skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everybody can see why you wouldn't want to do that, but there's no point in lying or, if you prefer, selectively informing. Complex numbers and quaternions will be equally mysterious to the true novice; there's nothing intrinsically scary about the words.
If his tax rate (and those of people similar and better off) did in fact jump from 15% to 20%, then that sounds like this particular policy change (tax the rich a little more) was successful and does not, in fact, apply only to the "income rich". "Tax capital gains much less than ordinary income, even on other people's money" is a seperate policy decision, which was the situation before and is the situation now. In fact, the gap closed very slightly - tax rates on the top income bracket went up 4.6%, whereas tax rates on capital gains for high earners went up 5%.

One thing that is bugging the hell out of me is the news coverage. They continually throw numbers around without being at all precise about what the numbers mean. I saw an op-ed, in the last run, arguing that $250k didn't amount to aaaalll that much once you take taxes out of it so let's not raise taxes on those making around $250k - except the $250k figure everyone was throwing around was post taxes; in pre-tax income $250k was simply not a any sort of interesting point. Now, we're hearing that capital gains is going up for people "making more than X", and the like - is that pre-tax? post-tax? is capital gains counted toward that? These things hugely change the character of the situation, and I flat out can't get it from the press, and that is absurd. Similarly, "Extend the Bush tax cuts for people making more than X" - that's not what anyone was talking about; they were talking about extending for everyone the Bush tax cuts on the first X dollars of income.
I think we used to have something similar in the UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_interest_relief_at_sou...

Seems to be another one of those perks that got removed just as I reached the point in life where I'd benefit from it.
For India, they don't even have any option of getting it free. You have to pay a minimum 7500 Rs (~ $ 150) + taxes. Though after payment they gave it in 4 days.

This is a sear monopolistic policy, why should I pay fucking 150$ to any agency for just getting a DUNS number. On top of that, there is this annoying wait period and delays.
Was there/is there a rationale for allowing people to deduct interest from their incomes?

Yes. The situation is analogous to borrowing money to invest in the stock market: Your profit is the profit you make from the stocks minus the interest you pay on the loan, and that difference is what you pay tax on.

In Canada, a mortgage on a principle residence is not tax deductible, since Canadian tax law doesn't consider where you live to be an "investment"; this is balanced by a principle residence being exempt from capital gains tax.
OK, I get you. The inline :WHEN in that FOR form makes me go "what?" as well. The syntax feels halfsie to me; it abandons regularity but doesn't want to go full mini-language a la LOOP, so it ends up in a syntactic no man's land. It doesn't feel very composable to me, either — does it scale to more complex expressions? I'm biased, though. The following seems far better to me; slightly lower-level, but clearer and more composable:

(loop for x in '(0 1 2 3 4 5) for y = (* x 3) when (evenp y) append
(loop for z in '(1 2) collect (list y z)))

=> ((0 1) (0 2) (6 1) (6 2) (12 1) (12 2))

The reason why LOOP has keywords for all its loopy things is that the set "stuff you often want to do while iterating" is too varied to be supported by an entirely regular syntax. Of course it can all be done with the utilities of the underlying Lisp (which is all that LOOP expands to), but often not as concisely and especially not as idiomatically. I like crossing out of universal Lisp into Loopland to do those little plumbing jobs. Because LOOP is so limited and specific, I know why such a construct is there and can grok very quickly what I'm looking at and what it evaluates to. Having such forms stand out from the backdrop of the far more powerful language the main program is written in is a major clarity win. (Good god, I sound like someone arguing against Lisp syntax altogether!)

For the same reasons (concision, idiom, and clarity), forgive me but I don't like the monads/with-monad versions you've given. "monads/with-monad monads/sequence-m" is much too verbose — I want an operation this simple to be lightweight. It doesn't feel idiomatic to me for looping and pairing things, though that may just be my ignorance. And it feels like some powerful and general infrastructure is being invoked to do something whose triviality I would rather see the code bring out. Looping is the canonical example, I think, of something that one does so often and has such repetitive-yet-assorted patterns that a little language is perfect for the job. But I'm biased, as I said.

By the way, I've been puzzling over that FOR form trying to make out how it ends up producing a Cartesian product out of '(0 1 2 3 4 5) and '(1 2). In CL, if you make the bindings parallel like that, as in (loop for x in foo for y in bar...), it means "take an x from foo and a y from bar and keep going as long as they're both producing new values". So to get a Cartesian product, I had to make an explicit nested loop in my translation above. Both idioms are useful, but I use the parallel one quite a bit more than the nested one. Does FOR handle both?

p.s. You're missing a square bracket after [1 2]. I was puzzling even more before I realized that :)
The problem with one JAR is that you will then have to configure runtime in production which delivery is used and also, if there are alternative plugs (or jacks), what set of plugs you activate. That would have to be done with an external config file or database row, command line parameters or some super GUI. The problem is that those are really dangerous configuration options, because changing any of them, results in catastrophic failure: e.g. someone might accidentally change a plug configuration option to another value, and your MySQL turns into MongoDB which you don't have.

