skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If person A makes $100MM in salary and person B makes $100MM in dividend/capgains in 2013, their relative tax rate increase compared to 2012 is about the same: 8.4% increase vs 8.8% increase.

Michael's point was that person A (someone with a high ordinary income) will have approximately double the tax bill of person B (someone with capital gains income) on an absolute basis, and that he believes this disparity to be unfair.
Port Knocking packets can have strong crypto payload. So yes, it's not really any different than using VPN. (Yes it is technically yes, but it allows you to open access from one IP address, using strong authentication for service, which still got strong authenticaiton. TOTP, private key and password.) It's just front blocking access to that tcp port without the right opening packet.
I have a lot of respect for your comment and do not mean for this to sound like an ad hominem attack, so please take it as an observation on the societal state of affairs: what you describe as "spinning" I describe as "offering my opinion."

I think the fact that you would describe my opinion as "spin" is indicative of the larger societal disassociation with members of the financial sector. Because of this, people do not like hearing the financial sector described in positive terms. So, often when people are confronted with a positive viewpoint of it, they have no recourse but to caste it as "spin."

Society has harbored a distaste for finance many times throughout history. The Catholic church even went so far as to forbid usury, preferring to delegate tasks as inferior as money lending to Jews. Not surprisingly, this distaste becomes most evident following an economic downturn. Before the current recession, society's view of "Wall Street" was generally very positive. Now, things are a bit different.

The fact of the matter is that we do not live in an ideal world. But we want to move toward one. The best way to do that is through a strong economy. A financial sector is a necessary part of a strong economy. But I worry that people discount its value to our country.

As long as people view the financial sector distastefully, we are going to need to incentivize working in it. Otherwise the only people working in the financial sector will be people who don't care if they are viewed as working in the dregs of society. That is not the type of person we want in charge of the economy.

(FYI - No, I am not going into finance.)
Must be a random selection from a list. When I tried it I got Linus Torvalds :-) That, Wikipedia, is very cool!
I received my number within a week for free without hassle, but I applied some years ago. After that, I received continued phone calls on the registered phone number from companies claiming to have some association with DUNS.

This continued to the point that we actually changed the company phone number to avoid these people. We left the old number working for a while, and the only calls were DUNS spam.

After we dropped the old number we found only one disadvantage to having our DUNS contact details being out of date. When we applied for one of the more verified SSL certificate packages available, the company phoned the number on the DUNS database to verify.

But that could be worked around, and a bit of hassle there was far outweighed by the advantage of stopping the spam calls.

So linkbait headline? No, I would agree from several years of having been on their database.
The problem here is the distinction between discrimination (there exists X) and calibration (X is close to true figure Y +/- Z, where Z is inflation from anecdotal inflation bias).
The Art of Quality
No it's not like MySQL which has MySQL Cluster a supported, well documented, OOTB, easy to use solution with lots of enterprise customers. Similarly Percona has a very, very impressive product with great support.

Instagram had to roll their own and Postgres XC, PGPool both have always seemed pretty sketchy. No official support, no notable customers, shocking complexity and everything just seems all over the place with documentation from say 2009 referencing PostgreSQL 8 e.g. PgPool beginner guide. They may be great solutions but do they really look like something that inspires confidence ?

These guys seem to have the right idea: http://www.cloudpostgres.com

It would just be nice to have something as simple and polished built into PostgreSQL.
A Beautiful Algorithm
Sorry, I meant to address this question in my original post. You make a valid point. This is not Arrington's money, so why is he being rewarded for investing it? Shouldn't the investors themselves be the ones rewarded?

The answer I see to this is that Arrington is rewarded because he is making the investments on behalf of the investors. I would hazard a guess that many of the people investing in Arrington's fund made their money outside of tech, and therefore do not possess the skill set to critically analyze tech investments. But they know the technology sector is a good place to invest, so they hand their money to someone with the proper skill set to invest in it. In this case, that person is Arrington.

He is rewarded because were it not for him, the people investing in his fund would be unable to intelligently invest in the tech sector.
Perhaps you should wad a book instead.

http://www.amazon.com/Shut-Stop-Whining-Get-Life/dp/11180245...
Can we have some stats?

Number of Servers?
How much bandwidth per month?
How much space needed and at what rate is it growing?
Traffic stats (if possible)?
I'm pretty sure he was paying cap gains. You're quoting the ordinary income rate.
I'm not sure how to define "fair" but haven't the investment money been already taxed as corporate profits before they are paid out to investors? I know some investment vehicles allow to avoid that but most regular investments do not, as far as I know.
For some people there is. It's a marginal effect. Every time you alter the tax rate, some fraction of earners will change their behaviour.
I suspect the grandparent comment is pure sarcasm.
Those poisoners weren't dumb.

