skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does income tax include capital gains in the article? I think not but am not sure on this. One must look at the ratio of wealth controlled to the ratio of total expenditures of government. For the very wealthy that ratio should be higher than it is for any other group. That's the idea behind a progressive system.

The focus on income taxes is a red herring. The poor pay a disproportionate amount in regressive taxes such as sales tax. One must look at overall burdens and overall ability to pay. Proportionately the more one has the more one should pay.
I wonder, what fraction of households in the US has the electric power necessary to charge an electric car?
Why Reddit's voting system is anti-content
I don't think it is a good long term business plan. I believe you should "dance with the one that brought you".

If this is all about advertising or branding, it is just sad and it makes it harder for the people who actually care about their developers.
Normally I would agree with what you're saying. But it's important to notice that Google has always been consistent about this. This confusion originated from sensationalist bloggers looking for a fight with lots of blood that would generate clicks. Google themselves made it loudly clear from day one that they were just adding a social layer to existing products.

And I don't think the average users of this social layer (people who use the new social tools in youtube or gmail, but not the g+ stream), are even confused. It's the loud bloggers and us who read them who are confused.
The US has a relatively low corporate tax rate compared to other developed countries. The U.S. relies significantly more on deductions and credits than any other nation, lowering the effective corporate tax rate below 20%, or even into single digits, for most corporations. Many corporations are able to lower their effective rates to single digits, or even below zero (i.e., GE).

Size is not a factor in this; proper planning is. Paying an expert $10,000 to structure your business flows at the beginning can save millions down the line. You would not skip out on hiring a lawyer to properly incorporate your business and draft your shareholders agreements, so why would you skip out on a tax planner?
Databases are often excellent for interoperability. This happens all the time in business environments; e.g. a reporting tool can access an application's data using the database as the middle man.

Files, on the other hand, often have peculiar formats. Is .xls "interoperable"?
Two-Hour Personal Hackathon
It makes me happy. They're beginning their transition away from being a tech company to being IBM. 100 million is a drop in their bucket full of cash. However, 100 million is a few insanely great engineers and a product they're never going to build. because they're starting to move away from the "just be better" method of making stuff.
What if I want to bootstrap a game changing company? :) ... I understand the inherent risks but I'be been willing to try so far.
So how many G's can one of these pull? I imagine it's much higher than any human fighter since the upper limit is what can safely hold the craft together.
Warren Buffet famously observed that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary. I'm mainly talking about income tax, but that chart seems to include all kinds of taxes including real estate etc. It's not at all surprising that the top few % are paying higher taxes on their property and other static wealth, my point is that they're paying lower rates on income taxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...
Thanks for the links - it's incredible to see how much Chrome peaks during the weekends at the expense of IE!
> Americans love to talk about democracy, they've been brainwashed to after all, but so few of them really know what it is

We are not a democracy. We are a representative democracy, which is very different.

I don't know about a single modern country that has a pure democratic political system.
High temperatures pretty much always lead to increased mortality for the old and sick, so yes, that is one of the critical issues. Most other places where power is critical (e.g. hospitals) have backup generators and diesel supply contracts.
Talking About Death Online
helped restore my belief in humanity
Chrome overtaken IE on browser Share long time ago
The brands I care about are all yelling at me
At my company, we have a written rule to blame our VP for any and all problems.

It let's us focus on fixing stuff.
how is it that amazon.com itself is never, ever, impacted?

edit: so basically, the businesses suffering outages (heroku, netflix, etc) don't value uptime to the same extent that amazon does. they got what they paid for.
Check out http://majortom.bonobolabs.com

AngelHack finalist who made tool for app store reviews and measuring sentiment.
LaunchRock page.
A Framework For The $10B+ Native Advertising Market
ha you're another person i meant to email today ... i should get on that soon!
This. We would ask our users why they use IE and if they would switch to using Chrome/Firefox or CF. Many of them in public education or state government offices are in a situation where the conversation is a no-starter.
For me there's Southwest, and everything else that's usually much more expensive. So I won't be using Hipmunk much for air. I also find Southwest's interface to be excellent. I really like Hipmunk's hotel search.
24 Blogs only For Entrepreneurs
Thats true and I sympathize with you. I experienced something similar and I felt helpless and frustrated. By the way: I am really impressed by the screenshots of InstaDesk. Looks like a nice and polished app. Lets hope that everything works out fine...
If the money that would have been taxed doesn't go to the shareholders as dividends, then it goes to the shareholders as cap gains when they sell their shares.
Yes it's that hot. Google about people dying in homes at temps < 100, even.
Hollywood is dead. Long live eHollywood.
i have a big fat disclaimer in the preface that this isn't meant to be anything other than me telling my own story; it's one data point, and there's a huge amount of variation in Ph.D. student experiences.

maybe i didn't make the disclaimer big enough, though :)
The UK funds the health care system with what is know as National Insurance contributions that comes out of your pay packet; which also covers a basic state pension. Companies will also pay what are known as on costs to top up the NI contributions. I think together they work out at around 12% of your own salary and the company pays ~12% on top.

