skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps something hasn't been made clear. I'm not sure why you seem to have adopted a condescending tone.

A wealth tax is typically a periodic (monthly/quarterly/yearly) tax on total net worth. This tax often ranges between 0 and 3% yearly, often with with highest rates only applying to wealth above a certain amount.

What I think might have been left out from your example is the fact that the person isn't choosing just between spending and not spending. They are choosing between spending and saving/investing.

The arithmetic is simple. If I can generate a 7% return on my assets, and I'm being taxed yearly at 1% of my assets, then the way for me to make the most money is to have the most assets. The return I get yearly is 7% - 1% = 6%. If one year I have $120 and I spend $20 of it, then I make $6 that year. If don't spend any, I make $7.20 that year.

EDIT: Re "... discouraging productive investments". This statement might be true for capital gains taxation, but it isn't so for wealth taxation. If I invest extremely conservatively (e.g. in precious metals) then I might only manage a 3% return. A 1% wealth tax would then amount to a 33% capital gains tax. If I invest aggressively and successfully, then I might earn 10% that year. Then the 1% would be equivalent to only a 10% capital gains tax. As such, a wealth tax is the only tax that actually encourages productive investment and discourages hoarding.
I'm not sure if the submitter created BlinkLink, but I hope the author had fun making it. It's a neat idea, and it exploits human psychology in clever ways. I like how the reward for tweeting increases as the number of views remaining goes down. Also, people are driven to share the link with their friends immediately since they know views remaining are scarce.

That said, it's pretty easy to mirror content. In case the link is dead, http://i.imgur.com/KGo7oRH.jpg is what was on the page originally.

Oh, and I found a UI annoyance. On the front page (http://www.blinklink.me/), the blue "Make a BlinkLink" button at the top that says is just a link to blinklink.me. The bottom button (which is a less-noticeable white) actually posts the form. You should probably hide the top button on the front page.
These are just engineering tradeoffs. Sure you need to weigh them carefully, but the fact that we spend more on software than hardware does not indicate a horrible failure in the industry.

For example, processing power, communication speed, and storage has improved by orders of magnitude, but battery capacity is perhaps better by one factor of ten. Much of the advance in battery life comes from reduced power consumption by other components. Much of the advance in software development has come by creating inefficient abstractions that let us create things faster but squander CPU, network, and battery life.

Most companies today are willing to burn up some hardware performance in order to reduce software development time. If they're burning too much, they'll fix it or they'll go out of business. Premature optimization is still not a good idea.
I've lost 30lb in four months without eating less or moving more. The biological reality is a lot more complicated than the "calories in/calories out" people insist it is. How accurately are you really measuring your calories out, and how your diet and exercise impacts that? Or how the composition and combination and timing of the foods you eat impacts your digestion (calories in)? If calorie restriction works for you, that's great. The times I've tried it, I was constantly tired, hungry, and cranky, and the results were really mediocre, no matter if I cut a little or a lot, or exercised a little or a lot alongside the diet.

Plus, if you actually care about whether people are healthy or not, the psychological factors are hugely relevant. All the "calories in/calories out" mantra seems to do is give people a soapbox to talk about how they're just intrinsically superior to fat people.
That's a contrived expression, and not one of genuine sadness; he's pulling a face, not expressing an emotion. You can see on his GitHub profile he's got a similar facial expression, although a little less pronounced. [0] It's kinda like his duck face!

I think this has just been created for giggles, not for any particular reason. Admittedly, it piqued my curiosity!

[0] https://github.com/clayallsopp
As laypeople we seem to think about this issue much like programmers think about algorithmic efficiency ... who cares if my code is messy, slow and non-optimal, all I need to do is wait a few years for CPU speed to double and nobody will notice.

i.e. most people think, just wait a few years until the scientists develop a better antibiotic. Cat and mouse.
From the business point of view, 'wifi everywhere' is a lot more desirable than say, clean water everywhere.
I seriously admire your patience in replying to comments.
People have different metabolisms

That's your belief.

there wouldn't be an entire multi billion dollar industry and worldwide government initiatives to help people if there wasn't a legitimate problem

That's your belief.

Your beliefs don't enter into the equation. At all.

Allow me to turn this one right back around to you. You have a series of old wives tales that you believe and then tell people that their beliefs don't matter. I'm frankly surprised you didn't yank out the "I'm big boned" defense which has been as disproven as a person's intrinsically "faster metabolism".

The funny thing is that I'm usually lectured about how to be thin by people that have struggled with their weight their entire life. These people have had years and years of being overweight, have no idea how to truly eat and their weight has see-sawed their entire life. All the while, I have maintained the same thin weight. For 41 years. But they insist on how wrong I am and how right they are.
Can you define what "eating bad" means?
Thanks guys — I was afraid it was something like that. I absolutely hate it when Mac software litters stuff outside of its bundle without even asking the user. Plenty of people figured it out correctly — GitHub.app, for example, installs a copy of the git command-line tools into its ./Content/Resources/git, and remains self-contained and clean.

