skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lazily posting links without further comment is not really what I think constitutes a good discussion, but I'll bite because I happen to have a link of my own handy.

NPR's Planet Money once brought together a bipartisan panel of economists and asked them what they agree on. Consumption taxes as a replacement for investment+income taxes got universal support: https://nathensmiraculousescape.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/pla...

The effect of a consumption tax would be to never tax investment income until it is spent on something that isn't investment.

Beware Krugman; he is brilliant but sees himself as a pundit in service of a political agenda, and has baldly admitted as much himself. I would be surprised if he disagreed with consumption taxes on grounds other than political expediency. I don't believe that particular question is raised in the posts you link.
Something to keep in mind is that regardless of the issues with Metro, you can easily ignore it by using software such as Start8[0], which readds a start menu and goes straight to the oldschool desktop when you log in.

Windows 8 has significant performance improvements over Windows 7, so there's no reason not to replace Windows 7 with it at this point for regular, old laptop/desktop use.

0: http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/
Alright, I understand now. Well good luck, I would be interested to hear how successful this SaaS offering ended up being a month or two down the road maybe submit a blog post on HN later on, that definitely would be an interesting read. Good Luck, it looks really polished at first glance.
So Santa Clara and most of San Jose don't exist?

You can even see where it cuts off. See that little burnt orange stub at bottom center which sticks out into a sea of white? That's Central at Lawrence, where the SV/SC border goes nutty due to some annexing wars back in the '60s.

To answer the question posted in the post, no, I cannot find my zip or those of my friends, either.
Chinese medicine doesn't even have a concept of microorganisms, or cells -- things which we now know are pretty fundamental to knowing how a human body works.

When you say it is wrong to simply declare all of Chinese medicine to be "something that works with no underlying understanding", you are correct -- that statement implies that Chinese medicine works.
Well, the jobs/money are in the Valley and East Bay is a pretty long commute down there. If all the jobs were packed into SF, then everyone would live in the East Bay. East Bay is far nicer than much of San Jose & Silicon Valley IMO with the BART benefit.

It's pathetic that the technology hub of the world has piss poor infrastructure. It's a testament to the mediocrity of the California and US federal governments. The tax revenues generated there all flow outward to subsidize regressive states instead of investing into the place that shoulders much of the load of the economy.
Broken by what measure? Relative to what? Is the government mismanaged compared to say Google? The federal agency I worked for was a much tighter-run ship than the startup I worked for, or the medium-sized tech company I worked for. I'd wager the federal government, or at least most of it, is better-run than most small and medium sized businesses in the US. The caliber of people in most of the agencies is just extremely high compared to what you usually see at all but the top private sector companies.
He donated all of it. Whatever you got isn't that interesting.

You know, I've never had a problem with the income taxes that I pay. They're taken out of my check and I work with what's left. I never think "oh man, they're taking my money" any more than I think "oh man, I totally deserve to win the lottery".

I do think there's something about earning money through investments that makes paying taxes "feel" more like your money is being taken away from you. It's not automatically deducted. It's not there every week. Sometimes you lose money. You have to pay it all at once. Taxes are not part of the mental calculation of how much you made on that sweet stock investment. I think that's WHY the rates are lower. People just feel like the rates SHOULD be lower. But it's a psychological effect. When I look at the economic effects of the current tax scheme on a large scale, it seems to me that this kind of benefit is just a giant tax dodge.

Let's say that the tax rate is structured in a way that the cost of doing productive "work" with your capital is 30%, but the tax rate for just shuffling the money around through a bunch of investment vehicles is %15. Well, you've suddenly got a free %15 to play around with. And if you only need to return %10 to be considered a pretty good investment, then it seems like you really can't fail as long as you've already got enough money to play a different game than the rest of us. But those guys are already orbital, and the rest of us can never achieve escape velocity. I'd prefer to not live in a cyberpunk future where the rich get their own orbital gardens and the rest of us have to live in the ruins they left behind.
That Forbes article seems highly politicized and doesn't cite a source for that number.
I offered a thought experiment, and using the example of "giving $1,000" is easier to think about than "not taking $1,000". As a thought experiment they are equivalent, with respect to the question: who utilizes resources most efficiently?

By introducing variability of how much the government takes total it adds another question that is being used to persistently distract from the question of progressivity. When people say "the wealthy should bear a larger portion of the burden" a typical response is "we should be spending less on government!" – which is no response at all, just a distraction.

You said: "The notion that taxation should be predicated on whether the government or the person can 'better use' the person's money is damn scary." – which is EXACTLY what I was pointedly NOT asking. The degree of progressivity in a system does not determine whether a person or the government has the person's money, but WHICH people have how much money.
> Mostly around Google's inability to communicate, both internally and externally.

