skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If a person is married with two children, the weekly deductions on a $500,000 salary are: federal taxes, $2,645; Social Security, $596; Medicare, $139; state taxes, $682; and city, $372, bringing the weekly take-home to $5,180, or about $269,000 a year, said Martin Cohen, a Manhattan accountant.

Martin needs to check his figures. Social security, for example, is 6.2% for the first 106k of income, which is a weekly deduction of about $127, not $596. This is a difference of almost $25k / year.

It's also highly unlikely that a person in this scenario wouldn't have a range of tax mitigation strategies, from retirement investments to real estate.

EDIT: Here's another one:

The total costs here...are $790,750, which would require about a $1.6-million salary to compensate for taxes.

By and large, people making millions of dollars per year in income do not end up paying effective tax rates of greater than 50%. The highest marginal tax rate is currently 35%, so even once you account for SS/Medicare, city, and state taxes, you're still not above 50%, especially once all deductions are taken into account. Additionally, many of these folks are probably subject to AMT, which is a flat rate of 26-28%.
> There is no right way or wrong way in business . There is only one way - The way that makes money

And so it goes. No wonder Americans, if not humans in general, more and more despise "Big Corporation".

Here's a novel idea: make a good, honest product. It will get good reviews without costing you an additional dime. Give value for value. Be honest instead of paying for lies.

You'll sleep better at night, and be able to look children and dogs in the eye.
Visual studio has __int8, __int16, __int32, and __int64. Any of these can be prefixed with "unsigned" to got their unsigned equivalents. They're compatible with their stdint equivalents.
According to the Wikipedia entry on this, for very large numbers -- up to 1e18 -- about 1 in 700 billion is a Carmichael number.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmichael_number
Exactly. Paul Erdős was a guest at people's places, not a freeloader. He never sneaked into anyone's living room as far as I know.

Maybe I am judging that dude too harshly, but I think his essay is a good example of how people sometimes do less noble things invoking noble intentions. You see, he's not a parasite, he's eccentric. He's not a nutcase who adopted a parasitic lifestyle because the great Erdős himself was homeless too.

I pay 50% of my grad student salary in rent. It's the way it is. I do resent smart-asses who think they know better.
Ancient Rome had a population of roughly one million people. That's quite a large market for a government to attempt to manipulate back then, especially before any financial system had matured. Now with populations a hundred times the size and economies many times more complex, its interesting how they are still trying.
Coca Cola and the whole murdering labor organizers thing comes to mind.
These practices are not really inconsistent...
Data portability allows mashup for Australian bush fire crisis
That's fine. So many of the one sentence summaries (including the one for this article) read to me as being very dismissive, or as if the author hopes that their comment will encapsulate so much that you can glean the information or "learn the lesson" of the parent article through the summary, and now don't need to bother reading the post. If that wasn't your intent, then awesome, points to you. It is definitely how they almost always read in my mind, though.

I know the HN community is growing and the spread of topics pushed to the front page is expanding, but the original point of letting a user type in a headline and then letting the community vote up interesting ones should in theory at least alleviate the need for a summary.

I compared the summaries to "first post" because they often feel like someone is posting them simply to post. On HN you obviously couldn't "post for the sake of posting" with an actual First Post, but typing up a sentence summarizing the first or last paragraph of the post is probably close to the bottom of an innocuous "post just because you can" contribution.
This article relates to an (ongoing) bushfire disaster in Australia - A disaster that is unprecedented here, which is saying a lot for a country prone to bushfires: http://www.theage.com.au/national/our-darkest-day-20090208-8...
Maybe Apple's implementation of Cocoa is Mac-only, but if you use something like GNUstep you can have the Cocoa APIs on other platforms.
Sadly, good reviews don't do much on the app store for sales, unless you have a competitor with awful ratings. Colloquy has 4 stars (skewed by the couple of people who didn't understand what the application was (sigh...) and the couple of people wanting feature requests in inappropriate places) but that hasn't done anything much. Neither has being in the top 10 for paid social networking applications for 2-3 weeks (now dropped down to top 20) nor having a recent release date impacted sales as much as I imagined..although this may be genre-specific, i.e. games would be more popular than social networking.

