skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no inherent morality attached to paying taxes. And there is no inherent morality that dictates what amount of tax one should pay. There is a legal obligation to pay taxes, and a moral obligation to follow the law, but there is not a moral obligation to pay more in taxes than what the State requires.

Put another way: there is an intrinsic moral responsibility to not murder, but there is not an intrinsic moral responsibility to pay taxes. One could imagine a country in which there were no taxes, and such a state would not be immoral. And those who lived there and did not pay taxes would not be viewed as immoral. But if this same country did not have an explicit statute outlawing murder, we would still call people who murdered others (e.g., killed for pleasure) immoral.

Given that we are morally obligated to pay taxes strictly on the virtue that a law exists that says "You must pay this tax", how is it morally problematic to determine what you owe under the legal structure that has imposed the tax? Your moral obligation is to pay the tax as it is defined, it is not your moral obligation to pay more tax than the tax code requires.

That seems to me to be an obvious tautology: you owe in taxes what the tax code says you owe. If the tax code allows you to limit your tax responsibility by moving money through trusts, so be it. It doesn't seem any different than parts of the tax code that limit your tax responsibility for buying a home, having kids, or making under a certain threshold of money.

Whether or not the tax code, as constituted, is fair, equitable, desirable, or is having its intended effect are fair questions. But calling people immoral because they find legally sanctioned ways to reduce their tax liabilities is troubling.

I don't make enough to really worry about these structures, but I can guarantee you that if I did I would do whatever I could to reduce my legal tax responsibility.
I disagree. The police don't consistently arrest people for committing minor infractions. For example, spitting on the sidewalk is a violation in NYC, but the NYPD isn't issuing thousands of summonses. It doesn't make any point re: the police and race.

This guy is a professional agitator. He didn't get arrested for carrying graffiti tools, so he tagged city hall. The officer present decided to not deal with a political speech issue and moved along. Then he decided to be a smart ass and annoy people who have the power and broad discretion to apply the letter of the law upon him. When you do that, you tend to attract harsh treatment.

The second part isn't a problem per se -- the District Attorney's office and Probation Department are legally invested to use their own discretion. I suppose that if he built a rapport with the PO and had his requests granted, that he would be complaining that he received favorable treatment for being white.
Google and Facebook sell your detailed browsing history and social interactions to advertising companies. For a similar price, they'd likely sell this information to any government as well.
My understanding from reading his blog is that everyone works from home. Which means that he doesn't have to pay for office space, and he can hire people who live where engineer salaries aren't as high as they are in the major tech hubs.
There is literally no such thing as "bad guys."
I was hoping for variables where the variable could update based on the screen dimensions or something like that. All this gives us is a shortcut to re-using the same styles.
Stanford Seminar - BTC: Bitcoin, a New Value Chain in China
>US firms lose contracts and relationships sour.

This meme is not based on facts. American companies dominate the internet space even more now than they did before Snowden. Anti-Americanism is great but you need other companies to replace their services.
White House names former Microsoft exec to run Healthcare.gov
Because Firefox also used GDI on XP. It doesn't on newer versions of Windows.
I was just about to accuse you of dependent typing.
I actually subscribed to TeamTreehouse because I wanted someone to hold my hand to introduce me to iOS. It was a good experience.

For background, I've been programming for 20 years, first in Basic, then PHP, Javascript, R, (a very small amount of) Common Lisp, and Go. Given that I currently have little free time, it's quite nice to have someone show you a Good Way to write idiomatic code in a new language.

I found their (high, compared to blog posts) pricing to be a positive indicator of quality, and their videos and code seemed to match.
This adds to my opinion that Craigslist needs to have a good (paid) API.
Very cool, but once you start working in something like LESS or Sass, it totally changes how you write styling and becomes something more than "CSS with variables". The possibilities they offer are more than features, it changes your entire workflow. Personally, I won't go back.

But besides all that, it's pretty sweet to have something more like "CSS with variables". That can come in super-handy sometimes.
The Future Is All Robots. But Will We Even Notice?
hehe this is awesome
Indeed. Most people still cling to the belief that NI funds the NHS, instead of just being "income tax plus". Having said that, TV tax does fund the BBC.
Chronos 2.1.0 for Mesos Released
Sorry, that was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that companies like Facebook and Google that get most of their revenue from advertising tend to sell some data about their users as part of their advertising platforms. Of course, the data exposed through those interfaces isn't nearly as explicit or personal as the sort of direct access the NSA wants.
They're running Macs or Linux and never see the garbage when they're designing their sites. The poor rendering only occurs when you use GDI to render the text which is only used by Chrome on Windows (and Firefox in Windows XP, but not Vista/7/8).
> Now, instead of wearing suits, if he wears baggy jeans that almost fall off his butt, puts on a few tatoos, nose rings to match, and starts doing seemingly illegal things.