What else is new? Google communicates more on HN with its users than anywhere else... To the point where if you have a serious problem with google you are more likely to reach adequate support by posting a rant here than by going through the normal channels.

Google just simply doesn't get support. I doubt they ever will.

So you approach them like the weather: use what's good, ignore what's bad, forget about interacting with it in a way that will change it. Whatever falls out of the sky that is worth it for you you can use, but you can never count on it and you can't expect to complain when it does not work in a way that it will get resolved to your satisfaction.
im sorry...but what is the point of this "OS"? It doesn't even seem to be a real os. Just a nice way of showing links to all your accounts.
Choosing a jQuery datagrid plugin?
Selling to enterprise developers is a grass roots strategy into the enterprise. Applications and services use a freemium model to get their initial users with the hope of becoming business critical. Once the tools show their worth, they are deployed at scale which triggers the paid version.

This approach has worked really well in the DevOps space since there is a strong motivation to use the same tools in development and production. Rather than being dictated from above about what tools to use, the developers are going to their management and saying "we need this to do our job". The enterprise ends up paying to keep their developers happy and productive.
$50 comodo wildcard SSLs (while they last)
"CircleCI" makes more sense than "CircleCi", though both can be found on your website. Congratulations on such a compelling service.
The capital markets also tell us that we shouldn't invest in clean energy, or basic scientific research. I would hate to see what education would look like in some parts of the country if we let capital markets determine resource allocation. The point is there are certain things that the market simply cannot value correctly, but clearly do hold value to society. These are the types of things that government is well suited for.
You said economists are in agreement on this issue. I showed a prominent economists who isn't. I'm sure I can easily find others. You said that capital gains taxes have terrible consequences, but one of my links shows the history of capital gains taxes in the US, they used to be higher, and terrible things weren't happening.

Your last comment is largely an ad hominem. Consumption taxes are typically regressive.

Edit: your last link did not say what you said it said. It did not say to replace capital gains taxes with a consumption tax. It didn't mention capital gains at all.
just got an essential SSL for $49.99 for a year, limit 10 per customer, half price. Also you can get an EV cert for $50-60.
I thought they were cheap per square foot because the houses are so huge.
The flood barrier needed to -partially- protect NYC from Sandy flooding is estimated at $6-10 billion dollars.

Spread that out along the coastline and the taxes needed gets into REAL money. Of course, with 110+F temperatures down South ALL summer, most people will need to move away from there.
Yes, that's more or less how I think of koans too. (There's also the fact that in the tradition that originated them, koans were given in the context of a personal relationship between teacher and student. We missed that when we turned them into intellectual gimmicks.)

But the point is that this metaprogramming business is not impossible to describe.
Or for the economics of fossil fuels to change drastically, figure out ways to reverse warming, enter a natural cooling period, or any black swan event.
Doing research is no guarantee that you'll come to the correct conclusion. For thousands of years, people treated serious illnesses with leeches, bloodletting, branding, ingestion of liquid mercury, and so forth. These treatments did not do any good, and in fact they did harm. If people stop being skeptical and calling out bullshit for what it is, then those days will return. The mainstream media have been very irresponsible in this regard, reporting on a lot of highly questionable studies on small numbers of people as if they were incontrovertible truth.
I think this is changing slowly but surely. First, there are more pure technology companies nowadays, who have developer mindset in their DNA. Second, companies from all sectors understand importance of technology more and more, because they have to.

Developers in good companies are increasingly able to affect technology decisions and purchases. Senior developers in team leading roles have (small) budgets and can quite easily approve $x00 a month subscription. And there are more and more people in management roles who started as developers.

Of course, the old world of direct sales to top management is still going on strong, but if there are macrotrends to jump into, the one that predicts that developers have bigger budgets and even more decision more power in the future is a pretty sure bet.
This is a repeat submission

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4821161
The site is down now, HN effect.

Use the age old trick to get the cached copy from Google -

cache:dbpattern.com
You do not get to tell users that they use a tool wrongly if it effectively serves their purposes. It's great that a Jira-based solution works for you, but that does not make it "right"--it makes it work for you.

Your attitude is why normal people hate IT people.
Do you have Philly data?
This guy inspired me. I'm just reading about Stripe a while ago and I don't know the founder is just 22!

I'm 20, and I think I need to rush some things. I don't want to be late.
I wish the heatmap scale went beyond $3 per square foot.
But even 'monthly active users' is a very stretchable metric. For one app it is defined as 'user opened the app', for another app it is defined as 'user interacted with the app' and for a third it is defined as 'user communicated using the app'.

Depending on which of the three you use you're going to end up getting wildly different figures from different kinds of apps.

Mobile metrics are like web metrics back in the day when 'hits' were the normal way of expressing how popular a website was.

