skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure what aspect you mean, specifically, but I can agree with at least one. I got my CSE degree from Davis, and I found a significant portion of my classmates (read: half) to be bright but otherwise uninterested in CS, there simply because they hoped to get a well paying job or their parents pushed them to be engineers.

I don't know if this is a problem particular to this stratosphere in higher education, geographic location (near the bay area), or if it's simply more common than I think.

(The other half of students were really great, don't get me wrong. I can't speak highly enough of the faculty either.)
$1 is worth much less to the rich than it is to the poor. So if we redistribute it to the poor, the whole of society will get better utility of that dollar.
(Edit: I assumed that the $1 is consumed rather than invested. As pointed out below, if the rich invests that $1 instead, it could be more useful to society.)

A counter-argument is that too high a marginal tax rate will greatly reduce an important incentive to work and therefore makes everyone worse off, especially from the lack of new inventions (see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged).

A question very relevant to us is "Will it?".

If you face, say, 70% marginal tax rate, will you still work as hard or be as ambitious as you are?
Where did alllll of these come from in the past couple of months... I love them all but Grooveshark, Mixturtle, Justhearit, whats going on here?
"Winning" at that level is all part of the incentive, though. It doesn't matter exactly how or why Bill Gates amassed his fortune, but where he started and how much motivated people can personally relate to him. There's nothing in his history (short of some incredible brains) that is much different from my history, meaning it's quite possible I can be Bill Gates someday if I work my ass off and get lucky.
numbers may be skewed, true. but in aggregate truth will out. perhaps some people are not truthful in their reported data (any data anywhere), nevertheless all you need to do is make assumptions on the veracity of the data and what you get is a +/- range from your starting point. that said, these numbers are kind of what you would expect if you just had to guess or rank.
I want Jing or other screenshot programs to do that, but all the time and store a configurable amount of pictures per second, etc.

I click the program icon (or hit a hotkey) and poof it saves away the current bucket of images with a name of my choosing.

Maybe I'll see how possible it is to make a skimpy little tool that does this, as it would help me a lot in debugging and remembering things that just vanished.
I pretty much agree with you here. However, in Bill Gates case, he actually sensed back then that software will be very important. (from reading about Moore's law)

The key piece in his luck came from the IBM deal that put the standard of PC's OS into Microsoft's lap.
My main beef with your argument is that (IMO) the government is no less careless than us as individuals. In fact, when you look at the sad state of California (see http://tinyurl.com/cy6rxe), you might argue that governments are even more reckless than us when they have a surplus of revenue.

There is also Hauser's Law to consider (see http://tinyurl.com/6fnjml).
You seem to be arguing against high spending, and using that to condemn high income. The thing is, spending and income are two different things. And your income tax is going to prevent me from investing my money in a positive manner. So I think that what you're really arguing for is high sales tax.

But your argument doesn't work anyway. You're really only pointed out the truism of decreasing marginal utility while assuming that the spending that can be positively identified is more efficient than whatever the other guy can't remember. You've provided no argument for why that would actually be true.

If those having higher income are spending their money less efficiently than those who have less, then how do the former group achieve and maintain those high incomes?
Please explain for me.

Well, my grandmother is technically inept, the concept of computers scare her - the keyboard, mouse, so many wires etc. It becomes a little overwhelming.

This sort of device would be something she could use to play games like solitaire, perhaps read emails from family (maybe sending them back depending on how easy it is to use) and generally, it would be more instinctual for her to touch the things she wants to navigate, rather than have to grab a mouse and direct it to click onto what she wants to look at.

It's a device for people who aren't like us. The odd thing is that it will be pushed by techcrunch - I hope they have a more direct to consumer marketing plan in mind than just advertising on techcrunch, as I think they'll really be missing out on it's real potential.

The technological device for people scared by technology
Thanks, erlanger!
more joyfulhappyunicorn fun!!!!!@!!!
Or I can just use my class and everything is a zillion times cleaner. I don't see why you're still arguing with me over this. My class is very clean and guaranteed to be compatible with all other code. Perhaps you got thrown by a previous commenter saying I "redefined nil?". But actually I did was define a nil? method on my internal UndefinedHash class, overriding the default Object implementation (ie. standard inheritance stuff, nothing dangerous).

I know you can do useful things with Exceptions when necessary. However I have to say unequivocably that using an exception in this case would be the worst possible idea. Why? Because the exception would be NoMethodError (ie. from nil[:key]). This equivalent to a NullException in Java, indicating all manner of generic logic errors that could have occurred anywhere within the stack.

