skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, one of the major effects of basic income is that it would decrease marginal income tax rates (although it would undoubtedly raise taxes overall). This is counter-intuitive, so let me explain.

Marginal tax rates are the taxes that you pay on additional income. Eg., if I make (rounding numbers recklessly) £9k per year, I am taxed nothing. However every pound I make over £9k is taxed at 15% -- that's my marginal tax rate at the £10k income level -- then there is another step at £20k-something, etc.

For the poor, however, effective marginal tax rate include not only escalations in progressive tax rates, but the withdrawal of social support. Eg., let's say I am unemployed and receiving £700/month worth of benefits. Then I get a job which pays me £800/month. The first £750 is tax free, and I'll have to pay £8 of income tax on the remaining £50, so my total take-home pay is £792. Fair enough, so far...

Except now that I'm earning an income, all my benefits are withdrawn. This means that although I'm now doing £800 per month worth of work that I wasn't doing previously, at the end of the day I'm only receiving (£792 - £700 = ) £92 pounds of additional income. Hence my effective marginal tax rate on the extra income is a whopping 88.5%.

I'd have to think very hard about whether I wanted to keep that job, or stay on benefits. In fact, this is a fairly generous example: many benefits programmes are structured in such a way that they impose an effective marginal tax rate of more than 100% upon people who increase their incomes -- in other words, you can end up with less money by getting a job than by staying on benefits.

This is the mechanism which turns benefits programmes into poverty traps -- by de-incentivising people to work via astronomical marginal tax rates. Unfortunately, people have a very difficult time understanding this mechanism, and their intuitive reaction is often to "fix" benefits programs by increasing conditionalities and means-testing. The problem is that the more conditionalities and means-testing you impose, the more you increase the marginal tax rates for people trying to get out of poverty -- so such programmes are inevitably counter-productive.

A Unconditional Basic Income, however, is never withdrawn. This means that it imposes no penalties for increasing your earnings -- meaning that it actually minimises the effective marginal tax rates.

In fact a very fair basic income could be funded via a flat tax: tax every income at 50%, and then redistribute the earnings as a flat Universal Basic Income. Mean income earners, in this scenario, would pay exactly as much taxes as they receive back from the UBI -- so their tax rate would be zero. Non-income earners would earn 50% of the mean (which is roughly the level that Switzerland is proposing). Billionaires would see their income reduced by nearly 50%. However the marginal tax rate would be identical at every level of income. No matter what your standing in the economy, you would always receive the same UBI, and you would always pay the same rate of tax. It would seem almost fair.
It's Google's fault for bribing on behalf of Google's benefit.
the day snowden announced that a bazilian company (vale) was spied she cancelled a trip to washington if no official explanation was given before her visit.

on her latest UN adress, which btw was right before obama's, she ended with strong criticism and call to action about the program.
About "optimization", Gates likely had
a point. That problem of assigning
code blocks (subroutines/functions) to
memory segments
does suggest a
significant role for optimization.

What is optimization? For a very
sparse description,
for the set R
of real numbers,
positive integers
m and n, functions f: R^n --> R
and g: R^n --> R^m, find x in R^n
to solve

minimize f(x)

subject to

g(x) >= 0

So, set up a mathematical description
of the problem based mostly just on the
'cost' function f, that is, what want
to minimize, and 'constraints' g
that keep the solution 'feasible', that is,
realistic for the real problem. Then look
for a solution x. Yes, easily enough such
problems can be in NP-complete and
still difficult otherwise.

Likely what Gates wanted was function f
to be the execution time and function
g to force honoring the 64KB limit per segment,
etc.

Then a big question would be, assuming
what software to have its segments
assigned?

So, for an answer, just take some
Windows and/or Office code and
get the total execution time on
a typical workload.

Might also want to be sure that
on any of several workloads, the
optimal solution was no worse than
some factor p in R of the best
solution just for that workload.
Then keep lowering p until the
f(x) starts to rise significantly
and come up with a curve of f(x)
as a function of p. Present the
curve to Gates and have him pick
a point.