Churn figures have similar problems, as do customer lifetime value (which you can only properly establish at the end of a cycle) and various other metrics.

Some standardization and common sense would go a long way to making the mobile world more transparent but as long as there are fortunes made based on opaqueness this is not likely to change.
The integration is what sells it, for sure. Between Exchange and Sharepoint, you have a really nice solution for normal/non-techie workflows. I hate it, but I also am pretty comfortable with alternatives and do most of my own stuff in a terminal and browser.
Government is the only entity that works for the disadvantaged.

The Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Catholic school and hospital network (CRS), Doctors without Borders, Lutheran World Federation, the ACLU, etc etc etc.
Cambridge center to study tech extinction risks
Taxes are entirely not consensual. And that is the crux of the matter. Because they are not consensual there needs to be some sort of mechanism to limit the ability for the majority to simply appropriate money and property from the minority.

Suggesting that the only limiting factor is whether the government (even a democratically elected one) thinks it can use the money better than you can, really isn't a limit.

When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. -- Benjamin Franklin
My favorite was startup.com. Not because it was particularly good (it was ok), but because I lived the same startup in a different company at the same time, all the way down to the "3EO's" and the ability to pay parking tickets online.

It was a very surreal experience watching it.
The % of renter occupied housing units is fascinating.
You don't need to protect the entire coastline, just already-developed parts of it that would present an extreme disruption to let flood. $6-10bn in the grand scheme of New York City is nothing (well, assuming anybody gives a shit about NYC in 300 years).
> I am a fan actually, and I don't think my views are incompatible with his.

I'm unable to reconcile your comment with what I understand to be John Lock's theory regarding property rights. They seem incompatible to me.
Not to be too pointed, but that attitude is socialized

I would disagree with at least the strong form of that assertion, on the grounds that evolution actually does stuff. Males and females have very different genetic payoffs for having lots of sexual partners versus holding out for a high quality mate.
The viewpoint of an investor is by nature skewed by their portfolio and those that they interact with. Those are all parties that have already somehow 'made it'.

The dark horses don't drop in frequency but as the size of the market increases your chances of interacting with one as an investor during the time when they are still small enough that you could get a relatively large slice of the pie for a good price are decreasing.

That's one of the genius elements in YC, they have made a focal point for such companies at the time when investment is at its cheapest. All it takes is one or two successes for this strategy to pay off wildly.
Anything similar out there for Europe or Asia?
Banks don't really loan out money these days, either -- they generally have been keeping it on deposit with the fed, or in government securities, rather than making commercial loans.

And, banks are a lot less efficient at deploying capital than enterprises internally, or private investors, even in good times.
I'd kind of dismissed the idea of a consumption/sales tax as terribly regressive, but it doesn't have to be, and lately I've been wondering what the distribution might look like. To make a sales tax more progressive, you might in effect say that the first $20,000 you spend is tax-free. If you have a 10% tax, then you just give every individual $2,000 cash (and ignore that some people spend less than $20,000 – that's the sort of loophole that can never grow very large).

Given a system like that I'd be curious what the numbers might really look like. How high a tax would we need? What would the actual tax burden look like for different amounts of cash-back? Could we replicate something similar to the progressivity we have now?

But there's still distortions. Consider high Shipping & Handling fees – these are often done because S&H is considered a service, and so sales tax is not levied on that portion of the cost. But a $0.01 book with $7 S&H is clearly bullshit. But who is there to call the seller on that bullshit? Why are goods taxed but not services? I've never been clear on that.
"Science knows what color is, how we perceive color"

As long as you're willing to accept that step 2 is "and then a miracle occurs."

"Firsthand experience from meditation is only evidence that using your attention in certain ways has various effects on the brain, it says nothing about the existence of chakras, qi, energy fields, auras, or the existence of deities or supernatural entities you were concentrating on."

Chakras, qi, energy, etc. are just names for phenomena you can experience. These phenomena may or may not be supernatural, but there is not necessarily anything supernatural needed for them to exist.
Stupid article by clueless writer posted online, flamewars ensue...
Who said anything about money? GNU/Linux is about freedom. In most of these new devices you can't run GNU/Linux without a lot of work, because there are no driver, leaving you with no freedom.
At 25 feet, it looks like the shoreline moves up (at least) to highway 101, but that map doesn't go far enough south to really be sure. Look at this and you can really see the impact: http://cal-adapt.org/sealevel/

Just at a glance, I'd write off Oracle, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Moffett, Alviso, the new 49ers stadium, lots of Cisco buildings around Tasman, and that industrial park up in Fremont where they shot the T2 Cyberdyne office scenes. The inundation of the SJ/SC water treatment plant would also make things even worse, I imagine.

