I'm sorry, but I cannot answer that question."

Super super important:

- Plan!!!
- Decide what you will do *before* you get to customs.
- Don't stress out, just relax and don't answer questions you don't want to.
A fun aside: if an article title ever asks a question, the answer is always "no". Otherwise, the headline would just read something like Online Piracy Does Hurt the Economy.
No judge in the US would allow a grand jury to go ahead against a person that has allegedly breach an US law, that didn't occur in the US, wasn't done by a US citizen, and didn't affect any US citizens. In a way Mega Upload brought themselves within the sphere of US laws, using a .com address, paying money to US companies, hosting within the US, having assets within the US, allowing US customers, registering as a DMCA service provider, etc. These all contribute to allowing a US forum.

If you set up a service like Mega Upload that doesn't have any dealings with US citizens or institutions then an US court has no jurisdiction and a grand jury motion will likely not succeed, and in most countries, other than the sycophantic ones that allow extradition on merely accusation, you can just ignore it.
A person who earns a $10m a year but only spends $20,000 pays close to the same tax as a person who earns $10m and spends all $10m.

Only if you ignore sales tax and other taxes incurred when spending money (hotels, fuel).
Using Social Media To Make Some Real Cheddar
Toronto's restaurants are using social media in inventive ways to further their brands.
At least in the US, the average actual corporate tax rate is much lower than the statutory (by about half). Corporations get deductions far beyond what individuals do.
What if we special-cased the essential consumables a bit? Not very elegant, and probably a bit exploitable, but I can't think of any glaring holes (yet).

As for your second objection, I don't see the issue. If they don't want to be taxed, they can forego buying something.
Wikipedia may be saving bandwidth, but that's not the real reason they're switching to SVG for logos. They're doing it because SVGs can be more accurate versus a PNG or JPG version, and because it scales much better.

Take a look at the template {{Should be SVG}} (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Should_be_SVG): it says "This image was uploaded in a raster graphics format such as PNG, GIF, or JPEG. However, it contains information that could be stored more efficiently and/or accurately in the SVG format, as a vector graphic."

Also, whenever you go to an article that displays an SVG image, it's actually a PNG rendering. It's only when you view the actual file that you see the SVG. Take a look at the United States article, for example. The image of the flag at the top is actually //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e2/Flag_of_the_United_States_%28Pantone%29.svg/125px-Flag_of_the_United_States_%28Pantone%29.svg.png, not the SVG itself.
"Let's have a chat about how you're drinking too much Coke" has to be the most reliable indicator of company performance I've ever heard.
Nice to hear from someone without vested interests in this ebooks thing.

Now, about that "what they offer is far from special" line. Are you serious? If what they offer is far from special, how come nobody else offers something like it?

Have you seen how Lulu proposes you format your books? Have you seen any Amazon kindle book maker? Have you seen the Blurb photo books app? Not even close.

Also, there's nothing amazing that "Apple thinks can get away with". What the said is only:

1) Here's our huge store with a market of 50 million devices.

2) Here's the reading program we have made for them.

3) Here's a free app to format your book content.

4) IF you want to sell something you have formatted and exported from our app, you have to sell it through out store, and we get 70%.

This would be reasonable even if the app (3) was paid for.

Actually, in that case, it would be like the "iOS membership program"'s $100.
Fair enough, but what if said company convinced you to take a lower salary because the company was always dropping $100 bills? Cutting back there would effectively be a salary cut, and you would have a right to be upset.

I think the real issue is that the author's recruiter was unscrupulous and willing to take advantage of someone who wasn't skilled at the whole negotiating thing.
I like how you refuted me with another part of my own link. I'm embarrassed to have missed it.

It seems to be a fair bit worse than you've stated, actually. One of the citations in that section leads to a Globe and Mail article[1] which states that the subsidy will be phased out over the next few years:

> The government said it will introduce legislation to gradually reduce the allowance of $2 a year per vote by increments of 51 cents starting on April 1 of next year until it is eliminated by 2015-16.