GPGTools guys — if you're reading this thread, please please stop installing stuff outside your plugin's bundles.
There's also a strong role for horizontal gene transfer in antibiotic resistance, e.g. by swapping plasmids, which can allow bacteria to swap higher-granularity mechanisms, rather than having to evolve them from scratch with random mutations.
Someone missed the point of the article.
Article is more like: Willpower is a finite resource and you need some sort of motivation to keep going in a fitness regime.
All is in the giant forum thread (51k posts and counting).

During the night scene several readers tried to use the stars to determine location and date:

* Diurnal motion matches 39.5° north.

* Proper motion and the position within milky way indicate far future.

* Eventually someone matched everything to Tuesday, 10 April 13291 and that estimate stuck (but it could be off by several hundred years).

http://xkcd-time.wikia.com/wiki/Astronomy
> What if we US citizens bear some responsibility for Haiti's suffering

We do, I think. Write the history book of today that someone might read (probably through a brain interface) in a thousand years.

The story of the US isn't one to cast a positive light on. The 500 year legacy of imperialism is that empires conquered the world and intentionally kept vast swathes of it in perpetual turmoil for selfish goals.

Every time the US conquered a country, be it by proxy in Iran in the 70s or directly like in Iraq, the legacy will be the US getting in the way of the people of foreign countries dictating their own destinies. And that is something we need to hold ourselves accountable for.
This is the absolute exact response that I would have given. I think I'm in love with you, joe_the_user. ;)
Journal bias circle-jerking can 'vote' science away. Watch this TED talk about how journal bias is destroying the SCIENCE of medicine (Doctors don't know about the Drugs They Prescribe): http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_kno...
> Google doesn't care if iOS or Android wins

They may care now that they own an Android phonemaker (Motorola.)
No idea, but using a private window in Firefox 22 (my main bowser ATM) works.
How To Hire A Programmer (Even If You Don't Know Code)
Or Mint.
What is your point? No one can be smart at everything. Just because one occasionally writes words that helps computers do things doesn't mean one's world view is not silly when it comes to other things.
Why do devices that do different things in different ways need to be interacted with in the same manner?

I came here to say basically the same thing, except you put it much better than I would have. I love the Corolla / 747 comparison. That really gets to the essence of it.

Here's a thought... how about vendors of desktop OS's focus on creating the best possible desktop experience, vendors of tablet OS's focus on creating the best possible tablet experience, etc.? And where there's a happy bit of confluence between those two goals, then exploit it - otherwise, embrace difference and make the best experience for the people who are actually using your product at a moment in time, as opposed to the best experience for "people who are using this and people we hypothetically think might also use this, but on a different device"?

I've always had the mindset that Fogbeam Labs would probably not ever get into the OS business, thinking "Red Hat, Canonical and Novell do a good enough job as Linux vendors" but I swear, sometimes, I find myself wishing we had the resources to throw at a desktop Linux distro.
A 3-Step Plan To Get Into Your Startup Hero's Inbox
joe_the_user above states it much better than I can. The body is not a static science experiment in a lab. For people who's bodies don't naturally regulate themselves properly, the body is an active agent that is fighting tooth and nail against what the person knows to be best. For someone who's body is physiologically normal I'm sure it's really difficult to conceive this situation
I suspect they are mentioned to be gods to suggest that they may be asked extremely complicated questions, which they will interpret from a purely logical standpoint. ie. Not human.
I try to focus on root causes. There's too much noise and wasted energy otherwise.
Yes,

The funny thing is, "find the approach that works for you" seems like it should be as good as anything for someone marketing a gym or even a family of products.

I think the biggest dynamic is that when individuals do find the approach that works for them, another thing that often "works for them" is telling everyone else that what they do is the very best. More weirdly, consumers feel attracted to systems that forward a dogmatic certainty that they are right and such systems produce a group of believers who will also sell the system. Ah, I can't see an easy way out.
I think you point a more systemic issue in the modern world. It isn't just in non-profits, there is a general lack of land, money, and construction supplies. First world infrastructure crumbles not due to a lack of unskilled labor to set to paving streets with vehicles, it is a lack of those vehicles for people to drive, and a lack of money to push politicians to allow it.