If you looked at what I was actually doing, you might agree that SafeNestedHash is an incredibly useful abstraction. Hell, if it was written in PHP you could look at the algorithm and say, "wow, that's fast, elegant and readable." I'm not sure why you're so dead set that I'm doing something wrong, but you're just pulling this stuff out of thin air without any context.
Yep, all three of us....
Getting a full-time job as a programmer after being away from that career for ?how long? may be a bigger problem than your age. HR doesn't seem to take kindly to that.
Is this debate format something new for The Economist?

We always get the knee-jerk "But that's not HN" when stuff like this comes up, but where else do people rationally, objectively, and maturely discuss interesting questions like this? I was wondering if anybody had comments on this format and whether it is worthwhile.
Frameworks? really? how about a list of positive words, string concatenation, a random number generator, and a hashtable to store the URLs and their short versions, possibly with persistence. Common Lisp hashtables are transparently persisted with Rucksack, Prevalence, BKNR, Elephant, cl-store, etc.

So here is my take on it, 10 minutes!

http://paste.lisp.org/display/78367

P.S. how does one post code in HN?
Personally I think making the rich pay higher taxes is unethical. Everyone should pay a flat income tax.

Why do we pay taxes? We pay taxes so that government can be funded, and in exchange government provides certain public services. Services like firefighters, police, hospitals, etc. If you think about it, these are services that everybody should receive equally, thus they should be services that everyone pays for equally. Currently we have a system where the rich pay a disproportionate amount of the costs for these services, and intentional or otherwise, what has happened is that the rich gain a disproportionately better use of these services, like the police are more likely to protect the rich than the poor, etc.

Bigger houses are more expensive to protect from fires than smaller houses, so real estate taxes should be proportional to the value of the property. Sales tax applies to everyone equally but those who consume more pay for more, which makes sense since those who consume more are making more use out of consumer protection agencies, like the FDA. Bigger companies are more expensive to regulate, so proportional corporate taxes make sense too.

But a human life is a human life. When one person pays more taxes than another person, the implication is that person deserves a larger share of the same essential services we are paying for than those who paid less. That seems a perversion of justice to me.
Or, will you still work as hard, but not necessarily at making money...

At super high tax rates I'd be doing less lucrative, but more fun work. If I ended up doing charity work or something, society might be better off (though I'd have less money to spend doing it). If I worked at a bar, society probably wouldn't be better off.
no kidding. when i read that statement it told me the article has no credibility.
I'm 53 and I have the opposite problem. I have so much paying work that I have trouble finding time for my start-up. And everywhere I go, I'm the best programmer they've seen, regardless of age. Sounds like you could be in the same boat if you'd adjust you're thinking and give it a better shot.

Many people are primarily focused on getting the work done. If someone rejected me because of age (or anything else unrelated to the work), it's a self-correcting problem. Their bias clearly demonstrates enough mind-fuckedness that if it wasn't for this stupid decision, I'd be leaving them for some other stupid thing before too long anyway.

If you're as good as you think, get out there and get to work. Someone needs you, believe me.
The question comes down to this, what motivates you? We're (hopefully) hard working people here. I am motivated to get what I want - a decent house and car, being able to pay for my kids college, having enough money to go on a few sweet vacations every year. I work as hard as I can already to get there. Taking 34% of my income or taking 39% of my income won't change how I work - the economy fluctuating has done a lot more damage to my wealth than that. Taking 80% would change my mind. In that society I would live near a beach, code FOSS at night, make enough to pay for food and revel in the fact that the gov't will pay for my kids college.

Not exactly the same productivity level from me.
That's going to be a long time in coming; I shoot film, and what ends up in Photoshop is Silverfast raw in TIFF format.
Not much luck involved in the IBM deal.

http://prospectingprofessor.blogs.com/prospecting_professor/...

"IBM president John Opel served on United Way's national board...as did Mrs. Gates. In 1980, when someone mentioned Microsoft to John Opel, he responded, "Oh, that's run by Bill Gates, Mary Gates' son." Behind the scenes, Mary Gates had spoken with John Opel about the new breed of small companies in the computer industry, which she felt were under-appreciated competitors of the larger firms with which IBM traditionally partnered."
Now now, I know you're joking, but the non-rails community is perhaps larger than you think. They just tend to be less noisy. Particularly in Japan, there is a huge number of people who use Ruby primarily for scripting - as in, traditional scripting, automating system tasks and the like. I personally know at least half a dozen or so "pure rubyists" like this.

The number of people who use Ruby who have never even touched Rails is probably quite low - who wouldn't want to try out the hot new thing? - but heaps of Ruby users are not primarily there to use Rails.

Funny thing is, I generally prefer Rails users' code. Rails enforces such a strong MVC structure that one can't help but write decently organised code, IMO, and the habit sticks. People who came at Ruby from scripting tend to just write "whatever works" and you know how that turns out.
> $1 is worth much less to the rich than it is to the poor.

Extending this argument: a $1 product is worth much less to the rich than it is to the poor.

