skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first point to note is that the 90% rate kicked in at an earning rate of several million in today's money.

The second (more debateable) point is that the rich, in the end, receive greater benefit from society than the poor. The poor man receives (say) an education, income support, roads, etc. The rich entrepreneur benefits from the fact that each of his employees received an education thanks to society. The rich man benefits to the tune of many millions because society protects his property (both intellectual and physical), and provides him with a stable environment to do business in. The benefits the rich receive are not just personal, but also present in terms of the affiliations that help make them rich.

Sure, there's the question of whether this tax rate is too high, but it's also hard to argue that when someone is earning many millions per year that it's just for them to have all that money, rather than it being distributed a bit more evenly to their workers. Capitalist society does seem to favour income concentrating ever more tightly at the top, and mechanisms need to be in place to address that.
Great post. I love reading about Lisp Machine history. I'll probably have to give in to temptation and get one some day...
Try pressing 15 times for some extra sparkle.
"Again, this is a get-rich-slowly scheme: the business generates enough money to house and feed its three founders, who live together in an apartment that doubles as their workplace."

That part is a bit misleading. Airbnb happened to cross over into profitability about the time the article was written, but the graph is quite steep.
maybe you could opensource your dataset? ;) (no, no, I'm after votes not images)
> Sometimes imperfections are the key to making things special.

Love that comment. Very zen, very Friday, very deep
It's also interesting to note that we had very LOW tax rates at various times in history and there wasn't mass starvation and cannibalism.
I don't really like this plan. First of all it would be near impossible to enforce, because if you were to make $100mm net this year you would move it all to a place where it is untouchable by the wealth tax. You might change citizenship or find some other loophole to hide your assets from the wealth counters.

Second, retirement would have to be looked at entirely differently. I assume the retired would only be taxed at a much lower rate, or not at all. But assigning any wealth tax on the retired implies a government mandated death age, just like a government mandated retirement. See: 'The Giver'

Finally, if you knew that your liquid wealth would be taxed at a certain rate, wouldn't you spend it on something? Houses, cars, stocks? What if Mark Zuckerberg was taxed on his artificial wealth? He can't really sell his FB shares to pay for it. If people knew that they HAD to keep 10% of their millions liquid for the rest of their life they would be less likely to invest it, since eventually they would need it.

I like the unique way of looking at the issue, but I think it's ultimately unworkable.
Do you have any benchmark schammy to confirm?

You could use the XML API as well.
I want to bookmark those pages as their are, not as digg pages. I do not know but I think this is going to backfire on Digg in the long run.
But who does a better job at redistributing money to the poor, the government or the individual? I would argue that individuals are much better at this than the federal government. Bill Gates spends an enormous amount of money on his foundations that help a lot of people. If the government had this money instead would it have been put to as good of use? If anything maybe the government can find new ways of creating even more incentives for individuals to donate to charities and other causes. I don't feel that is realistic though as the government would always rather end up getting the money and be in control than allowing the individual to use their money as they see appropriate. After all, the government is nothing but an extremely large, inept, and greedy corporation. Kind of ironic that they are penalizing GM when they are GM.
Amazing, glad to hear that the upper east side has been cornified thoroughly.

What type of statistics are you looking for? Or better, what type of insights would you like?
Right. I'm just pointing out that it's not really all that useful to know where someones ISP is based, if it's hundreds of miles away from them.
I think we should move to a number system for naming. That would make those two days out of every four years much easier for everyone involved. And perhaps we should make it base 26 so that the numbers don't get absurdly long. And because of the ambiguity between "1" and "l" and "0" and "O," we should just use letters. Problem solved.
I'm an active leaner, unless someone pushes me and I happen to be near a wall. Silly joke aside, you should edit the title of your post.
Which makes it precisely terrible for the use case that started this thread -- safe surfing on public wifi.

It's way more likely that a bad guy is sniffing traffic leaving his tor node than there being a bad guy in the same cafe as you.
>The first point to note is that the 90% rate kicked in at an earning rate of several million in today's money

I did note that by saying "granted it may be his millionth $10 for the year"

>Sure, there's the question of whether this tax rate is too high

That was my question. Do you feel it is just to take away 90% of a person's marginal income?
The problem with this idea is that the rich are more mobile, and will simply relocate globally to a more favorable tax zone, giving you nothing.
Servers of various kinds will be able to use the power. if nothing else, hosting companies will be able to offer cheaper and cheaper "virtual servers" with the same capability.

So long as there is some application for ever more powerful multi-cores, this will work to get more powerful multi-core chips in the hands of consumers.
I only meant to imply that providing such a feature is more work than a "few lines of code" when you're trying to monitor millions of sites in real time.
> 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.