Even among those that dress this way, the stop and frisk profiling still overwhelmingly targets black and hispanic people. Tattoos, piercings, and casual wear are extremely common in NYC, far more than suits, esp. in Brooklyn.
Hah! As it happens, I had just started experimenting with designing a new Lisp dialect when I got Emmett's email! It was working out pretty well, and I was having a lot of fun, but I think the world needs livestreamed creativity more than it needs yet another Lisp :)
Until you implement it at tiny scale using COTS integrated circuit technology or some semi-hypothetical individual atoms basis. MEMS chips are high tech.

Perhaps you could make a nano (well, micro) scale peristaltic pump out of a really small geneva linkage. Or gears for a little robot that floats in your bloodstream or something like that.
Talking a short walk when stuck on a problem.
So were you under the impression that incarcerated persons could not have their cells searched without a warrant, too?

The 5th and 14th amendments provide that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". He was convicted of a crime. The punishment can include random searches, drug tests, ankle monitors, etc., as long as it is provided for by law.
Yes, I am a lawyer. I have to respectfully disagree with you. The story kindly submitted here is fascinating reading, and I'm glad the author did his experiment. I've long thought (perhaps because I had interpreting work before I attended law school that brought me inside courtrooms and jails and prisons as a visitor) that everyone who works in the criminal justice system needs to see the system as suspects and convicted offenders see it, at least briefly. Some of our imagination about the system is dispelled if we experience the facts.

I agree with your suggestion that members of the general public should also become more aware of the working conditions of the police. Many police departments in the United States allow members of the general public to go on a "ride-along" in a police car on patrol (that usually involves signing release forms and promises not to misbehave while on the ride-along) and that too is a good learning experience. Basically, it's good for everyone to understand better how the other half lives.
Up until iOS7, the ad-tracking settings were under:

"Settings" -> "General" -> "About" -> "Advertising" and not with the rest under "Privacy".

And then they helpfully used a double-negative when describing the behavior of the function, the default state was: "Limit Ad Tracking -- Off"

Apple are far too good with usability for either of those choices to be accidental.
It was pretty much guaranteed to fall since I just bought some right before that. Next time I plan on buying any, I'll let you know, so you can plan accordingly.
10 lessons I learned from building a travel startup
> RedHat Fedora makes no apologies for dropping legacy support. Heck, they threw out ifconfig in Fedora 19.

WTF? Is that because Linux was becoming too easy to use? They have to keep changing it up, so the certification classes have new material to teach. Why wouldn't they keep the command around and wrap whatever re-invented mousetrap replaces it so millions of people can keep typing ifconfig?
It's literally:

.header {
background-color: orange;

p {
font-size: 16px;
}
}

You nest the selectors and it spits out .header{} and .header p {}. Much cleaner to write and maintain.
You did not read the same article as I. Or, rather, you read the same article with a filter of bias, bigotry, and media fueled fear. To wit, you believe they are "purse snatching, or beating up an ex-girlfriend, or playing the knock-out game, or emptying a cash register" and you comically believe police are severely punished for bending the rules.
"Interesting. If trains only make sense for trips of <4 hours, how does that impact the California High-Speed Rail project?"

Disclosure: I am pro-rail and pro-CA-rail ...

Better to refer to it as "California Rail" and not "California High Speed Rail" since the speed and travel time is modern, circa 2005 or so. As of 2015 it is looking a bit sluggish compared to competitors globally and by the time it is actually running, with riders, it will be decidedly slow by comparison.

Anything under 2 hours from city center LA to city center SF is very interesting and a real game changer. But 2:40 or more ? And I am potentially stepping off a train in LA which is absolutely governed by car infrastructure ? That sounds like a wash, at best.[1]

[1] As opposed to a 5.5 (or so) hour drive, with complete control over departure time, unlimited luggage, total control over your own environment and when you arrive you have your car with you already ...
Not really, I just prefer the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. I hated upstart when it was introduced too, it broke stuff so I had to replace it with the unsupported (but fully functional) sysvinit every time. I still don't like the fact that it obsoleted /etc/inittab and that it has both old fashioned /etc/init.d and a /etc/init, because I have to look in 2 places to find a config or script. But it does give me a getty on whatever I set as console on the kernel commandline and it's definitely not broken out of the box any more, so I'm game.

You might think of a tiling window manager as being the greatest invention since sliced bread, but having to configure it in Haskell FFS (I'm looking at you, xmonad) just doesn't jive with me. Nor does any other tiling window manager except WindowMaker (oh, pardon me, that's a tiled window manager). KDE is just as bad because it has too many bells and whistles, it doesn't follow KISS principles. Is that a straw man to you?