Gee, should we rule out having
the same subroutine/function in more than
one segment? Hmm ....

Just where Gates learned about optimization
would be a question, but he had a point.
As someone who is Korean, I don't find it all that more efficient or less efficient than Latin characters. I also speak Mandarin, however, and I do appreciate Hangul's terseness.

I wrote my name in Hangul and it came out to 16 "strokes", in English I approximated about 18 strokes (things like m/n I'm not quite sure how to calculate in strokes, so I counted both as a single stroke).

Meanwhile my Chinese name is a whopping 52 strokes. I hate writing my Chinese name.
Isn't this an example of poor OPSEC? If he is in fact using the procedures spelled out in this post, he's giving his potential attackers a clear picture of all of his security measures so that they can focus effort on exploiting a weakness.
One thing that is natural, is people's enjoyment of something when exposed to it. If you don't enjoy programming, or math, or creating art, then you will be hampered in developing a skill for it.
A "scripting language" is a programming language. "Scripting" is a completely useless description, and is usually used to stoke a flamewar.
Ask HN: How to work for an acquisition department in a big company?
I always wondered how someone gets a job at acquisition departments in the companies like Google, Facebook, Cisco etc ? What kind of skill set or career is required to be in a position to research and acquire companies ?
Do These Chemicals Make Me Look Fat?
And thats why Schneier probably isnt using Windows but its a diversion. Takes tinfoil hat off.
Regarding the mysterious hidden traction control that no one can find.

How about a modified wireless air pressure sensor inside the tires that also reported tire slippage?

Then perhaps that slippage info gets received by electronics built into the drivers shoes?

Then the millisecond acceleration and braking is controlled by actuators inside the shoes that hit the pedals, faster than any human can and using instant, actionable slippage data.

When the driver walks away, nothing unusual can be found on the car when it is presented for inspection.
Ask HN: Why do all payment processors charge 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction?
I have been looking into multiple payment processors and it seems everyone charges the same thing. Why is that?
I would love to see that elusive budget cap implemented but if that were to happen, I would want to ease the technological limitations.

Imagine the kind of innovation if you were free to do what you want up to a max of X million/year.
Next time you are unfairly double taxed, try telling that to your local tax agency.
at least you can zoom.

death to all lazy slobs who just cancel zoom on mobile instead of doing his/her work.
The idea of a 'write-only layer' in the browser scenarios described is ridiculous. It simply doesn't exist.

In the days of DVDs, GPU acceleration exposed the concept of 'overlays' that you could dump YUV or RGB video content into, and those overlays would be presented directly to the display - the RAMDAC overlaid them onto your framebuffer when producing VGA/DVI/etc signals. This, at least, made it possible to make such a mechanism 'write only', if you sufficiently secured the output (via negotiation, or something) to ensure it wasn't being fed to a capture device - you only had to deal with the analog hole.

But once you're trying to composite protected content into a webpage, you've already lost the game. The content can be clipped, scaled, rotated, sheared, faded, masked, filtered, and so on - all without writing any JS. All those transformations would somehow have to be baked directly into this 'protected rendering' pipeline and implemented cross-platform in such a way that none of that data was accessible at any point in its myriad trips between the CPU and GPU. You'd have to access-control all the cache textures on the GPU, all the buffers on the CPU, all the intermediate information. You'd also have to access-control the resulting framebuffer for the browser tab, and any other intermediate framebuffers, along with the actual output from the GPU that's sent to your display - and most displays these days are connected digitally, so now you're dependent on your end-users having HDCP compliant displays (which many do not).

It's a complete joke. EME cannot work. Period. Modern GPU/CPU configurations are basically general-purpose compute hardware with mutually accessible memory and the ability to do computations and read/write operations from inside rendering routines (i.e. pixel shaders).
So (unethical) hackers are also completely blameless, after all it is in fact the software itself that allows this unintended access. Are you willing to endorse that statement?