I'm pretty sure that the folks who built said house and cars appreciate the work.

And, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to like some of the technology used in that $100M house. It was nice of the rich guy to pay for the prototypes.
a bit of a silly argument imho. it's like saying back in the mid 90's that 'searching the web' would win over the web itself.
Well, admittedly, that should probably be a mixin, I just grabbed the first thing I saw.

I don't see why it's so bad though - it's not like it's overriding anything.
> As part of our commitment to the environment,

don't pull my dick Debra
I hope everyone considers the current national debt and historical evidence for the rich patriotically paying off the debt after WW2 while reading this.
Honestly, it doesn't really matter to me since I've already had my exit from my company but unfortunately I don't think this is true. Given how much data collection and analysis has to go into good IP geotargeting technology, this really is something that a for-profit company has to do. Otherwise at some point in the last 10 years that Digital Envoy has been around, the company would have been crushed by an open source or cheaper alternative. That isn't true and this is the main reason why, IMHO.
Finally, a layer of indirection even joshu can feel happy about.
Wow, the web's two most obnoxious swollen egos disagree on something. Stop the presses.
Thanks for the detailed suggestions, those are all good points. An api-type feature, like you are suggesting, is on the way, and the other suggestions are now on the list.

Happiness all the way!
I learn in three, I would guess, 'modes'. Passively, where you just pick up knowledge and information. Reactively, where you have a problem and you find what you need to solve it. And Actively, where you're just simply learning.

I however find Active learning to be very difficult, as my brain often tries to disregard it. "Oh well I doubt I'll ever need this, why bother keeping it.", it goes.

But if I have a task, or I'm just idly reading or listening ot something, I soak it up like a sponge.
Oversimplified. Taxes are progressive and the /highest band/ starts at £37,000. Council tax differs from place to place and is also in bands based around the type of property you live in.

You can't simply add VAT like you have, because you obviously can't spend money you don't receive: clearly if you're only receiving 38% of your income, a 15% VAT rate at most can be a smaller percentage of that you do receive, or 5.7% of your total.
What does it matter what you can sign, if the contract doesn't have the support of courts to make it binding?
If you're going to argue "truth", it's poor form to not mention (1) There were significant tax shelters during those times that don't exist today (so the effective rates were far lower) and (2) the fraction of the tax burden paid by "the rich" is significantly higher now than it was then.

But, let's ask a question that Obama was asked during the campaign. Would you raise a given tax rate if the result was less revenue collected? He said yes. Do you? If so, why?
"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."

This is a popular argument. I've never seen any reasonable proof of it. I take the argument as wishful thinking in that most with wealth agree with it and most without disagree.

"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?"

This is also a popular argument. As for doctors, my feeling is there are not enough M.D.s. The M.D. system is rigged to keep doctors in less supply (in the U.S.). It might be a good idea for doctors to make a little less and also work less and produce more doctors to make up for the shortfall. This argument is most likely unique to doctors though.
Wikileaks.de domain has been seized
Okay, let's take this one at a time. Railroads: founded by a partnership between industry and government. Government's effects, aside from land grants, were dubious at best http://www.jstor.org/pss/3115585

Yes, there were bailouts. But that hardly makes modern railroads a function of government intervention. Aside from eminent domain, railroads have been very capable of operating and turning a profit on their own, at least when it comes to freight. Even then, it was deregulation of the industry that brought Conrail back to life (1980 Staggers Act) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_Central#Bankruptcy_and_Con... Even now, passenger rail is a money-sink, one that government continues to find worthwhile but the market does not.

The internet was "invented" by DARPA as a means to make research more effective. Unless you were at a federally-sponsored university, you didn't have internet access. But the rollout of the internet was very much a commercial thing. Delphi, America Online, UUNet, etc were all commercial players and they were the ones who brought internet to the masses. University participation was great in the early 80s when a small percentage of the population used it, but the "real" internet as we know it today runs on Cisco routers over Verizon cable to a local ISP owned by Sixpack Bob. It has grown and done just fine _without_ government help.

Lastly, toll roads are making a come-back, if you haven't noticed. On a recent trip to Florida we saw them everywhere. http://www.orlandosentinel.com/community/news/apopka/orl-lid... Privatization is a current trend, with some commentators worry about the effects on low income drivers http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_19/b4033001....

History is a great thing. You can take some event, like the building of the trans-continental railroad, and focus just on government involvement. Then you can look down another layer and see lots of private sector involvement. Push down yet another layer and you'll find legislators pandering to businesses. Push down yet another and you'll find some businesses trying to build something to make a buck. If you're not seeing the entire depth, it can appear to be anything from government saving the day to free market euphoria. In fact, it's a complex mix of interaction that makes things work. Part of that reason is because of the driving factors: politicians are always looking to make things more complicated and businesses are always looking to create something to make more money.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm on it.