Based on this argument, should the rich be charged more for products?
"If money is spent recklessly anyway, and is barely noticed when it's gone, why not put it into a pot where it at least stands a chance of benefiting more of society?"

Because it's my money that I earned that represents my hard work and the risks I've taken to generate that wealth. Part of my freedom is to spend the fruits of my effort as I wish. Who are you to decide that spending recklessly is an unnecessary freedom?

I don't disagree with taxes, but this notion of increasing our taxing of the rich every time WE'VE spent OUR money recklessly seems somewhat like thieving to me now (I'm halfway through Atlas Shrugged).

In a capitalist society you don't own my work and my effort, I do. If you would rather the community own my work, then please convert to a communist society so I can leave forthwith.
One thing I have always wondered is, how often do you really need to sort something? It always seems to me that the best way to go about getting sorted input is to constrain your inputs in such a way that you will always have a sorted array. Also, how often does one need something to be sorted. Not as much as we talk about sorting algorithms it seems.
I don't think I was even close to saying that the market doesn't exist.
Well, sort of. The difference is that, at least on my box, Grooveshark actually works (as in music plays).
Unless a future step is to require every computer to be registered with the authorities, or go through some central ISP gateway in order to access the New Internet, which gives authorities greater control. Who knows where this kind of stuff can lead.
My opinion, which I'm sure everybody will hate.

This is a moral question, along the lines of "How much money do I think you should have?" or better, "How much money do you owe the rest of us for helping create your riches?"

Well, how much does active environmental public expenditures lead to the creation of riches? If anything, we've seen riches being created throughout history with very little governmental help. In fact, it seems just the opposite -- we need government to help monopolies from running the markets.

So maybe the question is "Now that you're rich, how much money should we take from you to protect us from rich people in general?"

But then again, taking money away from rich people doesn't actively solve the monopoly problem. In fact, it just makes it worse -- by putting the power of market distribution into the government's hands you just trade one monopoly for another.

So no, I don't think you morally owe more to the rest of us because you're rich, and I don't think we need to take your money to prevent some evil from happening to the rest of us -- we can manage just fine with other legal remedies. I'm left with where we started: "How much money do I think you should have?"

Some people are very happy to answer this question. They'll bring up Bill Gates or other billionaires and beat us about the head and shoulders with what "should" be their appropriate contribution. In the numbers game, however, I'm much more interested in the corner store owner who manages to make and save enough to give his family $10 or $20 million -- enough for his kids and grandkids to live comfortably. So aside from people who have so much money it wastes their time to stop and pick up a $100 bill, I find the entire question of my judging what other people should own to be morally repugnant.
That doesn't make sense at all. There is a certain level of spending everyone must be at - food, shelter, a bit of clothing, i.e. the poverty line. Sure the rich eat at Ruth Chris and the poor eat a McDonalds, but if you break it down to the normal level it is tough to spend more than $500 a month at the grocery store per person. It is also tough to spend less than $150 per person per month.

When I'm making $75 an hour as a programmer today I remember when I was making $8 an hour at McDonalds 6 years ago. When 90% of your income is going towards food, rent, shelter and then the government comes in and takes 30% it would effectively leave you with zero. No money to save, no money to pay for education etc.

But for me at $75 an hour, necessities are a small part. Now I'm saving and investing and have no debt and all this great stuff. So your saying it is a huge burden on me to pay 40% tax now so that people trying to get ahead like I was 5 years ago don't have to? Absolutely not. I still have plenty of money for everything I want.

It is more unethical to subsidize your personal discretionary spending at the expensive of somebody's necessities because you are simply greedy. That's the reason why the tax code has always been and will always be progressive - even in schemes like the flat tax system there is a credit for the bare necessities.
Microsoft's Spam Bot has been Blocked
Training Your Users
Nothing new here. Looks like some guy trying to promote his book.
I saw this issue come up on a few HN threads. Hopefully other analytics programs follow Clicky's lead.
ya you(yourock) are 100% correct, even same way i believe ...in upcoming days we will surly get a better free option.
I don't think you can build a community by just writing libraries, frameworks, etc. ;) The crucial (and hard) part is getting people from the outside involved, so that you _don't_ have to write everything yourself, but it will turn into a 'community effort'.

The team working on Clean is pretty small. Currently there are some efforts to make it more friendly and welcoming for other people to join.
Luxury items (fancy cars etc.) should be taxed at a higher rate than basic items. This is already done in various countries on items such as electronics, gaz-guzzlers, bread, milk, etc.

I think if we taxed items appropriately, we would not need income tax on the low and middle classes - they are the ones who can use extra cash to pay for their kids' education (high ROI for the kids), better housing (high ROI for society) and higher quality food (high ROI on $$ saved on health care costs).

