skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Making it non-regressive, let alone as close to progressive as our current system, is damned hard."

Its not really important or difficult. The state I grew up in has a long list of poor people exemptions by industry. Everything in the grocery store except hot deli food is tax free, for example. Tuition, medical care, bunch of other poor people things all tax free... As a poor person the only taxes you'll likely ever pay are the 100% or so gasoline sin tax and sales tax on a car. 5% depreciation on a new car is a fraction of driving it off the lot, and for used, especially for poor people, there's a wink and nod that if you're not involving a bank just don't submit anything completely ridiculous, and they don't enforce sales tax at all on family sales because they know we'd just avoid it via gift tax if they cracked down and other than divorce situations you'll never get family members testifying against each other.

Its important to keep the tax rate reasonably low compared to the "real world poor folks" inflation rate (not the made up one). Another way to think about it, is I live in a civilized (non-california) area and our cost of living is much lower. So you can express our 5% sales tax as living about 18 months in the future, or as living about 1/20th more like Californians. Its just not a big deal.

Now if you want a euro style 50% then the big problem isn't so much the poor as all the people trying to evade that kind of tax rate. We already have plenty of problems with petroleum fuels and tobacco products, imagine those kind of problems with "everything".
>>"Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?"

These are the questions.

Maybe its the money? Engineers see investors throwing millions at sexting apps, yet not as much "sexiness" around curing cancer (which in the long run is a LOT more sexy, IMO).

It is weird though. All these smart ass kids you go to school with, and then they're like

"We're starting a startup"

"Cool, what does it do?"

"It's a photo sharing app that allows you to share photos and meet people with similar interests."

(YAWN!)

Or maybe it's a laziness factor. Why solve the worlds big problems when you could solve #FirstWorldProblems and get paid pronto?

It's a self-perpetuating problem though, because in the long run its probably gonna bite our tech-hipster generation in the ass.

Maybe it's lack of foresight:

What happens when we're older?
When we're not as "cool"?
When we don't look as good in skinny jeans?

Or, even worse, what about when we've been diagnosed with cancer/something else? Wouldn't we wish that we and our nerdy peers spent time solving those problems to help save ourselves? When do we realize that while vanity, voyeurism, and sex can easily bring in the eyeballs/cash, that these things are fleeting....

...but love, health, and helping those less fortunate than us is what might actually save us in the long term.

But not too many seem to care.

It's weird.

(Back to working on my SnapChat-meets Tinder-meets Secret-meets Facebook clone. )
> The only thing you have to know how to do is build something people want.

"Build something people want" is a popular mantra, but notwithstanding the fact that many entrepreneurs overestimate the potential demand for their product or service, it oversimplifies what's actually required to build a company that's likely to be successful.

In the consumer market, translating popularity into dollars sufficient to support a sustainable business can be very hard. It's easy to look at companies like Snapchat, but most startups will not become so popular that they can obtain the type of funding that allows them to significantly delay the implementation of a revenue strategy. Monetizing a modestly popular consumer property that can support more than a handful of employees is still very, very difficult.

In the B2B market, creating a successful business requires that you build something people want (or, more preferably, need), that you can sell and sell at a profit, and in sufficient volume. B2B sales can be difficult and slow, even if you have a great sales team and a great product, and the cost of sale can be much higher than you anticipate. If you do crack the sales puzzle in a profitable manner, scaling sales to the point at which you actually have a real business is a hurdle many startups never get past.

If you look beyond the top 1% startups, you'll quickly find that Silicon Valley is littered with stagnant startups that are based on seemingly good ideas and that might even elicit comments like "I would use that!" But they're not "wanted" enough to get from great idea to great business.

None of this means creating a company is a bad idea, but starting the journey with the "build something people want" mantra in mind, and little else, is more often than not a path to disappointment than success.
really cool and helpful.
Am I odd in seeing a Google engineer discrediting Google's own product?
Yes if we're still talking about poaching, it creates downward pressure on the salaries of everyone else.

