skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's stupid, but that's because it's very difficult to write out benefits that intelligently phase out. The reason is simple math.

Suppose you have a $5k/year benefit at $0 that phases out to $0k/year at $20k. The worst way to do that is obviously to have a cliff: at $20k, you suddenly get $5k/year less, effectively an infinite marginal rate. It's as extreme a trap as you can imagine.

But now consider the opposite, best case scenario that's the softest landing spread out over that entire income range: a benefit that phases out linearly. So at $10k/year, you get a total of $12.5k; at $15k/year, you get a total of $16.25k/year. That means you automatically get a walloping marginal tax rate.

If you wanted to limit benefit phase outs to contribute a maximum of 5% in marginal tax rates, you've got to spread it out over 20x the value of the benefit. A $5k benefit has to phase out over $100k.

Also note that that's by itself: you've also got regular taxes to pay. Worse, few of these welfare benefits have been designed so intelligently, and there are a lot of them, so you constantly hit discontinuities in marginal tax rates that make it really irrational to do any additional work or try to improve yourself.
The first 8 points are all totally valid comments and I don't think they can be rejected out-of-hand. The author seems annoyed by a perception that they're thrown into the mix in snarky, passive aggressive or ad hominem ways but that doesn't invalidate their use when they are accurately applied.

Facile, poorly reasoned content is abundant on the internet. Hacker News is a firehose of content – both good and bad – and commenters aim to filter that by tagging the content through comments.

It is not always a good use of your time to make a reasoned argument against blatant logical fallacies, scientific/engineering ignorance and failure to understand modern tech business practices. If you're spending more time discounting vapid content than its idiot author spent creating it, then the world is suffering a net loss.
I think 2D toolkit is a great asset too, hopefully they got something out of this and will keep on doing good work.

But I think what most people are missing is that the real game changing 2D news is the new 2D physics engine (box2d). Doing sprites has been a tiny hassle compared to using the 3D optimized physics engine we had before to do accurate 2D stuff.
sounds like the same problem as DRM. Once content is made available to the user, there's always a chance to intercept and copy it (unless we can install a DRM chip inside people's brain and even then I imagine there would be some hacks).
That still leaves a 100% marginal "tax" rate. It's better than >100%, but still seems less than ideal. Trying to fix that quickly gets you into Basic Income territory.
HN at its best. Someone (pg) mentions that people with strong accents tend to have problems building start-ups. We have a brief rant about how he's not "politically correct." Finally, someone offers a way to help solve the problem, followed up by other helpful comments.
> "What comments bother you the most?"

Mindless evangelism of proprietary technologies, disguised as an attempt at an insightful comment (microsoft's mvps and evangelists are particularly guilty of this).
I don't think that's a problem. I think that's by design. Internet forums are similar to bars where people gather to hang out and talk about common interests. There are other outlets where the people that have something to say can say it.
Lenovo’s CEO shares $3.25 million of his bonuses with employees again
> The founders knew it would become outdated quickly and recommended rewriting it every 25 years or so.

Interesting! Where was this mentioned -- in their personal correspondence, or a more public document?
> I understand this is a place for serious debate and constructive criticism

Is it? [citation please]
>This may be the Stockholm syndrome speaking, but it's pretty alright.

>Makes you want to stab your eyes out.

I dunno...
quicker to just keep pressing 9 and the system defaults back to a crash and sends you to an operator ;)
This will not work in the Netherlands (although, see below, the law here might change soon). The law as written in NL prohibits reading data out of a user-device (fingerprinting) when not strictly necessary for delivering the service that was asked for. So getting things like screen-size and browser-name just for identification purposes is not allowed, because you wouldn't need those to deliver the service as requested by the user. Next to that, IP-addresses are under discussion for being "identifiable information", as is already the case in Germany.

Please do take this all with a grain of salt, because not a single website here actually adheres to the current implementation of the cookie-law. The political process has been set in motion to change the law and exempt anonymous statistics from the permission-requirements. This "soon to be exception" is already used by virtually all website and the regulatory agency responsible for enforcement seems to have decided not to make a problem of it for the time being.
Definitely sick of seeing [citation needed]

Sometimes discussion boards need to have opinions on them and not just facts, IMO!
The first working API for ThePirateBay in Python
It is very difficult to manipulate, misinform, and indoctrinate intelligent/skilled people who work with information and information systems.
It would be nice to have a sort of an "argument" database, so instead of putting the argument in the comment again, you could just link to the database. Then computers could filter these arguments automatically for the people who already know it. Maybe the arguments could be parametrized, to make the connection to the problem at hand more obvious.