I'm not well versed at all in the problem, but I see it as a major one - there needs to be some major innovations in materials extraction and distribution to enable a next generation deployment of machinery to make the next round of renovation globally possible. And there is just no one picking up supply to meet that demand, mainly because while people want to fix all the broken infrastructure and build nations on new roads and proper housing, there is just no machinery to meet the demand, and no money to pay for it.
Mac OS X/iOS: One OS, one interface, all devices

ChromeOS/Android: One OS, one interface, all devices

Windows: One OS, one interface, all devices

All three of the above companies have been moving in this direction for quite some time. Everybody wants to do it. Canonical is always two to five years late with any trend.
While I'm not intending to develop for a mobile app per se, I think I have to keep it in mind as I'm learning.

One question I have in that regard is how to make an app that is most useable for the widest audience?
Amplifying on my answer in this subthread and I now see mjn's comment, it's complicated. Simple mutations only take you so far, they change something that's necessary for the antibiotic to work. E.g. a surface protein that brings it inside gets trashed, or a enzyme or structure that it works against changes enough to be resistant while still functioning enough for survival.

The nastier stuff, like β-lactamases---enzymes that destroy the β-lactam ring that is the "active ingredent" of so many antibiotics ... and that it's used by so many families that humans can tolerate is telling---are obviously a lot more sophisticated. Bacteria developed them to compete with the molds that produce β-lactam antibiotics, and they spread from one species to another, especially in plasmids as the article notes.

A great deal of this is not new mechanisms of resistance being developed, but long existing ones becoming prevalent. Somewhat like in the good old days when a drug company could make its money back bring an antibiotic to market, and scouring the globe for molds that produced ones, improper use of antibiotics (e.g. not switching to one of different mechanism quickly enough, especially likely in places like India where they're in practice available over the counter) plus widespread global travel is allowing the best mechanisms to survive and sort of thrive.

Not thrive in most environments of course, just in humans who are under the selection pressures of antibiotics.
RubyWarrior - Bloc
Thanks for clearing that up. I was about to mention that passive income people are almost always extremely vague about what they did. Maybe they are afraid of others picking up on their niche, but I also tend to assume that what they did was shady or shameful, like they charged $10 for information that was available free elsewhere.
Nothing precise really, but I would say a lot of sugar (candy and soda) would be bad. Vegetables would be good. Avoiding fast foods and sugar will go a long way I'd say.

But other than that I'm really not sure, there are a lot of different (often conflicting) ideas of what is "good" and what is "bad".

Fat is bad vs Fat is good.
Calories matter, the rest don't vs Calories are different.
etc.
Eating a varied diet of real whole foods and staying away from processed, packaged food is the general consensus for a "good" diet.
I got the sense alot of people consider a sudoku puzzle unfair if there isn't a discrete set of logical steps you can take to solve it, sans guessing.

After all, if you're looking for a hard Sudoku to solve in that vein, just look at the minimally unique Sudokus. Those required a metric ton of back tracking.
Ask HN  : Building a marketplace for developers. Features?
I'm building a marketplace where people can get qualified developers to work on projects/bugs. And if you have a project/bug that needs work you can find someone on the site as well. The idea came out of people asking me multiple times to "just fix the problem, i dont want help, i'm willing to just pay you to do it".
As developers what do you think is missing from the Elance/Odesk type of sites?
As project submitters/bugs what would you like to see as features.<p>Every project on my site will be required to be pre-funded ( money sits in escrow ). Devs sign up through Github or Bitbucket.<p>And if you're interested in the beta : http://signup.codefix.io/
What's with the rudeness?

"Reality" is that indie devs are struggling on both platforms, big game makers are doing well on both platforms, and the apps that matter the most on both platforms are increasingly those made by Google itself. Apple's sliding market share means their proprietary ecosystem is increasingly irrelevant to even iOS users.
> It’s time for a new operating system. Not a 2.0 or a
> 3.0, but something built from the ground up. New code.

The author's metaphor here assumes a world where a massively complex system, which is basically working but has some problems, can be "fixed" via replacement by a new system designed from scratch.

In all of human history, how many times has this ever actually worked?

Continuing the comparison to operating systems, the three most popular OSes of today (Windows, Mac OS, Linux[1]) are built on foundations dating back to the dawn of microcomputers. The intervening forty-odd years have seen hundreds of competitors invented and abandoned, while the last scion of CP/M holds its ground and the descendants of UNIX consume the world.

Or going back to the world of international politics, what is the half-life of a newly established form of government? All of our philosophy, reason, war, and technological advancement have brought us nothing but small improvements to systems of democracy founded thousands of years ago in Greece and Rome.

The NSA scandal and ongoing derailment of the Arab Spring show that we still don't know how to even control our own governments, much less design sweeping improvements to them.

[1] I'm counting Android as Linux despite not being GNU/Linux, because it runs the Linux kernel.

---

On the topic of charity:

One might think of charity as a medication, given to a sick society. It is effective in some cases, ineffective in others, and sometimes outright harmful[2]. Objecting to charity in general is equivalent to advocating against antibiotics.