Makes you wonder how many poisoners do get away with it.
This is the case with dividends, but is not necessarily the case with other types of capital gains.
I registered for a DUNS number circa 2003 at no cost, and also experienced high-pressure sales calls/emails regarding upgraded credit monitoring services. One sales rep even mentioned 9/11 as a reason that I should care about my business's credit rating. That's pretty scammy as well as pretty stupid. If you actually want to do business with the government, then you'll also have to register your new DUNS number with the CCR, and ORCA, which are much more time-consuming processes, but not at all scammy.
I believe it's perfectly legal to donate any amount of money to the US government.

So if he wants to pay more tax, he can.

He may also rearrange his tax affairs to increase his tax liability. Same thing, but with the exciting frisson of potential coercion (gosh!).

He doesn't seem to be doing either of these, however. Possibly because that might lower his social status vis-a-vis others of his kind.

So actually, he's prepared to make a great personal sacrifice ... if everyone in his class does too.

It seems less impressive when you put it that way, but that's human nature.
I'd love to collect a small list of sites that cater to beginning web developers like this, could anyone think of a few more?
> this is pure hyperbole.

I'm pretty sure it was satirical.
Most medical studies, including this one, summarize differences in risks by estimating a hazard ratio. A hazard function gives the conditional probability density of having an event at time T, given that no event has occurred at time t < T. (E.g. the probability that a hard drive first fails in its 14937th hour of operation, except that formally speaking we're talking about the probability density of failing not in an hour, but an infinitessimal instant.) A hazard ratio is the ratio of two hazard functions. Just as with hard drives, death is certain (eventually) but we can still prefer a hard drive with MTTF of 5 years vs. one with MTTF of 3 years.
If it were a one-off download, it probably wouldn't be. But I quite like the system O'Reilly uses: $5 for an ebook if you own the dead-tree version, because you can download it as many times as you like, in all different formats, and they maintain it with errata updates etc. for life.

The lifetime ability to download the most-current version of a book in any current format is, IMO, worth a few dollars more than a free but unmaintained ebook in what may very easily become a legacy format within a few years.
> It amazes me at how far to the political left is Silicon Valley.

Speaking as a foreign onlooker (I'm in Australia), I see more libertarians than any other stripe, tbqh.

> Yet Silicon Valley regularly supports candidates and policies that would place large burdens on the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The Bay Area is home to San Francisco, a traditional hotbed of leftist activism. It's also home to UCB, a traditional hotbed of leftist activism. Some of the outlying suburbs are ... yes, traditional hotbeds of leftist activism.

Mix in:

1. The relatively lower presence of traditional / conservative / "silent majority" voters who are motivated voters

2. That leftists are motivated voters

3. That libertarians are often not motivated voters

4. That voting in the USA is voluntary and not compulsory

and the electoral calculus suggests that libertarians will be out-numbered by leftists at the ballot box.
The Value of the Ego
So far I have only seen you mention the costs of the now increased taxes. What are the costs that would be payed if the taxes had not been increased?
So because $SOLUTION can't do both $FEATURE1 and $FEATURE2, you don't use $SOLUTION and thus you don't even have $FEATURE1?

Hstore is invaluable when you want to add arbitrary attributes to rows in your tables (think: different attributes for products in different categories). It's as if every row had an unlimited (and different from other rows) amount of columns.

To do this without hstore, you can dump the additional data as a serialized blob of some kind, but then you lose the ability to efficiently[1] query or sort for those additional attributes or you use a complicated mess of join tables, which means increasing cost of querying as you add more fields to query for (one join per field).

With hstore, you get indexed querying and sorting in addition to an unlimited amount of fields.

Also: because keys and values are just strings, it's in fact possible to nest hstores, you just don't get the nice indexing or any kind of type safety past the first level of hstores.

[1] if your blob is XML or JSON (via pl/v8), you can use functional indexes to still get indexed and sorted lookups in advance without having to do the indexing inside the application logic which you would have to in case of any of the NoSQL stores.
Try taking public transport, if you can. An hour on a bus may sound worse than a 30 minute drive, but if you spend it reading you may well enjoy it more.
Bitcoin transaction volume is up tremendously but that is in large part due to 'satoshidice.com'. The reason why they're so large is because you can't really do all that much with bitcoins (yet, this is improving though), so people will gamble their bitcoins away.

As an experiment I put a bitcoin donation link on reocities.com customer pages to see if anybody would donate but the counter is solidly stuck at '0'. I figured if the general public starts to see bitcoin as viable then I'll see some donations there, there have been offers enough of people that want to donate money, bandwidth or server capacity to the project in the past.

The bitcoin ecosystem is tremendously interesting, both from a game-theory perspective as well as an economical one (and technical too). Within a short time we've seen CPU, GPU and FPGA miners to go to insane hashrates with a generation of ASIC based hashers about to turn the previous generation of FPGA/GPU units into expensive doorstops.

