skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you were earning £50,000 as a self employed person (after all expenses) the national insurance contributions would be less than the national insurance contributions of an employed person. For 2013/2014:

£50,000 Employee: Tax £9,822.00 NI £4,214.64

£50,000 Self Employed: Tax £9,822.00 NI £3,217.03
You didn't even bother to read the article, it says "family member or intimate acquaintance." If you're intimate with "drug dealers killing each other" then I stand corrected.
Any luck on that page?
Interesting. Thanks for sharing your perspective. That's certainly encouraging.
"Each blood test: cost $X"
"Each x-ray: cost $Y"

etc etc.

That way patients can ask the doctors if the tests are actually needed.

You're right that emergency care becomes a lot more complicated.
Link, with anchor, to the specific clause: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/922#d_7
We’ve got a Butterfly Labs Bitcoin miner, and it’s pretty darn fast
How Feedly Is Outdoing Google’s Aggregator
You should look up Andrew Joseph Galambos (who changed his name from Joseph Andrew Galambos as to not infringe on his father's "property"), I'm sure you'll like his thoughts on the issue.

Meanwhile, I leave you this: http://mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
People with sufficiently serious diseases will die, period, even if they're the wealthiest people on Earth. I don't see how the inevitability of death caused by disease is a useful argument. If there was some disease that one person had, and that could be cured only by pooling the entire wealth of the Earth, should we forcefully take that wealth to cure that one person?
Interview: John McAfee Answers Your Questions
Do you mean Australian super or 401(k)? Would love to get some more detail on this.
Last I heard, Elon promised to dig into the Hyperloop after his 1st quarter earnings were announced. This seems like a fine time to toss around ideas for what it actually might be.
Working at a place like that is a curse. Leaving is a blessing. Getting fired is a blessing in disguise.

Are you working at a better place now?
I am a self-employed US citizen living in Sweden, so I can relate some of the paperwork. I manage it because I had a good accountant before I left the US, and she handles all of the paperwork.

First, be aware that only the US and Eritrea taxes its citizens on their world-wide income, no matter where they live. If I were a South African citizen living in Sweden then I wouldn't have to pay taxes back to South Africa. But I am a US citizen, so I have to file taxes for both countries.

Of that, $95,100 in 2012 is tax free, so I only pay taxes on what I make over that. Which I did one year, so that was fun trying to figure out how to pay the IRS from an overseas bank account.

The US has a bunch of bilateral agreements on income taxes so that I don't have double taxation. However, there's only a handful of countries with bilateral social security agreements with the US. Luckily, Sweden is one of them; I needed to get a form to prove that as a self-employed person I was covered. Being self-employed overseas makes things more complicated.

From what I can tell, if I had moved to New Zealand then I would be paying social security to both countries.

I also need to report the maximum value of each of my accounts, because of the FBAR requirements. Some people have gotten in trouble with it. See http://www.thelocal.se/39522/20120306/ for some examples. ("the penalty for non-compliance of FBAR is $10,000 per bank account per year, with the IRS looking back six years").

Have you filed your FBAR statement?

Then there's problems with the banks. Swedish banks really don't want customers who are US citizens, because the US requires a lot of extra paperwork from the bank. FACTA makes this worse. I am a permanent residence here, with an account which was opened before the new requirements went into place, but last month I spent an anxious 30 minutes at the bank while they figured things out.

There are more complications for a US citizen who wants to invest in a company. I think there's more reporting obligations for the company in that case.

And of course I pay for a CPA to handle things, since there's no way I would keep track of the relevant laws myself.

It ends up being this odious choice - how much are you willing to pay and how much hassle will you put up with in order to keep your citizenship?

The even worse case is for someone who is an American citizen by birthright, but was born, raised, and lives outside of the US, with no intention of going to the US. I think these people are still supposed to file taxes and deal with all of this mess - and are potentially subject to huge fines for not having done so already, should the IRS decide to go after them.

Also, it makes sense for a few corner-case reasons. The Wikipedia page on "Renunciation of citizenship" mentions that Vincent Cate 'renounce[d] his US citizenship to avoid the possibility of violating US laws that may prohibit US citizens from "exporting" encryption software.'
Don't you have to pay duty in order to export goods to another country? Isn't it the same thing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_(poetry)
Unproductive coding sessions: are you having one of those days?
Julian Assange doesn't use email. "And encrypted email is possibly even worse"
I asked God who should be model for Sisteen chapel. Ben Franklin. Kinda sorry I asked. I hate the Jews for asking His name. He said "I am", fuck yerself.

God says...
grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley.

The words of Job are ended.

32:1 So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous
in his own eyes.

32:2 Then was kindled the wrath of Elihu the son of Barachel the
Buzite, of the kindred of Ram: against Job was his wrath kindled,
because he justified himself rather than God.