That makes you want to _not_ have one JAR and then keep your fingers crossed that it is configured right. Optimally things should just work (tm) in production without any configuration. (Not to mention if you try to sell your software, you can not sell just one package because just by changing the configuration from delivery1 to delivery2 you get the second product for free.)

With dynamic languages what you presumably would want to do is just zip the right files and that's that (although you still need system tests that verify that the zip has the right stuff in it), but with static languages it's more tricky. One way to get that would be to have A-core.jar that has all code that is common to every installation, and then A-installation1.jar with the right delivery and plugs for the first installation, and A-installation2.jar for files for the second installation etc.. Because in the installation JARs there would be only one delivery, and only one plug per jack (and one jack per contract), things would work without any additional configuration.

Now the problem with Maven is that you can't easily get many JARs from one src/main/scala. Or can but things get complicated when start releasing stuff to repositories. Which results in the really messy directory structure I outlined above, or then you would have to figure out some other directory structure that would work better. Of course the best would be to hack Maven to work around the "one JAR per src/main/scala" limitation. Or write a maven-obvious-plugin. :)

The backstory here is that packaging tools easily mandate directory structure. Directory structure in turn directs source packages (inverted URL in Java), and source packages tend to influence the architecture.

The cool thing in Obvious is that by making the directory structure itself reflect the architecture, code is automatically steered towards good practices. Of course you can create a great code architecture with any directory structure, but in many cases _where_ you can put stuff, influence _what_ you put in there.

So in some cases, it's actually the supposedly trivial packaging of sources that is a culprit for bad decisions. Which IMO makes packaging also non-trivial from an architecture standpoint.
The report on nearly three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9) were not more likely to die than normal-weight people.

I seriously don't understand this paragraph. Maybe it's because I'm a geek, but I was always under the impression that the risk of dying was 100% no matter which group you belong to. I don't understand what the author of the article is trying to convey here.
I am a pretty big fan of http://musicforprogramming.net/.
I love "Buddhist Nike+"! We are staying away from language that might turn people off but it's a pretty compact way to describe this whole set of devices. :)
The "Welfare Queen" exists largely in the imagination of the right. Even in areas of the US with relatively generous public assistance, the difference in standard of living for someone who relies solely on welfare versus someone with even a moderate income (much less "rich") is so large, no rational person would choose to live on welfare just to avoid the taxation that resulted from having a high income.

I certainly don't agree with tax policies designed to punish or discourage high incomes, but this is pure hyperbole.
It's never surprising that a group of people wants to raise taxes on other people who are not them. It doesn't mean it's good governance.

It's one of the classic problems of democracy - two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
So what you're saying is Musk, had he been short 10-20 million of that $180, would have been completely unable to pull off Space X and Tesla?

I'm not sure how you figure. Were you perhaps under the impression that Space X and Tesla were funded solely by Musk? Considering Tesla's operating expenses last year cleared $400M and they are currently in debt, I am fairly certain Tesla is not funded solely by Musk's pocket book.

Anyway, so what if investments are taxed more heavily? So long as all types of investments are taxed equally, you will still have plenty of people investing in new business ventures.
...why would anyone use/recommend this over the Khan Academy resources?
Unfortunately, raising the taxes on the Wall St. guys is going to hit Silicon Valley too. The carried interest rate is probably less relevant for SV than the long-term cap gains rate. California cap gains going up by 12% this year (prop 30, PPACA, and the cliff deal) means that 12% of new capital for Silicon Valley startups is going to be diverted from Palo Alto to Washington.
D&B makes money selling their rating information, but while a DUNS number is free, you have to pay to manage your rating. I can't recall the exact wording but the salesman's phone pitch bordered on "Nice little business you got there. It'd be a shame if anything happened to your DUNS rating."

These two links share similar experiences:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.505486.1...

http://www.cartoonbarry.com/2010/06/dun_bradstreet_seems_sca...
Scam might be too harsh a word, but it is more than just a pain.

They have a pattern of shady business practices, including bullying customers into paying more for a service that they have a federally-granted monopoly on. They are abusing their position as a DUNS provider to make profit off of uninformed small businesses. That's what earns them the title of a scam. DUNS may very well be a useful service, but if it's managed by a scamming company, then the usefulness of the service erodes.
Of course it was created as an incentive, there's a nice justification for pretty much every line of the millions in the tax code, however it is considered a loophole because it turns out that it is really easy to manipulate the structure of investment deals so that all the income is gained as carried interest, and it even more surprisingly turns out people actually do this if there's sufficient incentive, so a lot of people now redefine what would have been 'income' into 'carried interest' in a way that appears not to have been intended when the rule was created.