If not, then Google is to blame for taking advantage of tax loopholes.
Great stuff. On a side note, this ECMA website is fantastic. I've never seen it before, but it's really quite interesting to change the URL to random numbers to find out what other standards ECMA has done.

For instance, there's a standard for measuring computer equipment in controlled rooms: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...

And here's an important one, DVD-RAM discs: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST... and their cases: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...

Plus, NFC: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...

It's all new to me!
PSA: The best way to delimit URLs is to enclose them with angle brackets (< and >) as per < http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt >.

However, like many flaws with HN's underdeveloped software, you can't actually do that on HN because the parser includes the trailing > in the URL. So your best bet here is with whitespace.
Keep downvoting me.

I honor the memory.

I remember when.

-haiku
> What 'debate' on HN do you expect about such an article?

Something better than "the hipster socialist crowd", which adds nothing to the discussion but makes it harder for that discussion to be useful.
Bumper-Sticker Agile
RDP makes it easy to access drives, devices, etc. from the the client... do you do any additional configuration to disable these features?

http://geekswithblogs.net/DesigningCode/archive/2010/04/19/f...
Exactly the point though, towards the end of the article, they lament the fact that instead of an open and somewhat self-regulating environment, we are getting more "political oversight".

Political oversight is seldom effective, especially when you try to honor the rhetoric that everyone must be on equal footing. With such a plurality of stakeholders, any consensus is extremely difficult to achieve. Instead, you often end-up with a bunch of half-measures and nuisance regulations.

In my own ideal world, governments and their regulations stay within their borders and the "Internet" as a pseudo-entity is not regulated in any way.
None, because I'm not writing an OS, and my time is worth more than the computer's.
Android isn't written in Java. The userland might be, but the kernel itself is Linux, and that is written in C.
1. It's conjecture, not an accurate observation.
2. It's unnecessarily inflammatory.
I have no idea. Chances of a mix that violently burns at 1300 degrees being under regulation somewhere in the wide world are not that slim.
They are treating people like cattle. Herd em up, brand em, and profit.
I wouldn't. Not in F1, at least. Not if you wanted to regularly come in the points. You could stick Vettel in a Marussia, and he'd still finish near the back of the pack.
I'm actually very confused by it - I thought the specification for ECMAScript 3 already specified trailing comma support for JSON. Will need to look it up...
Sounds like a great plan to me! Will we keep this one on HN, or create a meetup page for it?
That is a gross misunderstanding of both uncertainty and science. Uncertainty is based on measurements made. The 1% you came up with is an entirely made up number. Also, science is explicitly not about assumptions. It is requires testable predictions. The complexity of the solutions does not matter. Otherwise we would still be using Newtonian mechanics for everything.

The problem with your dragon example is that it is testable. This moves it in to the realm of science.
Why Design Documents Matter
I would've done the same thing if I had a slimy developer building next door to me
Actors Performs Real Amazon.com Printer Review
good point. the article is thin on this topic.

my guess is that latin countries will have a local exchange instead, which is about damn time to be honest.

which happens regardless of that meeting...
I usually go down through the "down to to do list way". This gives me a frame for working, and allows me to be in the state of mind of "this is a job, you signed for it, you do it"More than often some joy of working appears a few times after the struggling
This notion that there will suddenly be 5000 gazillion 0days as soon as XP loses support in April, and that as soon as you go on the Google homepage on May 1st, is ridiculous and absurd.

I've been running unsupported XP SP2 on one of my older machines for over a year now. It's connected, runs applications, email, and internet services. No hacks, no worms, no rootkits, no nothing.