32:3 Also against his three friends was his wrath kindled, because
they had found no answer, and yet had condemned Job.

32:4 Now Elihu had waited till Job had spoken, because they were elder
than he.

32:5 When Elihu saw that there was no answer in the mouth of these
three men, then his wrath was kindled.

----

"wrath kindled" is cosmic ray

RAM changes with rays

Job
So basically technically illiterate people are subsidizing Engadget and Huffing Post and a bunch of others. I should send my résumé over while the gravy train is chugging along.
I don't think data really helps you get to an answer. I can only go by my experience living in America.

My observations are that Americans definitely look out for themselves. People tend to give (as you stated) in ways that directly or indirectly benefit themselves.

These are broad generalizations but having lived here for 30 years I'd not consider our society to be generous by any stretch of the imagination.
Be a Hackathon Hero
My Resume Sucks
I will recommend feedly.com, nice UI/UX , if you want a different approach, you might also check http://www.feedsapi.org , nice UI/UX as well and easy to use.
You should "Show HN" how you managed to get your grandmother to use pgp.
If you know a password generation algorithm, you can compute a lower bound on the average time to crack a password given that it was generated by that algorithm. Some individual password might happen to get unlucky, but you can still have a good general idea of the strength of a password if you know the set it was drawn from and the distribution.
Having experienced medical care in a number of different countries, I am convinced that rationing is the heart of the problem.

For example, as more treatments for symptoms of old age are invented, more is demanded and spent per elderly person (who can blame them). The problem is that in the West the elderly are increasing relative to the working population (medicare enrollment in the US is expected to double in the next 15-20 years).

Governments in socialized healthcare countries have to decide how to allocate services between the young and the old. Free market advocates would argue that a true free market system would allocate resources appropriately (richer older folks would sacrifice medical care for themselves in order to pay for their younger relatives).

I don't know what is the right solution. The idea of a lightly-regulated free market where innovation happens appeals to me, but I can't see it happening in this political climate.
I love using Glacier for photo archival. Every month, I transfer all the photos of my Android device and my wife's iPhone, zip them, and push to Glacier. It's very manual at the moment, but it's super cheap archival for all my photos.
The fact that the £5k is charged to your employer, not you, doesn't mean you didn't "pay" it (you never "paid" taxes anyway, they were deducted before the money was ever in your hands), it just makes the system more opaque (and makes people believe they pay less in taxes than they actually do).

I agree that it's a fundamental property of modern societies to ensure universal health care, one way or the other. What angers me about the UK model is how the system handles a scandals like Stafford Hospital: with anything less than total fury. At Stafford Hospital (est. 400-1200 patients died as a result of poor care 2005-2009). One manager resigned, one was suspended on full pay. Years later, some meagre compensations has been paid out, some apologies and an inquiry which one party will now use to push the same reforms (maybe they're sensible, maybe they're not) they always wanted to push, and the other party will try to block them for the same reasons they will always try to block them.

Yadda yadda yadda, in the meantime, people died, no-one felt any consequences. The same people in the same organisation that let this happen are still here. And no, I'm not vengeful-blood-in-the-street-type person, but I'm not seeing the whole "Shit, this is a systemic failure, we're all part of the system, thus we're all responsible. How do we fix this?"
But, Aaron Greenspan is synonymous with Think Corporation, which he himself emphasizes in his request to press this claim, as a non-lawyer individual, without the usual (by rule) corporate counsel. Greenspan is the 100% owner, the author of this complaint, and the origin of its offbeat legal reasoning. To leave him and his personality out of the headline, and name the artificial corporate persona instead, would hide the real story.
> The baby boomers idea of self-esteem is disgusting.

It seems to be the same as yours: "If people had more self esteem they would want to be more like me"
Ask HN: Which Web host is the best?
I am deciding between NetworkSolutions and SiteGround. What do you think are the best hosts to start a website on?
No, it isn't, but it becomes much more difficult when you feel justified in your actions.

This is one of the areas that having "no-men" is a good idea. Someone who will force you to reëxamine your idea and lay out alternatives.
Strictly speaking this is not controlled by any regulation You simply aren't going to get the experience necessary to perform certain surgeries with any proficiency without the aide of the gatekeepers. Also the reason for the steep price differences from state to state is partly due to a lack of a supply of doctors with a booming population of people who are seeking more medical care so I would argue decreasing the barrier to entry into the medical field while not decreasing standards should be a part of the plan.
The world’s first gyroscopically stabilised two-wheeler
Right but if a society cannot possibly survive on its own, then what? If the settlement is tied by umbilical to a company or country or treaty org here, it's hard to act like it's an independent entity, because it's not one.

