skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The complexity for income tax law stems from tax breaks. There are all these different ways for people to pay less in taxes, but each rule for paying less has its own set of instructions and there are criminal and monetary liabilities for filing incorrectly. So it can be said that if you just pay your income taxes as they come and don't claim any deductions, you are essentially over paying in taxes. Another problem problem that arises from this system of tax breaks is that it allows people receive more or less in deductions based on their life situation which is inherently inequitable.

Tax law doesn't have to be so complex though. For example, you could just have a simple income-bracketed flat tax that is just at a lower rate than current taxes without any deductions possibly. Or possibly better yet, you could get rid of the income tax all together and just use a federal tax on sales, real estate and money transfers out of the country. Granted, this would give the government more direct control over how much money is being collected on a daily basis and could result in some people feeling like they need to have a party with tea, but assuming we do live in a democratic society, something like a sales tax would be more understandable and visible to everyone (as the rate would be printed on all of their receipts) and it would probably lead to more oversight of the tax by the taxpayers rather than everyone just being concerned with paying less than they are asked to each year without getting audited.
While getting Office listed in the Chrome app store is a refreshing thing for MS to do, it seems like quite a stretch to conclude that MS has conceded anything, or that this is related to how MS perceives Chromebooks. If anything, this kind of press might make MS less likely to do things like this in the future, which sucks.
Intel: We're betting our tablet future on Android, not Windows
Perhaps there's a place and need for certain supporting infrastructure around Bitcoin—similar to what we have with bank cards. In the latter case payment doesn't necessarily happen immediately as you swipe the card (the transaction can be pending authorization for a few days afterwards).

Some service could provide instant payments with Bitcoin and handle chargebacks, disputes, credits, etc. I guess if Bitcoin is successful, the big players would go after that.
The Free File Alliance has certainly improved over the past year.

Previously, their system used Flash or Silverlight, and had horrible ui around tabbing between fields and copy/pasting. (Especially on the cap gains form).

This year, they're running jquery, bootstrap, and a whole host of other html5 javascripty goodness. The usability went up for me.
Yeah, that part stood out to me as well. The only way I've found to get different values for each of the functions is to use a different closure for each functions.

funcs = [(lambda i: (lambda :i))(n) for n in range(3)]
for f in funcs:
print(f())
Thanks for the info, it's been fixed
I like that you didn't, because I was expecting Dragdis, but it would have been cheesey.
Yes, of the criticisms in that review, I think the "Crypto Box" one was among the most useful. He can fix that problem simply by renaming his library. The problem with calling it that is that there's also a library that provides a very carefully designed crypto_box: NaCl. NaCl was designed by someone who is simultaneously one of the world's best software security people and one of the best cryptographers. Repurposing the name like that is a little like a guy named Alan writing his own cipher and calling it "Alan's Encryption System".
Looks interesting. I can see why you'd want to own your students/users to customize an experience for them, and with that be able to better monetize them. Who are the target users you're focused on bringing in? Do you think they'd be able to handle the marketing effort themselves, as opposed to say Udemy who's doing a part of this for you?
There was an attempt at it, https://github.com/halgari/clojure-metal
Similar to ChromeOS, a Firefox OS release for notebooks would be great.
Not sure what Lisp family it compares to, but there is Hylas:

https://github.com/eudoxia0/Hylas-Lisp
Just give the prize to Docker already. Is there any serious doubt it should win?

(Except by the people who claim Docker in nothing new because it is just Linux Containers. To whom I just say OS/360, and then ask them to please package me up a redistributable Linux container with a single command)
Those who are defending this as a reasonable and commonplace policy are dissembling at best. This is another example of the emerging electronic class system. Those who are members of the Silicon Valley clique are privileged to take what they want from those who are not. Recall the Googler who was able to have a web page he didn't like shut down, just by calling his connection at Digital Ocean.

One might argue that a thing such as an Instagram account is just a service provided by a business and the business can do as it likes, but this isn't the case. A social media account is a vehicle for the user to interact with the entire world, and it shouldn't be able to be unilaterally revoked, especially if the only reason is to give it to a"more deserving" insider. We need a system of due process for situations like this.
Great. How did you think your comment would contribute anything to the discussion?
Super Planet Crash – Can you feel the gravity? [Game]
I've lived in DC for nearly five years and I run a software company here. Here are my thoughts:

1. The quality of life here is very high. I believe this is probably one of the best places in the US for young professionals (its reputation hasn't caught up with it yet).

* We have a strong bike sharing program and decent biking infrastructure. I'm not a biker and I use this most days now.

* I recently got rid of my car. I simply didn't need it. I can walk in four directions to neighborhoods with great restaurants. I also have several grocery stores within walking distance.

* The North West part of the city is very clean.

