skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will never be wealthy and I will still continue to vote for a fair tax system. A flat tax system. Because everyone should pay the same, regardless of status or income.

Trouble with a flat tax system is the poor can't afford the tax rates the nation's current expenditure would require. It would work O.K. if the expenditure was much lower, but I see no way to get from here to there.

Aside from that, I've come to believe that a flat tax system isn't actually fair. The less income someone has, the more taxes cut into basic living expenses (because a greater portion of that person's income is spent on basic needs). On the other hand, someone with large incomes sees no tightening of basic living expenses because they make enough that the money lost to taxes falls solidly into the "extra income" region.

I'm not very good at describing this idea yet, but I tie it back to the idea I have happened upon that (for example) a 25% raise to a person making $40k is in terms of spending power much more than a 25% raise. This is because discretionary income is much smaller than $40k. The new $10k can be considered added discretionary income (assuming the person was meeting basic needs before) thus making it in effect much larger than a 25% bump.
Calling people names because they disagree with a progressive tax structure or mandated health insurance isn't a convincing argument for your side. There are arguments to be made for and against these policies.

In fact, it would be helpful for you to recognize that you are simply one side of a two-sided issue, each side of which believes they are obviously correct and that the other side is too uneducated to know how wrong they are.
LV2013平底鞋
why would dynamically pricing tolls cause less traffic? Especially in the morning rush hour - you gotta get to some place by a specific time, you have to pay the toll no matter what it was (with reasonal maximal prices of course). its only when there is an unreasonable maximal price (or no maximal price) that people's behaviour would change - imagine a toll of $500 during peak. It would put off people from going on the road.
Ask HN:hey developers, what brings you joy?
Hey Guys

Just wondering what makes you happy ? Well written code, beautiful designs and appreciation to my work brings me joy. What about you ?
I deleted my Facebook account with it's 700+ friends and moved over to Path. I've been there for about a year and so far only have about 10 friends and family. We use it hourly, sometimes more often, and it's has been a refreshing respite from the cognitive overload (and sometimes time drain) that Facebook used to be. So I get the move to Instagram...
Does anyone know of a similar resource but with real world examples and perhaps R snippets? Would be great if I could practice two things at the same time.
A flat tax? That's a bit too socialist for my tastes... should a man making $100k per year really be forced to pay twice as much as a man making $50k per year, just for being more productive? Wouldn't a head tax be better, since everyone would then pay equally? Plus you would not have the disincentive effect on marginal labor of your "make twice as much, pay twice as much" scheme.

Also, why should I be forced to pay for your military and your police force? Shouldn't it be my choice to consume what I want?
I think a person's best interest is often (not always!) the same as the general interest. Education comes in to play when a person is educated enough to be able to rationally reason that case. For example, "I have a perfectly good well on my property, but I understand that contributing to a public water supply system may benefit me in the long run, because maybe my well will go dry." Or maybe, "I have a well, but contributing to a public water system will increase commerce in the area which will directly benefit me."

Obviously that's not always going to be the case, and people can and will reason incorrectly, but the important part is that a person is capable of applying some modicum of thought instead of just "The rent is too damn high" or "Obama is a communist, hang him for treason."
A great snippet posted by the author in the OP.

"The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat). At the same time each day (I suspect this is scheduled under cron), the little packets (ducks) exit the host (boat) by way of a bridge (a bridge). From the bridge, the packets travel onto the internet (here embodied by the Yangtze River)."
the single biggest downside of public transport is that you don't control the schedule (nor where it goes - but lets ignore that for now).

A driverless car is a taxi that's cheap and effective. You don't have to park it, you don't have to figure out the route. You just hail one, get in and type in the destination. Its sane public transport.
One needs acoustic signals for underwater communication. I work with underwater modems, and we use frequencies in the 18-34 KHz range. Other modems can operate in bands from 8-50 KHz.

Autonomous underwater vehicles are an active area of research. One of the challenges involved are localization once the vehicle has dived. You cannot get GPS under water, so one way to localize yourself is by tracking your velocity/acceleration once the dive has begun. Another way is to exchange messages with your peer robots and devise a distributed location resolution scheme. See some of the work done in my lab in these areas: http://arl.nus.edu.sg/twiki/bin/view/ARL/STARFISH
They could have had both if they'd used window.history.replaceState()[1]

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/window.history#...
OpenXC - API to your car. Now available to all
Witness Bhutan's Gross National Happiness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_national_happiness
I guess I was inferring a counter argument to "the middle class is declining" which goes something like "the middle class is changing and not the same types of people now that it was then." Young people studying longer, settling down later, more immigration, etc.