Let me know if there's anything else I can do to amplify your ability to spread happiness.
> ... some people are just infuriating and make one lose one's sense of reason.

A disagreement and an idea.

The disagreement: No one makes me lose my sense of reason. Let's take responsibility for our own emotions, responses, etc.

The idea: Learn to avoid responding at all, if a reasonable response is not possible.
I have no idea if this will show up now that this topic is dead, but:

In exactly the same way that no one needs 5 personal cars, no one needs 5 sets of clothes. I challenge you to come up with an argument for having 5 sets of clothes that isn't merely a wealth-displaced* version of the argument for 5 cars.

* Wealth-displaced meaning that the only difference is our collective wealth, so that the cars argument is the same as the clothes argument would have been 200 years ago.
Putting the money to work in a manner that builds companies and creates jobs has a different long-run effect than giving it to someone who will go buy a burger with it.

In the short-run, consuming helps that same dollar get spent over and over. In the long-run, creating wealth and jobs is more valuable, IMO.

When raising taxes drives capital to locales which are more capital-friendly (chiefly via lower taxes), then it inevitably takes job creation with it.
Is slavery the only comparison you've got? Because slavery isn't remotely like a noncompete, which makes your argument sound weak.
I can forsee situations where it might become complicated. For instance, a bunch of 'critical' hardware is in a datacenter somewhere and you are also in that datacenter. A cybersecutiy emergency happens and to protect this.. whatever it may be, the datacenter or parts of it get airgapped.

And your stuff becomes unaccessible, be it a corporate website, your own personal server, whatever. And there's not much you can do to remedy it either.
I'm currently using a very neat framework called EyeTunes (http://www.liquidx.net/eyetunes/) which handles all iTunes communications.

When I was prototyping I would access iTunes information by AppleScripts.
Google, Universal to Launch Music Hub 'Vevo'
Oh, ok. I interpreted your comment to mean that no major service could pull real time analytics beacuse it's just too hard. Sure we're a lot smaller than Google but 200,000 is a pretty big number if I do say so myself.
Any idea what they are doing? If it's just looking for cloaking you think it would be better to not have the search.live.com referrer. That makes it easy to game if you were somehow trying to cloak for the Live bot which I don't think is a real problem anyway.
that's a clever idea. nicely done!

have you considered enabling click-to-buy for the MP3s and collecting affiliate fees? i could see many impulse buys happening that way.
Overriding core methods is a definite no-no. And if you were actually going to distribute something, you'd probably have a new class descending from Array and add your methods to that.

But for private code - you've got a bunch of Arrays, you want them to output something interesting - what's wrong with that?
The guy who made motormouths should have given it a more generic name. You know, so the site could expand to different products later on.
You know what, you're right. I was thinking of something like:

if (strpos('http://digg.com/', $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']))
header('Location: whateverPage');

But that would block all traffic from Digg, including links in comments, etc. To perform the same check as the regex would require much more code.

However, I stand by my Apache recommendation as the best option.
Almost immediately Clifford Stoll's TED preso jumped into my mind. "If you want to know about the future, don't ask me... I'm old...ask a kindergarten teacher." (paraphrased)
I'm deeply troubled that the majority of the respondents here are in such strong favor taxes as a means of wealth redistribution and social engineering.

I wonder if it's because you are natural problem solvers, and see taxes as a way to solve problems. With taxes you can reward behavior you like and punish behavior you don't like (social engineering). You can attempt to address the logarithmic nature of wealth and the perceived unfairness of that. For a hacker, taxes are seductive, I suppose.

We've come to a point where taxes are so accepted that your moral right to take money from your neighbor at the point of a gun is not even questioned anymore. The debate has moved from whether you are morally right to do so, to whether it is economically optimal to do so. This is a shame.

To me, the Laffer curve is ignored at your peril when contemplating raising taxes. If that stops your enthusiasm for this course of action, I'll take what I can get, but it's like having you refrain from killing me because prison would be inconvenient for you. I'd really rather you didn't kill me because you felt it was morally wrong to do so.

There are other ways for governments to raise revenue besides income taxes, but they lack the social engineering and individual control that income taxes provide. I understand why governments like income taxes. What I am struggling to understand is why you do.
Invisible children - Soldier Children in Uganda
"How do you get started? All that's required is a great idea for a product that will fill a need in the 21st century."