There are certain costs associated with hiring someone. Such as:

1) Recruiting
2) Interviewing
3) Onboarding and introducing to team
4) Provisioning equipment, office, etc.
5) Ramping up and getting integrated

Now, if these costs are paid per employee, then the longer this employee works with us, the more valuable they become and the more money they can make.

BUT

Those employees that get poached, or "fail upwards" into other companies, or whatever, actually make that position cost more. Way more. And I am not just talking about the fact that they might leave mid-project or have a moral hazard of screwing up a project knowing they'll have their next job to fail upwards into. But something even more basic.

For example if I have to pay the cost of 1-5 once every 3 years, that's 3 times less than if I have to pay it every year. So will I bear the full cost of 1-5 every time or pass it on to the employees I hire into that position? Of course I would pass it on, and moreover I can justify it by saying that they don't have "seniority within the organization" or that we are a meritocracy.

So you are completely neglecting this side of the phenomena, and blindly claiming that salaries will go up because poaching increases. It's not at all obvious that they would!
Capital gains (the losses) don't saturate at $3,000.

If I have accumulated $100,000 in capital losses over the prior ten years, I can wipe all of that out in one shot by producing a large enough capital gain in one year.

Capital losses saturate when applied to ordinary income.
I had the exact opposite experience. I found that I was laser focused on a particular chunk of code when working in Clojure. Functions were logically grouped together. I never found myself jumping around.
Seems like a nice idea! Thanks :)
Can we please link to the slides instead of the scummy growthhackers.com domain?

http://www.slideshare.net/kylewild/kyle-wildtokyoproductisth...
You have excellent taste in comics.
There are no useful laws for magmas. Monads have a fair amount of structure for something so simple.
That's not far off from what we have at the moment.
This Is a Generic Brand Video
I am beyond very confident that the solution set containing embedding Python, JavaScript, AngelScript, and Lua covers just about everything in the problem set a game programmer reading that book is going to encounter.

And if it doesn't, it's not going to be improved by rolling your own.
Probably doesn't help you answer the question, but out of curiosity, are you going to apply alone? With what if I might ask?
> i'm now wealthier and won't have to pay taxes as long as i transact in bitcoin.

False, you clearly aren't understanding what's being said. Transacting is a taxable event, you owe money on the gains.
I'm not certain, but I suspect many of the different variants in the Octodex had a 404 page at some point.

http://octodex.github.com/
It's more complex than that because both parties have to report the dollar amounts of the goods/services in the barter exchange.

Whoever comes out on top has to report income, and whoever comes out on bottom has to report the expense.
The Rails 2.3 -> 3 upgrade is not exactly a walk in the park.
Because infrared doesn't work very well in water, and crashes in water are the biggest challenge for finding wreckage.

Airliners also carry emergency locator transmitters† (ELTs), which, when activated by a crash, transmit radio signals which can be triangulated via satellite. However, ELTs do not work underwater. No ELT signals from MH370 were heard.

†http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Locator_Transmitter
This seems insane. If I build 3 chairs I do not include the market price of 3 chairs on that day in my gross income, I sell the chairs and recognize the income generated by the sales.
If its treated as property then the maximum is 20% of capital gains. Do you not think you should pay taxes on gains?
React was the missing link for sophisticated clojurescript web apps. The Clojure community discovered it in December. Expect substantial web apps this year. The largest open sourced example I'm aware of in this new wave of apps is Omchaya [1] which isn't that large but shows how large apps could be structured.

[1] https://github.com/sgrove/omchaya/
Isn't the whole point of saying bitcoin is not currency, but property, that you're not allowed to do this kind of accounting? I'm pretty sure if I buy and sell the same stock throughout the year, I can't simply account for it using the stock's average for the year.
"Because MATH!"

Yup. Sounds like Kyle.
They share the same renderer codebase, Gecko. You are correct that advances for the OS benefit the browser, and vice versa.
It might be the most foolish law on the books. Does anyone think that someone who hates a racial, ethnic or religious group will all of a change their mind because its against the law?

