skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry but I can't buy the "rich will take their capital elsewhere" mantra anymore because they already do that. From Cayman to Dubai, there are tax havens all over the world and the smart rich do use them as their headquarters and capital planning; they know how to manage their assets better than you and me. The only way for rich to get richer is to invest smartly. And if you make investing difficult, it doesn't mean they'll stop investing. It means they'll have to figure out how to make money despite the difficulty in investing. Yes, they can invest anywhere in the world but they are free to do that already and there are already many incentives for them to do so. The rich aren't suddenly going to take all their money out from US and put it into India or China. They know better than that.

Additionally, so what if the top few % take their capital away elsewhere? There are millions of entrepreneurs who can fill their space. These "rich will leave and you will suffer" tactics make sense if they aren't already investing elsewhere heavily and if the rest of the world is a much better investment opportunity than the US. But that isn't so and hasn't been so in a long time.

I'm not saying tax the rich unfairly. I'm just saying I don't buy the "if you tax the rich they will leave" line anymore because that line only works in an untapped free market for capital with perfect competition, which we do not have anywhere in the world.
Reagan implemented that policy, but then got bogged down in bankrupting the USSR.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_Law

Has some more information. You won't find much commentary today, because the article is nearly a year old. In any case, this is basically just politics, so I flagged it.
Thanks! I've added some of those questions into the list in the article (with link to the comment, but can link elsewhere if you want)
The argument seems politically motivated. Lower taxes for the consumer tax brackets would be another valid way of increasing GDP (through an increase in consumer spending).

And the graph is meaningless at best. We'd expect to find a correlation b/w the average tax rate across the board and tax revenue as a percentage of GDP. Plotting just the top tax bracket in an effort to show no correlation is intentionally misleading.
The extra benefit you get from a given increase in income decreases as your income increases. (If someone's on $20k/year then a raise of $5k/year is probably quite a big deal. If they're on $500k/year, not so much.) Therefore, the cost of a given amount of taxation is typically less to someone rich than to someone poor. On the other hand, the benefit of the taxation -- whatever hopefully-useful things the government does with the money -- is independent of whether it came from rich people or poor people.

Therefore: whatever amount of taxation revenue you want to raise, and ignoring second-order effects (e.g., that higher tax rates reduce the incentive to work and increase the incentive to find ways to avoid/evade taxes) you will reduce the amount of harm done by collecting the taxes if you take more from the better-off and less from the worse-off.

Of course, once the differences between rates become very large, those "second-order" effects may no longer be small. If you ignore them entirely, I think the conclusion is that for maximum total utility you should tax + redistribute until everyone is equally well off, but long before you get there the "second-order" effects will be much more important.
Cool. On a similar note, for most gated communities where there is also a keypad (for residents or visitors) to get in, 0911 works on 90+% of them. This is the standard "backdoor" for police/fire/EMS.
There is a standard expat deduction -- I want to say it's something like $72,000 per year. If you make less than that, you don't have to pay anything. "Quite a few expats and international businesspeople" who make more money, and hide it, are constantly getting in trouble -- see, for example, the recent move with the US against UBS. It's becoming harder with every passing day to flout the rules, so it's really a lot better for people to design their lives with the rules in mind.

And we're not the only country - there's always Bangladesh!
is this based on cookies or the css history hack?
"Considering the second one has been done... :)"

It has? Do you have any source/article you can link to? I'd like to read about it and how it's done, seems to me like you'd need a fair amount of black magic to do it!
I, a creature of a different age, suffer a similar phenomenon. I have cherished old mix tapes that I prefer the sound of. I've tried recreating those tapes with playlists of perfectly ripped flac from cd's and they just don't have the same life.

I've gone so far as to record the tapes straight into flac and listen to those on my ipod instead.

I know every warble, wow, and flutter from those old tapes, I even have a rough chronology in my mind of when the tapes developed their defects. The too hot car stereo in my friends camero that summer day... that lousy walkman that tried to eat it.

I can play the modern digital copies in the right order till the cows come home and be unmoved but even a whisper of the noise between tracks on one of those old tapes and its '94 again and I'm back on the beach at sunset with that girl in my arms...
I'd add (from painful personal experience):

Get a lawyer to draw up a frame agreement for the corporation. No matter how much you trust each other, you need to get some documents in place that protect the individual interests of each party. Don't allow loopholes to exist that permit one party to screw over the other, no matter how convinced you are it would never happen.

Trust me on this.
At least you can move this one... Skittles.com should make their site with this tool :D
Recognition is generally broken down into two steps, processing faces into "templates" and then comparing those templates. Generating templates includes all the preprocessing stuff as well: detecting faces in an image, estimating their pose, and finding landmark points. Our site goes into these issues in some depth (with some examples). So yes, we do break the process down: generating the templates can be done individually for every image, which allows you store that result and use it for future comparisons.