I went on a quest to find the numbers years ago and those were the conclusions I came back with. The numbers are messy. I wish I had them or remembered what I read to form those conclusions. I'm actually drawn to this question because I thought of trying to make a website that drew together the data with visualization and statistical analysis.

If you find the data please being it back and share it.

EDIT: Actually the Wikipedia article on social mobility in the US is a pretty good start. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_...
New Feature: Handshake reviews Embassytown
found in the comments:

"I manage my relationship with my girlfriend using Trello. I stack potential gifts for her in one list, briefs on arguments we have in another, etc. My friends share the board and help me resolve the arguments in real time. I use the labels to convey my emotions at a certain point in time for a specific card. I really love her. Fingers crossed she doesn't find out!"
No it wasn't. Only outside apartments where the landlord gave permission as the cause.
Help us Architect the Future of Fantasy Sports
Yes, that particular case is what was up for decision today. What makes you think random searches are more legal if nobody's asking or complaining?
Great quote! It stresses the point that a great solution to a problem could comes from a different domain.
This sounds a lot like strong_parameters, which (I believe) will be the default in Rails 4, and is only a gem install away from Rails 3.2 apps.

https://github.com/rails/strong_parameters
Marx did not mention the destruction of the environment, which is a natural outcome of capitalism. I agree with everything else he said.
I would like to know how they could maintain this webserver all the years... Rock solid :-)
"This Web server was one of the first 50 Web servers on the InterNet"
In the companies for which I've worked (media production and software), paying the minimum wage for internships was hardly a problem. The people in these internships were often senior-year or better, easily worth twice what they were being paid.
Deleting code: leaving behind simplicity, and bringing order where there was chaos.
Apple Working on Lower-End iPhone
Remember when release cycles where short in Java? Me neither
If you guys like probability and real world examples, you may wish to follow my research (and educational process) here: http://www.shift8creative.com/posts/social%20media

I'll be updating it with more geeky math and how it relates to social media in the future.

I'm not a statistician or mathematician, so I really appreciate this article and the links in the comments. Thanks!
One thing that's not mentioned a lot, it's frighteningly easy to drag a whole country into a war, especially if regarded as a defensive one. The media are obedient and sensationalist, they will drum up the public for it. Once the train starts moving it's hard to stop.

War is the easiest thing to fund, a true emergency that requires extraordinary powers for the state.
HTML5 Showcase for Web Developers: The Wow and the How
Interesting, but I couldn't find out where their data comes from.
If we move to a system where half of the country is either stagnant or losing ground while the other half is surging, the social fabric of the United States is at risk, and with it the massive global power the United States has accumulated.

Translation: If half the US citizenry is utterly suffering, we won't be able to keep drone-bombing Yemeni infants, Oh the horrors!

You'd think that preventing the suffering of half of the USA might be an aim in itself.

Also, what's wrong with leaving the Yemeni children alone? Oh, I forgot, we want to provoke more terrorism. Maybe even hit the jackpot and start World War 3.

What a stupid article.
> If they weren't crazy before they sure will be in a few months

And you want to consciously cause that to happen to a person?

Woa. Considered a career as a Sith Lord?
Your comparison of North Korea with Marx shows unequivocally that you don't have any clue what you're talking about. It is actually laughable how wrong you are. Maybe you should read some Marx before dismissing something you don't know the first thing about.
The ideas are ok but the writing is too dense, too verbose. Not my cup of tea.
I found the numbered registers even better, since "overwrite text with pasted content, multiple times" is a relatively common operation.
Interesting read. Was sad to click through to his homepage and find out that he had already passed away in 2000 due to an automobile accident.
One of the things Knuth is famous for is writing a lengthy program for word counts that was equivalent to no more than 6 lines of shell script.

I highly doubt that he's wrong regarding his own programs, but it's most certainly wrong for the majority of programmers.

PS if we're going to appeal to authority, Church and Lambda Calculus were there first.
Nike Dunks,Nike Air Force 1,Nike Air Max,Air Jordan shoes
I am not an economist, but it sounds like you're getting at something similar to the diminishing marginal utility of money. I can't find a good source online that explains this, but the basic idea is that the more money someone has, the less each additional increment is actually worth. For example, a $10,000 raise is a lot more useful to a person that makes $50,000 a year than to one who makes $500,000 a year.