The guys behind bitcoin (who I think are related to Michael Peirce and Donal O'Mahony somehow [1]) have done their homework very well and the fact that bitcoin has survived relatively unscathed over the first couple of years has definitely made me shift from 'fad' to 'possible'.

This likely won't be our last crypto currency but it definitely has life and merits serious scrutiny. The bitcoin economy is now already very substantial and it will likely grow enormously in the coming year.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/228/
One of the reasons Romney has 13% effective tax rate is that he gives a lot to charity - about 13% of his AGI on average, if you believe the auditors:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2012...

So when using Romney as an example, it is good to know that if he did not give this much to charity, the rate would be somewhere around 27%, maybe more if charity deductions avoided triggering some higher rates, etc. Average effective income tax rate (don't confuse with marginal!) for millionaires is 23%, for "middle class" is 20% and below (the figures is for tax year 2010, other years I imagine they may differ).
I think of Silicon Valley as on the economic center-right, but socially liberal. Lots of techno-libertarian rhetoric (I find myself well to the left of the average techie on that), but cultural-conservative rhetoric doesn't play well. Candidates who are anti-gay, anti-abortion, or playing up the importance of religion in public life don't play well. The GOP has had a strong element of that cultural-conservatism for a while now, strongly damaging its brand among some demographics. The Democrats end up as the default option more than what people strongly support (I know many more people who were fired up against the GOP rather than for the Democrats in the last election).

Imo, the Democrats are a pretty miquetoast centrist party on economics, hardly "far left". They're broadly in favor of free trade with a modest safety net (quite modest, by first-world standards). Heck, I'm not sure more than a smallish minority of the party would even qualify as true social democrats, let alone actual leftists.

On policy terms, I would disagree that tax rates are strongly relevant to a startup scene (not irrelevant, but not one of the more sensitive environmental factors). I do think regulation is an important aspect. One reason I would support discontinuing the use of regulations to achieve quasi-safety-nets and replacing them with direct safety nets. But as for why SV is in SV? I think culture, networks, and education have a bigger role in it. Otherwise you'd expect a vibrant startup scene in lower-tax parts of the U.S. than California, Massachusetts, and New York, and we aren't really seeing that.
If that is the case, I apologize and feel a bit sheepish.

In my defense, I live an incredibly conservative area in the US, and many of my neighbors honestly believe this exact thing, so it isn't obvious sarcasm to me.
> After the first week, which is always the hardest, I'd lost 10 pounds.

Dropping carbohydrates from the diet causes a drop in retained water. For instance, some energy is stored in the muscles as glycogen, which binds with water on an approximately 1-to-3 basis. Each gram of glycogen binds ~3g of water; so when you cut carb intake and begin to break down stored glycogen, you unsurprisingly lose weight quickly.

Paleo and keto types call this a "signing bonus". It's generally not an indicator of the long term trend because there's not much of your body mass tied up this way. When people are overweight, it's usually fat. And fat is a stupidly dense store of energy compared to the glycogen/water mechanism.

Athletes in weight-class sports (boxing, powerlifting, wrestling, weightlifting etc) have known about carbohydrate and sodium tricks for manipulating water weight for a long time.

All the matters is: can you impose a long term deficit? Whether by paleo, keto or any other dietary method, the sole long term determinant of average body mass is net caloric balance.

I wrote about this simple physical fact last year [1], which prompted what one friend called "the diet riot". It was good for lulz then. I bet it will be again.

In the past year I've followed a diet called "Eating Less" (Intermittent Fasting, to be all trendy about it[2]). So far this has put me down about 30kg from my peak weight -- approximately 65lb.

[1] http://chester.id.au/2012/05/26/fat-and-simple/

[2] http://chester.id.au/2012/04/17/my-diet/
> A Raspberry Pi is a fully functional computer so you have to wait for it to boot in to linux before it can do any other tasks.

There's nothing to stop you programming the pi bare metal style like an arduino. It's not as well documented but it's perfectly doable and quite fun.

https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=72
I'm not sure I like the ﻿ｒｅａｌｌｙ ｗｉｄｅ ｆｏｎｔ
Compare SSL Certificates & Find Out Which Is The Best
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If there was no "carried interest loophole" people would have no incentive to invest money in their own business. Wouldn't this be a bad thing?
If you have a 'home office' then the interest you pay on your mortgage is an expense, and is thus a business deduction, as are hydro, gas, communications, etc.