Ah well.. a man can only dream.
Well the ancient COBOL programmers got their revenge when they were begged to come out of retirement. I suppose that 20 years from now people will scramble to find someone that understands how exactly this 50K lines xml moves the enterprise java mission critical system that haven't been updated since the great crash of 2015.
Who exactly is considering Windows Phone a failure?

When iOS came on the scene, it was mostly a different kind of animal than any other phone. There wasn't really any similar device so it got first-comer status. Android was able to compete by taking an opposite model. Be cheap and on as many devices as possible, which is more or less what Windows did back in the '80's to out compete Macintosh. Windows Phone took a very different UI/UX approach and was late into what had become a competitive market.

Considering all that, 4% market share and continuing growth is good. If it was stagnant or shrinking, that would be something different.
Ah yes, the classic "middlebrow dismissal".

Sometimes refutation comments are good and valuable though.

In general the decisive factor in the value of a comment is what I will call the "lebowski rule". If a comment contains a statement of someone's opinion and nothing more it is rarely worthwhile.

By way of illustration, this comment would fit that criterion up to this point.

However, I will explain my reasoning which will hopefully rescue it. In the internet age most people are aware of the variety of opinions on a topic, especially the most obvious pro/anti points on a given topic. What can often happen on sites like reddit or HN is that the first comment that espouses a well-known opinion then becomes effectively an impromptu poll. This breaks the link + comments model though because the opinion of the link is inherent in the link itself so a post voicing unadorned agreement would be easily recognized as valueless and thus generally not created or voted up. Whereas the contrarian opinion has no representation and thus becomes the proxy poll for disagreement. The problem is that people voting for/against place their votes differently, either for the link or for the most popular "middlebrow dismissal" comment. But because these are two separate beasts they can't compete against each other directly. Which is why you get the behavior of highly upvoted rejection comments, since that is effectively a reflection of the controversy around the subject. Even though that rarely improves the level of discussion.

In contrast, a more thoroughly thought out refutation which follows through lines of reasoning and evidence will be more likely to contribute to both the disemination of new knowledge to readers as well as higher quality discussions.

Additionally, the mere attempt to try to improve the quality of a comment through fleshing it out will lead to a higher rate of abandonment of less worthwhile posts.

P.S. Here is one area where I think the HN software doesn't help, because it encourages shorter, more quickly written posts which tends to favor the exploration of shallower depths of thought.
The start of Skynet. </sarcasm>
<Troy McClure>Hi, I'm Kenton Varda. You may remember me as the creator of Cap'n Proto and the LAN-party-optimized house.

Back in 2007, I created "Jeff Dean Facts" as a Google-internal April Fool's joke. I wasn't funny enough to write any of the jokes myself, but I created the app that let people submit "facts", and was blown away by the results.

If you like primary sources, check out my write-up from when I first talked publicly about it in January 2012:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/118187272963262049674/posts/TSDh...

Don't miss the second comment, which has a long list of top-rated "facts".
I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. I have lots of issues with Google, but dismissing what they've done because it is insufficiently new is just silly.
blogspam…

original source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-01/lenovo-chief-yang-s...
NASA is turning science fiction into fact
Is this really relevant to Hacker News? What does it have to do with hacking?
This discussion of an ep or event in series happens regardless... You are just defending a timescale based on an old model as a reason for it to exist.
Right now the people who don't want to work cost us a lot of money, a large fraction of which doesn't even go to them.

To a certain degree, I see it like the war on drugs. Yes, ending the war on drugs will increase drug usage, but not as much as many people think, and the costs of dealing with that will be less than the costs we spend on prohibition.
Comments that focus on a single ambiguous phrasing or definition, then begins a giant chain of people pedantically arguing about technicalities.

Can we please discuss ideas and concepts?
What bothers me is the link. If you say it's ad hominem and I don't know what that is, I can google it. Adding a link just feels pretentious.
>But that's the big question. The affordable care act is going to make it so that you can get health insurance on your own, even with pre-existing conditions, (though, I think, employer-paid insurance will still be tax-advantaged) - I wonder how this will effect the number of upper middle class people interested in working part-time

I would be very surprised if there isn't a rush to the exits from people in their mid 50s if it looks like health care will be affordable. I know I'll be able to retire a full decade earlier if I can get health care for a few hundred bucks a month.

As to people working part time... I can see why people would want to (hell, I'd like to do that myself), but I don't think it's going to happen to any great extent. Employers don't like it because there are a lot of per-employee expenses (as opposed to per-hour). Two half-time employees cost more than one full time employee.
That's not annoying, that's my favorite part of HN: automatic counterpoint. I don't always see them otherwise.
Underwear Sale Party in Santa Monica (13 Photos)
You thinking about bugzilla?
Yes, sometimes you want to see a source, but why would you use that phrasing? The passive form doesn't feel like a conversation. Like the original poster wrote, it comes across as passive-aggressive.