* I don't own a car. So long as I live here--I will not need a car.

* When I want to go running, Rock Creek Park is nearby. Same for the National Mall. If I want to go Kayaking on the Potomac, it's a longer walk, but I can hit a Dept. of Parks and Recreation boathouse and get a kayak.

* DC has a short-ish winter. We get one and it gets cold. Some days we get snow the city doesn't know what to do with. Overall though, January and February are the worst of it. Sometimes we get hints of Spring in March. April, Spring is usually here full bore. Spring and Fall here are beautiful. I'm from MI and I lived in Syracuse, NY. I judge weather through this lens.

2. DC is very expensive. I incorporated in DC and I suspect the city took a cue from the Spanish government in terms of forms and prerequisite forms and licenses one must acquire to start a business. They claim they're pro-startup. I don't see it. I just see a bureaucracy that nickels and dimes small businesses. Taxes are high too.

3. For my sector (cyber security) and the types of customers I have; DC is the perfect home base. I'm close to my customers and potential strategic partners. We even have a cyber security related accelerator in Northern Virginia. I see the concentration of folks and businesses in my industry as a big plus.

4. I travel a lot for my business. If I need to go to NYC--I take the Accela and I'm there in three hours. If I need to get into the suburbs of MD, I use the MARC train. If I need to fly, I have three airports to choose from. The closest airport (Reagan) is a 15-20 minute cab ride.

5. We have had a massive growth of startup and coworking spaces in the past two years. I don't know where they all came from--but it's insane. If you're looking for semi-affordable office space co-located around other startups--you'll find something here, probably walking distance from where you live.

6. DC benefits from a flood of ambitious folks who want to change the world and start their career here. When I moved here, I expected a scene of lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and their hanger-ons. It's not like that at all here. This is a very ambitious city with people who work very hard to make things happen. I like its energy and this is probably where I will stay.
You have no ownership over a username in a private service. Your access can (and will) be terminated at any time in accordance to their Terms of Service. If you want to maintain control over your identity and presence online, you ought to use self-hosted services like Pump.io or Diaspora.
Christ! $1500? I know they're "handcrafted" and all. But there's neither $1500 of material or work in that desk.
Yes, I think this is something that his happening here. It's at least partially my fault, because once I had to pull the review into Gist, it was easy to post it on Twitter too, and so it took on a life I hadn't anticipated for it.
Dear M$... It's not me, it's you.
A breakup letter to Microsoft.
Interesting.

Is this something that works for people? Even with a 6 hour layover, I'd probably be stressed about getting back to the airport in time, unless I heavily limited my activities.
Worried about having someone steal your invaluable Twitter or Instagram username?

The solution is obviously to immediately litter all your social media accounts with such foul loathsome toxic content that no one else would want to touch them again for at least the next 1000 years.
Really interesting! It would be great if the readme could go into more detail about how the relationship between the hub, CLI, and cron works, including an explicit description of what text goes in the crontab files.

How do you get the reports of each run back to the hub? Are you wrapping each cronned command in a script which captures the output?

Does the hub have its own notion of what jobs exist on each machine? If so, there is the potential for this to get out of sync with what's really on the machine (manual editing of crontab, database crash and restore from an old backup, etc). Is there any way to detect that, and bring them back into sync?

Can the hub form an opinion on whether any job has failed to run when it should? Can that be exposed to something like Nagios?

How do i integrate this with rcron for my highly available cronjobs?

Have you thought about supporing sqlite for a database? It would simplify deployment considerably in simple cases.
Yeah, I think it begs the question: When did the last activity take place?

It's weird that they didn't just delete the account. Instead they renamed the account to "_____kathleen": https://twitter.com/kathleenw/status/448151516399276033
He's advocating fail early with "set -e". And as for the other, you can allow overrides with syntax like:

COULD_BE_SET=${COULD_BE_SET:altvalue}
Create JavaScript, CSS Interactions With Zero Lines of Code
You describe a very abstract type of a synapse. Nature is more complex than this.
I think it's just a definition problem. What do we mean with modeling a brain? Is it the same like modeling a neuronal network? On which level do we define a brain.
E. g. We can also include all chemistry and even fluid dynamics in a cell.
E. g. to understand a computer: do we have to have to simulate on the electron leven with doped compounds and barriers, or is it enough to model it with characteristic curves of transistors, or is it even enough to model it on the binary level as switches between 0 and 1?
Isn't this the problem, then? People here seem to think you are, and by reading you I get the impression that they're right. I don't believe that you won't write a book because you're not qualified: you just don't want to write one. And that's a good enough reason.

I think the community in general is very harsh towards anything related to cryptography. It's as if you shouldn't bother writing code unless you have mastery of the underlying mathematics while at the same time not bother with the maths unless you're an expert very-low-level-language programmer.