Wow! So easy! Where do I sign up???? :-)
What about a "three strikes" for bad comments ?
Nice article, but like many mainstream sources, they leave a big gap in the technical center.

a. great idea
b. computer magic
c. get rich

Their examples of computer magic?

"He visited RentACoder.com and Elance.com sites where you can find software developers."

"they quickly enlisted as their partner a former roommate..., who had some technical skills"

If only it were that simple.
Another link "shortener" service? Don't we have enough of those in all their different shapes and colors?

No thanks.
> enumerable (i.e. whether it appears in a for-in loop

Huh? I can see "can appear in a for-in loop", but "appears" is different and I'm not sure why I care or what it even means means. (Appears when is one question.)
"I for one, would never put my time in to a community around a closed source language."

I for two. With open source, one knows one's contribution is going to help others, will be another small push of momentum, and generally just all-round contribute to the virtuous cycle of this language is good because lots of people help becuase the language is good, etc.

Closed source? You've got to be kidding. Whatever it is, they can do it themselves.

Whole different atmosphere.
This move doesn't do anything to reduce the "market manipulation" you allege. If employers are negotiating from a position of strength, they'll get all manner of other concessions, starting with wages and benefits --- which is all most people care about. I don't see the principle that you're arguing from here.

Your comparisons are a little silly, too. There are good reasons (right of way, regulation) and bad (monopoly concessions, lobbying, corruption) that private utilities own entire markets. These have nothing to do with the forces behind noncompetes. No noncompete has helped establish any company's monopoly in any product or service you can name, even regionally.

Noncompetes are a trade. Companies provide employees with access to resources, client lists, and trade secrets. They want to ensure that rolodexes aren't shopped and product plans aren't bootlegged. These are reasonable goals. Employment contracts are blunt and inefficient instruments for accomplishing those goals, but that doesn't make the intent corrupt.
We're definitely looking at all publishing platforms, Wordpress just being the first.

In the meantime, there's a great button you can add to your site (courtesy of ConvoTrack) that, when clicked, will show related comments:

http://convotrack.com/
The answer could be "both". The economy needs both the consumption and the top-down execution. Keeping it all in balance is the real trick. This argument would be better positioned as "What is the right balance of taxation for the short term to provide a healthy economy?"
> It almost goes without saying that many more start-ups fail than succeed.

When will this myth finally be put to rest?
I marked active because your described experience doesn't feel very familiar to me.

I either get concepts very quickly regardless of whether I need them at the moment or not, or else they don't click and I often get a bit intimidated by the foreign feeling. The appearance of a real relevant problem may force me to work to understand concepts I'm not comfortable with, but I don't think it particularly helps me understand.

The active style may in some cases help one solve problems more efficiently later, but the reactive style directly "wastes time" only when you're in school and have scheduled times to go spend several hours attempting to learn in ways that don't particularly work for you. If you're not now in school, probably you should just not spend any more time on something you don't yet need than it takes to have roughly an idea of when you might need it.
I've been involved in legal posturing between companies over noncompetes before, too. I wonder if, even if courts refuse to enforce noncompetes against individuals, the agreements will still have teeth between companies; just the cost of taking an ultimately doomed lawsuit to court might be deterrent enough.
It's all good. Please keep in mind that Hapylink is not a url-shortener, but a url-happifier. Like you say, url-shortening is over crowded, so Hapylink focuses on more of a niche audience of users with unhappy links.
Q&A: Turing Award winner Barbara Liskov
Plus a portable hole. But, if you ever stop paying, I stick one into the other and...
I love politics, for a lot of the reasons you bring up. People simply don't make any sense at all.

As an example, if you had this same generic conversation -- government controlling what you can and cannot possess -- and apply it to pot, a lot of these same commenters would be yelling about government interference with private property rights. If you were on a site that favored the drug war, say a religious site, these commenters would be arguing that government can only be involved in people's lives so much, and that past that point it's immoral. Some of the religious folks would counter-argue that it's in society's best interest, and that no good comes from pot. The other side would say you can't enforce it anyway. The religious side would say well you need tighter drug laws. We need to show folks we're serious about this!

Now take the same crowd and talk about progressive taxes, and everybody changes seats. It's like cognitive musical chairs. The music stops and everybody argues the opposite viewpoint and takes up their opponent's reasoning.

It's great. People are wonderfully irrational.
Most links are actually longer - but they are a lot happier and more like to viewers smile, which is the core focus of Hapylink.
In theory, the ability to sign a non-compete increases an employee's options. In practice, if they're enforced, many employees no longer have much option for employment without signing them.

But don't worry, even if this bill passes, you'll still have the option of signing enforceable non-competes in almost every other state in the U.S.