skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I usually can understand abstract concepts, but also need, or prefer, to work all the way from the bottom up, just to make sure it works like I think it does. I can't just believe something the teacher tells me, I have to prove it works that way, based on past knowledge. But it is necessary to be able to function in higher levels of abstraction, I understand matrix multiplication as a bunch of dot-products, not as sums of products of numbers, for example, and from that easily derives the need for equal number of columns/rows.
You realize, of course, that the railroads and internet were built by people who made money doing so, not by taxes, right? Roads used to be maintained privately as well.

Substitute "chain of local stores" for local store. Thanks for sharing your story.

Actually, if I understand correctly, although the tax brackets were high, nobody actually paid that much. It was all a shell game. Politicians set the rate high for political purposes, and then left in loopholes so that the rich got away without paying much. In fact, I'm thinking they actually paid much less in those days than they do now. (sorry, no link)
In this case, it moves the luck part back to being born the son of Mrs. Gates. :-) (with the connections and intelligence)
The argument for and against taxing the rich.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121124460502305693.html

http://usbudget.blogspot.com/2008/05/you-cant-soak-rich-resp...

The former was posted earlier. the latter, it just came up on google when I was looking for the wsj article.
That's why I'd be in favor of wealth (rather than income) taxes.

If I was to earn $100mm net this year I could sit on my ass for the rest of my life, effectively taking me out of the motivated labor pool.

That much money would probably take my kids out of the pool too even though the hypothetical lazy brats would grow up spoiled and highly undeserving.

A wealth tax rate of 10% per year (halving my wealth every ~7 years) would encourage me to carry on thinking of new things, and make sure that my descendants wouldn't get a free ride.

For comparison:
Wealth tax 10%, 100mm in year 0, 50mm left in year 7, incentive to keep working to stop the pile shrinking.
Income tax 50%, 50mm in year 0, 50mm left in year 7, no incentive to work.
Awesome. On Cornify, if you click the button five times, every piece of text gets a very happy modifier. I derive much pleasure from this.

Will Hapylink ever add the same functionality? Because it would probably end war and hunger.
I think that would be near impossible to enforce, and probably not worth the trouble. Look at all the families that lie about their income and net worth so their kids can get scholarships and student-aid at expensive universities.

People will always try and avoid taxes, thus, taxes should be kept simple to avoid loopholes. This is why I really like consumption taxes as opposed to income tax.

I think that their should be higher estate taxes, people should not be able to inherit massive fortunes. Some money is ok, but I like the saying, "You should leave enough money for your kids to do whatever they want, but not enough for them to do nothing at all"

I know I changed the subject, sorry.
The gap between what would be a smart hire, an experiened programmer, vs what is a stupid hire, any guy with 10+ years of RoR experience, is always grim. And woe onto any good programmer screwed by a stupid requirement for language x.

But there are alternatives. Look for smarter employers, employ yourself, and lastly switch industry and program for fun, if you're good you will get noticed.
But is there a logical reason to not do it?
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i have a similar experience, i'm running a free Barcode Creator software, it's the best free ever in the market.

I used adsense with it and it made $670 or so the last year, not so much but i think better than what donations can make. (I have few traffic 200 unique a day)

Charging for it can be good, the application need to look professional and priced correctly. you'll have other few things to look into, like how payment will be made, supporting your users...

I was very busy for the last while or i would make a pro version and charge for it. So my advice : Go for it!
I haven't accomplished anything similar, but I have a few ideas. You can always just charge people for it, but I'm not sure if this is substantial enough for people to pay money for. However, I would love to be wrong.

Another avenue is to create a service that compiles these CUE sheets for sets that don't come packaged with them. You can aggregate cue sources, or even potentially outsource identification to Amazon's Turk. If not identification outright, data entry from multiple sources.

I'm really not sure what the market is for sets, since I listen mostly to individual tracks, but hey, it's an idea.

edit: I'm curious, did you write this as a proper cocoa component, or a COM object using Carbon? Last time I looked at writing iTunes plugins, I had to use Carbon w/ COM.
Webmasters also had this problem with Cuil.
One of the reasons a laptop is the design it is, is that the screen is positioned in a comfortable position for viewing. I can't really see how you can sit comfortably with a tablet like thing. Hold it with one hand and try to navigate with the other? Could get tiring.
With great power comes great responsibility. The real debate is whether that responsibility should be exercised freely by the individual, or forcibly via taxation, but the fundamental social value should still apply in either case.
I don't think that Microsoft is an exception to that, actually. C# didn't really start gaining popularity until AFTER ECMA ratified it as an open standard (same for the .NET platform and the CLR).
> $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.

