skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well okay so think about it this way. If the only change in the system, is that your tax rate gets increased, and the extra money that gets collected is thrown away, and the economy continues on its current trajectory, then what you said makes perfect sense.

If the desired goal is "more money in your pocket" then the equation should be

money I make - taxes = money in my pocket

and assuming we are talking about a guy with a business and not someone taking a salary, the money you make is probably affected by the overall state of the economy.

If the action that causes of increasing your taxes also substantially improves the economy, don't you think maybe .. just maybe .. you might make more money overall?

What is better? To have a bigger slice of a shrinking pie or to have a smaller slice of a pie thats getting bigger and bigger?
Top 5 reasons iTunes doesn't suck:

My wife, who is not a geek, can:
1. Import CDs
2. Buy music
3. Arrange playlists
4. Sync her iPhone
5. Burn CDs

All without help or frustration.
Maybe you should read the article before dismissing it as spam.
Flagged.

What the heck is going on today? I think I've flagged more articles today than I have the past two weeks.
Awkward. I am in class right now.
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How to save the American auto? Kill the unions. Done.
Is WOA Phony?
If you are in that amount of money you are better off with Google Apps free hosting. One day of Exchange expert for setup or problems is in the hundreds.
Shakespeare was a good commercial author and extremely successful as well. As others have written here, the empirical test of "great" is whether his work lasts.
Oh, what a shame :-( I remember reading Jurassic Park 2, and then being appalled to see how the fairly reasonable science in the novel was just flat out massacred in the film. Worse yet, the film absolutely killed the best parts of the plot.

However I was yet another turned off by Timeline. It was the next book of Crichton's that I read after JP2, and I was seriously disappointed... I don't remember the details now, but there were several glaring flaws in the logic of the story, not to mention some of the stuff about language just seemed so far fetched to me.

Still, there can be no doubt that Crichton was a very talented man. His contributions to our culture will be missed.
Go to www.quarterlife.com/intern and ask THE INTERN QUEEEN, Lauren Berger. The difference is she has all original internship postings and doesn't use Monster - thank goodness!
... yeah if he were black. But why omit being half white? That's the gist of my comment.

I've already answered that in a manner that I'm confident makes sense in America: Because he is black. By the definition of the people for whom it matters, the color of his skin tells them all they need to know. Whether he has "white" relatives (whatever "white" means, since a large percentage of white folks have non-white ancestry, of some sort), or not, is irrelevant to a racist. It doesn't matter to folks who don't care about race; it matters no more whether he is black, half-black, one-quarter black, mocha-latte-frappucino brown, or plain old white of the purist driven snow. To the people for whom it matters, though, "half-black" is like saying "half-virgin" or "half-pregnant". To them, a black man has been elected president. And this is what many black folks have grown up believing was impossible...because there is a real history of racism in this country. As a nation, it has dramatically improved over the past four generations.

I still don't understand why you think it is some great truth that should be trumpeted from the rooftops that Obama is merely half black. It's not a secret that he has mixed race parents, and never has been. Nonetheless, his skin is brown. If racism was going to hold a black man back, it would have held him back just as well as it would hold any other brown-skinned man or woman back. And...it didn't hold him back.
A market panic is when everyone rushes to sell at once; this seems like the opposite of a panic. Those who had long positions aren't complaining. And I can't see that Porsche was fixing the price of VW stock; they were apparently doing little or no selling so the price must have been set by other traders.
I agree completely. The students that misuse the laptop are going to end up getting a grade they deserve, regardless. This professor is putting the burden on himself, when it should remain on the students.
Your honor, I just wanted to build a hierarchy of topic pages.
For some. You're over generalizing here.
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I know it's off topic but I have a feeling a lot of people will be floored by this video so I'm sharing it. What do you think?
I'm a lot more selective these days. Since time is valuable, it's worth doing a little research on the book before I begin.

The book gets added to my to-read list if:

* it has received a a good recommendation from someone I respect

* the author has a good interview on a program such as KQED's Forum or NPR's To the Best of Our Knowledge

* has generally good reviews on amazon.com

The more criteria it matches, the higher it sits in my list.
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Ask YC: How do you generate C100K requests?
You must have had some way in the lab to generate 100K synthetic concurrent HTTP requests to determine your scaling needs May I know what tools you used to generate that load?

