skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We already have AMT. Which was introduced with exactly this purpose. Read its history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_minimum_tax#Histor...

It grew in an unmanageable mess of complicated rules that nobody understands and that has very little relation to its original purpose. Since it worked so nice the first time, we absolutely have to do it again.

> and have yet to hear negatives to the "rich" paying a bit more, especially if many of them are for it.

By "many of them" you mean half-dozen wannabe politicians? You are confusing the opinion of tiny vocal minority with the opinion of silent majority which doesn't do talks on TV.
The reasons not to do it are plenty - grabbing more money from productive people to feed insatiable appetites of runaway government spending projects is not a sustainable model. Since most of the politicians are afraid to talk about any serious spending cuts and measures to bring deficits under control, it will not end up in anything but the same deficits with more government spending. Government can spend arbitrary sums of money, so we'd just end up in the same place very soon.
Despite comparing people explicitly submitting their own DNA in order to search for traits or relations with law enforcement DNA matching, the article misses a pretty fundamental issue:

What access does law enforcement (or "The Government" agencies in general) to the 23&me and other commercial DNA databases? A quick skim of their ToS suggests the general "and everything necessary to comply with laws/court orders" clause, which sounds to me like you could drive a truck through it.

I think privacy issues such as that could be a pretty big stumbling block to mass adoption once price comes down (and utility via detectable traits goes up).

Can anyone shed more light on exactly what their T&C permit?

Edit: and, if it differs, what you think it should permit? I seem to recall from other situations that entirely speculative 'fishing expeditions' on databases are frowned upon, but the sheer benefit to LE faced with an unknown sample is massive, and bounded only by user adoption and their access.
the connectivity argument isn't real.

just monday, I spent 4 wonderful hours to go from CDG into town because public transport in Paris is simply broken. Berlin isn't 100% but it's 100% better.
Darn, I am in Southern California...and mostly pay attention to eclipses because of an interest in astrology, not astronomy.

I know: Wrong crowd to confess that too. But it wouldn't amuse me if it were the "right" crowd to confess to.

Someday, I will get that astrology site working. And it will be astrology for the thinking simian.

Those of you lucky enough to be able to see this: Count me jealous.
It is annoying how they grab for low hanging fruit like the light switch. Arguably the real need is not domestic but business. There are millions of businesses that need to automate small things. A cheap and easy way to do that without needing engineering expertise would be very cool.
I don't think it's too surprising. What were their viable alternatives --besides cutting off from video entertainment altogether?

I don't think they have credible competitors§ yet. There's Hulu and there's Amazon Prime videos, but neither, to me, have the same breadth.

§I mean, via internet delivery. Even DVD mail delivery, they are very good, but that's not a growth market.
Yes, context is key. My implied context was small problems that can be solved with just a little bit of programming. If the problem is big enough to require a team then a different approach is required.
Quite simply, no. The goal of a country is not to amass wealth in the government.
Federal judge in Google/Oracle case learned to code
This is what I don't understand.

For me MongoDB and PostgreSQL aren't really playing in the same field. Yes they are both databases. But I wouldn't use PostgreSQL for document storage (the recent JSON addition is pretty weak). Likewise I wouldn't use MongoDB when I need my data to be more structured. I would have no issue using both at the same time.

I guess everyone is looking for that mythical single stack of technologies they can use for every use case.
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Palantir Technologies Nabs $56M New Funding, SEC Filing Shows
First Mind Controlled Robot Arms Documented in Humans
I just realized the track of the eclipse would be so much more effective if it were an overlay of Google or Bing maps. Anyone have such a thing handy?
MLM Essentials
Amazon Instant Video has a sort of an annual subscription fee option: if you sign up for Amazon Prime you can watch many videos for "free". Since some who sign up for Prime wouldn't sign up if not for the Prime Instant Videos, it is being used as a video subscription service.

The thing you're talking about is quite comparable to the iTunes Store. Most, if not all, of the videos that are free with Prime Instant Videos can also be rented one at a time by people who aren't Amazon Prime members.

I also think paying for rentals one at a time makes more sense for watching movies.
With a first look at that chart, what it seems to truly reflect is the size of the middle class in each nation.

Wouldn't a better solution be to increase the size of the middle class rather than decrease the size of the upper class?

Also, among the western european nations and the US, I suspect a strong correlation between immigration rates and the data on the chart.
Meteor, websocket-dbs.
What answer would that be? Because looking here[1], the effective tax rate during our largest job growth (Clinton Administration) was also when we saw the largest effective tax rates for the 10, 5, and 1%.

I guess I have to correlate until we run out of data, then checkmate or something.

[1] http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...
You should really clear that up, because I had the same reaction to the kickstarter as other people have. In the write-up it sounds like you're going to use emacs itself as the starting point to build on (but of course emacs is GPL which means if you did use any code from it, that would infect Emacsy and anything built on it and leave you no choice but to use GPL as well).