I'm assuming that means that the subsidy won't appear at all in the 2015-2016 budget, which means that it will actually be gone by the time the next election rolls around in October 2015. Hopefully the NDP will be able to get enough seats to bring it back after the election, preferably alone but possibly with the Liberals.

Incidentally, I was surprised to find that the subsidy has only existed since the beginning of 2004. I suppose that has a lot to do with my age, since I wasn't quite 19 then, and anything that happens before the first time you vote tends to be regarded as "the way it's always been."

Thanks for the clarification.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/budget/news/pa...
Is it? I thought it was fair use.

Like cassette recording an album in ye olden analogue days. To stop vinyl wear-and-tear. That was certainly perfectly legal as long as it wasn't distributed.

Sigh. I'm a criminal and don't even know it.

I'm fucking sick of paying taxes and yet still being labelled a criminal by people who don't even know me. I'm sure I'm not alone.
On the other hand, a consumption tax taxes people proportionally to the benefits they receive from society. It might be less progressive w.r.t. income than our current system, but it is arguably more fair.

It's also hardly clear that the tax burden is even felt by the rich. Consider an investor with millions in investments who only consumes $50k/year. He would like to invest in his new venture, a medical search engine. But because of the taxation, he has less money for this investment. Think: who is forced to consume less as a result of taxation? The rich man continues to consume $50k/year. Instead, goods and services have been redistributed from the medical search engine to government uses.

The real question about taxing investors: do we believe the government will spend the money better than Fred Wilson would?

See also: http://www.thebigquestions.com/2011/04/18/the-man-who-cant-b...
In my opinion this is exactly like SOPA, a corporation-sponsored bill. Why would any government care if you "pirate" a movie? There is no tax on cinemas, but you pay an tax + extra fees if you're buying blank CD/DVDs -- because they presume you're going to write ("burn") illegal content.
> And then I often think of my two brothers who probably pay 40-50% of their income each year in federal, state, and local taxes. It just seems so unfair.

If the author really thinks his 28% tax rate is very unfair in light of his two brothers paying 40-50% taxes, he could donate the difference between 28% and 40-50% for himself to the Treasury each year, and effectively be paying a 40-50% rate.
I love the idead of a flat tax. I think H&R Block might not be so excited by something like that though... imagine if we could all file our taxes in under 5 minutes??? The accounting industry would certainly take a hit...

This is perhaps another reason there is such opposition to removing tax deductions and simplifying the code. There are tonnes of people who need a complex tax code to make their current jobs relevant. So much inertia holds us back from getting to a better place.
have to click the login button - works for me in chrome
Income is income is income.

If you make over six digits I don't care what the source is, no-one should get a special rate. Because once you hit that level, there is no way you could convince anyone you are "suffering" even if you decided to work 12 hours a day. At that level work is a choice, where the millions making 4 or 5 digits have no choice.
http://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2003/03/08/
Hollywood should make a movie about this.
The iBooks Author App Icon
I agree; this isn't nearly the scale of SOPA/PIPA.

This bill just makes it a requirement that ISPs keep customer IP addresses on record for at least a year. I'm guessing that most major ISPs have already agreed to do this sort of thing for law enforcement without any law requiring it.
"One is that a flat tax is regressive meaning that it penalizes lower income earners by taxing them at the same rate as higher earners. But I think we are all coming to realize that the current system may be even more regressive since most wealthy people find ways to pay lower tax rates."

So change the current system to prevent wealthy people from paying lower rates, don't just move the goalposts and call it a goal.

The fact that more money often means you can pay lower tax rates doesn't mean those people shouldn't be paying higher tax rates, just that the current laws aren't doing a good enough job at getting them to pay higher rates.
A good precursor to the tax discussion would be heightened transparency via public access to all tax returns. E.g.
Since 2002, all Norwegian citizens' salaries and net worth has been accessible to all.