Erm. Whoa there. This seems to me to be fundamentally flawed in no less than two respects...

1) $1 may be less valuable to a rich man than a poor man but that -does-not- imply that it is of less value to society for it to be in the rich mans hands than in the poor mans hands. In fact, it's quite easy to argue (and is often done) that it's substantially more valuable, to society as a whole, in the rich mans hands than in the poor man's hands.

2) More broadly, and the first point follows from this point, this is a false dichotomy. Society doesn't have a fixed number of wealth and it is not a zero sum game. You cannot trade dollars 1:1 and ignore the economic impact.

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

I find it interesting that you take the first proposition at face value as "self-evidently" true but feel the need to question this second proposition. I find the first one substantially more controversial than the second.

Of course increasing the marginal tax rate is going to have some quantifiable effect on the people's habits. Let's say I have a private medical practice and I have the choice between working fridays and getting taxed 70%, or I can have the practice closed up on Fridays so I can play golf, what would I do? What % of doctors would close up shop on Friday?

Whatever the answer is, it's not zero.
Batteries fueled by blood
getclicky.com monitors over 200,000 sites and it's real time. Sure it's challenging to provide that level of service but without challenge life is dull.
It's OK and I upvoted you.

I think anything other than a flat tax is immoral. I think a national sales tax and elimination of income taxes is a great idea.

I merely posed my original response as a thought experiment.
I think this is the article I was thinking of... http://career-resources.dice.com/it-job-market/2008-2009/sil... ... the bottom line is the market favors employers much more now than last year
Yes, for several reasons.

1. Ignore, for a second, the diminishing marginal utility argument. What do most poor people spend their money on? Food, household items, and rent in low-COL areas. Mostly, these are commodity goods. What do most rich people spend their money on? Trophy properties, expensive wines, and brand-name art-- in other words, items whose value is indexed to the status they confer. If you give the poor more money, their standard of living will improve. If you give the rich more money, the things they buy just become more expensive, and their standard of living doesn't change that much. The same argument holds when taxes are increased.

2. The rich get more, even on a percentage basis, from the government. If the government builds a road to a factory, each worker is a stakeholder in the project, using the road to get to work every day. However, the factory owner is a much bigger stakeholder; not only does the road enable him to get to work every day, but it also enables his workforce to do so. He's getting a lot more out of that road.

3. Money is the world's first AI algorithm-- an algorithm to allocate resources and manage society. Like many crude algorithms put to complex problems, it does a terrible job of this if left to its own devices, making improvements for a few iterations but later diverging to a degenerate state, and needs constant correction through means such as progressive taxation.
Electronic Stylus with Writing Feel patent:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=6MceAAAAEBAJ&dq=berkson
People forget that rich people don't just take their money and throw it in a giant vault somewhere never to be seen again. Rich people and companies have to invest their money, which can create jobs and other opportunities for poorer people.

The real question here is who do you want to invest your money? An elected official who has never created any value in a marketplace or a wealthy individual who built their fortune by building something that people wanted?
Sorry, didn't mean to jump at it like that. It's just URL-shorteners have been annoying me lately. Just because they're easy to make doesn't mean you should; there is no hack value in them, as nothing new is there to be discovered and no new ground to break; and they have no business value, aside from being, potentially worth BILLIONS as an integral twitter utility for the next generation of enterprise web grids and semantic net appliances ..meh.
Did you miss Cornify on April 1st? Ahhhhh, kittens everywhere. One of them was constantly batting at a floating butterfly. You should be really sad you missed it. This will cheer you up:

http://hapylink.com/supermerrysunnyjollyfunfriend
>We had 90% tax rates in the 50s.

A man makes $10 (granted it may be his millionth $10 for the year) and we take away $9 from him.

Do you honestly think this is right and just?
There are also other studies indicating that raising taxes on the rich has no effect. They'll just figure out a way to wriggle out of it, and the government won't collect any more money.

http://www.theneweditor.com/index.php?/archives/8036-You-Can...
"Ruby is undisciplined, monkey-patching lunatics"

Look, what is so innately wrong with monkey-patching? You mention it in a distinctly perjorative tone, but why? Yes it can be used badly, but it can also be bloody brilliant.

Bad monkey-patching: touching any method defined in core.

Good monkey-patching:

class Array

def to_sentence
return "I contain #{self[0..-2].map {|x| x.to_s + ', '}}and #{self[-1]}."
end

end

Seriously, being able to do throw that kind of thing into the beginning of your program, extend the core classes just like that, is frickin' awesome.