Gnome managed to create a nice iteration of gnome-shell with 3.6, but it was riddled with bugs (it still is, albeit to a lesser extent). Then they had to ruin it in 3.8. Categories are for losers, right? Let's remove that. And no one ever needs accessibility, right? Let's git rid of that, too. And what's with all these keyboard layout options? Can't have that, way too useful! Yeah we put some of them back in gnome-tweak-tool but not all because obviously no one ever used them for anything. The final straw for Gnome (for me) was when shell extensions that were never meant to appear in the lock screen, did in fact, appear in the lock screen. The gnome-screensaver they got rid of did one thing really well, but they couldn't find a way to let it display notifications so they axed it.

I'll do my best to make Fedora 20 work because it offers the option of installing MATE, which is Gnome 2.x based. So it packages all of the latest gizmo's (for better or worse) and presents it with a friendly face without an identity crisis (it knows it's a PC, not a tablet). Though I'm on my 3rd install now, at some point the installer stops working resulting in a blinking cursor when I turn it off and on. It works perfectly in a VM, but I want the real deal. (It did pass verification.)
Everyone that I showed this screen to on their own phone hadn't ever seen that it existed. It's one thing for the phone to log it in some database. It's another that anyone could pick up your phone and see where you live, work, what time you come home, etc.
Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse. It changed my outlook on life.
"We have an internal generator where we just feed our rails app, and the code for our framework is just 'ported'/generated on the fly based on our framework and we just deploy it." - Well that sounds useful! Any thoughts on open sourcing it?
I'm working on a project currently that needs this but we're an express / mongo stack and not a meteor stack. Anyone know of anything similar I can add to the mongodb node driver? Or can I switch to meteor's node driver without the rest of meteor?
Isn't it more likely to be in graffiti than via Morse coded gnome hops? I hope the NSA is getting photos of all that graffiti it sounds dangerous.
HOPE X
>They left because the police have utterly failed to get a hold of the gang activity pervading the south side.

I don't think this is even vaguely true. They left because of the property bubble raising prices, the crash shattering the black middle class, the dismantling of Chicago public schools, and having the half of the city that they occupy being utterly neglected by the administration.

Crime is bad in Chicago, but crime is down in Chicago.

>And of course these were the kind of people you didn't want leaving: the ones that can afford to.

No, it isn't. Most of the migration is people moving South, where they have family, because they can't afford to live in Chicago anymore. This city caters to upper-middle class white suburbanites and the cream of the small town Midwest to the exclusion of the rest of the population.
Ask HN: Becoming a General Surgeon?
As a Web Developer I'm looking to expend my interest more in life and I see a lot of people with many problems in life which is considering me to become some kind of Doctor, preferably a General Surgeon because I would like to fix or cure people with deformities, cancer, illness or surgical needs in their body. I want to make a difference in people's lives.

I know HN isn't just full of Programmers but people of all professionals so I would like advice and what it takes to become a Surgeon. I hear the cost is expensive and takes decades to become one. Please let me know what you think of this. Keep in mind I don't have a degree or any experience in Medicine.
I had a similar conversation before about profiling and I have to agree. I'm a male, 18-35 yrs old. If I go to the airport and they stop me, but let a 70 yr old Grandmother by because I look like the bigger threat, then I think they are doing their job.
> However, I think he ignores a really salient distinction: a lot of these "crimes" like the laws against graffiti, exist not because the acts themselves are particularly heinous, but because they're proxies for things that are dangerous, namely gang activity.

You are referring to the broken windows policy of policing, where minor crimes or infractions are pursued heavily under the notion that catching people that do this early will somehow curb harsher or violent crimes in the future. However, crime rates in NYC have been falling even before that policy came into existence in the 90s and that policy also has been applied in a way that ties in to racism.
You all should be aware that it is impossible for CSS preprocessors/postprocessor to fully replicate calc() and var(). For example, you won't be able to do something like calc(100% - 200px) or have scoped variables.
ReRe: The ability to write UI code in Objective-C easy is connected to its late binding. For the same reason it is easy to write services. On Objective-Cloud you have to do /no/ configuration about your service's APIs in external files in a different syntax and so on. You simply define that in your Objective-C code as usual. (= As you would do with classes and protocols in your local code.) I think that this sounds like a good tool for the job.
Well, now I learned something. Also, that's pretty awesome. I could definitely use that.
Yes, it was my impression that some companies participate voluntarily (other than by court order), because the government pays for access or otherwise awards them contracts for access.

One discussion: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/07/10/what...

It's easy to understand why the typical company would choose to participate if they simply need to provide a data stream to gain a new revenue stream.

It's also easy to understand why a factory will dump pollutants into a river instead of disposing them "properly". It's our job as a society to create incentives and remove options that provide this sort of "tragedy of the digital privacy commons" (not a perfect analogy).