The only way to really get good sales of your app if you're not on the front page of the app store in any way is to promote it elsewhere, and typically the best places to go to are the big Mac/iPhone/tech websites with promo codes. TUAW reviewed Colloquy (well...more like Colloquy's built-in browser, it was a very odd review: http://www.tuaw.com/2009/01/22/first-look-mobile-colloquy/) and sales almost doubled the couple of days right after the review.

If the $50 review site in question is the site I think it is, the only reason why we haven't paid is because we've gotten reviews out of higher-traffic sites for free and can't justify paying for a review from a site that we can't even trust any longer for good reviews. It's one thing to charge everyone a flat fee, but another to tell developers they're just going to sit on the review until later unless they cough up a fee. Sure, it's their choice to do so and if they can profit that way, good for them..and there are developers who will pay and perhaps find it worthwhile, but we just don't see that happening for our app.
I'm not sure your first example is Apps Hungarian: indeed in the last segment he says that such an example is a bad variant thatis of no real usage.

I too initially thought "how great would it be to compile some of these prefixes into a language" but after readign through I think it would be difficult.

The intent is that the prefix describes what the variable is not what type it is. And so the prefix will vary from project to project.

However your example of specifying type is inherently possible and many languages DO do it (not with the prefix - they just check for type at compile time). The point, I think, Joel is making is that the Hungarian convention is a way for the programmer to vet the code as he browses it. Identifying errors and logic clashes etc. :)
Why not just buy a netbook if you're going to carry something around that large? I'm not trolling here--it's a sincere question. I do like the idea of "e-ink" though, and I haven't seen a device that uses it, so my opinion might be changed in favor of ebook readers if the e-ink technology is really that much superior.
You can do that in Haskell easily.

data UnsafeString = Unsafe String
htmlencode :: String -> String
sanitizeUnsafeStr :: UnsafeString -> String
sanitizeUnsafeStr (Unsafe cs) = htmlencode cs
Not really, 140 is pretty limiting. You should be using it as proactive/preemptive support. Grab up some rss feeds of some searches pertaining to your service/startup and D or @ respond to people who bitch when something not right.
Well, if he figured out a way to go apartment-less without being a freeloading, lock-picking drain on society, then good for him, my hat is off to him.

Reading the other stuff on his blog, he comes off as a bunch of people I actually know in college - people who have no social lives, spend their existence on the internet, sleep on couches in the buildings, all the while lording their "non-conformity" over the rest of us regular folk who bathe, go out with friends, and God forbid, have our own apartment.

I hate to be judgmental, but if you have to write a blog post about how a trip to Japan and your deep, philosophical introspection and meditation resulted in you realizing that pickup lines and nightclubs are not the best place to get real "love an affection", you're probably doing it wrong.

[edit] I notice there are a lot of people here from the University of Waterloo. Seriously, this guy is like the scores of people who constantly crash in the comfy lounge. They raised your student dues just to clean up that place, and it's still known to the non-CS community as a smelly, stinking, and likely disease-ridden cesspool that reasonable people dare not venture.
That was a nice set of slides, but was there a video (or audio) to go along with it?
Are you really defending WordPad? WordPad doesn't have a spell checker.
Google has not really cracked realtime search yet. Could this be the kink in their armor?
Trend Briefing, covering half a dozen consumer trends for 2009
If that site makes a practice out of bribing developers out of money for positive ad scores, they will eventually get outed, and (I imagine) will eventually die.

Joe consumer probably doesn't give a crap if some iPhone app site charges $50, but other tech journalists, and hardcore/cutting-edge users definitely care, and those are the people who drive that site's pagerank and reputability through linking to and discussing it.
Did you check out the penalty? Death.