Either way you're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't here, IMO. It won't get much use if it is GPLed and it won't get much use if it isn't actually emacs, because if the core isn't actually emacs it is bound to have lots of small incompatibilities which will break compatibility with the large body of existing emacs scripts that are most of the reasons emacs is nice to use in the first place.
But ignoring all of the ways RFCs could be better, this site is significantly better than the alternatives (the ietf site, plain text on some random domain, or that shitty purple one i always seem to end up on...)
Understanding Multi-Level Marketing (MLM)
Ask HN/PG: How about having comment scores back
There are way more posts and comments on HN than it used to, but time isn't stretching to skim through it all looking for the insightful comments. Would it make sense to bring back comment scores now?
>>You're throwing a generic exception; Bloch's version throws two specific exceptions, together with appropriate information. Java tends to have excellent error reporting.

I know. I reduced it to one generic exception because that is what the person I was replying to did. Bloch's version is better of course.
But performance is just one of many aspects of a database. Relational databases are a nightmare to develop for when you have a fluid object model.
People deal with small problems or questions all the time. If you can answer your own question using less effort than it would require you to communicate the question to someone else, you're ahead.
It's not about punishing the wealthy, it's about realizing the enormous benefits the wealthy receive from society.
> With Netflix, I watch 2 movies a day.

You watch too many movies :)
It really doesn't matter what their TOS says; if the government wants the data it's just a NSL away. I guess they could promise to not voluntarily send your DNA to the government.
Why should the government "invest" then?
Yeah, because high tax rates always discourage entrepreneurship </sarcasm>

Norway - with one of the highest tax rates & comprehensive welfare states on the planet - has higher rates of entrepreneurship than the USA does. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/01/20/norway-entr...

If you look at international entrepreneur rates, its pretty clear that there is no relationship between income tax rates and start-up activity (that's not to say that specific tax policies don't make a difference). http://www.internationalentrepreneurship.com/total-entrepren...

For every argument about high tax discouraging risky ventures, there is a counter-argument that high safety nets reduce the risk of start ups.
Hulu's advantage is that they have more things that are available on cable - I can see Bob's Burgers and Once Upon A Time the day after they air.

The downside is that I cannot watch the first season of the former... unless I fire up Netflix :)
If going to jail where you can get raped, beaten and killed does not work as a deterrent why would something less severe work as a deterrent?

Sometimes I think trying to solve the root cause of crime would be more effective than increasing the punishments.
Asking Grover Norquist for advice on economics is like asking Pat Robertson to explain what causes hurricanes and earthquakes (hint: he says it's something about the sexual orientation of some people).
Not all companies that operate are for profit.

BUT, The goal of a country is to amass wealth, is it not?
Building web apps like a (England) boss.
I've always thought that using some sort of internal torrent mechanism would be a good way for applications to download their updates, especially something like Chrome, which updates quite frequently.
I consider myself a pretty conservative developer when it comes to the tools that I use, and mainly stick to the core LAMP stack for my deployments - MySQL, Apache, PHP etc. I've ventured down the path with MongoDB and currently use it for one special use case where the data served is static.

But for Node - I've really come to the conclusion that it is a great tool for back end API work, such as serving very short requests, Ajax calls, etc. Couple the ability to develop in Javascript while serving JSON makes Node a really nice place to develop in.

Plus, performance is off the charts for my API serving applications. On a dev instance I can serve close to 5500 reqs/sec for one of our APIs where PHP was at about 1000 req/sec. And the difference in memory usage is fantastic.

BTW, our production Node deployment is Node, with the memcache, mysql, mysql-pool, cluster, and express modules. I've been thrilled so far.
I'll toss my two cents in.

Java is one of the few languages in existence that I actively avoid (Symbian's particular flavor of C++ is the other).

I've heard it best described as being a very "bureaucratic" language and I think that sums it up perfectly. Checked exception and the rigid language rules just make Java really painful to develop with.

For a long time folks went with Java by default. Usually tossing around something about how impressive the standard libraries are. That's an advantage that doesn't really hold today. Python and Ruby (in particular) have developed amazingly strong third party and standard libraries that allow you to accomplish almost anything, and do it with way less pain than Java insists on inflicting.

Amazing things have been accomplished with Java. Hell there are immensely talented programmers who prefer Java. I'm just not sure that's really that common anymore.
IcedCoffeeScript To CoffeeScript - Translation Technique
It really depends on the prices.