Rich people (the kind we want), after a certain point, are not motivated by money - they just want to win and make a difference and that can be done in a high tax society as much much as a low one.
As an addendum to this I'd like to say I'd love to tax SOME of the rich more. The ones who aren't creating real value for the economy and who are really just leeching off of others' ideas and stifling growth (coughauto industrycough for ex).
That's great to hear. I'm 30 with my first kid on the way, and definitely been concerned over where my career will go in the next 20 years. I only came to a silicon valley company 2 years ago, but been doing web work for 13. I was intimidated that I would only be average in silicon valley, but thankfully I found that while there is more talent here overall, there's still just as high a percentage of talentless hacks or brilliant people who don't know how to actually ship.

I think the key is working in environments where your value can be seen and really build your reputation and networks so that by the time you're middle-aged no one has to ask if you know language X, instead they say "this is the guy who built Y". At least that's my plan.
The way this question is being asked, it's nothing but class warfare.

It's one thing to say "we have some extraordinary needs, is it right that those with the greatest means should contribute far more to satisfy those needs?"

It's another thing altogether to simply ask "should we demand that those with lots of money give more of it up?" without accompanying that with any argument about the need.

It seems as if the rich are to be punished simply for being rich. And the fact that I wish that I had more money gives me some moral right to extract some of that wish from those that have managed to achieve that wish on their own.
It works for me (same Chrome version)
Another perspective: many people are born lucky. They may have great intelligence (most of self-made multimillionaires are above average in intelligence), rich parents (and therefore can afford better schools & tutors), some special talent and live in an environment that allows it to develop fully, or great looks, etc. These people end up with a lot of material wealth based on luck of birth.

At the same time, they benefits from services provided by the less fortunate. Owners of large businesses can't be that rich if they don't have enough customers. (If you sell in a small country and don't export, you can never be nearly as rich as Bill Gates.)

Is it fair that they should share some of that luck and wealth back to help the underprivileged and their customers/employees?
I'm curious as to your reasoning here. You seem to be saying that the explanation of need somehow changes the answer someone would give.

So if you robbed a bank because you needed the money, that would be different than if you robbed it because you hate bankers?
by the time you're middle-aged

I'll let you know when I get there.
we should make taxes the same for everybody rich or poor or with a $100 billion fortune.

But here's how we can tax them more.

We make a tax of $100 a year for a simple car for example (a Ford fiesta) and a tax of $1000 for a hummer.
This will be good in my point of view.
However taxing the rich more for the same product is wrong.
"How much money do you owe the rest of us for helping create your riches"

A good chunk. What business can you create that doesn't use the roads, the internet, or the public school educated in this country? Look back into the 20th century at the top marginal bracket, realize that all the infrastructure that we use today was built on the backs of people paying significantly higher taxes than our selfish generation pays today.

And what corner store owner leaves 20 million to their grand kids? I don't think you know much about local small businesses. My uncle is a mechanic, and worked for several years at a small gas station, and then when the owner retired he bought the business. The land was still rented from the gas supplier, and after about 30 years of that he just bought his own plot down the road for $2 million. He now has a half dozen guys working for him and business is great, but to get that $2 million he had to drain out his IRA and all of his retirement to sink into the business. At the end of 40-50 years of owning this business and working 6 days a week, he will probably have a net worth of 4-5 million dollars.

And that is a business with 6 guys charging $50 an hour for car repairs 6 days a week, I don't think selling bubble gum and newspapers yields 20 million bucks.
I completely agree. If Man A with $100,000 and woman B with $500,000 buy the same $50,000 sport car, they pay the same luxury tax on it.

My original question posed to the parent poster was questioning if prices of goods should be based on the income/worth of the individual.
Excellent movement on Spark's part. I've personally been handed a non-compete by a venture capital fund that would make a producer blush. It's preposterous what some firms try to con entrepreneurs into.
It's already 77% totalled up where the economist is based (UK).

40 Income, 10 NI, 12 Employer's NI, 15 VAT. (NI is National Insurance similar to Social Security and VAT is sales tax).

Mortgages aren't tax deductible and capital gains starts at 50% (decreasing over 10 years).

Insanely enough the services people actually use come from separate council tax (a local authority tax). It was about 1000GBP pa last time I was in the UK.
I use 'frameworks' as a handwavy term to encompass 'anything that means you don't need to spend days reinventing the wheel'. If the aforementioned Lisp utilities mean you can do that, then so be it.

(Indent three spaces for code.)
http://www.truthandpolitics.org/top-rates.php

We had 80% tax rates in the 30s.

We had 90% tax rates in the 50s.

We had 70% tax rates in the 60s & 70s.

We had 50% tax rates in the 80s

We had 40% tax rates in the 90s.

Strangely enough, noone quit making money, no matter what tax rate they had to pay