You sell a loaf of bread for a proscribed price and they come and kill you. I would imagine the arresting, jury, and trial took only a very short amount of time.

There's a human urge to try to micromanage economics. It all looks so simple. You just set the price of bread so that everybody can afford a loaf each day. How much easier could it get? Or if people are poor, just up the minimum wage. Heck, make the minimum wage 100 bucks an hour and we'll all be upper middle-class! All of us! Above average. All it would take would be some smart politicians to write a law.

Somebody once said that voters should have one year of economics before they would be allowed to vote. I'm against that, but the guy had a point: of all the political topics, economics is the most non-intuitive.
1709: The year that Europe froze
On mainframes where it really, really matters that the answers be right, three processors will do the same calculation in lockstep and any one processor deviating will have its results thrown out.
K7: a standard library for the V8 Javascript interpreter
Well, I'm stuck between two answers:

- You can't.
- You can, if you use a native client through IMAP. Both Mail.app in OS X and Thunderbird work very well.

There are some open source projects out there that try to do a good webmail interface. It's been over a year since I last scoped out that scene, but there wasn't much stable, mature stuff back then.
Proposal for Passive Private Browsing
I'm getting close to having my own iPhone app completed. Would you be kind enough to share the list of sites that you sent requests to? Stuff like that would be really helpful.

Thanks!
I ride. I enjoy riding. I enjoy the loud grumble of a cruiser, and the exhilarating whine of a sport bike.

When driving a car I still can't hear a bike overtaking me until it's already passed. I think "loud pipes" is just a rationalization for bikers to justify their beloved exhaust notes.
And indeed a programmer can vet the code as he browses it, by using a data type like the one I gave above, just by making sure all user input methods have type UnsafeString, and all output methods had type String, with UnsafeString as an abstract data type.
A Twitter Decision
What is left for TechStars to copy from Y Combinator? The only thing I can think of is Paul and Jessica's baby, and the logistics behind that are scary.
Yea common sense these days: Don't look like a tourist. If you're walking down the street with a backpack, moonbag, camera and a tag around your neck you're just looking for trouble.
Any reason for that link?
First, to clarify. By inspiration, I do not mean that someone hears a voice telling them what to do. Instead, I mean the person has a vision of something higher, outside of themselves, that they try to replicate in their art. Maybe you already think this, and we're just talking past each other.

Homer starts off the Iliad with an invocation of the muse. Read Plato's dialogue Ion, where Socrates says exactly what I'm saying. Plus, you will find the same idea in Phaedrus, Republic, and the Symposium. I'm not saying Einstein is religious. He's obviously not a theist. But, he did think his ideas were not merely constructs out of his own mind but following some higher sense of beauty.

pg writes a similar idea in his essay on taste:

http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

He says taste is not subjective, not something people just create. There is a timeless logic to it.

Finally, in closing, here's a relevant cite from the very end of Dante's Paradiso:

As the geometrician, who endeavours

To square the circle, and discovers not,

By taking thought, the principle he wants,

Even such was I at that new apparition;

I wished to see how the image to the circle

Conformed itself, and how it there finds place;

But my own wings were not enough for this,

Had it not been that then my mind there smote

A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish.

Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:

But now was turning my desire and will,

Even as a wheel that equally is moved,

The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.
Slightly old but classic advice on web operations
To further expand on this, we would have a request function returning type IO UnsafeString, and all output functions would have type IO String. By abstracting the UnsafeString type we would make sure its users don't use the type's internal representation (I don't yet know if this is possible in Haskell,) so the only way to use input as of type String would be by asking a private module for a conversion, which would sanitize any dangerous input. Now you only have to look to the input methods to be sure no unsafe input is getting through.
That's quite noble of you. I appreciate it. I tried not to be harsh in that comment, though it may have come across that way. I rewrote it a couple times.
Where was I reading about a study showing that whatever people said, their observed behaviour shows a lot of (most?) people show more signs of happiness at work than not at work?
Email Follow-Up & Auto-Responder
...and remember, leave them with a long-distance # to call to help show their interest. Let them know to leave a message with their full # & area code and to let you know their biggest problems along with their past time involvement and courses of study. How much have they spent before in training? Develop an email list & deliver both quantity & quality. Deliver key messages that assist them & keep them interested. Develop & use an auto-responder for their benefit.
This is the list I've been using. It seems to cover the big ones.