There is certainly a need to put forward blatant errors and potential flaws. But the general harshness is misguided I think. Tptacek, you simply said out loud what many thought, I'm sure. You'd make a lot of people happy if you wrote a book. Because you're still learning doesn't mean others can't learn from you.

Very subtly broken cryptography software is better than no cryptography software. And together we will learn to make it better.
Relatively close? What is this, horse shoes or hand grenades? I need precision dammit!
Sure it's true. If I do two cases, and my billing times overlap even by one minute, I am not going to get paid for either one of them by Medicare. If I place an epidural in Medicaid pt, I get paid something like $36 for the placement, and I don't get a penny for watching this pt for next 18 hours.

The question is why medicine is becoming the most miserable profession (with polling data to back it up) while the gov't interference in it is at all time's high and going higher and higher all the time.
Canadian bill to crack down on illegal downloads has privacy experts worried
Can Facebook Innovate?
As others have mentioned, this was probably due to inactivity. I stopped using Instagram years ago, but still had 'instagram.com/derek', and just checked to see if that was still my username. Nope, it is now 'derek______________', just like '_____kathleen'. The fact that a FB employee now owns the 'kathleen' user means they probably have an internal reservation system for expired accounts, which is a nice perk.
is this library independent of d3.js ?
TriangulateNC – Index/Map of the NC Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
Instant Login For Meteor Apps
I spent months working with Chef and made a good amount of progress but I feel like it drained years off my life. It's not because "devops" is even hard, but it's because the tooling is still horrible and the community is still split / documentation sucks in general / etc..

It actually killed my motivation to program in general so it's not like I'm some ansible fanboy too. I don't use anything now because I haven't deployed a line of code in about 2 months.
That's the plan. We want to include it in the base price.
It makes more sense to rename the account. In the case of a user having old photos, likes, or comments, they don't lose all their history.

Another HN commenter had a similar experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7598567
Stripe went through YC four years ago. Give the newer companies some time.
Yep. Success hides failure. A company can do 9 things right and one thing wrong, but if the company does really well then people assume that all 10 things are right. In Blackberry's case it was a lot more than one thing wrong.
"I suspect this is often a conflict between the expectations of the children of helicopter parents and my generation."

At 49, I see the exact opposite. Members of my generation tended to exhibit more tact and decorum. The urge to dress like a hobo, swear all the time, and flame everyone in sight is a classic overcompensation for years of helicopter parenting which forbade all of these things.

"In some cases, it's honesty."

In others, it's honesty used as a pretext for acting out.
> I found that the EIA publishes prices in nominal amounts, i.e., not adjusted for inflation. So, I used the inflation calculator at http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm, and then I plotted electricity prices from 1990 to 2012.

See, this is the problem with data. "Lies, damn lies and statistics." The period from 1990 to 2000 can't help you because electrical consumption significantly increased over that period.[1] From 2000 to 2012 you take an upward sloping graph and try to flatten it by adjusting for inflation. The problem is, it still shows an inflation-adjusted increase of ~10% from 2000 to 2012, and over the same period the inflation-adjusted median income was on the decline.[2] And that's before you account for the loss of personal wealth resulting from the dotcom bust, 9/11, the housing market crash and the consequent lack of credit availability. And even then, all you can say is that electrical consumption failed to increase significantly. There is no reduction over time, the number of MWh generated even increased slightly.

[1] http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/state/
[2] http://www.davemanuel.com/median-household-income.php

> after thinking about it a bit, I think residential electricity usage for lighting should be a great test case for Jevon's Paradox.

> Unfortunately, although I can find current data on residential electricity usage for lighting, I haven't been able to find any historic figures.

Test cases are meaningless anyway. It's a mathematical equation. You can test the degree of the effect, but all you're really testing is the price elasticity of demand in a particular market. It won't be the same number for light bulbs as for air conditioners or for transportation.
I'd say there's two types of "intentional" complexity. There's the complexity that comes about because we feel like some actions should receive preferred tax treatment over others. So, tax expenditures like student loan and mortgage interest deductions and so on. They had some complexity because "we", as a government, decide to do that.

But the darker side is the complexity that exists to let people with enough income and the means to obfuscate their true tax rate. We may have a top marginal rate of 39.6%, but even people who have a huge income pay nothing close to that. And it's in high income people's interest to keep it that way. It's also in the interest of the companies we're talking about to keep the tax code complex both because they're run by high income people and if the general population has a sense that the tax code is super complex for themselves, they're more likely to use tax preparers even if they actually have very simple taxes or just mildly complex.