There may be a connection with progressive taxation, in the sense that if money has diminishing marginal utility, then a flat tax on money is actually regressive in terms of utility. So then a progressive tax on money is closer to being "fair" in the sense of being a flatter tax on utility.
The article specifically mentions that it's not driver skill which is the issue:

These commuters aren't necessarily slow or bad drivers.
Instead, they come from a few outlying neighborhoods and
travel long distances together in the same direction like
schools of fish -- clogging up not only the roads they
drive on, but also everyone else's.
The title of the article is horribly misleading. The coverage area is thirteen blocks. That's maybe 1/3 of Chelsea.
This is a documented Zend Framework thing, so personally I wouldn't call it "contrived", "dumb" or "weird".

http://till.typepad.com/blog/2008/10/zendframework-performan...

> Removing require_once in favour of __autoload shows
> one of the biggest performance improvements in my
> entire application - I shaved off roughly 220
> milliseconds by removing about 15 (or so) calls to
> require_once in my bootstrap.php file. And that's
> with APC enabled, and a decent sized realpath.cache
> (and .ttl).

Presumably this lazy loading approach starts being faster once your codebase exceeds a certain size. Everything you've said so far indicates that you tend to work on smaller, fire-and-forget PHP projects, so maybe this just doesn't resonate with your experience and I can certainly respect that.

No matter what your gut feeling about language-level features may be, I know that at my day job, we measured a clear performance boost when we removed require_once and switched completely to autoloading. For those of us working on very large, long-term PHP codebases, autoloading really is a good thing and I hope you can respect that in return.
CarVille, anyone?
While I agree with the basic premise of this blog post what I find just as rude and selfish is when people over-generalize late-comers to include anyone that is late at all ever and don't care about the "why?" even if it is quite a valid reason.

I've had this happen to me multiple times, and I'm the most reliable person I know when it comes to this stuff.

Reasoning aside, sometimes people are just rude and selfish and it doesn't have to have anything to do with being late at all it's just one of many symptoms of the underlying problems.
Describe a problem many people might have. Write well. Slide your solution in at the end.

I like it (no sarcasm). Good technique for writing a company blog.
This story was my favorite part:

: : : : :

The best ping story I've ever heard was told to me at a USENIX conference, where a network administrator with an intermittent Ethernet had linked the ping program to his vocoder program, in essence writing:

ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder

He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure.
Hacker News Tokyo Japan Meetup #18 – January 10(tomorrow) 2013
Thank God this forced login popup is killable via browser's developer tools. But why oh why did they put this on their page? Could people stop doing that?
Based on what I've seen, refusing to add someone can be seen as a social snub in many circles. Simply adding and muting someone avoids a lot of social hassle of people wanting to know why you refused to add them when you did add some other person.
Man records police at work, is cited for HIPAA violations.
I certainly understand the point of "crowd funding".

> If you expect projects to be on time you couldn’t have picked a worse thing than Kickstarter... Take the Double Fine Adventure: It will completely overshoot the estimated delivery date by a long, long time

This is a problem with estimation. It's way worse to overshoot a delivery time than deliver before it. This is poor project planning. If I would have known this, I perhaps would not have backed Double Fine Adventures.

> At Kickstarter you give money to something that might or might not work out in the end, but that will most definitely overshoot its estimated delivery date

I disagree fundamentally. If a project is funded, then it is funded. The backer rewards aren't qualified with "if we're successful". They're "you will get ___".

> if it doesn’t it’s a fluke.

If I didn't get my backer reward, then they stole from me. If I do, and I get it late, then they poorly managed their delivery date.
I find managing tabs annoying. What I would really like is for ctrl/alt clicking the back button to take me back to the previous domain.
Backer rewards are (if they meet their funding goal) "You will get ___". If I don't receive it, then they should refund me. I'm not throwing money away for the sheer whim of "backing" people who won't give me my reward - I expect the reward.

I care if they deliver or not! I paid money! If they don't deliver, then they stole from me.
im afraid its not this easy. continuing your stock exchange analogy, trading volume at the individual stock level will be too sparse and unevenly distributed to make an unassisted exchange workable except at massive unprecedented scale (which i admit we'll achieve eventually). that's why in daily deals "stock brokers" exist, they are groupon/LS/etc. and they're still bleeding cash trying to reach these merchants profitably despite their "high" gross margins.

also i dont think you've adequately fleshed out the chicken and egg problem; ie i dont think folks will sit there and load up their deal preferences without you having demonstrated some kind of value first. demonstrating that value will be difficult without reverting to industry standard stuff. back to square one.

most importantly, in daily deals merchants pay for marketing+distribution = new customers. what you're describing will mean the customers voting on a merchant will already be aware of that merchant, and this makes your pitch to them a different (and much more difficult) conversation. from the merchant's perspective, discounts lower their product's value in their customers' minds. imho the right way to deal with loyalty is through having a loyalty program (assisted by the many great startups in this business), not generalized discounting.

hope this helped.
Amazon's unknown unknowns
Facebook Removes Instagram User Counts From API After Traffic Confusion
Actionable Analytics, Big Data and Cloud has obviously Jumped the Shark
Gives new meaning to the term "amplitude modulation".