By paying for access (at presumably a rate much greater than cost), the government makes firms who refuse to provide access less competitive in the market than firms who do.
Trailing the oplog for events is a great strategy. 10gen use it to generate point in time snapshots for disaster recovery and various companies have described systems doing this to react to data changes in mongo. Web Scale database triggers. Ahrmm.
You mean a CLI-UI?
Sexy Redhead Sings
Xubuntu is very nice as well (13.10). I'm dual booting with Debian 7 XCFE to try to reverse engineer the font rendering on Xubuntu which is much nicer to my eyes.
Bank: A simple.com API client for accessing card info and transactions
Scalaz - an extension to the core Scala library for functional programming
CIA Leak Gives “Incontrovertible Evidence” That 9/11 Was State Sponsored
Yes you didn't and No the conclusion is not that justice is being applied evenly.

Be white professional == not get arrested. Expose the system == get inordinately punished as severely as possible even if (or maybe more so) you are white professional.

The system is unjust and abuses its authority to intimidate / curtail anyone pointing that out (or otherwise embarrassing the system, it's components or people).
As an Italian, I don't agree.
But that's for Italy, we're corrupt and we always bend rules.

Currently living in The Netherlands and things are very different here. Also Belgians and Germans are very strict, from what I heard.

Europe in itself is far too broad. We may be very small land-wise but culturally-wise we can be very different between each other. Can't say for sure, really.
Mathematician here. Time for another boycott?
Graphing the Marvel Universe
I find it hilarious that the Obama White House doesn't seem to be taking the tech companies' position seriously. In fact, the White Houses's almost complete non-response to the NSA revelations has damaged their credibility in my mind much moreso than the Healthcare.gov debacle. Me and other tech-industry-type people I talk to understand why code projects fail and break, so, while we shake our heads at the poor management and deployment of this website, we "get it." It doesn't really concern us.

This Snowden thing is really getting out of hand, though. I initially was anti-Snowden when the first leaks came out; I was unconcerned that the government might be storing metadata. But I am certain that the NSA has been lying about the scope of their collection and it's legality. As more documents leak, I become increasingly concerned with the apparently blank cheque for surveillance that the NSA has been issued. It has personally shaken my trust not only in specific channels of communication, but the entire internet in general. It's troubling the steps one must now go through to have a semblance of secure communication: I have trouble trusting ANY software for security because I have no idea what the NSA is allowed to do (I suspect its almost anything if it's en masse). The one percent doctrine is the scariest thing to come out of the Bush White House, which wasn't exactly a beacon of freedom.

The wheels of law and government turn slowly, which is, generally, a good thing, but I believe that the gov'ts policies regarding information collection need to be addressed ASAP. They're hurting the United States' already shaky foreign credibility, and they're hurting American companies' interests as well. Somebody needs to light a fire under Congress's or the White House's seat to get the ball rolling. Judge Leon's ruling is a good step, but I'm disappointed and ashamed that the first president I cast a ballot towards is stonewalling on such an important issue.
Show HN: Hacker News JavaScript app
That part definitely put me off too, but I wouldn't chalk it up to "trying too hard". I have a problem with the author's idea that putting "extra work" into a resume with animals on it actually made her a better candidate for the job in any way. It's worded as if she's surprised the song she recorded failed to actually demonstrate her competency to the hiring manager any better. Of course it didn't. No one hires software developers based on the colorfulness of their resumes or their vocal range.
Actually I have no idea why you think I'm under that impression. I know that (for example) convicted felons can lose their voting rights, but I did not know that committing a misdemeanor would cause you to lose protection against searches in your own home after your release, potentially forever.
It's hard to synthesize, this book revolves around an attempt to model what produces good design and provide a formal method to reach it (note that it's "design" in the broader sense of finding solutions given certain constraints). It provides many insights:

- The notion that form (more generally, structure) is not something in itself, but the manifestation of the forces (constraints) acting on it. An example of that is how a water droplet not only has a particular form, but can only have that particular form, because that is a manifestation of the constraints (molecular structure of water) and forces (gravity, surface tension) acting on it.

- The notion of problem vs. context, and how you can find a solution by just moving the boundaries;

- Definition of good solutions as a function of "fitness";

- Development of the concept of "fitness", as a process of reaching balance between interdependent, positive and negative features;

- A critic on the current design process (he calls it the "conscious" process), in which features are proposed/changed indiscriminately, as opposed to forms that arise from feedback loops ("unconscious" process). He gives the comparison between a consciously architected building that fails to meet the requirements vs. an indigenous village in which the buildings already evolved, already meet the criteria given the constraints, and basically don't change anymore between generations

While the author's discusses all these from the PoV of architecture, I've found his insights have surprising parallels with other things, from darwinism to machine learning to data structures and algorithms.
That's how Reddit (and probably every link site) started as well.