So, yes, with a huge economy the tax code is going to be very complex. That's just politics and the nature of the beast, but there's more complexity than there needs to be because of interests who drive it to complexity for their deadweight gain and strive to keep it complex.
The coffee included with the $45 plan (there are two tiers), is not $3 coffee. It's black coffee. In DC, a small drip coffee or pour over runs around $1.80 or so. It's $85 a month for the plan that includes lattes and other more expensive espresso drinks.

A small latte usually runs around $3 or so. An espresso might be $2.25-2.50. Two small lattes a day (not a lot of caffeine) would save you a ton of money a month with this plan.

If you drank even one cup of coffee a day, you'd save money with this, with either plan. A lot of people drink a cup in the morning and the afternoon, and that's where the savings really add up.

I'd personally be more interested in a hybrid plan that got me unlimited black coffee and a certain amount of espresso drinks a month. I know they have a more expensive plan with espresso drinks, but I don't want that daily. How about a $65 plan?

It's a great idea though. If you live and work in an area with coffee shops supported by this, you can basically have a monthly fee that covers all of your coffee needs. You can also no longer worry about having any coffee equipment in your apartment. Saving space is important to city dwellers.

If this came to DC, I'd strongly consider signing up for it. It's a great way to encourage people to go to non-chains, and to make paying at non-chains easier. Many of the big chains, including Starbucks, have long had ways to pay for drinks with an app. That's part of what this product does, and why small coffee shops would want to get on board.
Bill Gates Patents Detecting, Responding To "Glassholes"
I forgot to clarify the opposing view. Some people see or foresee a negative outcome of an unfettered market, and want to take steps to prevent it. Then they pass laws or regulations, like hotel zoning. They see the improvement as justification for the burden placed on the market. There are so many of these baked into society that you probably don't notice them. Minimum wage laws, overtime laws, vehicle safety laws, workplace safety laws, noise ordinances, etc.
Still, from the consumer side of things there's far less friction/lock-in. Switching between phone platforms brings pain only in app selection, most data (like pictures, calendars and email) is all online and doesn't need to be moved over[1].

The key here like you say are software developers. I think Microsoft is aware of this and their purchase of Xamarin is them taking steps to solve this problem. In the future you could see Microsoft showing developers how they could build their applications for all major smartphone OSs with their tools, allowing them to eat up ground in the app space.

[1] Contrast this to PC vs Mac, where even switching from an old PC to a new PC can be a daunting task, and the risk of data-loss is high.
Open source software quality outpaces proprietary code
Before we all seemingly jump on the "she should have updated her account" bandwagon, it would help to see actual evidence of her inactivity, or at least evidence/statements in Instagram's TOS that state what "inactive" really means.

This doesn't cut it: "We encourage people to actively log in and use Instagram once they create an account."

How long can I go idle before Instagram takes my account back?

Also, as someone else stated in this thread the very least Instagram could have done was to email her and inform her that she was about to lose her account due to inactivity.

Lastly, it's important to note that Instagram didn't just "prune" her account, they renamed it and gave her original account name to an employee. If they were concerned with squatters or dormant accounts they would have actually nixed the account, not renamed it to something else.
> it seems like quite a stretch to conclude that MS has conceded anything

I think its fair to conclude that Microsoft has conceded something -- but not necessarily about Chromebooks' "worthiness", per se.

I think its fair to conclude that Microsoft has conceded that tieing the rest of the company to live and die based on the strength of the Windows OS and brand isn't good long-term strategy -- and this is just one of many signs (rebranding Azure from "Windows Azure" to "Microsoft Azure" is another.)
One list I am aware of for LA is http://represent.la/. Are there other websites which provide information on startups in So. Cal?
> But thinking you can, perfectly and without error, assess the quality of something as both nuanced and capricious as the possible value of a technology start-up concept based on a few brief exposures is really pretty arrogant. And all but certainly wrong.

I never said that they could assess it "perfectly and without error". I said that it means that "YC doesn't think that you're one of the 50 or so best startups".
Dude.

If someone took my handle on instagram and thus I can no longer access any of my photos I would LOSE MY SHIT. It's totally unacceptable, especially for non techies who don't back up their stuff, to jut shut off access to your memories.
I do, when they're particularly annoying.
Getting tagged by friends and family should factor in somehow. Even if the wife wasn't logging in, people following her were getting content and the people tagger her were keeping their photos organized.
Actually this thing is not entirley new and such tools already exist: there are enough arduino-style boards out there that allow you to create a phone already, as well as a bunch of other useful things: get a gps modules, a gprs module, a keyboard module and a screen module and off you go.
Is there a way to determine whether the exit occurred due to the bash script finishing successfully, or due to an error (via set -o errexit)?
I would imagine they are going to try to aim this at the business crowd. My coworkers and I often go and get coffee together. We almost never actually sit down. We talk on the walk to and from the coffee shop. We might take the coffee to a nearby park.

I agree that this won't make business sense with people who use coffee shops as an office.