Laws against anti-semitism lend credibility to proponents of conspiracy theories. "If what I am saying isn't true, they why is the government out to stop me from speaking about it?"

If you look at France in particular the attempt to shut down the comedic routine of dieudonne m'bala m'bala who has a routine that makes fun of the holocaust has likely done orders of magnitude more to stir up anti-semitic sentiment in France than his routine

regarding the anti-islam stuff, its a similar situation, with some important distinctions that I won't get into at the moment. Regardless, silencing anti-islamic sentiment, just as with silencing anti-Semitic sentiment, will only make the situation worse

P.s. its not just in Europe. In Canada we have 'human rights commissions' that can force you to apologize and pay enormous fines and legal fees for 'hate speech'.
I think the "Googleness" is in your head. Those parameters were defined long before Google bought Urchin.
The Windows Server lifecycle comparison is interesting, but makes me curious about what Azure does, as a more apples-to-apples comparison. Is there some kind of guarantee of what notice you'd get before major changes or deprecation to services? I can't find one explicitly in some quick searching.
From the Google announcement, regarding AppEngine: "We've lowered pricing for instance-hours by 37.5%, dedicated memcache by 50% and Datastore writes by 33%. In addition, many services, including SNI SSL and PageSpeed are now offered to all applications at no extra cost."

Pricing is here: https://cloud.google.com/products/app-engine/#pricing
That's great to know, will definitely consider applying in the near future.

Thanks for answering!
"joebar" -- I don't know who the fuck you are, but you're not joebar@google.com, I am. Who are you really?
Android Sync Adapter or Direct API Access
http://bitcoinaverage.com/ does currency-adjusted price averages across many exchanges around the world.

You should be able to get a yearly average from the API but I worry this would not be what the IRS had in mind, but rather specific prices at time of purchase vs liquidation.
If their stuff is open-source how will they hide backdoors even if forced to insert them? I don't get it.
My point it is there can never be a Bell Labs again. Very few organizations have the resources to fund basic sciences and have all the talent they had under one roof.

Some argue that you can again, but I just don't see how it is possible. See, e.g., http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-Innovation/d...
I get Amazon, and I've seen copies of the purported Bezos 'everyting must be a platform' missive, but when I joined the Google platforms group in 2006 and talked with Urs Hoezle about why all this infrastructure for search, we had a lot of interesting and far ranging discussions but he never said "Oh and we're going to rent this stuff out for money too!" Until the original AppEngine project, and that got a lot of push back and discussion inside Google about 'outside stuff' breaking out of the sandbox and into the Google infrastructure, providing outside access was generally viewed (in Urs' organization at least) as dangerous at best for very little value.

The Great Recession hit, Google stopped building infrastructure for a time and focused on utilization, which lead to some awesome improvements in cgroups and i/o scheduling and such, and only after that and some early successes of both AppEngine and other projects which were kind of like it but much less well publicized, did the idea start to be considered as something Google might actually productize.

I could completely see them building infrastructure at this stage which is purely for rent, they have the recipe for building data centers pretty well baked. But I have never heard it put that they started out with that in mind.
this blog post is by Bobby Grace, not by me.
Those MS-DOS 5.0 manuals were sure good.
I was such a big early fan of GAE, but I do remember so many people feeling burned by the pricing change and the terrible customer service. SSL was for me an important missing feature and I got a friend to walk up to one of the GAE guys at SXSW to ask him directly about SSL or SNI, but according to him it wasn't even on their public roadmap in March 2010. I see that Google product guy has long since moved on to Dropbox, but here's hoping Google is getting serious about throwing real weight behind some of these services and they provide great customer service from now on. Reminds me of this Googler's rant about Google's platforms versus Amazon's:

http://pastebin.com/FBbSkp2i
> Doesnt selling stock immediately rather than after a year mean your tax rate on it is higher?

This is the exact thinking that got many people in trouble during the dot.com bubble.