When I mean "concurrent" I am asking for concurrency at the server at a granularity of a second (the generating client concurrency is a different issue). A quick way to check this is your access log on a microsecond time scale and the number of loglines for a given second should be close 100,000.
If you google "economic inequality" you will find many resources to educate on how U.S. style economics of the last 30 years have contributed in greater economic inequality, to which most believe is a major underlying factor of social problems.

As to your assertion that the rich live in 70% tax brackets, this is quite untrue. The 70% bracket is unfair but few Americans actually find themselves in this bracket. Those in this bracket are high-wage earners, mostly doctors and lawyers, that don't have much outlets for tax reduction. This group is unfairly punished at the moment and it would be wise to fix this problem.

If you as an entrepreneur find yourself even remotely close to a 70% tax bracket, I highly encourage you to post something to HN like "Ask HN: Please help me find a tax planner with two brain cells to rub together" ;).

There are lots of risks entrepreneurs take. But one reward is great opportunity to reduce tax both as you go and after a big payoff.

As to your feeling that you wouldn't want to live in a a country that never had Reaganomics...there are many great Americans (those that created what we have now) that lived before 1980 that do not share your feelings.

I'm not trying to be abusive. I'm writing this to provide additional perspective.
Why does someone have to be a climate scientist to analyze climate data?

Anyways, the points he makes do not seem loony, or at least not loony enough to require BBC to shun him.

Finally, we have to do something about this automatic "controversial = trolling" shutdown. Being rational and levelheaded does not mean avoiding controversy. A good forum does not necessitate that nothing difficult is discussed, but that when difficult subjects are discussed they are handled in a constructive manner.
Obama could easily have come up with that answer himself. Everyone hates the BCS, even a lot of the people who participate in it. I'm not going to say that would necessarily be the most common answer you'd get from sports fans, but it might be high up the list.

I would have been more impressed if he said the MLB instituting a hard salary cap rather than that silly luxury tax.
Ask HN: How do you stop reading the internet when you need to work?
I'm a big fan of the LeechBlock plug-in for Firefox; it takes care of the worst time sinks (for me, social news sites). However, my mind seems to be very creative at destroying my productivity.

What can I do to get to work?
All fine and well until you start dealing with the collapse of an industry that employs/supports literally millions of people.

Millions of people out of work with no money becomes your problem, and mine. This is the only reason that the big three are getting any money at all.

It stinks, but it's certainly better than the chaos that would ensue if GM didn't exist tomorrow.
I am bullish on Mark Cuban.
Being a libertarian is good practice for developing this kind of skepticism, as governments often use specious statistics to support their current agenda. Second-hand smoke is one such area, as Crichton mentions. Anti-drug campaigns are also horrible for pulling numbers out of thin air.
I try to look at my rescue time dashboard everyday before I log off.

The thought of seeing "fun" being in my top 2 or 3 has so far given me enough of a guilt trip that I keep working.
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This is tangential, but you seem like you are informed on the climate debate, unlike myself. Feel free to ignore this if you consider it a troll, or that I'm bringing up tired and often refuted points.

Anyways, I've been reading a climate change skeptic, James Hogan, and he makes a pretty interesting claim. James says that 90% of the earth's warming is caused by water vapor. Of the carbon dioxide that does contribute to warming, only about 2% (as I recall) of it is human contributed. I haven't checked his sources, but these numbers seem pretty hard to fudge. That means we contribute at most 0.2% to the earth's warming with our carbon dioxide.

James also made a number of other points, like the measurements used to prove global warming are taken around developing areas, and more objectively obtained warming and carbon cycles show very strong correlations with solar activity. But, the water vapor point stood out the most in my mind and seems to clearly demonstrate we're overreacting.

Is there some kind of fallacy that I'm missing? Am I significantly underestimating the potential for that 0.2% to push us over some kind of tipping point? Thanks for any input you can give.

[edited a couple times b/c I'm too tired to do basic math]
Double mod up (if I could) for buying music and burning cd's.

itunes makes this dead simple.
I agree with you that this topic can be hacker news. I think a lot of controversial subjects can if we approach them as an opportunities to grow in adult discussion with strong disagreement on either side.

I consider this to be very important, since it always seems like the most important subjects are the most controversial, and consequently the least likely to be discussed well.
It's not that simple.