Plus, you know, everything else in between.
I wouldn't worry about it, just try a little harder. In the long run it doesn't really matter what your situation is today, what matters more is how you allocate your future time and how you will deal with the opportunities that come your way.

The luck element is out of control for everybody, timing you only control so much, execution and attitude you control 100%.
Most people can't leave work at 3pm no matter how early they get there, thanks to the obsolete practice of valuing "face time." Even if it's permitted in the rules, you may suffer poor evaluations or just get passed over for promotions etc. That said, if you feel you can, it's definitely a great move.

As for coffee... Too much. You're likely used to the effects of caffeine by now and only drinking it to avoid withdrawals. I'd replace that with tons of fluids, perhaps make a ton of green tea in the morning and drink that throughout. My recommendation is to actually take a choline supplement, consume lots of quality Omega 3s (snack on walnuts), have good nutrition, etc. These will make your brain feel great and "gelling" while you do intensive tasks.

For those who don't have standing desks and sit all day...look into a foam roller. You can get one on Amazon and leave it in your office. Get up and roll your back up and down it, it will feel amazing and release all the tension that builds up in your back as you sit all day.

It's also proven that you become more focused when you are hungry (up to a point). I like to put off breakfast as long as possible. If I'm busy, I forget about eating, get past my initial hunger pang, and feel focused. When you're starving, you don't waste any time. So, try getting some quality hours out this way in the morning then eat when it's too much.
The big deal is that AMT doesn't apply to capital gains (at least not directly; it can cause you to blow the exemption cap though)
ABI: Cumulative Mobile App Revenues To Exceed $30B By End Of 2012
http://www.volokh.com/2011/04/21/vibrators/
If you have really serious security concerns, there are companies that will shred your documents on-site and then take them away to be burned.
What's "code-as-procedure" supposed to be? Denotation?

And how could "code-as-procedure" fail to be easy to express using "code-as-data"?

Isn't it more essential that "code-as-data" should be easy to express in "code-as-text"? (As that's where languages like Lisp and ML, that have quasiquotation, excel).
The experience of reading young success stories is both exhilarating and depressing to me. On one hand it expands my vision of what is really possible at such young age, on the other I realize that I am at the point in my youth where people like Patrick and John have achieved so much. It shows a little ingenuity and complete persistence can make you go real far.

Kudos to both of them, and godspeed on their current endeavor.
> well, there won't be a Black Friday bump in Nexus 4 sales. The darn thing sold out on Thanksgiving instead.

oh noes. is it like the movie industry, where the only thing that matters is the opening day?
The way to deal with "bootmgr is missing"
Has the computer error "bootmgr is missing" occurred to you the day before? It occurred to me several days ago. It was a terrible experience for me and I didn't figure it out until I saw this article. If you have the same trouble as I did. I hope it is available for you.
Sure, I'll accept that. But it's a dismissive argument that (purposefully) misses the point.

a: "I want the administration to increase funding for NASA"

b: "Shut up! Send them money yourself!"
To give an actual answer: What's meant by "data" is a richer structure than mere text. For example, an expression tree that can be manipulated by recursive procedures to form a new expression tree.
Can you normalize this by sqft? Size of rentals available likely skews this data, as rdl points out, bigger houses are typically cheaper per sqft.
So You Want to Find a Technical Co-Founder...
"Crack aims to provide the ease of development of a scripting language with the performance of a compiled language."

Where’s the speed comparison? Where’s a substantial enough code sample to show that development is “easy”?
The hardware decode blocks in each processor/GPU/etc are rated to handle certain bitrates at certain profiles. The tech sheets usually specify. Going over those bitrates is usually death on these types of CPU's. They don't put much work into software decode, and even if they did, it wouldn't even come close.

A lot of the cheaper ARM SOC's folks are talking about have decode blocks (either in CPU or GPU) that can only do H.264 high profile @20mbps or 30mbps at best.

By comparison, intel hd graphics (even the oldest ones) will support decode of at least 40mbps of high profile h.264 (and newer ones often have no problem with 100mbps). Nvidia's purevideo hd and ATI's UVD can do the same, obviously.

Realistically, if you want a box that plays stuff out of the mainstream (and honestly, mainstream is 20-30mbps or less right now) you have to pay more for it.
> The flood barrier needed to -partially- protect NYC from Sandy flooding is estimated at $6-10 billion dollars.

Which is several orders of magnitude less that fixing global warming will cost. The GDP of NYC is $1280bln. Even at twice the cost for the barriers ($20bln), it's 1.5% of GDP to permanently "fix" global warming for NYC. Also, it's fairly deterministic. The tools and methods to build such barriers are readily available. The same can't be said of a political solution.

> Of course, with 110+F temperatures down South ALL summer, most people will need to move away from there.

Well, the region is already more or less uninhabitable without air conditioning, so the solution to that problem is pretty obvious.