I get the distinct impression that taxes in the UK are just thrown into one big pot anyway so NI contributions are just another general tax.
100F in a non-dry climate is very hot as it feels like 110F. Heat sickness is a very real concern, along with food spoilage and pets. Additionally, sick people without access to A/C in 100F weather can become even more sick very quickly.
This data comes from federal tax returns. As far as I know, there are no federal taxes on real estate (except for capital gains when real estate is sold).
100F with high humidity will result in a number of preventable deaths due to heat exhaustion, heat stroke, dehydration, etc. So yes, it is the most critical thing, along with power to hospitals and emergency services.
Blogging lessons from non-news blogs
Hipmunk serves a niche within the industry by providing travel and flight info in a unique way, and they do it well. As the story notes, they won't necessarily find the cheapest flight or present the most flight options. I think it is a good case study of a service succeeding in a narrow segment as opposed to trying to be the end-all, be-all provider.
The IRS currently collects $1.1 Trillion/year in personal income taxes. http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/article/0,,id=102886,00.html There are progressive "tax brackets" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State... but to incentivize long-term investments, you might be able to claim some of your income as "capital gains" which is only taxed at 15%. So the change in revenue from taxing capital gains at a higher rate really depends on how much income is being claimed as capital gains right now.
When you travel to a rich or poor country, you don't have to look at people's bank accounts to tell which kind you're in. You can see wealth—in buildings and streets, in the clothes and the health of the people.

And you can see in the US that increases in wealth disparity have had a negative effect on some of these measures. Healthcare outcomes and the state of road repair are two headline examples of what suffers when the wealthy become so wealthy as to resemble an aristocracy rather than a bourgeoisie. It's often pointed out on HN that there is a seperate legal system for those with money. Likewise, the wealthy have outsized control of the legislative process and the levers of government in general, and they have used this power to enrich themselves at the expense of the lower tiers of society.

No, wealth is not a zero sum game, but when the wealthy use their power to make sure they don't have to contribute to the government purse and keep a greater share of corporate wealth for the very top of the hierarchy, they impoverish the rest of society by destroying the foundation that allows people with fewer advantages to turn their labor into wealth.

A 747 pilot doesn't make 40 times as much as a checkout clerk because he is a warlord who somehow holds her in thrall. His skills are simply much more valuable.

Pilots are also supported by a union that undoubtedly increases their pay. There are many more pilots than there are jobs for pilots, which suggests that they are not paid market rates.

I cannot but feel pulled in the opposite direction by some kind of populist/socialist desire to chip in more and make society a better place.

You can believe that wealth disparity is bad for the country without being some sort of squishy idealist. Most wealthy people are not like Paul Graham. They are largely in corporate management and finance. It can be argued whether CEOs are worth what companies pay for them, but it does appear that most people who truly have a lot of money are rent seekers, not innovators. And they have actively attempted to make it harder for people who are not already wealthy to become like them.
What are you even talking about? You'd rather use a fucking web API than your local pc when dealing with FILES?!

You are everything that is wrong with modern computing. A web API is always inferior to what you can do natively.
Thanks for writing this, much insight and honesty. I sense that your Mother's talent for sociology has rubbed off on you, don't you think? I see it both in your choice of and approach to research (interviews, case studies, etc. as opposed to purely technical), and in the way you recognized and clarified the socio-political barriers to graduating (the subtleties in finding the right project and people).

A couple of childhood friends just finished their third year of their PhD programs, one in molecular biology and the other in physical chemistry, and are very much in that all-too-common third/fourth year rut. I wish they'd had this to read three years ago!
thanks! just to warn you -- it is definitely "research-quality" code. out of all the tools i built for my dissertation, CDE is the only one that's remotely usable ... everything else is just a proof-of-concept.
Has Twitter done with mobile ads what Google and Facebook can’t?
We do not care about your email address and we will not share it with anyone.

Except with http://launchrock.com ?
...and probably killed this thread.

I wonder why its done, there's no reason for it.
Income expectations for their offspring are lower now for contemporary Americans than 1970s Americans.

No, income expectations for the offspring of Americans are far higher than they were in the 1970s.