Just use a good antivirus and you'll be fine. AFAIK there hasn't even BEEN a 0 day patch for XP in more than 3 years.
Dwolla doesn't charge that but I have no idea who uses them
I looked at Fisher's site for the pen and saw that you can get them engraved. Tried to type a heart in the way that they mention alt-3 and learned that alt-# switches to tab # in firefox. Apparently ctl-# is the windows equivalent. Cool to learn something new on accident.
After all the comments, I have realized I may have jumped the gun. Yes, possibly.

It was a bit of an hectic morning and then I read this with the wrong mindset and so on...

Thanks for the feedback.
Why do you ask him without the stubborn and arrogant comment on G+ and about trailing commas? Or is indirect better?
That's just a license for software available on json.org, so no impact at all.
404 Standard Not Found
C++11 brought type inference so these days it would be either

auto whatever = new std::map<int, std::vector<int>>();

or

std::map<int, std::vector<int>> whatever;

depending on if you want heap or stack allocated variable, stack allocation usually being preferred as the default solution (and thus being the tersest form).

But lets look a bit deeper why C++ is more verbose in this case. One central reason is the idea that standard library should not be special/privileged in the language syntax. The upside from that is that almost all syntax sugar can be applied to user defined types. A relevant example would be uniform initializer lists in C++11, which allow you to write eg.

std::vector<int> foo {1,2,3};

but also

MyFunkyDatastructure bar {1,2,3};

as long as suitable constructors are defined. In comparison afaik in Python you can not define a class that can be initialized with sugared syntax.

The theme of non-privileged standard library also extends to global namespace pollution. In C++ stdlib does not get to reserve names at global namespace, which leads slightly increased verbosity (std:: -prefixes or using-statements).

So when you ask why you cant make a map/dict in C++ with just 'd = {}', know that there are actually good reasons for (some/most) of the verbosity. The tradeoffs might make it less suitable in your usecases, but there is no absolute/general superiority in either way.
Swift Rescue: Saving a Protected Alpine Swift, Stuck Atop a Six-Story Building (HD) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T83EHM_rUlw
Any thread about environmental topics becomes a space to debate environmental politics, just like any thread about the US government becomes a space for leftists and right-libertarians to take pot shots at each other (I don't encounter many supporters of the traditional GOP faction here).

This might not be a good thing, but it surely isn't unexpected.
If you're interested in building a single-page website or app with similar layouting and transitions I recommend the much more flexible, cross-browser friendly jmpress.js[1] jQuery port.

[1] http://jmpressjs.github.io/jmpress.js/
If you genuinely think there's an unfair advantage here, buy some GOOG stock. Then you'll be on the receiving end!
Somewhat in his defense, he does admit to "inexperience" and "wishing he had a mentor" when he was at Apple. Not that it means anyone should take his advice now.
They would be stupid to do anything that was flat outside the rules, they just don't need to to get wins.
Yeah, I think the first clause was retroactively added to the title, because I did click through to read it before I posted--although I could have missed it and be embarrassingly wrong...

In any case, I'm surprised my criticism got so much discussion. It's hardly novel to call TechCrunch myopic, and not very insightful in retrospect. It was kind of just a knee-jerk reaction to a confusing (for me) original title. It just goes to show how important geography is to people, I suppose.
I think you are probably right.

Your theory is getting some press, too:
http://www.f1sa.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=articl...
The IP addresses listed are interesting: Latvia, Romania, Iceland, and New York, USA.
Forget Clang, these are the games that shaped the way we play. Literally
90% of these uber mergers dont really add value and end up destroying companies snif DEC being a premier example - of course merchant bankers and lawyers get a metric shit ton of cash for advice
This is what I get for commenting about movies I haven't seen yet.
No problem! Enjoy the handbook!
Syrian Refugees Get E-Cards To Buy Food In Lebanon
Cites distance and cost/power as reasons why "RAM is slow, registers are fast", not a mention of differences between SRAM and (S)DRAM.