Generating 2 templates is many more times expensive than comparing those templates. However, as your dataset grows, generating templates grows at N, and the number of comparisons you need to do grows at N^2. So eventually, comparisons dominate.
The Broadband Gap: Why Is Theirs Cheaper?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7O4Sa8sGXk
This video refers to "experts", but I am pretty sure you can find more of the same via Google.

And apparantly the propaganda was in the 20s-30s.
It worked quite well for my face but not my wife's ( http://webdemo.pittpatt.com/recognition_demo/view.php?id=X3Y... ) because her head is slightly tilted and not facing front in these pictures. I'm certain your video recog. is better but I think you should look into making the requirements for photos a bit more lax because very few photographs have full-frontal, upright faces. And once you get it right, talk to Facebook/Myspace etc. :)
Mechanical Turk: Profitable or Not?
Theres a number of bakeries that I really miss getting stuff from. Also, salsa, coffee, sweet tea, jelly, and barbecue sauce were always the best at the farmers market. I'm going to be down there for my spring break, when I stop by i'll be sure to let some of the merchants know about your site.
I've been suspecting that his recent blog post "The value of downvoting" to be an insidious attempt at getting more PR for his site, stackoverflow by dissing HN.
My old school friend went to continue the business with another guy and left our company to die on my hands. I pulled it through on my own and had a steady income for 2 years.

Never trust your feelings and imagination. Plan your startup as a military operation then you should be alright.
It's a hodgepodge of low-level stuff. Some C. My favorite is the SSE-optimized assembly :)
Hasn't Yahoo! been doing this since a while?

http://advertising.yahoo.com/marketing/bt/
I wonder in what measure modern production techniques (for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression ) influences the choice of the listener.
It's becoming harder with every passing day to flout the rules, so it's really a lot better for people to design their lives with the rules in mind.

For some reason that reminds me of the phrase "the tighter you squeeze your grip, the more that will slip from your fingers"

E-gads! Now I'm quoting Star Wars!

But really, countries can make all the rules they want. Getting every other country on the planet to enforce quirky U.S. Tax laws is more of a wet dream than reality. It reminds of Thomas Paine, who was put on trial in absentia by authorities in Great Britain who were also tightening their grip. They charged him with libel.

""If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy . . . to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous . . . let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb""

As far as I'm concerned, you can say the thing about "unpatriotic" tax evasion by rich people choosing to move away. This country was founded on a tax revolt, and trying to tax people for leaving what they feel to be an overly burdensome system is the height of bureaucratic arrogance.
I disagree.

I think there is a lesson in pricing strategies here.

The trade of money for goods or services always follows a curve. Whether that is money for governmental services or money for startup services. It's an extremely important concept for strategic market positioning.

The argument of how it applies to government may be political, but the economics are assuredly not.
C168 Blue Lcd Display Problem
So the problem with this kind of reasoning is that you deny what happens to companies after they are acquired. Look at Keyhole, which became Google earth. This was a small company in Maryland with a small audience of paid, mostly government and enterprise, users. They were purchased and in a remarkably short amount of time, ported their imagine serving to googles infrasctructed, expanded coverage and deployed the free Google Earth to tens of millions of people worldwide. This would not have been possible without the use of Googles operations and data center people and hardware, or the storage technologies that uses them.

Similarly, look at Android. Android was purchased very early in their development cycle, and literally grew to a team of hundreds at Google, where the bulk of the work that went into that took place.

This is not to discount that we buy companies because they are doing something interesting/cool/new/smart, but to discount what happens after denies a very large part of how large businesses work.

Maybe what I'm trying to say is if Google can take a legitimate hit when an acquisition goes poorly (dodgeball comes to mind) then maybe it is worth considering what happens when acquisitions come off.

To actually answer your question, gmail, pr, gfs, bigtable, orkut (As a stealthy side project kind of thing), google news, finance, google talk, the igoogle homepage and the gadget spec therein which lead to opensocial, streetview, containerized and large scale data center operations, etc, etc,etc..

But that also discounts the value we've seen from our adoption of open source technologies and the day to day work of thousands of engineers.

Maybe what I'm trying to say is that (ugh, I hate this word) innovation is wherever you find it, and a decent company tries to find it everywhere.
The global taxation feature of the US code is a double taxation on income, as you typically pay taxes in the foreign jurisdiction as well (There are tax treaties that reduce this double taxation in many jurisdictions, but only to a certain amount). It also applies to US businesses that operate globally and is a major reason so many multinationals move their headquarters offshore. The US, I believe, is one of only two countries in the world that taxes citizens globally, the other being Israel.
Good points Numair - also probably pretty useful to people who don't know the law, deductions, exceptions. I know a lot of it off the top of my head but I think we've built a better thread together.