However, when you include immigrants and their children in the mix, the numbers appear disproportionately low. This is due entirely to Simpson's paradox.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/immigrants_simpsons_p...
Why can't a middle class person who became "rich" (although most people don't consider >1.5x median to be rich) do the same thing?

Starting new businesses: It's more a matter of "Don't" than "Can't." A middle-class person who became rich is either tending the business that got them there or has otherwise lost the impetus of need that drove them to start a business. If your income suddenly dropped dramatically, what would you do: adjust to your new income level and be happy, or strive immediately to retain your previous level?

Spending income: It's easy to spend 99% of a median income. It's almost impossible for the very wealthy to spend anything like what they make.

Additionally, there are only so many needs to be filled. It's more economically productive to have a very large number of people willing and able to buy modestly priced items than it is to have a very small number wanting to buy very highly priced items.
thanks; this might be a presumptuous suggestion, but if you're interested in these topics, please take a look at my dissertation. at the very least, it's useful as a bibliography of work in this field ...

http://pgbovine.net/projects/pubs/guo_phd_dissertation.pdf
This is what reserved instances are for. You can by low use reserved instances for disaster planning.
While space travel may be irrelevant to most today, thanks to those like Musk, it may be very relevant in tomorrow's society.
I'm switching back to Safari when Mountain Lion is released. The unified search/address bar was the only thing holding me back.
So I've noticed that facebook now has a feature that tells you that a message has been viewed. Could OkCupid benefit from a feature like that?
But is it the power network inside the building, or outside? Presumably, the problem wasn't a power outage in the city's grid.
Google plans to ease the Android update problem
Send Bitcoin Via Facebook, Email & SMS.
For starters, you have a very weird definition of 'untrained' when it comes to food production. Secondly, the food IS cooked by people who specialize in cooking food.

I surely can't compete with a sous-chef.

Washing dishes and bussing them back and forth from tables to the kitchen does not require the same level of specialization.
Because taxes have given us public schools, public infrastructure, and other public services. While all of these could be done better by the private sector in theory, there is no evidence that it will happen in practice.
Got a bit of the nastiness going there with that interesting interpretation and the "your too young" stuff.

If your users cannot figure out what you are trying to accomplish then yes, I believe you have failed ("you suck") and need to redo or evolve your work.

Computer most definitely were not magnificent every step of the way. When one of the great programs running on the Altair relied on its ability to interfere with radios near it, you can bet that it didn't impress the common man.

Do some people still see the potential, yes, but that doesn't mean what's there is valuable in itself. It is clear that the product hasn't reached its potential if the users don't understand it.

"Suck" is a perfectly valid term to explain ones dismay with something.
Yes, +1 for the kindle/mobi version
I've never identified a strong correlation between my music playing and coding, but I've learned guitar, bass, saxophone, sousaphone, trumpet, piano, ukelele and drums over the years, and I know enough about violin, cello, upright bass and flute to not sound like a complete tool.

I guess I'd equate that to the ability to write in specific languages (PHP, Python, ASP, Javascript, C) and the ability to read other languages (Perl, Ruby).

I've no doubt that being able to effectively and efficiently learn at one (coding or playing) is incredibly helpful when learning the other one.
This outage only affected us-east-1. Considering an Amazon.com outage would cost them $51k in lost sales every minute, I seriously doubt they put all their eggs (servers, that is) in one basket.
How does this type of aircraft shift the balance of power? It doesn't appear to do anything "better" than a manned aircraft aside from not having a pilot to lose onboard.
What is the problem with launchrock?
I think spearheading the move to all-electric cars and ending our reliance on oil and the need to start wars over that oil, is a pretty big one, too.
"It would be better for everyone if we had this disagreement in public. -- Nobody, ever"

I disagree. I am hugely glad on both eBay and travel sites when I can see a scathing review from one person and a response from a seller or hotelier like "you tried to pay with monopoly money and you tried to return a bag of rocks"

Private responses are an acceptable alternative to public responses. They are not a substitute, especially if it leaves the original negative review standing in public.
Amazon.com does not run on the same EC2 that you and I use. It runs on a nearly identical system that is isolated and private to Amazon. I wouldn't be surprised if they were in entirely different physical locations.
Show HN a product, not a meaningless LaunchRock page.
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Is there a problem having a launchrock page? Do you thinl that i misuse something?
EDIT: This is a reply to yummyfajitas, not to myself.

That's not how it works. The only time shareholders will see the corporation's income is if such income is distributed to them. Generally, this happens via: (1) a distribution of the corporation's assets, (2) a dividend, i.e., a distribution of the corporation's earnings and profits but not its assets, (3) a redemption which decreases the shareholder's ownerhsip, or (4) a liquidation which eliminates all shareholder's ownerships.