If you really want people to respect your profession (I assume you intend to go into finance?) you should focus a little more on the ethics of what you actually do and less on how to spin it.
Can anybody recommend a good tutorial for setting up Vagrant and Chef? I found the official docs on both websites to be both convoluted and incomplete in parts, and I haven't had much more success searching Google.
This is very telling example of how differently Java people think.

First of all - ''this'' is NOT list comprehensions. Lisp has list comprehension, the sub-set of features that makes macros possible. Quote, back-quote, comma and grouping with parenthesis are parts of Lisp syntax to do it.

This is a meaningless generalization from a lisp programmer's perspective, just another macro.

Look at it carefully. This is the how confusion looks like. Thinking in terms of classes and methods prompts them to create artificial, unnecessary complications.

This is not hacking, this is exactly opposite.)
Here are the FOSDEM Python Talks 2013
Prefilling Backbone data
Some of C's syntax is distinctly kooky, particularly declarations. By way of illustration, my two favourite C declarations:

const struct strange typedef volatile;
typedef evil;

Or the following, in which the struct tag is a forward declaration, but only within the declaration, and only if the struct has not already been declared:

void func(struct odd);

There's no good reason for the declaration syntax to have so many meaningless edge cases. It simply was not designed very well.

Then there's the other odd bits of C syntax: & and | have the wrong precedence, variables are bound inside their own initialisation forms, labels can appear in bizarre places but can't appear at the end of a compound statement, case statements can be interleaved with other control structures, etc. And there's the preprocessor.

None of this stuff has done much damage to C's success, but let's not pretend that the language is free from quirks and corner cases.
You might as well be dealing with the Mob.
I probably shouldn't say yet, suit is still ongoing and isn't settled yet.
Musk famously borrowed money to pay his rent after plowing all his capital into his businesses:

http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/12/space-age-risks-and-profoun...

I'm sure he would have found a way to make do with 1% less capital. But what if rates had been 9% higher, as they will be going forward? What if rates were 28% higher, as they would be if cap gains were treated as ordinary income? At some point, either Space X or Tesla would have never been made.

The tragedy is that we will never know the future Space Xs that are never built.
They changed it now. Still has "stealing" though, maybe someone should send them a dictionary.
Product Designer  Lift
We’re looking for a product designer to help us chisel product concepts into clear, simple, potent applications. It would be good if you were strong in visual, had mobile experience, and cared deeply about the reactions your designs get in the real world. It would be bad if you aspire to be a specialist or don’t enjoy long-winded job postings.
I found the documentation on the official vagrant site to be clear. What exactly are the problems you encountered?
If you are married, filing jointly, the student loan interest deduction is fully gone at $150,000 of adjusted gross income. Yet another in a long line of reasons why DOMA sucks.
This is what is wrong with the marketing and management fields of study
Of course, that might defeat the purpose for some people.

For me it would. Mindfulness meditation is accepting things as they are. When you are tired, you are tired. When you fall asleep, you fall asleep. I find peace in meditation exactly because there's nothing to attain.

Of course, gamification might help newcomers, so it's a worthwhile experiment.
We need it in Singapore, and we don't have the option to get it for free, we had to paid around 30 USD for it. And it took weeks to sync with Apple database.
So, wait - I understand how this might be an incentive so that Arrington's investors invest more capital - they pay low taxes on any gains the fund produces. But, why is also Arrington himself, as the fund manager, paying non-income tax, even though all the money he makes is his proper income, and not money produced by his capital investments (as he has no capital invested)?
The tax rate on his $180M at the time he cashed out was the 39.5% rate that thing would have reverted to if this bill failed. So your point is? The 5% increase just cost me personally an additional 100K minimum on my 2013 tax bill and I am okay with that.
The Internet was invented in the 60's and 70's, not 1983.
BMI is not a completely accurate indicator of obesity so I'm not at all surprised they got this mild contradiction. Doubly so because it is an easily-sellable message.
That could work for concentration meditation, but I think this could create pitfalls in mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness is seeing things as they are. If there is angriness, there is angriness. If angriness leads to a higher heart rate, there is a higher heart rate. Such gamification could have the effect that people who practice meditations start pushing away and block negative emotions, etc.

The goals is not to not think about anything. The goal is to be aware of things as they are without judgment.
It's not a quicksort. It's a quasi-quicksort, which is actually not quick due to memory allocations.