Not worth reading.
these slideshows are new <marquee><blink>
Does this mean comments will be added to the spec?
Show HN: New HTTPretty 0.7.0 website
But it's not a matter of using identical locks. He has offered to turn over particular pieces of evidence about particular suspects; but he refused to hand over his private key which would allow the feds to snoop on everything. It's like asking for the master key, when only the key to one particular room (or one particular car) would be sufficient for the investigation.
>if i believed that more open information was the solution to factual journalism, then i'd have more sympathy for this report.

Translation from Newspeak: access to the facts would prevent their dissemination.
Actually, it's there just because of legacy tools we had :)

So, we've already had Capistrano to help deploy lots of PHP apps, so this fit in quite nicely.

Ansible was a last-minute change from our Bash provisioning scripts. All in all, I'm very impressed with it, and it just simplified the crap out of the Bash scripts :D

I will be removing Capistrano as a dependency and either use (1) Ansible or (2) use an NPM module to just run the ~10 SSH commands needed for deployment.
id prefer a dividend give the spare cash directly to the owners.
Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6532542

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3476403

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519238

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4981416

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3414012

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4926839

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3424199

(edit: fixed "Perviously")
Processors have upstream costs to Visa/Mastercard/etc that are charged in similar ways. The idea behind them using a percentage is that it relates to the risk. The more you spend, the more could be fraud and might need to be written off. The $0.30 is effectively a lower bound to stop micropayments. Otherwise people could do a $0.10 transaction and only pay $0.003. This could be to avoid system load.

While it might seem expensive, until a few years ago, taking card payments required getting a merchant account at a bank with high monthly fees which could take months. Now you can pay similar rates but without the misery of dealing with the banks.
The news came after we already had all of this working for the past month. Now there's even more reason to replace it :)
Alans an engineer from what I recall?
There will certainly be a driverless racing circuit one day.

Soon, if Google's automatic cars ever become available.

It will probably start out as an underground thing.
Well I might got it wrong but I got the bytecode reference from here:

http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/interpreter-irregexp....

Skimming the code it does look like they are interpreting byte code from Irregexp but I would need to read further to say it for sure.
Who is this article for?
MIT's self-healing metal
The reason a lot of people think this story is true is because our government wastes a lot of money, so it seems believable.
I would like a showing of +1's from anybody who thinks they would be as good as Terence Tao if they just studied more mathematics.
The existing taxes, in most countries, nowadays, are a very significant part of the GNP. Check:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenu...
and this covers only the taxes from the central state, there are also local taxes, and social security. In France, that makes it over 67% from only 44% of national taxes.

The point of such a citizen basic income, is that it would eliminate the need for plethoric armies of "civil servants", at all levels. Instead of paying them to bother and harass the public, we pay they to do nothing, and the money that was wasted on their useless activity (beside their salaries converted into citizen basic income), is used to pay this citizen basic income to the other citizen.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519241/report-suggests-...

In other words, YOU are already paying for it!

As for the free ham sandwiches, what is required for that to work is:

- material resources: the universe is big. Even the Earth is big! (but we need energy to dig deep down).

- energetic resources: the sun is big too! And there's uranium, thorium, and perhaps soon hydrogen fusion.

- to put this energy to work moving mater into a ham sandwich, what else is needed is information, the command and control systems, which any programmer will be delighted to implement, if you give him the chance to do it.

Robots and 3D printers are already doing a lot of work, we just need to automatize more. Why aren't google cars already driving on the roads everywhere?
Why are we still making buildings with man power, when the can be made in automatic factories or by big 3D printers?
Introducing Clib: C package manager and micro libraries
If I genuinely think someone's stealing, I should buy stolen goods to take advantage of the situation?

That's an interesting moral viewpoint!
Working with Meteor Data
Meteor is an awesome JavaScript framework that literally lets you save data from the client to the server. This is a quick tutorial on how to work with data in Meteor.
I can't try this out right now but I'm wondering if you can band together with people close to you and build alliances/nations? Would be very cool to be able to take over countries and eventually the world if so