Commenter Roei Dahan got the gist.
>> if it doesn’t it’s a fluke.
>If I didn't get my backer reward, then they stole from me.

http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-not-a-store
Not necessarily. When a highway is close to capacity, it only needs to be blocked for a short period of time for it to back up traffic for miles. So if there's a rush from a particular suburb, it could very well cause traffic problems at a specific time.
Thanks, this ties in to what I was saying very well.
> I will never be wealthy and I will still continue to vote for a fair tax system.

What makes you think that's fair? I didn't say what is fair or not, you brought that into the discussion. Do you think marginal utility doesn't make sense. Why is linear, percentage based, tax "fair"? Seems rather arbitrary to me.

> I won't always be healthy and I will still continue to vote against a socialist healthcare system. Because everyone should pay for what they use,

Ok except that the world where each individual is isolated and should just get what they need for themselves by paying and nothing more is a fantasy world. Exactly the kind of a situation I was talking about. Turning human lives and their health into a marketable commodity is craziness. Letting emergency services handle terminal heart patients, which would have been managed better by preventive care is insanity. Checking people's accounts before pulling the ambulance to the door is a pretty scary society, and maybe you evaluated it and decided to vote for that, I decide not to. Starting wars just to fuel the military industrial complex, is craziness. Letting old people die of hunger and neglect is craziness.

> You don't believe what I believe? That's fine. But how dare you ascribe my beliefs to ignorance?

I dare because it seems at least some of your beliefs are crazy and are hurting not only yourself in the long run but others. Maybe you'll say that you don't care about others, and it shouldn't matter what happens to them, and I say that's crazy as well.
This is such bullshit.

When AIG and Lehman went down, the crisis had already hit.
That's what was meant by "financial crisis".
The government actions to abilout AIG only happened after.
So you have your timelines backwards.

And the NINJA mortgage issuers (like Goldman's Countrywide) weren't issuing dodgy mortgages because the government was taking on the risk, they were doing it because they could offload the risk to chumps like AIG and Lehman.

Pure systemic free-market failure. Basically the banks were trusted to regulate themselves, and the risk controls all over New York, Frankfurt and London were pants. If we still had the heavy regulations of the 1970s, none of it would have happened.
No, the person who invested in the building and bought the machinery and raw material gets reimbursed and paid the opportunity cost of their investment, aka normal profits (as opposed to economic profits). I think the labor theory of value is one of Marx's main errors; it sort of works for agriculture because food does actually grow out of the ground, land was owned without being built, and in the 19th century the vast bulk of the expense involved was labor based, but this didn't translate well to industrial production at all.
Your website Outgrow.me is a very good idea.

Bravo! I wish you a lot of success and certainly redirect my friends to it.

I always thought a real shop was the missing link at KS.
I understand KS concern to stop their "service" at the funding level, but from a user point of view, it’s a bit short. And from a creator point of view, KS fees of 5%+taxes+etc. might be a bit steep.
One example is once the project has been funded, KS could at the very least display the link of the website creator without "nofollow".

To me it looks like KS is missing tools to help creators to really understand how they can manage their backers and their fulfilment after the funding. It would give KS so much data in this critical phase.

But it looks like KS is already working addressing this issue. In 2012 they’ve implemented the deadlines for creators and made clearer the refund for failed rewards.

On any case there is an opportunity here for third party services to KS projects that have been funded (and maybe failed as well).
I agree,That is a great story of using ping!
Annoyance-free web surfing
You really can't tell the difference between socialism and communism?

socialism = Norway, communism = North Korea

So you think Norway and North Korea are identical?

Or are you under the delusion that Norway is badly managed?
Do you think people get dragged to the Gulag there?

You better shut off the Fox News and go read a book.
Not necessarily. Cars still use a large amount of land area per person, even if they're self driving and don't need many car parks (I disagree with that last part though, considering commute patterns).

Take a look at http://carfree.com/ for a good overview of what could be done with public transport, as well as all of the unseen issues with car use.
I was under the impression that a Government sells a bond, with a interest rate the Government sets. How would the Rothschild family buy bonds (Government debt) and ask for a higher interest rate than that was set in the first place?
>about all the bad rap they got for the worthless ideas that were presented.

This is the kicker, if you'll excuse my pun. No longer are the angel/vc/suit-and-tie people the judge and jury of good ideas. I'm absolutely astounded at some of the projects that got funded on KS. Primarily because I think they're the dumbest projects ever. But its great to be wrong.