1. That tax money doesn't vanish down a hole. It gets spent, largely on American businesses.

2. By collecting more we reduce the deficit, so it also saves on inevitable future taxes plus interest..

3. The cleaner isn't paying a higher tax, unless the cleaner makes $250k a year. In fact since the cleaner is probably making 1/8th of that, he is paying a lower tax and could therefore charge me less while still making the same amount himself, and the free market will make that happen.

4. A rising tide lifts all boats. If there's one thing we can be sure of, it's that the middle class isn't going to save that extra money, that's just not the American way. They're going to spend it. A retailer's after tax margins might drop a bit, but their volume will increase. (I think that's what Obama was trying to say in response to the infamous Joe the Plumber question, but he didn't explain it well.)

I don't see the logic behind your number 3. Salaries are, of course, a deduction, so higher taxes should have little effect on them. Any employees making less than $250k (and that's the overwhelming majority of non self-employed people) will require less salary due to paying less taxes to maintain the same quality of life. And increased volume will make up for decreased margins at least to some extent (probably varying by industry).

Also, one of my blog readers sent me a neat economics paper he had written in college (I think at Harvard) that showed that sensible tax increases (like the Clinton years) have no impact on business creation. He used EINs issued, among other metrics.
Yeah, it's really annoying when people expect me to just fall in line without any kind of convincing rationale. Is there a good way to respond to this sort of thing? It is very hard to constructively question heavily politicized issues since all actions are automatically considered to be driven by some kind of agenda instead of honest. While quite often the case, there is usually some honesty mixed in, and it is a shame that this is ignored.
Even if it were true, the flagrant use of emotive language in it discredits any opinion as completely bias. There is very little factual evidence cited, mostly it is just a white paper of rant.
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yes, but that will be history of social progress at that point...this is progress in the making ;)
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Work on something more interesting than reading the net.
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You may want to try AB http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/programs/ab.html
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I don't think race is the only thing people concentrate on. And I do not think that is at all what enabled Obama to become the Democratic front-runner earlier this year.

It is clear that race is still a factor. Obama has no problem discussing race issues openly. I don't either. I think it is healthy and about time we start talking more openly about race issues, it may enable us to make further progress. I feel race issues have stagnated the last 30 years. Its gotten a little better, but crawlingly so relative to what it could be.
Only 30,000 engineers graduate from US universities each year?! That seems low to me, but I guess I've never really thought about it.
I've been looking for something as well. I didn't know about LeechBlock previously, thanks for the recommendation.
Didn't you just write yourself that probably it was just a fabrication of his press guys? Anyway, no, I am not interested in the issue. I don't know the book in question, and I don't know Clinton.
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Haven't read the book, but I loved the movie. It's the only movie ever to succeed at giving me nightmares.
As one of the comments pointed out this is not a "jailbreak", it is "logging in", which is a very different thing. Of course, allowing non-Android apps access to the keypad, screen, etc. may require more effort. I'm going to tinker a bit this weekend...I'd like to be able to run an audio tracker on my G1, so I can write tunes on the train.
A simple plugin is not gonna stop me. I tend to just live with the fact that I'm going to get distracted. I have a tendency to get lost in work once I get going, but that doesn't happen often ;->
i've heard that said, but so far, i don't think it's true for us. we've had a single ec2 instance running for 30 days now, with no end in sight.
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The time has come for you to try something different with your photographs. You have been taking those digital snapshots for some time now and your memory card is bursting at the seams, and you need to figure out what to do with them. Most people probably just store them on their PC and browse them occasionally when family or friends come round.
I faintly remember discussing another Crichton article of the same gist on HN?

While I did not make it to the end, I feel there are two strategies at work in this article:

A) Talk so much that your opponent loses the ability to focus and becomes vulnerable for injection of any meme you slip into the speech.

B) Draw random analogies and take advantage of the flaw of the human brain, that is "addicted" to drawing analogies if there are none.

Because ultimately he says "look, there were false things that were believed by a lot of people. Global warming is believed by a lot of people, therefore it must be false". That is simply a logic error. I wonder if Crichton was aware of that (and since he was intelligent, I suppose he was), because if so, I consider the article a disgusting, dishonest attempt at manipulation.
The IPCC models do account for both water vapor and solar irradiation. Water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas. It is roughly correct to say that it accounts for 90% of the greenhouse effect (the lowering of infrared flux from the earth to space). However, it's not correct to say that 90% of the earth's warming is due to water vapor, if what one means by warming is change in average temperature over time. The amount of water vapor has apparently not changed very much.