$0.50 a viewing would be great, but I wouldn't take it over $10 a year for access to the same library.
I get your points for the category of software you are referring to, however I am pretty sure that there will be a common understanding round the subject of "real-time web" and from my point of view I dont see how that can in any way interfere or make things harder for people writing real-time software using non-web-tech. I find it unlikely that the big web developer community will use a new terminology to describe what they are building in order to please the old-school real-time developers.
There already is one: Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org). It's created by Jose Valim, who (as you probably know) is also a member of the Rails core team. It's a very interesting language.
Similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill, but in a positive way. I can't think of any other non-negative examples.
Looks very interesting.
Is it necessary to collect emails before even being able to trial? I'd like to give this a shot, but that's a barrier I'm not breaking.
TedX Baghdad - Iraq - violence, Arduinos and irrational hope
Download Volume Needed to Hit Top 25 in iTunes Store
this debate is so complicated that you can easily take data to support any side of the argument

for eg. the effective rates don't match up for the 80s but they do for the 90s. they also don't take into account capital gains, which is what most of the top 5, 1% etc. pay

then if I was arguing the other side of the debat I would say that this data hasn't been normalized for purchasing power

etc. etc. ad nauseam
Just in case you didn't know, they recently added Amazon Instant Video support to the PS3.
Our mobile planet
The man with the bad character on account of the tamping rod through his brain
Javascript was popular-but-not-dominant as the server-side scripting language for 'classic' ASP (vbscript was also used), which died out a lot around 2002 with the release of .NET.
Can you solve this fairness issue:

"the US already gets 70% of all its taxes from the top 10%"

The rich are getting richer not because they pay too little in taxes, they're getting richer because they rig capitalism with the help of their buddies in D.C.. Level the playing field of commerce, and you'll start to see some redistribution of wealth.
Its not difficult to setup - included in most package managers; EnterpriseDB produces installers for desktops / workstations; a straightforward build process from source.

The perceived "ease" at which MySQL is available, thus a lack of actual understanding about how to work with an RDBMS, is why MySQL is so widespread yet such a maligned platform.
Every language sucks to various degrees, but for what it's worth there are over 100 alternative languages that compile to javascript:
https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...
Oh thanks... I click on the link that takes me to a picture of the theater in downtown Savannah I can only assume. Memories of another time...
I'm using cluster, crypto, express, memcached, mysql, and mysql-pool in production and they have worked flawlessly for a node deployment that serves a pretty busy JSON API (200-300 reqs a sec on average).
Why I Taught My Daughter To Code (A Little)
You can just use any of the online DB REST interfaces.

MongoLab has a nice one http://support.mongolab.com/entries/20433053-rest-api-for-mo...

That will return a json object as the value.
I realize that, but the tax cuts disproportionately benefit the rich, still (http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/03/news/economy/income_inequali...). Low income houses would still pay low taxes, just not no taxes.

Plus, the idea that ending the Bush tax cuts and giving a break to the poor are mutually exclusive is a false dichotomy. The power exists to do both.
Android fragmentation + the world wants a 4-inch iPhone
I can understand why a good and experienced Engineer would become a founder of a startup. I do not see why a good and experienced Engineer would become an early employee of a startup, when they can get paid better and treated better for less work at larger corporations. As an employee at a startup, you get most of the downside, and very little of the upside that you would get as a founder. Really? as an Employee, you are far better off with a larger company.

Most startups offer some token stock and below-market wages. As such, they are competing, usually, for inexperienced Engineers.
Give this project a quick shot & see who your "best" friends are here in the demo app (bundled with the project):

http://facebook-friend-rank.herokuapp.com/demo/index.html

It asks for & requires the read_stream permission to scan your activity log and see who you most frequently interact with.

The click "Apply Friend Rank" to start the ranking process.
I would also say any attempt to discuss causation would be great. It's very light on that, and doesn't address any of the huge macro issues to contend with.
"Education performance has stagnated ever since the DoEducation was created. Who benefited? Not me or my kids!"

Education performance lagging in the US is not the fault of it being federated. The shining education systems by competency in Math, Science, and Reading comprehension (S. Korea, Finland, Canada, New Zeland, and Ireland) all have federated education systems. FWIW, though, I love the idea of the Finnish 7-16 compulsory school then switching to academic (university) track or vocational (tech school/apprenticeship) track. That is something we can and should do here in the states.
Thank you. It helps to remind myself of this.
Brain Tapeworms Are Real, And They're Disgusting
Stop thinking Backend-as-a-service will solve all your problems in life
Isn't Hulu going to become exclusive to cable subscribers soon (a la HBO GO?)
Building a hosted search service
We are building a hosted search service at Bimaple (http://service.bimaple.com). The effort has multiple years of rooting in academic research, but is turning into a commercial effort to increase its impact. The new service (beta) allows developers to upload your data and launch a powerful search interface with the following features: (1) Instant search; (2) Error-correction on the fly; (3) High efficiency; (4) Support of real-time updates.