Amongst other things, it would give a better picture of political candidates' motivations as they propose various tax "reforms".
You don't own "Intellectual Property". You own a temporary monopoly on its reproduction in certain circumstances. But the creative work itself you don't own. Sure, if you paint a painting, you own the physical canvas, paint, and wood frame. Those are your property. But the depicted image? You don't own that. You own its copyright. Which is that temporary monopoly I described before.
Bit of a link-bait title. I'd wager that the majority of blogs DON'T use Disqus, so saying it leaves 'All blogs comment-less' is a bit much.
You can only "donate" money as long as there are no strings attached. This is clearly extortion.
First, there is already a sales tax, so the guy spending $10m would probably pay $500.000 (5%), or 25 times more than the other guy spend.

Second, low income families spend all their money making ends meet, whereas high income families have a lot more latitude in adjusting their expenditure. Offsetting this with deductions will be a bureaucratic nightmare.
Nike Fuel Belt a bracelet stimulating activity | World New Electronics
Internet's Dr Evil
Does anyone have an equivalent workflow example for Windows? I get (git) the use of PhoneGap and GitHub, but the pieces before that which are local I keep playing with and haven't found anything I'm really happy with yet. Figure I'm not the only person still on Windows...

Additionally, I would be REAL interested to see if anyone has come up with a workable toolkit for doing this on an iPad or Android tablet? Not SSHing into a remote server but actually working locally.
The legal term for this is "chilling effect": from Wikipedia, this is 'used to describe the inhibition or discouragement of the legitimate exercise of a constitutional right by the threat of legal sanction.'

This is well studied in law, but mostly in the context of freedom of speech. It is clearly applicable in this case as well, and I wish the author had looked this up instead of coming up with an independent parallel analysis of the same idea.
Thought that was for Jupiter.
This is interesting but the problem that I see with this argument is that you are ignoring transfer pricing agreements. Basically companies like Twitter (and google, facebook, etc.) use a bunch of complex tax structures in different countries to legally avoid paying corporate income tax. Google paid something like a 2.6% effective tax rate. Others like GE paid a negative percentage.

So the issue here is that in the case of google or any major tech company investors + company only pay the 15% + marginal effective rate of 1 or 2% which is only 17%.
I saw that as well under Chrome. I don't remember what I did besides, logging out, closing the tab, coming back etc. Eventually it worked.
Your veins normally circulate blood by using the normal skeletal muscle contractions in combination of a series of one way valves. In essence, it is a passive system. By applying constant external pressure, you shift the balance of blood flowing between your surface and deep veins (your deep veins carry way more blood). The increase in pressure also increases your blood velocity. Here's a linky

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10633254
It depends on what you consider distributed vs. centralized. A blog that hosts its own commenting system has centralized everything onto its own server. By partitioning the content from the comments, you are decentralizing the various pieces that make up the site.

To truly decentralize things you could open up a web hosting and commenting system to anybody who participates. A user's web browser connects to your DNS servers and, a la BitTorrent, requests seeds of third-party services which hold the content. The browser establishes a quorum of servers which have responded with an identical hash of the contents. The content may be static or it may consist of references to other pieces of content which is similarly distributed, so the browser should recursively go through each piece and gather them up in a similar manner.

You end up with a much slower web implementation, but it becomes fully distributed.
Presumably they get deductions for expenses? Money that's spend can't get paid out in dividends.
Well this is pretty neat. Reminds me of the old PSP portals that people used to make for homebrew back in the day. They'd emulate Windows and Ubuntu and everything in between.

I would just open this up full-screen on someone's laptop and watch the magic unfurl. A little more JS and you could have an awesome copy of Lion in the browser.
First, both of those guys earning $10m will have paid a $4m income tax. With the remaining $6m, it'll be difficult to claim existing consumption taxes paid will be anything close to $4m.

Second, you can implement a progressive consumption tax scheme. You can mirror with existing income tax system - first $10,000 spent each year is tax free, next $20,000 at 15% and so on. It could be hard to implement at this moment but with the advance of technology it would certainly become possible. An alternative would be to charge higher taxes for luxury goods like yachts and fast cars and lower taxes for basic goods like food and transportation.