Here's how quicksort looks like in haskell:

import Data.Vector.Generic
import qualified Data.Vector.Generic.Mutable as M

iqsort :: (Vector v a, Ord a) => v a -> v a
iqsort = modify go where
go xs | len < 2 = return ()
| otherwise = do
p <- xs `M.read` (len `div` 2)
m <- M.unstablePartition (< p) xs
go $ M.slice 0 m xs
go $ M.slice (m+1) (len-m-1) xs
where len = M.length xs

Or something like this (u-u-ugly) http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction/Direct_Trans...

At this point it's less for more.

I don't understand why they chose quicksort to show off.
I can't help but feel that the recent mindfulness fad, and some of this blog, misses the point. While meditation, and mindfulness in general, does have plenty of wonderful side effects, to meditate for any reason other than because it's the truth will eventually be self-defeating. The only thing that any of us are truly capable of losing is the present moment. Meditation is simply a pure expression of that fact. When you meditate for any of its myriad benefits, without framing it in the context of an expression of ultimate reality, it becomes just another form of grasping.

This is not to say that you should never use meditation as a tool. Samatha meditation is practiced explicitly to improve concentration, and Vipassana to improve insight. That being said, be mindful of your grasping and try to avoid meditating into your preconceptions. Ultimately meditation is a pure surrender to what is; not striving towards what you believe should be.

"Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings."
-Zen master Eihei Dogen
The tux3 filesystem returns
Thanks for explaining. Very informative.

Is the dividend/capital-gain increase across the board? Or is it bucketed progressively like the income tax rates?
Why can't you have black box abstractions in things that "have to work"??

And even "has to work" can be relative, as if you can prove that something will work for a p value small enough to guarantee risk of failure is small enough in the next 100 years for a device/system that will at most stay in use for 10 it good enough... And if you're not constrained by power use or computing power, you can also use redundant subsystems: I imagine something like a satellite, receiving high radiation that consistently corrupts cache or RAM but runt 5 identical OSs on five identical subsystems and on every "high stakes" decision it does a "voting session", choosing the result of a function with the most out of 5 votes and resetting the state of the disagreeing systems with the winning ones, and a similar type of reliabilty by duplication for medical devices or aircraft systems... And going further, you can always replace an expensive reliable satellite with a swarm of cheaper ones that can fail. I think we'll choose the "swarm way" for more and more things and this will relax reliability requirements for individual components and at the whole swarm level we'll have "good enough" statistical reliability instead.

And any "swarm" can conceptually be seen as a black box, once you accept its probabilistic nature and the low but measurable likelihood of it being wrong, and maybe using a "swarm of swarms" if one swarm's p value of being true is not good enough for your application.

The "fractal attention to detail" seems needed when you need both reliability and you have serious power or computing resources constraints. And since power usage per flops is always decreasing, the number of such "dual constraint" cases should get smaller...

EDIT: typos and + pre-last paragraph to clarify what I meant
My little non-profit apparently got a DUNS number automatically when we filed our first 990EZ "online postcard" with the IRS. I had no idea that it existed until a merchant card processor wanted it along with our EIN because D&B had never called or mailed us anything. When I did the lookup on D&B's web site and found the number already assigned, I gave it to the people who wanted it and thought nothing more. Two days later, the phone calls and letters started. "Your Dun & Bradstreet registration is incomplete and may not be accepted!" They haven't shut up for over a year. Fortunately they don't appear to have a working telephone number for me.
I think you are asking for liquid democracy [0], as seen in pirate parties [1]. It is direct democracy with no mandatory delegation.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy

[1] http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/22154/how-german-pirate-...
BMI is like KSLOC.

It's the shittiest metric of population health we have ... except for all the others.

Height and weight is always collected. Blood cholesterol ... yeah, not so much. So unsurprisingly everything is related back to it.

Anyhow. I'd be amazed if many of we key-hunters-and-karma-gatherers are in much danger of zooming into the dangerous band at the bottom of the BMI (modulo EDs).

So, given that most people are not rocking pro-bodybuilder fat-free mass indexes, the BMI is still better than nothing.
It's probably largely just historical inertia.

However, there are also potentially strong reasons to avoid it.

1. China dissuades capital exodus. (They actually have a whole government bureau for this, the Foreign Exchange Management Bureau or 'waihuiguanliju')
2. My recent travels about Southeast Asia suggest that the government-run centralized interbank settlement network 'China Union Pay', is being supported by the government as a regional alternative to the de-facto global defaults Cirrus/Maestro (Mastercard) and Visa (Bank of America).

Anyway, the why doesn't matter. It's really the situation.
For companies in the UK finding your DUNS number can be real pain, so for the record you can actually look it up yourself for free, with no wait: http://blog.thomseddon.co.uk/find-your-d-u-n-s-number-if-you...

And the TL;DR: http://www.dnb.co.uk/myduns
Bisecting Programmers
Knowing You Carry a Cancer Gene