Here's some figures tabulated from the standard models, from the fourth IPCC working group is found here:

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/WG1AR4_SPM_PlenaryApproved...

And a nice graph can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Radiative-forcings.svg

These figures are estimates of anthropogenic forcing, in other words, how the components of the heat flux of the world changed due to the ecological changes. There are quite a few things here which can be measured quite accurately: cloud albedo being one, stratospheric water vapor content being another.

These were estimates made in 2005. According to them, additional stratospheric water vapor accounts for less than a twentieth of a watt per square meter, and variation in solar activity less than a tenth. Anthroprogenic carbon dioxide accounts for around 1.7 watts per square meter, averaged over the year, over the earth.

Solar activity is a large component, but recent estimates point at it accounting for only '18 and 36% of warming from 1950 to 1999' http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/StottEtAl.pdf

As for the claims that measurements of global warming are taken around developing areas, I think that claim is most fraudulent. First of all, one can measure the surface heat quite accurately by satellite by looking at the ratio of radiation in different 'infrared windows'. This allows you to calculate, via the Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law, the temperature at a surface.

Second of all, and perhaps more obviously, nearly all glaciers and icecaps are melting or receding, and these are not exactly developing areas! Melting ice-caps are measurements too!
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He does not make any points, besides saying "in my opinion there is no man-made global warming". It is well known that there are cycles of global temperature, I was even taught so at school, 25 years ago it was already known. What pro-global warming people claim is that even taking those cycles into account, something is amiss. I have no way to judge it, but overall it seems unlikely to me that human activity on the planet has no effect whatsoever.
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Well, Dan Brown or Robert Ludlum are shit, the bottom of the trash pile. This is like saying that relative to Hitler or Stalin, Bush was a great president.
I'll grant you that, though I honestly think that Crichton's work will date very badly and he probably won't enter the "great" category. It still supports my point that it's far too early to call him a "great" author.
If only it was as black and white as you make it out to be: someone voted X on bill Y, they obviously feel X about Y. I shudder to think what it would be like if all the compromises I had to make every day were laid bare and presented in an absolute either-or form. Considering the complexity of bills and the amendments that are added and even the way they name them (PATRIOT is a prime example), I'm not so sure it's wise to interpret every single boolean vote as documenting someone's entire position on an issue.
"... How do you stop reading the internet when you need to work? ..."

Hard problem this one.

Some times you need to search the web for information. Other times you really need to turn access off to get work done. One suggestion would be to pre-search all you need to search for. But this is clumsy and sometimes unforeseen comes along. Then when it comes time to work, try working on a machine not connected to the Internet.

But this practice doesn't scale. Is anyone working on an idea that lets an algorythm to work this out for lots of individuals?
Most of the Drake Equation factors are fractions in the range [0, 1]. So you do know a lot about the range of the variable.
I think the CTO of the US should sell off any shares / stakes in technology companies to avoid conflict of interest.
What makes a great author?

Well, one possible test is, as mentioned by others, whether his works are still read a hundred years from now (I doubt that will be the case with Crichton). That's more a practical definition than a theoretical one though, and in my opinion it doesn't necessarily define "great" authors, but lasting ones. All great authors are lasting, but all lasting authors are not great - however, most lasting authors are in fact great authors.

On a theoretical level, I'd put the argument this way: Literary works use lies to achieve one or more of 3 objectives: 1) entertain, 2) expose new ideas, 3) expose deep pieces of ages-old wisdom. I think that in order to be "great", an author needs to at least have a firm foot in the third category.

Michael Crichton was certainly a good author, and very talented at 1) and even 2) sometimes, but did he ever convey any piece of eternal wisdom in his works? I sure didn't find any. This is not to put him down - being a good author is a hard enough achievement. But being great is something else.

Some examples of "great" authors, in my view: Dickens, Shakespeare, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, Gabriel Garcia Marques, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Tchekov, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Hemingway, Romain Gary...

Not all of them are 100 years old, although, sadly, all of them are dead.
Dude, take this crap elsewhere, please.
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