http://www.mobileorchard.com/9-places-to-publicize-your-ipho...
And what does it matter? Oh, are there consequences...

http://cyber.eserver.org/unabom.txt
You can do it in any OO language easily as well. For instance, in Python:

class UnsafeString:
def __init__(self, str):
self._str = str
self._sanitized = None
def __str__(self):
return self.sanitize()
def unsafe(self):
return self._str
def sanitize(self):
if self._sanitized != None:
return self._sanitized
else:
self._sanitized = sanitize(self._sanitized)
return self._sanitized

That way, as long as you wrap all input in the UnsafeString class, you'll have to be explicit if you want the unsafe version and you'll get the safe version by default.
Actually, if you check the first one again, it uses CSS, but it has a table layout commented out.
First talk @ http://www.dukedees.com/sessionpowerpointdownloads

(there is a 'video' link)

cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=472134
people are accomplishing absolutely zero in their lives so they need the fake feeling of accomplishment and respect from hitting level 60 in WoW. If we re-engineer society so that people actually have an opportunity to make friends, do productive work, get exercise

Someone has taken your (and DanielBMarkhams) arguments to their logical consequences...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=472731
The article inspired me to start tweaking my TextMate settings. I found that making hard coded strings stand out is not helpful to me (I write a fair number of queries).

But I got to tweaking and realized that making comments stand out is amazingly helpful. I completely agree that it makes me want to write more comments and makes commented out code a glaring problem.
Very few make much more than that. Here's an article about university president pay from 2006: http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=515933

Apparently the Harvard president has made ~$500-600k for the last many years.
Precisely. Isn't user input handled like this on most web code? It seems the most sensible way to do it.
New Jersey?

I mean, we do have laws against cruel and unusual punishment...
Thanks, you didn't come across harsh at all. I cringe on re-reading that comment and wish it could be purged, but sometimes we have to live with our actions...best, regardless.
I think to some extent you are confusing sympathy or agreement with identity. I think identity requires both the internaliztion of a belief and an emotional commitment to its truth.
Dang, I was searching for that :) That's where we got started.

We also sent promo codes to..ars technica, engadget, appleinsider, tuaw, gruber over at daring fireball, chris pirillo (plus a few extra codes to give away to his viewers, which was additional publicity), and some others I can't remember.

Depending on your application you may want to submit to sites specifically catering to your audience. I know some of our promo codes went to people at IRC news/review sites since Colloquy is an IRC client. And as an example, if your app was a game, you'd want to send a code over to sites like toucharcade, run by the same guy behind macrumors, who also frequents hn as 'arn' :)
I can't comment on their technical plan, but they're definitely on thin ice as a business. Six months is not a lot of runway, and the enthusiasm for funding luxury vehicles is not high right now: Tesla ran into this problem. Additionally, they'll have a hard time making a case that they can scale to downmarket, and so the marketing of the company depends not on whether it can save people money, but whether it can build a brand powerfully enough. Tesla did this very well, but it's still unlikely to save them.

There is another electric motorcycle company. They make a far more stripped down bike. I think they're in better shape. http://www.zeromotorcycles.com/

Incidentally, due to the difficulties with getting to market in vehicles, the first market for us is not likely to be vehicles, but energy storage (our website is embarrassingly out of date.)
While normal ads won't work on twitter, viral marketing will. So now, advertisers win by creating content people'll twit about. Perhaps even paying people to advertise to their friends. Shouldn't be hard to introduce with so many people looking for a source of income. Not sure I like where this'll go...
75 Creative Uses of the Spore Creature Creator
One of my recent comments was a summary of a post. I think it's my most voted up comment of my entire time at HN - a post wherein I went out of my way to try and add near enough nothing at all. It suggests that people value me not saying more than saying.