If you have a business that borrows to buy and then rent houses, the same principle pertains; the interest on the mortgage is an expense.
The Anna Karenina Principle of UX
The wider problem with the DUNS number, especially as far as its use within government, is that it is a proprietary identifier, which makes it unsuitable for use in a public domain context, especially as far as combining with other data (e.g. combining data from different federal agencies) or in an open data context. Having said that the UK government is now using it in procurement just as the US government is now starting to understand the underlying problems and having second thoughts about its use. See http://blog.opencorporates.com/2012/07/24/are-duns-numbers-t... for more details
But you could make the same statement for everybody - if it were not for the ordinary workers, capital would have no meaning. So why not give incentives to workers as well by giving them a low interest rate?
Hot tips on picking SaaS payment service
There is. Living in California, marginal rates for a well-paid engineer can be 50% and more. Given that you give up half of the money, one's incentive to look for a side gigs and other supplemental income is significantly reduced. Of course, nobody turned down a raise saying "oh, taxes are high so I don't need it", but if additional income involves substantial marginal effort and risk, given high marginal tax it's just not worth it.
Will Gutenberg laugh last?
Nice project :-)
BMI was never even meant to be an individual indicator of health. It was an attempt to classify larger groups. It also uses the same values for men and women, even though men typically have more muscles than women, raising their BMI.

Any individual who relies on BMI to decide whether or not they are overweight is doing it wrong.
repost?
The fun thing is that only the dumb poisoners are the ones that usually get media attention. Exactly because they are dumb. The smart ones usually never get caught.

Consider someone with a medical degree (like myself).
I not only know good and reliable ways to poison someone... I also have quite easy access to the substances. I can obtain some of them without registration. And I also know which substances will not be discovered by the lab when doing the routine post death tests (or ones that are not routinely tested). I am also quite aware which substances are not at all discoverable in my country. Also which ones could be made to look like flu, renal failure, pneumonia etc. Even worse.... If someone like me wants to kill some relative, they can wait for the right time to do it... for example, when the seasonal viruses have done their work (when they want to hide the poison symptoms somewhere amidst the virus symptoms). It will not even raise any suspicion at all...
Promises, Lies, and Dry-Run Mode
An ode to interns – the unsung heroes of the startup world
I am interested in doing this. Do you have any information on how to find out which IP ranges belong to server hosts? I couldn't find any useful results searching google.
Show HN: BOX'NGO - Online Buying, Selling, and Trading for Students
http://theboxngo.com/

I know I posted this before, but looking for feedback/opinions on what I can do to improve the site and market it. This is our MVP.
It's unfortunate the CA GOP is too inept to adapt to local circumstances. It benefits them to have social moderates in congress from blue states - e.g. more Scott Browns in congress than Elizabeth Warrens. But it is a state party that suffers from long periods in the minority.

Neither party really supports the issues that Silicon Valley cares about. The California Democratic caucus listens to Hollywood and unions more than SV.

I agree that culture, social networks, and education matter more than issues to explain voting behavior. College-educated people vote for Democrats and leftist propositions, so S.V. does too.
How about a simple RFID sensor solution that can be used detect arms being carried into public places like malls, Schools, religious places, conventions etc. were we have most of the public mass killing being reported/targeted. This would be just like RFID sensors used on merchandise's from being shoplifted. only that conceptually the sensor has to work in reverse from preventing objected materials being carried into the premises.
My read is yes, it's bucketed (corrections welcome, and my numbers are only for single filers):

Below $35k income: the 0% capital-gains/dividend rate is retained

Between $35k-$200k incomes: the 15% rate is retained

Between $200k-$400k incomes: PPACA adds a 3.8% capital-gains surtax, but the 15% base rate is retained, effectively raising the marginal rate to 18.8%

Above $400k incomes: the base marginal rate rises from 15% to 20%, plus the 3.8%, for a total of 23.8%
Then you would have lots of throwaways, saying "I am looking for a job, I am good at X and Y, please contact me at somefakeemail@gmail.com". I doubt it will have any success.
Great work... glad to see how well documented it is!
Valve: "93% of Steam users born on January 1st"
> still, taking 30+ days to register is insane

It may just be an indication that the the system is being used for things that it was never intended for. Maybe for the original uses, a 30-day lead time wasn't such a big deal, e.g. "when doing business with the government" over many years.
The whole marginal thing must be really confusing. The problem is not that rich people would stop generating income - they won't. The problem is that marginal rates modify behavior, including changing how income is generated, where it is generated, etc. And the rich are exactly the people that have ample tools and opportunities to do that. If you earn nearly-minimal wage in some shop, you don't have many other options. If your taxes are raised, there's not much you can do other than spit and curse. If you're an investor, you have wide array of options where to invest, how to invest, etc. I know it sucks that it is always sunny in the rich man's world, but it's a reality. If whoever designs tax policy ignores it, he'd be unpleasantly surprised when projected tax income falls short of the target, and would have to slash the benefits programs or get deeper in debt.