Imagine someone walking into a coffee shop and ordering coffee by saying: "Coffee required" -- while drawing imaginary square brackets around his head with his fingers.
a) the internet (and HN) can't get full

b) there are downvote arrows

To me it's OK if people just leave anything as a comment here because it will be modded down if it's irrelevant to the discussion.
I consider linking helpful; that's just being a good citizen. Ad hominem is recognizable, but e.g. "Begging the question" is more often misunderstood and linking helps clarify.
It's fine to post subjective opinions ("I think yellow flying monkeys are awesome, and should be venerated as gods"), but those kinds of comments are usually targeted at statements of facts that get thrown around ("Yellow flying monkey's poop cures cancer and diarrhea").
I don't have a free plan, but I offer a very generous reward for referring new customers. Some people may in fact never pay me or they may pay me but receive more money back from me.

* Everyone starts with 5 free transactions and test transactions do not count.

* If they were referred to me, they get an additional 5 transactions for free.

* After they use up those 10 total initial transactions and pay for credits, the original referrer gets 5 transactions for free, once, and 20% of what the person they referred paid me. This referral arrangement continues for a long time.

* I integrate the product into every customer's website for free to eliminate the friction of them not knowing how to do it. It's much easier to do a quick remote login than to educate customers how to do it.

* You can sign up to use my product by SMS. No credit cards required.

* I don't prevent a customer from using the product when they have zero credits. They simply don't get the product until they pay. However, I never change the end user experience.

* I don't charge a monthly fee and I don't charge for maintaining a mobile landing page, for which competitors charge.

For many customers, that initial 10 free transactions is all they will ever need. My technology quietly sits on their website and credits them for their passive referrals for clicks on my widget.

Due to the nature of my product, charging a monthly fee does not make much sense. The usage spikes and is difficult to predict. It made more sense to charge per transaction.

I am not sure I agree with the statement that you will not find evangelists among your free users. I don't pay for Apigee, Appery, Salesforce or BizSpark. I pay a modest amount to Twilio. I will talk your ear off about how great these and many other companies are.
The HN comment that really bores me is the one that totally denigrates the project described in the link because it's "been done before", "won't work because X" where X is a woolly hypothetical, "doesn't solve Y" where it's blindingly obvious that Y is either incredibly hard or tangential to the point, or "could simply be done with just A, B and C" where A, B and C are some permutation of a raspberry pi, arduino, a kinect, some random combination of open source libraries, emacs and a blender.

There is benefit in new approaches to old problems. Incomplete attempts are still useful. Actually getting a project into a state that more than one person can use it, even if that use is just "Here, read the code. It doesn't work, but you might find it enlightening," is an effort worth respecting.

It's extremely rare that these comments have any worthwhile content in them. They seem to serve to point at the commenter's username and say "Aren't I clever for spotting the problems with your project?" What effect is that supposed to have past your own ego? You can't rewind the universe to a state where the project didn't happen, so why not take 3 minutes instead of 2 and find something positive to highlight rather than a negative to pick on?
There are more accents within the UK that have less in common with each other than most other English language speaking countries combined. At least it feels that way when you work in a few pubs there...
About the MBA:
Good lord yes! You don't even need to get an official MBA, if you're an autodidact do something like the personal-MBA, which is basically a reading list covering all the different aspects of business. And for all the newly minted MBAs out there, go and work in an industry before trying to run it. You'll get a lot more respect from other business leaders if you've spent time in the trenches and know the domain you're talking about
Isn't parsing the JSON and converting to your own data format more work than just generating random users yourself?
From what I have read basic income is often suggested to be combined with a single land value tax. This means the only direct taxes are on the unimproved value of land, which is fairly easy to administer in a country like the United Kingdom, for example. That tax is then passed on to people who consume the output of the land, be that actual produce, like vegetables, or more intangible things, like crossing the land in a train.

The land value tax can be scaled to match the requirements of the basic income, plus additional government costs (e.g. defence). I suppose in a libertarian interpretation of that system the additional government costs would be minimal. Personally I would favour more social spending, but I could imagine less being necessary than under systems where basic provision is lower, or has more strings attached.
Here's the building I work in: https://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=26.200547,-80.149577&spn...

You can see the garage entrance to the left, and the garage wraps around behind the main entrance (a five story open air atrium) to the right hand side. It doesn't have to be hideous.
It seems driverless trains will be held to a much higher standard than ones with a driver. As with driverless cars we are willing to accept a certain percentage of accidents, the second a driverless car runs someone over though it will be a massive controversy.
Also check out https://threema.ch/en/ - it has the same functionality as WhatsApp (except of group chat), but secure/encrypted and is available for Android and iOS.