Compared to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466917 which took some effort. No votes at all and one reply which managed to avoid everything I wanted to talk about.

When writing said summary comment, I started off wanting to say "Look look, you have to look at that, it's brilliant, it's not the usual "my opinion about X" blog post!", but a summary seemed more fitting.

On the iPhone, I read comments first because they load and render quicker, and like concise summaries. It's not extra content as such, but it is a contribution.
Cripe, more than the US president less all the attendant duties. A functionary making that much...obligatory greenspun (nsfw) http://philip.greenspun.com/school/tuition-free-mit.html
But there are only two other consumer level OS's. Linux and OS X.

On Linux, all the software is free (unless you have very special needs) and distributable. And Linux doesn't distribute anything which isn't freely distributable (in general).

OS X doesn't come with a word processor or a photo app. Macs do. Which is different. Apple doesn't sell operating systems. They sell systems in general.

Furthermore, some linux distros only come with a word processor because you can run apt-get install openoffice, which you can do under Windows just fine (well, go to the web and download the exe, or install something like apt under SUA).
It's all about preventing taxes and death: lawyers and doctors.
They are careful with words; they are only saying that they would not publish a negative review. They are not directly promising a positive review. But it would cost them $50 not to publish a positive review, so they are very likely to publish an undeserved positive.
Its actually football coaches at big universities that make all the money. Median salary is over a million dollars last I saw. The academic salaries are much more reasonable. Mostly in the 100-200K range for upper level profs and administrators.
Reminds me of how I felt reading Kim Stanley Robinson last year. Robinson creates a homeless-by-choice scientist (Frank) in his Washington DC climate trilogy: Forty Days of Rain, Fifty..., Sixty... Frank lives in a little tent high up in a tree in the city park and joins a gym for the showers. He meets up with dumpster-diving Freegans and traditional homeless people. Well, I won't go into the whole story, of course. But I think Robinson did a good job of making Frank a sympathetic character I rooted for. I kind of wondered, though, about the author himself showing off an a ability to write about "underground" living.
Maybe he meant incrementally increase your coding abilities, you know, master a new keyword in 6 minutes, read the source code of an open source project in 6 minutes, run a static analysis tool in 6 minutes, ..., and write a compiler in 6 minutes.
Big Corporation pay celebrities money to give favourable reviews and endorsments all the time .

The difference is that there is no pretense of it being an unbiased opinion. The kinds of review sites that offer paid placement generally rely on deceiving the reader into thinking the review is honest.

By the way, could you tell me the name of your product or service? I'd like to know so that I can be sure never to trust any reviews of it.
Industrial Society and Its Future (Unabomber Manifesto)
If you factor in the cost of transportation and protection (not to mention the rent on a swanky, DC-area mansion), the President is pretty high:

http://dealbreaker.com/2009/01/no-more-than-the-president-of...
I think identity requires both the internaliztion of a belief and an emotional commitment to its truth. Beliefs make you stupid and strong, especially shared beliefs.
Yeah, I fail at this too, but I use my console for coding. So, increasing the font size of my console hurts me when I'm using the shell, so I don't feel like increasing the font size. It also limits the amount of code you can see; really you should just cap your functions at some arbitrary length 25-50.
Seems like there's a glaring loophole there. Let's say they want to pay their top five people ten million dollars each. And let's say they can think of five VP-level people who should be earning around $500K each. Why not say "Oh, these VPs are crucial to our survival. They're worth $20 million a year. Sadly, we can only pay them $500K of that." At that point, the VPs get about what they would normally get, and the traders can safely be paid $10 million a year.

Or am I misunderstanding the cap?