Charity can't solve massive structural problems in a society, but when properly focused it can do things that malfunctioning governments aren't capable of. Just giving twenty dollars to everyone in Pakistan will make their own lives temporarily better, but spending twenty dollars per capita on Polio eradication will improve the lives of their children, and grandchildren, and so on until the end of time.

[2] See: the near-annihilation of Africa's textile industry due to donations of second-hand clothing.
For this to be useful it really needs to be groupable by programming language.

And why it needs it's own domain/website instead of just a wiki page somewhere I do not understand.
> If you’re reading this, you’re probably a red-blooded American programmer with a simmering interest in cryptography.

Well yes my blood is red, I'm a programmer and I have an interest in cryptography. What makes you think everyone's American?
This statement dates back to a time when people would buy a machine and hire some programmers to write a program for it; that is, it's about the enormous expense of one-off, in-house, custom programs. IBM's System/360 was around but portable operating systems hardly existed yet (In 1972, Unix was just getting started).

Since then, programs are shared and run on many more machines; the cost is amortized through portability and writing general-purpose tools. Dijkstra was right to say that something had to change, but he didn't anticipate the efficiency gains from sharing portable software, at least not in this essay. Instead he seems to have thought that programmers should learn to write programs faster. We've made some progress on that, but the great efficiency gains happened at a higher level.
I agree. Every UI should have maximum optimization for the form factor and type of device it serves. With that accomplished, though, it should also have as many elements of familiarity as possible in the same ecosystem or family of products.

The problem is some are trying to use the exact same interface everywhere, and that can be a problem. It could work well enough on one type of device, but be very frustrating on another.

I'm not sure which category Ubuntu represents yet, because while the article says one interface, from the videos I've seen Ubuntu Touch kind of has its own UI. The only thing that is exactly the same is the icon bar.
Submitted a pull request. I merged the list I personally used in my webapps.
Please, do realize that if resistances were free, we would all be resistant already. We lived with those infections far longer than we did without. TANSTAAFL applies here as well, and even if the evolutionary pressure gets high enough to cause change (which will be far, far later than you'd like it to be, i.e. serious social trouble probably has a significantly lower threshold), it will be at a cost that is hard to predict, though likely it would be lowered resistances to something else, or maybe a higher risk of autoimmune diseases. Or something completely different.
This is like Snapchat for the web, except it's too easy to take a screenshot of the content which means there's not much of a point to the view limit.

You could make it difficult perhaps by requiring the user follow a path with their mouse, otherwise white noise appears. That way they cannot actually move their cursor to take a screenshot. Maybe do something else to occupy one of their other hands, such as pressing a series of keys. Of course someone else could be standing there ready to push the "print screen" button or use a camera, like you can with Snapchat. Don't forget a time limit.
"I've lost 30lb in four months without eating less or moving more."

- That's not impossible. However you've probably used drugs affecting your metabolism to increase your expenditure.

"How accurately are you really measuring your calories out, and how your diet and exercise impacts that?"

- Why would measuring anything affect how physiology and physics work? (And yes, energy expenditure and consumption can be measured extremely precisely in labs.)

"Or how the composition and combination and timing of the foods you eat impacts your digestion (calories in)?"

- In healthy people it doesn't.

I'm sorry to tell you but you were eating less than you we're burning. I know it hurts.
> The rule of law is being violated and it is an affront

You keep saying this. Could you tell us WHAT rule of law you think is being violated?
Coffee drinking tied to lower risk of suicide
There is a "Customize" option in the installer that seems to provide an option to not install MacGPG, but I haven't tried that to make sure.
I currently use Mail.app's built-in signing and encrypting capability with a free StartCom S/MIME cert. Does this offer something more/different?
Strange Fruit
I promised myself I wouldn't read the hacker news comments on this because HN comments are always a cesspool of people trying to prove they're smarter than the author of the post, but I just have to respond to this one.

It's very clear that you didn't read the article. Dick, the author, is my best friend and comparing him to a fat apologist is the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life.

He's a fat-kid-turned-competitive-bodybuilder and has helped a very large amount of people lose a lot of weight by cutting out the crap diets and mentality that try to confuse people into eating less than their TDEE every week. Dick's simplified diets for me and explained to me that fucking up every once in a while is ok, and I went from failing Atkins 2 times to losing 65lb in 8 months, and as I'm writing this I'm currently eating ice cream and waffles.

I understand that the fitness industry has a lot of negative stereotypes around it, for good reason, but please dear god read the article before you try to convince yourself that this person is just like the rest.
A day with Nancy
Self Referential Problem - from "What would Martin Gardner Tweet"
Building PythonHackers.com