People abuse it, yes, like people abuse any power they're given. Just last week I wasted several hours trying to fix some strange ActiveRecord errors which turned out to be the morons in Rails Core monkeypatching Hash#to_json; my solution ended up being monkeypatching it straight back. Great. Obviously, I wish I didn't have to do that kind of thing.

However - don't blame the technique, blame the people who misuse it. Used properly, it can be a dream come true. Always wish that Time could print to string including milliseconds? Baby, I've got Time#to_s_usecs for you in three lines of code.

Monkeypatching is a sharp knife - you can cut your bread or you can cut yourself. Either way, it's not the knife's fault. And either way, I'd rather have a knife than not have one : )
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Taking 34% of my income or taking 39% of my income won't change how I work ... Taking 80% would change my mind.

Presumably you realize the 80% would only be taken from a fraction of your income, right? That's how tax brackets work generally.
>I find it interesting that you take the first proposition at face value as "self-evidently" true but feel the need to question this second proposition.

Excellent point and very well written response.
Yes True.

as a new developer to the programming, I really don't mind about the numbers blogs like Techcrunch are showing. I feel that the Internet is so large and opportunities are always available if you are competent
Maybe Design patterns is not so interesting or life-changing topic (from a programming point of view) after all.

http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/51/

Some topics do not interest us. So, its fine if you don't feel connected to the topic at that moment.

Knowing the general "topology" of the topic for later recall and digging-into is more than adequate.
Ehh, but the income bracket varies wildly and doesn't show any sort of relation between tax rates and amounts earned. The question is are people less likely to produce another dollar of income if that dollar is taxed higher.

Another tricky thing with the tax brackets is that it only applies to income tax. Once you're making over a certain amount most of your money will come in other forms such as stocks and dividends.
Get Rich Slow
WHAT? Are you kidding me?

Go read a book on the railroads - that is a prime example of exactly what I'm talking about. Nothing Like it In The World by Stephan Ambrose is a quick read and covers my point.

The railroads were granted the land tracts by the government - they didn't buy it. That was in the 19th century, what about the 20th century resurection of Conrail in the northeast? We wouldn't have railroads around NYC at all if it wasn't for a government bailout.

The internet was invented by the federal government. It was largely expanded by universities - funded by state governments.

The toll roads utterly failed in this country, thats why they were nationalized. The interstate highway system was entirely federally funded. Who built the bridges that I commute over everyday to work? Not private investors, in fact even if they were profitable in their own right and people wanted to build them - they never could because land had to be TAKEN from people against their will in order to build something for the common good. NYC would not be what it is today without the tunnels and bridges - but when neighbor hoods were getting cleared for the port authority building, do you think people like you thought it was a good idea?
I agree with your counter points above. However, I'd say that for the consumption purpose, at least, it's mostly true. No one really needs $100 million house or 5 personal cars.

If that $1 is invested, rather than consumed by the rich, then, it could potentially be more beneficial to the society.
Thanks I didn't know that PDF have JS abilities!
No, sorry, that's not what I meant to suggest at all -- I'm far from a moral relativist!

My point was that absent any further discussion, a "yes" answer to the question seems to imply that we should take more money from the rich simply because it's there. I imagine some Congresscritters saying "oh cool, we got another billionaire; let's see if we can find something else to spend this guy's money on".

Contrast this with "we've got a war on our hands, and need to pay for our defenses somehow; if we absolutely must have that money, perhaps it should come from the rich". (note that I'm not supporting, or even referring to, any particular war here, this is a thought experiment)

I personally do not believe that having a need makes it OK. But framing the question next to a need changes the nature of the question. As it was stated, it appears to be purely envy and class warfare; with a balancing need in the equation it changes to the philosophical question of moral relativism -- which I disagree with, but it is a defensible position.
A strong case could be made that many of the wealthy enjoy their opulence due to class warfare against the poor, cycling wealth upwards and taking far more than the actual market value of what they produce, simply by being able to leverage wealth and power into more wealth and power. It's not true across the board, but our economy is far from a pure meritocracy.

I'm not in favor of "wealth redistribution" or taxing the rich a priori, but I think an evidence-based, non-punitive progressive tax is quite reasonable, particularly if the benefit goes to shared infrastructure that enables class mobility (public transportation, education, etc).
you do remember we fought this tiny war in the 40s that needed to be repaid? Seems to me that a lot of people have no problem being patriotic, until it hits their wallet.

Is 90% tax rate optimal? Maybe not, but it just goes to show you that even with a 90% tax rate, it wasn't the end of the world.