We also conducted a comparison with Amazon Cloud Search.

Check http://blog.bimaple.com/ for more details!

Chen Li
Bimaple Technology Inc.
I know I'm like the only person in the world who cares about this but I quit Netflix the moment I saw they used pop-unders for advertising.

People used to be screaming at all the popups and popunders in the early 2000s. People stopped screaming because adblockers and customer complaints in general end up getting rid of them.......except for Netflix! WTF!

They still use them. Saw a few this week, and I still won't support Netflix because of it.

Personally, I think as a geek, you shouldn't support them either.
Does anyone have global wealth/tax numbers? I'd argue that the US is not a closed system. So the % the world governments take vs GDP. This might be helpful to see if what he is suggesting is plausible.
Terrorism is opposition to the current political setup. It's not _just_ that; there are other requirements (terrorism is a subclass of opposition, if you will) but I was simplifying in the service of an epigram. (",)
No, it is not. GDP is not a measure of the happiness of the people.
The videos that are accessible for free for Prime members are really a small subset, and it's very difficult to find anything worth watching there. If I'm looking to stream something, I still have better luck with Netflix.
Sprockets 2 with Rails 2.3
Couldn't they write the canonical version in mixed case, and then convert to all caps for distribution via legacy channels? It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to make it so that, even if it's all-caps in some channels, the version distributed via weather.gov is written in some more readable format. Or is there some legal requirement to have exactly one canonical ASCII version of the warning?
My startup recently re-launched our website. Thoughts?
It just goes to show that you do not need great knowledge of programming to launch a business that relies on it. The founders of Bloomberg LP all had very good knowledge of the financial sector and the technology used in it. They knew the shortcomings in the solutions provided to trading desks. But whether any of them could themselves construct a Bloomberg Terminal is, in retrospect, irrelevant.

They had industry-specific knowledge of the problem they were attempting to solve. Unless you have worked in an industry, as a programmer you are unlikely to understand the true nature of the problems in that industry. And thus, you will not know what opportunities there might be for innovation. Is this the so-called "non-technical founder"?

Bloomberg wants to know how to build things in software. He wants to stimulate New York's economy with more software development industry reducing reliance on the finacial industry alone. It's interesting if nothing else.
MARY KENNEDY Dead at 52
Thanks for the link, first time I've seen this.
An invitiation to participate on every Mozilla page
Open source used to be used as a marketing tool --- people believed that software was automatically better if it was Open Source. Today, people have learned how to be more nuanced; just because it is better in some FSF sense (if it is "free software" in the Stallman/GPL ethical/moral sense of the word) doesn't mean it's better for a particular business purpose. If you're a developer, or your company has a development shop where it's prepared to make changes, then obviously Open Source is better.

If however, you're prepared to contract out support and development to a company like Red Hat, then from your perspective as a customer, it may not matter as much. As long as you are willing to pay $$$ to Red Hat and the software/services/support is of sufficient quality for your purposes, you're happy. Now replace "Red Hat" with "Oracle" in the above statement; does it still work? Why, yes. So you really won't care if it's Open Source or not.

At one point there was an argument that Open Source is good because you're free to change to a different vendor. i.e., if you don't like Red Hat's services, you could always switch to SuSE. In practice, alas, the ways in which various boot and configuration scripts are set up are just a tiny bit different enough that it's often not trivial to switch from one Linux provider to another. So the main difference is whether or not you're willing to make changes to the source code and recompile. But if you're a Red Hat customer, the moment you do that you use lose support for your modified package. So most Red Hat customers probably don't take advantage of the fact that all Red Hat software is "open source", at least not in a direct way. And in that case, why bother trying to use it as a marketing term?
It looks like NASA has one: http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEgoogle/SEgoogle2001/SE2012May...
This opens up some great possibilities. I noticed a jQuery plugin the other day that ingested JSON or could pull data from a supplied Google Doc. Seemed odd but makes sense when you see the direction Google Docs is headed.
There's nothing wrong with the rich getting richer as long as they're paying an equivalent share of their income to taxes and not getting special treatment. Crony capitalism is a different problem entirely.

And there's nothing unfair about the top 10% paying 70% of the taxes, in fact that statistic doesn't include the relevant data to even see if it's fair. It's not their share of total taxes that is relevant, it's what percentage of their income vs the percentage ordinary people pay that matters.

For example, if that 70% only represents 20% of their income, then 70% isn't enough, they aren't paying a fair share.
Well I might have to go camping in the mountains this weekend!
Static Basketball Stretching Exercises
Very interesting post, where couple of static basketball stretching workouts are detailed described with images and number of repeating. These static stretching exercises are preferable for basketball, but can be used before any practice. Keep in mind that stretching is one of important parts of a practice that will prevent getting an injury during the workout or during a game.