I think we're certainly capable by now to create a charter that hands the colony over to itself at some point, 10, 20, 50 years in the future.
That's only because companies tend to release market sensitive information outside of trading hours. If you do it within trading hours, a trading halt must be in place. In which case, the major moves up or down of a stock is still outside of trading hours. Price changes are discrete, not continuous.
Discrete Cosine Transforms - How JPGs work, and fun secret images
Chinese DIY Inventions
> It's not going to be the least bit inspiring to send people to Mars and plant a flag, or ride around in a rover.

Uhh... it would definitely be at least a bit inspiring.
It could be a DVD of You Got Served.
> I'm curious if anyone does it now for reasons entirely unrelated to taxes or inheritance or finance or the hassle of filing taxes/regulatory in general, but purely as a political protest or something like that.

Yes. Despite the HN headline and the lede paragraph of the linked article ascribing this to US taxes, the article's "poster boy" (I mean, literally, the example of the trend who they lead with a big photograph of, and the only one of the two named examples who is quoted actually discussing his motive in the article) -- Mahmood Karzai, who has lived in Afghanistan for 12 years and is the elder brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, cites his reason as "I might become politically active, therefore I decided to give up my [U.S.] passport." Nothing to do with taxes, there.
It's funny, I was thinking literally the exact same thing. I just put some money onto Watsi, and I think I'll keep doing that every time we get 'grellas top-post.
Mark Zuckerberg's Fwd.us draws fire from some in tech industry
Just to offer perspective, the interest to borrow shares of Tesla as of 2nd May was 46.10%. It was 85% as of 26th March.
While the Declaration states that they (Jefferson et al.) see it as their civic duty to fight an oppressive government (a fairly Lockean view, pretty much lifted from the Second Treatise), again, it was mostly an inflammatory document, written not for the benefit of Parliament and the King, but for other nations who might consider joining the fight.

Analogically using the Declaration today doesn't really work, there aren't any of the great political thinkers of yore around, and we don't have any comparatively great thinkers (in the same sense). We're too founded on our two party system at the present to move anywhere.

Plus, today's government would refuse to accept any rebellion, regardless of what historical document they cite. Technically, politically, the Union never recognized the Confederate States of America as a sovereign nation, but a rebellion. That's the largest and longest instance of such a 'rebellion'. It's likely going to remain such.

Of course, that's due to the fact that there really wasn't any way for the Confederacy to win. They couldn't have taken and held the north. If they did, they would have assimilated the culture they were fighting against, and would be in the same situation as before they rebelled.

That actually leads me to a slight tangent, but my favorite fact about the Emancipation Proclamation is that it didn't technically free the slaves. It freed the slaves only in rebelling states. Northern slave-holding states could remain as-is.

Moving back on topic: the Declaration of Independence continually cites 'Him' and 'He' in reference to George III. George III had no power. Okay, he had a little power, but he wasn't really calling the shots any more (he never was, his reign started almost a century after the fall of the Commonwealth and slightly less after the Glorious Revolution, which cemented Great Britain as a constitutional monarchy). One could argue the use of He and Him are due to George's refusal to intervene with Parliament (something he really couldn't do).

Again, it goes back to they saw an opportunity to start something new, even though if they worked slightly harder at getting representation, they could have.
No Buzz: Aldrin Trashes Obama Asteroid Mission
K-pop music recommendations and streaming Android App open-sourced
You can't keep making blanket statements about so diverse a region without eventually offending someone or making yourself look foolish.
I wonder if that "due to high taxes" causal explanation can be quantified a bit better. Not every person who renounces U.S. citizenship does so for tax reasons. I could believe it's 98% though, or maybe 80%; I have no idea. Is there any way to estimate the proportion who renounce for various reasons?

A non-tax category in which I know people who've renounced is those who have issues with dual citizenship. Denmark, for example, does not permit dual citizenship. So if you are an American who moves to Denmark and eventually wishes to naturalize, you must renounce your American citizenship. Perhaps more commonly, if you are born with dual Danish-American citizenship (Danish parents but born in the U.S.), you can keep the dual citizenship until age 22, but then at age 22 must apply for permanent Danish citizenship, and at least officially they will, as with the naturalization case, require you to renounce your American citizenship (though in practice it seems not everyone actually does so).
[CEO responded, see buried comment from 'jmaleter' currently about half way down the comments].
It provides a sense of validity to people who may know your boss and see you, as an employee of theirs, as being competent and proficient at your job role.

Say I work as a design engineer. My boss is probably older and more experienced. He may have worked at competing firms previously and has connections there. I connect with him, and he's connected with former colleagues. They want to recruit and so start looking around the networks of people in the industry and region.

Because I'm connected to my boss, I am more exposed in their ads. They see the mutual connection and consider that partial confirmation that if I'm employable under him, I'm probably a decent employee.