Funny, during the red scare, 90% tax rate was still considered capitalism, and now a 39% instead of 35% is considered communism.
Get Rich Slow: Paul Graham & AirBnB (YC 09)
Agreed maybe I didn't make that clear.

Say the top marginal bracket is >250k, and I made 350k. Under a 40% marginal rate I would still get 60k for my extra effort - that is a new car or part of a boat or vacation house, but under 80% I would only get 20k extra for all my trouble.

The difference between someone getting paid 250k and 350k is a lot of work, but the 20k you get to show for it is basically nothing - <10% increase in take home money for a >25% increase in work. I could cut my spending by some amount and invested it and had a lot more hours with my family.

Numbers aside, the main point I was trying to make is that there is a point at which the marginal tax rate becomes too burdensome, and in my opinion 40% is not it, but 80% is.
Economists like Friedrich Hayek have shown that the amount of money you can make from any endeavor is a direct indication of the value that society as a whole derives from that endeavor. Thus, if your work doesn't get you rich, it's because society doesn't value your contribution as much as the "rich-making" one. (that's not to say that society doesn't value the "poor" one, but that it doesn't value your marginal addition to the field, as much)

there are some hidden assumptions there, particularly surrounding externalities. But I think that those only affect edge cases and on the whole, still allow us to do relative comparisons.
This is fine if this will be only used by you. Now what if you started distributing this, say in a gem? The person using your software may already have a to_sentence monkey-patch in place, and your gem they are using interferes with that.

Also, what if someone monkey-patches a core method of Array? Any one else consuming this script has a broken build they need to deal with it. Most of the time, these collisions do not occur, but sometimes they do and and often in subtly and hard-to-detect ways.
You argument is based on the idea that taxation is really just another way of paying for services (public transport, policing, etc.). If you accept that premise, than being a flat-taxer makes some degree of sense, but you should also be in favor of huge user fees - if you don't use homelessness shelters or public pools, why should your tax dollars pay for them?

Taxation, as I see it though, is more than that. Sure, you're paying for the fire department, but you're also paying for "civilization", for lack of a better word. You're paying for things like the food stamp program, which (if this question applies to you) you would be nowhere near. It's accepting that in order to have a somewhat decent society for all involved, we need more money than would come if everyone was charged at the same rate, and as such, you charge more to the people who can afford it.
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I'd like to hear your arguments for it being substantially more valuable for the rich man to have the dollar than the poor. At least in this economy it seems like I am constantly hearing about how it is better to put money in the hands of the less well off because they will spend it and it will help drive the economy.
On the other hand, it's the only way to create something that people don't know they want until they see it.
"It is more unethical to subsidize your personal discretionary spending at the expensive of somebody's necessities because you are simply greedy."

Is that really the best language to use? Is it subsidizing people to NOT take their money? Given that you support increased taxation for the wealthy, can I ask why you aren't voluntarily sending extra money to the government?

In any event-- governments are good at certain things that require huge scale to work-- national defense, highways, trips to the moon, etc. What they are really freakin' lousy at is redistributing wealth efficiently. For every taxed dollar, how much actually finds its way to deserving poor? How good is the government at deciding between those who deserves it and those who made a bunch or stupid decisions and should live with the consequences?

On the other side of the coin, what does "rich" mean? What about a family that pulls down $300k a year but has fabulously expensive medical bills for a dying parent/grandparent? Or a sick kid? Or a big extended family that's actually pretty poor that they want to set up college funds for?

I agree that we have a responsibility to help those who are deserving and in need. As someone who's on the high side of the scale by many standards, I'm happy to take that responsibility. But why, exactly, should I be forced to hand the responsibility (and then wealth I've generated) to a government who is horrible at distributing wealth and pretty bad at filtering out people who aren't really deserving?

There are organizations that rate charities on how efficiently they distribute donated dollars. How do you think the US government would fare on this scale?
No, both of those are bad monkey-patching.

There is no reason for that function to be defined as a method in Array.
If you had to spend a sizable chunk of your money supporting your parents or paying for a sibling's college education or [fill in the blanks], I wonder how welcoming you would be of a 40% tax rate when making $75 an hour.

There is something inherently unfair in making people pay taxes at a higher rate, just because you arbitrarily determine that they can afford it
Scobleizer: Mike Arrington and I Disagree on the Future
I think this whole redistribution debate fundamentally overlooks the fact that what (all) people need is not money, but rather a comfortable place to live, healthy food to eat, clean water to drink, and medical attention as needed (Level 0.5 of Maslow's hierarchy of needs). If this were available to everyone for free, I don't think people would mind the rich being in the same tax bracket.

I realize that an implementation of such a project would be insanely complex, but that's another discussion.