Capital gains reflects the increase in the market value of the corporation. It is entirely possible, and usually is the case, that the market value of corporate stock is based on the "goodwill" value of the corporation (i.e., brand strength) rather than the corporation's cash earnings. For example...every tech company purchased in the past decade, including but not limited to, such notable non-revenue producing companies as Reddit and Instagram.
I have no problems with LaunchRock. But your text implies that you not sharing an entered e-mail address with anyone although you are sharing it with LaunchRock.
And Ford didn’t invent the car. Industrial car production would most certainly have been done by someone else if he hadn’t done it. It’s not like industrialization was something new during Ford’s time, it had been done for a century before him, just not with cars. (This is not to diminish Ford’s accomplishments. I just want to demonstrate that you can talk any achievement small if only you want to.)

Spaceflight is immensely cool. Much cooler than cars. But cars had a much bigger impact on humanity than spaceflight. I would predict that trend will continue for quite a few decades.
I changed into ask hn. How is this?
Thanks for this pointer.
That's interesting to know. Is there no general data type that's guaranteed to hold a function pointer?
I would also be greatly interested in this, as well as an explicit license to see how viable this is as an option.
Was it originally the same title as in the html?:
<title>The Surprising Truths About Income Inequality in America: Big Issues: GQ</title>
Someone who doesn't understand what he's talking about telling everyone that we don't need X because the future is the cloud and the cloud is just so different.

Yup... another day on HN.
I don't necessarily think the details of an eBay dispute between two parties should be public. A feedback score and, more importantly, a graph of feedback score over time* should be enough to tell you if a seller is reputable.

(I got ripped off once by a seller that had 99% positive feedback, and only recently had they started screwing over every single customer. I wish I had read the _recent_ feedback posts...)
It can ostensibly disable an adversary's satellite.
Ask HN: Family Health + Entrepreneurship
So, I believe that I'd be happier in life (in a first-world problem self-actualizing kind of way) over-all if I was an an Entrepreneur again. I love the entire process. I love the scaling up via hiring and getting lots of things done. But... as of now, I'm a cog making good salary with good benefits.

A member of my immediate family has a serious condition which make big-business benefits very nice. This informational asymmetry effectively works out to be about $200K/year of medicine and doctor/hospital visits. The condition of the family member is "stable" with no new issues; however, there is a non-zero future probability that something really bad will happen which will be costly both financially and in terms of my focus.

I left my last company which I started with a friend. I left because we didn't get to the scale where I could support my family effectively nor was I making a fair-market-value rate, nor was I doing what I loved (it became utterly boring), and the environment became toxic and overly political due to investors. Leaving was the right decision as my shares were effectively useless (as I lost the faith).

What I'm curious about is, in effect: what do you think? Is it the right decision to stay in BigCo? What is the best option for managing this risk with the best treatment options?

BigCo is a fortune 500 company that is doing "interesting" thing, but I've also lined up a Google interview soon. Let's say I end up a Google. would it be better to commit to that, or should I focus on building up a war-chest, collecting useful friends, and prepare for exiting after I've got my ducks in a row.

(I'm an engineer working at massive scale now)
Corporations don't care what the base corporate tax rate is. They care about their effective tax rate, which is what they will actually pay in taxes after all deductions, credits, and deferrals are accounted for.

Aside: I knew a guy who relied on wikipedia to give out tax advice. He was sued for malpractice and lost. He now owes his former clients $2 million (the amount of additional taxes they had to pay as a result of his erroneous advice).
No, but from the submission title people expect a product, not a landing page.
Do you have info that LR using emails for their own ?
By setting the password and not providing it is denying the company access to their own property and is likely to be criminal in most states. For example http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2008/071708-report-it...
I guess what I was trying to say is that Apple has always had a walled garden. They've always controlled the hardware and the operating system. Because of that they've always had a better experience. They didn't have to support the white box PCs from hundreds if not thousands of manufacturers. Microsoft always aimed to do that and considering the task they did a fairly decent job. But there were always problems.

The rise of digital appliances like the iPhone, iPad, and iPod have made people come to expect that level of stability and it-just-works experience from their computers. Apple had that before people expected it.

In the 90s and early 2000s consumers shrugged of the bad driver support, random crashes and litany of costly OS upgrades from Microsoft as just how things worked.

Moving towards computing as an appliance task, while hard for techies to swallow, seems to be the way things are going. As more people with varying levels of technical prowess get involved the successful companies will be the ones that keep the experience stable. Building a walled garden is the easiest way to do that. Apple did it in the 80s. Microsoft is taking a great step towards building their own with the launch of Surface.

I wish them all the luck, competition is great for the market. I just wish they would have done it sooner.