Networking with existing colleagues, including your boss, helps create exposure of your profile to others in the industry by utilising the connections that your (usually more experienced and more connected) boss has. I'd almost be willing to bet that connecting 'upwards' to more experienced people is on the whole far better for your profile exposure than connecting 'downwards' to lesser-experienced employees (e.g.: you as a mid-level employee connecting to new graduates entering your workforce).
I happen to be looking for a bioinformatics developer, perhaps we can speak when it is least convenient for you. ;)

seriously, though, I completely agree.
10 design flaws of JavaScript
Effectively, their customers are paying to be advertised to.
CONGRATULATIONS!
It would take about 82432708400 years to crack your password.

:\
"Does a flat tax (with reasonable deductions) hurt anyone besides the super rich?"

Why would it hurt the super rich? They can afford to find loopholes.
Right, if it hurt the super rich more, they wouldn't be so excited by the possibility.
In short, I don't feel I should need to spend $200/year (plus $25 more for flickr), so that I can organize and maintain a photo hobby.

Who cares if it's a hobby or otherwise? You want a particular service and you don't want to pay for it. Options are naturally going to be limited.
Engineers needed to fight online fraud with machine learning. Join us
Sift Science (http://siftscience.com) is a Y Combinator (S11) startup in sunny/foggy San Francisco that’s tackling a big, interesting problem. We’re ready for great engineers to join our cause.

Last year there was $4B in online fraud and 70% of that was driven by organized crime. The opponents are no longer script kiddies -- they’re just as smart and capable as any of us, and their attacks are evolving in both scale and sophistication. As the world becomes more connected, this problem will only get worse. We’re building a large-scale machine learning system paired with elegant visualization/UI tools to help ecommerce businesses take a stand. We’re literally fighting bad guys, and have big plans beyond fraud.

Our team includes several ex-Googlers with experience spanning e-commerce analytics, search quality, ads quality, and speech recognition. We’re all technical, push each other, and like to laugh.

As an early engineer, you’ll have a huge impact on the product, direction and culture of the company. You’ll be expected to punch above your weight class and wear different hats.

You must:

* Get stuff done

* Thrive on responsibility and freedom

* Bulldoze through problems

A background in machine learning, HBase, Hadoop, Rails, Mongo, statistics, data visualization and/or AWS is awesome, but not required. Just be ready to learn quickly.

We can promise two of these five things:

* Daily inspirational quotes read in-person by William Shatner

* Interesting and meaningful technical problems

* All-you-can-eat caviar breakfast, lunch, and dinner

* Weekend Lamborghini rentals

* An incredible team that will challenge and respect you

Our investors include Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital, Max Levchin, Marc Benioff, Chris Dixon, SV Angel, and others well-versed in e-commerce, payments, and enterprise software. We offer market salary, meaningful equity, health insurance, custom dev setup, beer o’clock, relocation help, etc. just like everyone else. But what’s most important is the work you do and who you do it with. Everything else is just icing on the cake.

Let’s make the world a better place. jobs+hn@siftscience.com
In my opinion, HostGator is a joke. They constantly push people to use FTP instead of SFTP.

Want to add an SSL certificate to a subdomain? You have to provide them your main account login, which is logged in plain text in their ticket system.

They also took it upon themselves to look through one of my databases because they thought it was taking up too much of my unlimited quota.
A flat tax, like a fix x-precent of income tax, hurts more the poor than the rich. That is why the are called "regressive".
So, socialized healthcare, despite its flaws, despite that its quality indeed does "not blow anyone's mind", at least has simplicity going for it.

But what you're asking to be "understandable", is that someone else should pick up the tab because you like to play wild in the snow and couldn't be bothered to get properly insured first. Now that is a poor argument for socialized anything.
I love Buzz but not running tests on the moon first seems crazy. Hell you could pay for a lot of the Mars trip through space tourism to the test sites.
That won't impress hipsters.
Publish data showing the disparity of medical costs across the US?
Also on that note: I recently discovered the 'Swift Player' app for iOS devices, which offers up to 2X speedup on most web videos (if they play on iOS already). It's great, and until I find something similar for MacOS, it's made the iPad my preferred presentation-video playback device.
Story.app
And as always, if you're going to enter your password into a page running zxcvbn, make sure to either disable your internet until you've closed the page, or disable plugins and monitor network requests to make sure what you type in isn't being sent anywhere.

Or you know, better yet, just don't type your real password into it.
A pretty idea, but planetary orbits in a multi star system are pretty hard. You either have to orbit in close enough to one of the stars that the other star doesn't destabilize your orbit, or you have to orbit far enough out that you orbit the center of mass for all of the stars involved.

As a side note... While not quite the same we have observed some pretty cool orbits around the super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Galactic_centre_orbits.sv... (I doubt any of those stars have planets either. Each time they go wizzing by each other or the black hole the planets would be flung off. Pretty chaotic mess in there :D)
Just a little reality check: the entire rest of the world thinks that Americans are utterly, raving insane on this issue.