They exercised their options and neglected to sell and hold enough capital to pay their tax obligation.

Then the bubble burst and stock prices dropped, in some cases to nothing, within a year. The IRS still wanted the capital gains taxes on the difference between the option's grant price and the stock price on the day the options were exercised (aka the taxable event).

It was not uncommon to have people loose their houses and have their wages garnished to pay off their taxes.

Consider this a cautionary tale when speculatively trading Bitcoin.
One thing I like about YC is that you'll are honest about a lot of things and invest to help the founders and company grow . However I've found out that people are the least optimistic about success in the valley . Then why the compulsion of having to move there.

P.S - I'm not a YC graduate but a startup aficionado
Neither is your computer or your safe. Coinbase is very likely much safer for the average consumer than anything they'd do themselves.
How do you know he's telling the truth?

Disclaimer: I too work for Google.

2nd Disclaimer: No I don't.
Internet time moves fast, but not that fast. No way is it that hard to support IE9, and no way that a three year old browser can be classified a dinosaur. IE9 has a modern fast ES5 javascript engine, sufficient css3 support, canvas, inline svg, and fixed most of the IE-isms in earlier versions. Unless trello is porting their codebase to webgl i cannot imagine it being that much work to support ie9. Supporting ie9 is simply part of the cost of doing business.
->Under what license?

If you create Derivative Works, you grant to Microsoft a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, assignable, sublicenseable license to reproduce, distribute, publicly display, modify, use, make, have made, import, and sell such Derivative Works.
Ummm Bitcoin is not property o.O
Text While Driving In The Bay Area And You Might End Up On A Billboard
Jarring Photos Show The Homelessness Crisis in Silicon Valley
That's not true. If you build 3 chairs and don't sell them by the end of the year, you pay inventory tax on the 3 chairs, i.e. you pay taxes on them without selling them.

This is why stores that sell physical goods to a blowout sale at the end of the year.
If you run a numerical simulation of white noise distribution of buy and sell, you'll find no profit to tax and your buy and sell prices will average close to that number.
There is a link to Wikipedia's exhaustive list of providers right by Step 2 in the Quick Start Guide.

Also, providers have a legitimate incentive to help people. They may even like why they do what they do.
The link just redirects me to this ad, hosted on imgur http://i.imgur.com/sOhJVBq.jpg
> all trades are overseen by the SEC

Longterm goal?
ahh. Yeah I feel you there. Just thought there was a somewhat interesting conversation on the GrowthHackers website as well. Thought it might add to the conversation.
I don't think it's mandatory. I think it's a humble-brag instead. These people aren't working so hard because otherwise they'll fail; they're working so hard because they can't not.
Point-of-Care Ultrasound: The Best Thing Since Stethoscopes?
Vend Raises $20M From Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures And Square Peg Capital
Ask HN: Mobile payments from 1st World to 3rd World?
I love Stripe but its solutions are not yet global enough to use in my app. Is PayPal really the only solution to reach as many countries as possible to send payments to?
Azure in it's entirety doesn't (1 year notice of changes coming), but Microsoft has a separate "private cloud" IaaS offering, which has a similar lifecycle to server. This is definitely not my area of expertise, but the word I've heard is this is pretty attractive to the big businesses that are most worried about that.

For example, I know a major hospital/research center who has said that they will 100% never let anything onto the public Internet, but are about to clear use of a Microsoft private cloud.
The thread where we question the activities of employees outside their workplace was yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7459529
> If its treated as property then the maximum is 20% of capital gains.

if it is _long_ _term_ capital gains. short term gains are taxed at the same rate as regular income.
If you haven't held the asset for over a year then it will be taxed at ordinary rates not capital gains.
I work for a startup. We're 15 people all told, and by all indications we're doing great.

The entire team shows up by 9:30am every day, and the office is empty again by 5:30pm, almost like clockwork. I exaggerate a bit... every now and then you might have a couple people stay past 6pm, but that's about it. Overtime is a very rare thing indeed.