The collected taxes can given back to the populace as social welfare. Most people would want to only limit welfare to low income individuals and families. I do not share the same opinion - there are many convoluted rules it is hard for people to see what the government is really incentivising you to do - in my country if you save more than $2,500 you lose your welfare payments until your bank account balance goes back below $2,500. Which I think is dumb.
I think the FairTax is a better proposal, much as I dislike the name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax
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Looking forward to it, as I just received an offer that was largely based on my github profile. Hiring manager told me they've never interviewed someone with one. So I suppose I can turn that around and say I deserve more than the typical offer.
10 free apps that i use for my design & development
"Here you are supposed to give up commercial exclusivity merely for the ability to use a piece of software. And there really isn't anything special or expensive about that software either"

If that is true, what is the fuzz about?
Yes but for what combination of hardware and software?
Coke costs all of 25c/can in bulk. Even 10 cans a day is only 2.50

Yep, and it baffles me when companies miss the forest through the trees and cut something like sodas. In the scheme of what a fully loaded engineer costs the company, even 10 cans of soda/day is minuscule (~$625/year).

As companies get bigger the same thing always seem to happen. The bean counters see the large costs of providing free X to thousands of people and/or people who work there start taking advantage of the situation (bring home a 12 pack of soda each day for all their roommates). No matter how cool the company claims to be, this seems to eventually happen to all large companies past a certain size.
I believe it's because DVDs do have a trivial copyright protection scheme on them - ripping the DVD involves breaking this and it's this part that causes the real trouble:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripping#Circumvention_of_DVD_co...
Yup. The most popular current excuses to shirk problems by suppressing liberty:

(1) anti-terrorism
(2) health and safety
(3) think of the children

I was actually pretty shocked to hear initial talk of protecting American inventions from 'foreign thieves'. That kind of language seems way out of date...
This is an example of the chilling effect you get when you hold service providers liable for users' behavior.

Are there any other examples of this post Megaupload?
Brazil Under Anonymous Attack - Tangara da Serra city site defaced
Yeah, I put that chat in the same category as talking about upgrading tools and other things the company should already have taken into account cost wise.

If your boss starts complaining about sodas, $50 license upgrades for team software, cheap HW upgrades like RAM, etc... then it's time to leave.
You are right, I get your point.

The thing is that at the beginning we were just three friends trying to develop a simple webapp. The domain hack (.st) was to keep our URLs short. The .com domain was parked. As you wrote, "I was happy with that situation". Well, I was not happy but I though it was not so important.
Now we are a company and things are different.

My fault was to not act directly against it. The urlist.com guy did a fake landing page with our contents before, now he is linking to a webapp related to bookmarking: he know what he is doing.

I was wondering if anyone has ever experienced a problem like this one, and what he/she have done to solve it :)
Genetically Engineered Stomach Microbe Converts Seaweed into Ethanol
It isn't just unfair that he is paying a lower rate. It is unfair that everyone like him is paying a lower rate. Him donating money will have no effect on the unfairness, only on his guilt.

That said, while I benefit personally from the low long term capital gains tax, carried interest is ridiculous.
This is a good point. I've also worked at huge behemoths before, and I wish there had been internal mailing lists to rant on. The bureaucratic walls around innovation and product release were so tall that a healthy release of those frustrations would have been nice. It's good to see that Google's employees have something to complain about, but more importantly that they actually complain about it.
How will you track consumption (required for a non-flat consumption tax) without creating a bureaucratic nightmare? There is a strong incentive to appear to spend less than you do (in order to hit the progression later), so every single can of coke you get needs to get attached to your tax-ID.
This.
I am trying to only use FOSS fonts, also for print, so having families matters even more to me. I actually went through the while directory and sorted it by hand just last month, so this service will prove invaluable next time i need to choose fonts for any project, especially cross-media.