They're using the NaCl library for cryptography and proper encryption of messages before leaving the phone can be validated here: http://threema.ch/validation/

(I'm not affiliated with Threema, just a regular user who likes the product)
Do you by any chance know that old British TV series "The Professionals"? I understand English pretty well and I even lived in UK for 2.5 years but for some reason this TV show is really difficult to understand for me - half of the time I cannot figure out what they are saying and I do not know why. Is it some local dialect or something?
"Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program"

The irony of this, is that it's exactly the tactic used by drug dealers. In order to avoid the risk of possessing illegal substances, they coerce drug addicts to hold their stash. The courts call this 'constructive possession'.
100% agree and I'd add other things I hate about HN:

* First comment debunks the article.

* Comments that start with "No." It's worse if the "No." is in its own paragraph.

* Mentioning Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

* General passive-agressivness.

* Lack of humour and light-heartedness.

* People upvote some really shitty stuff. The newest submissions page is sometimes more interesting than the homepage.

* People love to upvote blogposts of some people, e.g daringfireball.net or paulgraham.com, no matter the quality.
Harwell Space Cluster, Oxfordshire, UK - Satellite Applications Catapult

3 roles open – Data Engineer/Scientist, Web UI Developer, Visual/Graphics Designer

The Satellite Applications Catapult is looking for enthusiastic and passionate software developers with an entrepreneurial spirit to help us push boundaries and find new ways to utilise and exploit satellite data. Along with vast amounts of satellite data (>7PB), we also have a 28 screen videowall to visualise the data, a 3D projection suite, an operations centre, high performance compute and cloud computing infrastructure, raspberry pi systems, arduino boards, 3D printer, oculus rift, Kinect and Leap Motion as tools to work with, and a culture of innovation where the traditional ways are challenged and new ideas and techniques are championed.

Launched in April 2013, the Catapult is a not-for-profit organisation. Our vision is to be a world leading technology and innovation centre helping businesses of all sizes to realise the potential of Space. We bring satellite service providers together with businesses to facilitate new opportunities and innovation. As part of this we are creating a software platform that will lower the barrier to entry for using and exploiting satellite-derived data and services, and innovating with new techniques in data management and visualisation.

Our culture is exciting and innovative. A great example of this is we offer employees the opportunity to spend 10% of their working time on ideas and projects. If their ideas develop into commercially viable projects, the Catapult will help find funding to spin the idea into a business venture. Our benefit package includes; 28 days holiday, a generous pension scheme, life insurance, a cycle to work scheme and childcare vouchers.

Right now we’re building a core team of developers to pull together the base platform, with plans to expand as more projects develop.

If you are interested in joining us check out https://sa.catapult.org.uk/vacancies or email career@sa.catapult.org.uk for details.
Linus and RMS lead the popular vote for Next Microsoft CEO
They don't, actually.

"socially beneficial activities that are not compensated" -- doesn't apply equally well.

"most efficiently delivered through a direct cash transfer, rather than through a means-tested or other qualification-based process" -- doesn't apply equally well.

"no minimum wage would be necessary to reduce poverty" -- doesn't apply equally well.

"ensuring a life-long minimum earnings level for individuals" -- doesn't apply equally well.

"the economy itself will not be able to adapt in creating new labor opportunities" -- doesn't apply equally well.

Amazingly, that's each and every point. Not a single one applies equally well.
Yes, whether they are completely disinterested or overly cheery the majority of the time they appear that they couldn't care less about your transaction.

Which is fine, it just feels less weird of an interaction when it is a machine that doesn't care.
The inevitable comments about Bettridge's law of headlines every time a title ends in a question mark are not helpful. They don't make an argument, as the article is hardly ever arguing for the question. It is just indicating "look at me, I know of this exotic jargon term, and it happens to apply to this article title". Like, this article could have been "would hacker news improve if we stopped posting certain kinds of comments?"; the answer might be "no", but saying "no, due to Bettridge's law of headlines" provides no value or understanding to the reader.
"You get extra points if you start your reply with a cold remark such as "No." "Wrong." "False."

Exactly, I automatically downvote comments like that.
To put an even finer point on it, one of the worst and most pervasive comments is of this type:

"This is a cat, but I like dogs, why isn't this a dog?"

Once you understand the type you start noticing it everywhere all the time. Any time there is a creative work there will always be someone complaining that it's not the thing they wanted created instead.
It is a sad state of affairs that reducing your accent can increase your chances of success, though I guess everyone has a bias towards hiring people like them.

I wish that hiring was done without being able to hear the voice, see the face, or any other details that would identify race, religion, or culture of a prospective hire.

I think that would do a good job of eliminating bias, however the bias would still exist for things like promotions.
Ah, but it's not libertarian in the sense of total sovereignty for owners. The workers would start to backtalk!