As for me, I've never tried to slough off my taxes because I've wanted to show the income to improve credit and be able to get bank loans and show track record later. I was putting the view out that higher taxes could equal lower yields, which is, like, a doubly bad thing. Certainly, the IRS/INS duo means something. An American renouncing and not paying taxes they know about means you really can't come back, which is ugly. If you don't like living here, there's still some really amazing places here worth coming back to every so often. I really root for our government, partially because I live here right now, and partially because of some latent patriotism going on. If taxes went up and yields went down, I'd really be shaking my head.

Anyways, cheers for having the international tax discussion with me, hope everyone can learn a thing or two from it.
not sure how does that keep you from being bitter...?
Ask HN:  Thoughts on Singularity University?
See also the MegaPenny Project:

http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/
most interesting bit on her CV: "Why I Think The Recession Is Great" - http://www.brazencareerist.com/2009/01/22/why-i-think-the-re...

oh, the irony...
A Trove of Clues From Smartphones for Marketers
You enjoyed it so much because you knew you didn't have to do it for the rest of your life.
As they have been for years. My point is this isn't any 'extra' threat. If you don't want to be tracked for some reason, install adblock, or block the google domains.

Since adsense appeared on tons of websites they've been able to track people. Just like all the other advertising networks that have been tracking people for the last 10 years+.
Bespin Talk at Mozilla Labs Meetup
The Passionate Developer
The 80/20 rule strikes again
Yeah. Next Amazon will remember your previous purchases in order to offer you relevant suggestions for what you might like! Then where would we all be?
I can kind of believe this is true.

Since I know if someone formats a drive, I can get bits of the data back with
strings /dev/sda

but if they dd it with zeros, I can't do that.

I suspect most/all data recovery firms will only deal with the 95%* of easier cases - which involve them basically running some software and not opening the drive. If they are bit better they might attempt the 4.9%* of cases where they have to replace/fix/bypass the drive's firmware.
They write off the 0.1%* with dd style problems because they would cost too much for the customer and would need a better class of staff (recovery typically only costs a three-digit sum)

That said it depends, how secure you need your data to be. I think given a budget of $100k (if not less) for one drive this could be possible (i.e. a government, competitor company). For example you could employ people from the company who makes the drives, reprogram the firmware to read the weak magnetic data etc.

* percentages made up, to illustrate the point.
Ah, I didn't realize that was your site mate. You're one of my favorite submitters on here - it seems like I'm reading something insightful from you almost every day on here. Glad I was able to contribute a bit, and thanks again for being awesome.
I usually use MySQL Query Browser: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/query-browser/en/. I am on ubuntu, not sure what other platforms it handles.
The $300 million button
Human religious belief systems co-evolved with other belief systems
Well umm no article, rather practical experience :).

As I explained elsewhere we get wiped disks sent to us weekly. Some will have deen blanked with 0's (perhaps one a month). I know of only a few that specifically have had dd used on them - but usually we dont know the story of the disks :) so it could be higher.

We have a SEM that produces an image for our analysts to rebuild with a variety of software packages (Encase Enterprise is one example, and we have several pieces of kit from accessdata. Plus scripts/programs written in house).

With a zeroed disk your looking at minimum £1000 upwards and at least a months work (most of that time spent on the SEM and on one of our clusters processign the data).
Stephen Fry: The internet and Me
I don't know if you've ever heard economists argue over what they call data, but it's a headache.

It's hard to call this "science" as we can never really get a control group going as that's politically feasible.
Ridiculous, kids these days actually like the sound of the artifacts introduced by the reproduction technology?

Everyone knows the best way to hear music is through the soft clipping of a tube amplifier.
Thing that excites me about the future: Strong enough signal reception for wireless telecommunications that there's minimal need for physical infrastructure. Monopolies on any form of communication are ugly and greatly slow down world progress.
I'm not surely whether the full story is being told in this article.

The 90% tax may well act like a brake on wealth generation, but was only applied at the very highest incomes, not people on mid 6 figures. I bet the elimination of the top rate actually resulted in a large shift of taxation from the rich, to the middle-class, like you and me.
When searching around for Hauser's Law, I found this comment that directly addresses some of the issues in the WSJ article:

The problem I have with Hauser’s Law is that it doesn’t seem to include state and local taxes, which should raise the bar by quite a lot. Also, why should we look to the nation as a whole? To find out if there’s an upper limit, I think we should look at what state has the highest rate. For that matter, perhaps we should look at foreign countries.