I find it absurd this meme that to be successful in a startup, you must work yourself to exhaustion every day, sleep very little, and do it again the next day.

Or at least, it's not true for any company (startup or otherwise) that I'd ever want to work for.
Pizza served with Mexican slang causes stir in U.S. border states
It was the iPod that device that really demonstrated the value of a halo product.
Here's the founder talking on the local news: http://www.3news.co.nz/Vend-the-new-Xero/tabid/421/articleID...
"FAIR Tax-style check-cutting probably isn't enough."

I fail to see how this could be complicated. Assume poor person spends 100% of their income and all of it is taxed, so send them a "psuedo-basic-income" check of whatever minimum wage is times the sales tax.
Interesting, I was looking for the seattle story and instead turned up this interesting snippet: http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2021430981_faawarni...

"the tiny farming community of Deer Trail, Colo., that would encourage hunters to shoot down drones"

"Under the proposed ordinance, Deer Trail would grant hunting permits to shoot drones. The permits would cost $25 each. The town would also encourage drone hunting by awarding $100 to anyone who presents a valid hunting license and identifiable pieces of a drone that has been shot down."
Are you sure it's the first MOOC? NPTEL has hundreds of courses available online already...

http://nptel.ac.in/courses.php
Well, the blockchain records all transactions, and when they took place: http://blockr.io/ So if the IRS is auditing you, then it would be easy for them to cross-reference to that.
It's safer if they don't.

Unless Microsoft licenses it under a license with the most explicit and extensive protections against patent lawsuits.
Ask HN: What's the difference between a cofounder and an employee?
I'm more specifically referring to Asseta's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7468549), which is seeking a technical cofounder even though they have already raised a seed round, validated the idea, and built a team of 6.
The lower 20% (Didn't it recently go up to 29%?) rate is only applicable if you have held the asset for 2 years. If you buy and sell short term, as I have, then short-term capital gains applies.
Why Hire Older Engineers
> You can be successful in any number of odd scenarios but that is not the norm. It is not hard to prove: if you talked to any founder that led the creation of a billion dollar enterprise from nothing, you will find an endless stream of stories such as Adora's.

Starting with the exceptions, and not the rule, can lead to distorted perceptions. Building a billion dollar enterprise is not the normal outcome for most founders. It is the "odd" scenario.

There's nothing wrong with modeling your entrepreneurial journey after those of billion-dollar founders, but the "go big or go home" path is not the only option for entrepreneurs starting a business.

It is entirely possible to start a multi-million dollar business and still have a life, and I'd encourage more entrepreneurs to talk to self-employed millionaires (there are a lot of them) than read Forbes articles about tech's most visible billionaires.
Maximum of 43.4% if its sold within a year.
The Case For Columbo
Not a whole lot. Nvidia cards are not as efficient at mining compared to AMD ones.

1. Single gtx titan gets 300 mh/s [0].

2. There are two gtx titan chips in this card, so let's say 600 mh/s.

3. A rack should fit around 60 of these. This gives us 36 gh/s (gigahashes a second).

4. According to this[1] calculator you will get a whooping 0.00361597 BTC per day, which would be worth around $2.12. Tomorrow expected payout drops to $2.09. Electricity should cost you at least an order of magnitude more.

[0] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-titan-perfor...

[1] http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator
I think he's talking about mining, which is now subject to income tax (likely 25%) and self-employment tax (15%).
WhatsApp Alternative Hoccer Scores €50 Million
Sorry, you misunderstand me. I am as skeptical as you. I did not assume the statement as truth. I was just bit bewildered.
The async pan zoom controller (APZ/APZC) is only used on Firefox OS and the former Firefox for Metro. The graphics team wrote something similar for Firefox for Android (JPZC). At some point the plan is to use the APZ in other products.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/APZ
This is Why the Galaxy S5 Plastic Beats the iPhone 5S Aluminum
Netbeans, Idea, Bluejay