While tax revenues may been fairly stable over the past 50 years, that doesn’t mean we couldn’t generate more if we wanted to.

Posted by edelfenbein at May 21, 2008 10:22 AM
New iPod Shuffle that Speaks Song Titles
In that case, we are serfs, not tenants. Sucks for us.
You'd have to do this. I was incredibly tempted to get some buffalo meat, but when you price it all out, it's still more expensive that going to whole foods and getting it (plus at whole foods I get to see the meat in front of me).

Looks like a great idea though. Would love to see more exotic meats on there (venison? quail? ostrich?).

When costs become comparable to Whole Foods, I'll definitely be placing an order!
Banks, OTOH, would have lots of trouble storing it.
Introducing Redis: a fast key-value database
Small point: Dubai is finished. It is bankrupt. It was a classic boomtown. All of the building was done on debt. Foreigners are leaving their cars at the airport, flying out, so that they do not end up in debtor's prison (yes, Dubai has debtor's prison). Not exactly friendly to entrepreneurs - take a risk, take on some debt, and land in jail.

Every major country is going to have to spend to stop from falling into complete depression. Taxes will be higher everywhere. And the US will likely get through this crisis better than anywhere else. Having the reserve currency has its benefits after all. I really do not think going somewhere else to avoid higher taxes will make sense in the future.
On the other side of the macroeconomic coin, despite the standard political back-and-forth [1], government spending has also remained basically constant at 21% of GDP for the last few decades.

But now that may be changing:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/02...

[1] Thinking of the Democrats and Republicans as countervaling processes maintaining a homeostatic equilibrium that expresses the electorate's preference for a government that spends 20% of GDP is a good way to rehabilitate yourself if you've picked up the vice of excessive political involvement.
Skittlr - Taste the Marketing
Linkspam. This is the original (and better) article:
http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/
Josh Gourneau setup a MyCroft plugin which makes it pretty trivial to use Findjango 'in browser' for IE and FF, but not sure what the options are for WebKit or Opera.

I agree that exposure is a huge issue there, as we're not likely to sign and distribution deals in the near future.
I would say I was an opportunistic moved pragmatic...
CAD for Nanoengineering: DNA, proteins, and search-intensive design
Portfolio's Zubin Jelveh identified two major problems with Hauser's figures:
(1) They don't include corporate tax revenue, which has dropped dramatically.
(2) They DO include revenue from social security and other social-insurance programs, which aren't tied to tax rates and which have grown dramatically.

In other words, the appearance that tax revenue remains flat across the past 57 years of fluctuating top tax rates is a coincidence, to put it nicely, or an accounting fraud, to be a bit more accurate about it.

More details, including corrected charts, are here:
http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/odd-numbers/2008/05/20/...
Uniom vs China Mobile | The War for 2 billion market |
Well the easy way to do this is to start a foreign corporation (say Dubai) As long as companies are doing business with the foreign corporation (which you are an employee of), you won't have to pay taxes on that amount- you will only pay taxes on the salary that your Dubai corporation pays you.

However, if you ever try to move the money to the United States, you're screwed. The moment you transfer the money from Dubai Bank and Trust to Bank of America, you'll owe taxes on it.

So, the easy way to avoid paying taxes is to have the foreign corporation, and make everything you purchase overseas a business expense.
So is theirs less reliable than ours due to less maintenance of the bits which they are forced to share?
a good thing to remember is that almost everyone out there and here on HN is a egotist first and a hacker (worker, etc) second
Your logic doesn't work. There is no similarity between "protecting women" and "protecting children". Women don't need to be protected. Children obviously do, at least from some things.
This looks very cool, I can't wait to see if something like this gets adopted to other countries and cities
Google has a pretty good ecosystem setup.

If I click on a google ad to buy an xbox, google know I bought an xbox, or am thinking about buying one (If I went through Google checkout, they can be sure, but that's not in the current mix afaik). It's probably a good idea for them to show me offers on xbox games and accessories once in a while after that.

Facebook can monetize your pageviews. They just choose to spend it all on 800 employees, swish offices, etc etc.
well coding is not part of being a 'great hacker' according to this list... but the text editor you are using is part of it... Im not convinced to say the least, the word 'poser' comes to my mind, not sure why
Did you know that more than 40% of the country DOES NOT pay taxes?

Someone should be taxing that 40%...
As long as they are just inferring what type of ads I am interested in, I wish that someone would just ask us what we are interested in. Or at least rule out the things we are NOT interested in. Like, stick a little button on their ads which says "dislike?" and we could click it and not be shown any more of those ads (or ads in that category).