skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If someone wealthy willingly gives their money to people to dig holes and fill them back in, it has redistributed some of the wealth. This is at least slightly more efficient than taxing them and then employing people with that tax to dig holes and fill them back in.
Facial Recognition Technology Entering Retail World
I'm confused.

If someone lends me counterfeit money, I don't have to give it back.

Banks don't lend real money, they act with the government to legally leverage their deposits and lend out leveraged money. This money is created in the books and did not come from production in the real economy.

If private individuals' deposits were hurt then all the more reason to arrest the bankers.

The moral hazard comes from government guarantees like FDIC that discourage banks from investing prudently.
Haven't read Piketty - not sure I can handle it with the almost-insignificant knowledge I have about economy - but this argument seems very reasonable.

I've only read people writing ABOUT Piketty's book, and haven't seen anyone put it this way.

I'm from Brazil, and with the upcoming elections people have been all sorts of crazy down here, throwing around whatever "facts" they can find on the internet. One of the main points of disagreement between the two presidential candidates is income distribution, so "data" about it has been all over the news and conversations.

This kind of tax, if only to shed the faintest light on the matter, would definitely help. Even considering that the really wealthy people would not declare everything they have, there's only so much you can hide.

Thank you for this comment.
"Imagine three types of wealthy people. One guy is putting his capital into building his business. Then there’s a woman who’s giving most of her wealth to charity. A third person is mostly consuming, spending a lot of money on things like a yacht and plane. While it’s true that the wealth of all three people is contributing to inequality, I would argue that the first two are delivering more value to society than the third."

The problem with this line of thinking is that yachts and planes don't grow on trees. They're built and maintained by people who have jobs (typically well paid jobs) because someone with wealth is paying for it.

So, to me at least, there is only one type of wealthy person who doesn't add value and that is the hoarder.
I am going to repeat here, what I posted on hist site.

Mr Gates,

I am hoping you posted this not only to express your opinion, but to engage in conversation. And it appears you certainly are.

My criticism with your response is that philanthropy distorts economic resources through a similar mechanism that consumption does.

That is, by dictate.

I believe in the idea that people who are affected by decisions made should have a say in those decisions. This is the value of democracy.

And just like consumption of fine wine and jewelry distorts the economy to produce more of those things, philanthropy moves vast economic resources for what I would call "the pet projects of philanthropists". Typically the people affected by the philanthropic expenditures have no say. More often than not, no democracy processes take place.

A king who lives a modest lifestyle, who spends all his wealth on what HE thinks is just and good, is still a king. And I hold contempt for his arrogance.
No I totally agree. I believe that there should be an elite who makes most of the decisions, which is mostly how things are today, but I also believe that there needs to be methods of being sure that the elite are operating in everyon'es best interest, and that they will be replaced if they aren't.

There are a lot of broken incentives. If one of the elite comes to the realization that they are no longer the most useful person for the job, can we trust that they'll step down? Or will they hide this fact from everyone else and continue to enjoy their position of power?

These types of problems are not solved and it's important to keep looking for better solutions. I just don't think that "all people have equal say" is a better solution.
A restaurant would very unlikely be hit by estate tax. For one, it's the VALUE of the restaurant, not the revenue. What do you think the value of a restaurant typically is (especially a family one like you describe) -- probably less than 500k -- certainly no more than a million [1]. Restaurants are a fine way of distributing income to a family who work there, but the value is based on profit after that.

You could own 5 restaurants of that size and not pay estate tax.

[1] http://sellingrestaurants.com/news/how-much-is-a-restaurant-...
I wonder if the free rider problem will exist in the zero-privacy everything-public world that we seem to be heading towards. Free riders respond to being outed as free riders.
No problem and good luck with the site! It looks nice and I definitely hope to see more job boards focused on remote work only succeed!
In Canada (though the US is similar), you can file a petition under the mental health act, and have a court order a psychiatric evaluation. This means cops come to the person's house, and (forcefully if he/she refuses) escort them to a hospital of your choosing. The person doesn't get to do anything but act as seized property for almost a month before they get their first date in front a judge. This is how the legal system is meant to work.

In tax cases (according to Meads vs. Meads), the defendant is considered a tax evader if they argue before payment is made. You must first honor the contract before you're allowed to make the plaintiff prove you owed money in the first place. If they can't prove you actually owed, you get the money back. Not only is this how the legal system is supposed to work, but it's based on UNCITRAL (international trade law) conventions, meaning it's how this works in every jurisdiction (including sharia law jurisdictions).

Both sides eventually get to make an argument, but the arbitrator expects the defendant's performance (to restore the honor of the parties) before any arguments are made.

Judge Judy and The People's Court are valid ex acquo et bono courts, but one shouldn't take their conduct as the only way court proceeds.
Maybe Node will finally get a free operator now:

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2012-October/0...
Is RAM not a worthy technical specification to list? I think its pretty critical.

Until somebody corrects me I'll just assume this thing has the 1GB of RAM which is pretty standard these days.. But not enough IMHO
In order for imgurbash.sh to put the URL on my clipboard, using xclip, I had to modify a line:

`xclip -sel clip` instead of `xclip`

https://github.com/naelstrof/maim/issues/8
A tax does it with the force of law using the systems we already have in place. It's the cheapest, easiest, most likely to work way we have of doing this sort of thing.
You're right, the first ~$5M is an exemption, and not taxed by the Federal government. My mistake.
Introducing four new Twitter Triggers
I love it! This is one step closer to having puu.sh on Linux. One program I sorely envy Windows and QSX users for.
It has 3GB of RAM. http://www.motorola.com/us/Nexus-6/nexus-6-motorola-us.html#...
I would be interested to know how you look for these things. We find that although folks can seem very passionate and curious, sometimes they find out they just don't enjoy (or aren't particularly good at) programming. Would love to be able to figure that out before they enroll in our classes.
LibreSSL now turns off SSL 3 by default as a fix for POODLE
> Given that the battery isn't removable too, this makes for a very shitty development phone.

When was the last time you pulled a battery on an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch. I think calling a phone 'shitty for development' just because you can't pull a battery is a bit over the top given the current landscape.
Stanford engineers build, test earthquake-resistant house
I think Microsoft is liable for all the damage they did, (which could be in the 10s of millions of dollars), but There was nothing secret about this - the process server handed over everything, nobody was bound by law to not talk about this. This is nothing like the NSLs.
Thanks to 17 USC § 512 (c), service providers are not liable for hosting copies of copyright infringing material so long as they don't have actual knowledge of that infringement. Since a fork can differ from its parent, notice that the parent may be infringing is not actual knowledge that the forks are as well. That means Github has, in theory, no legal liability for those copies. It can just point to federal law.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
iOS 8 App I made demonstrating the new Notification Center feature and helping NJ Transit commuter figure out the ETA for their bus at their bus stop.
I invite you to Google the NSA's origin (especially it's special "birth certificate") and then think about your statement about the privilege a private company can enjoy.
Yeah. I recently had a guy with a CS degree ring up my groceries at the supermarket. There are definitely people out there with CS degrees who cannot make it as software developers.
Yes it is a phone in that it allows 2 or more parties to conduct a voice conversation utilizing technology over some kind of network. Fortunately, the article doesn't state that it is not a phone. It states that it doesn't require a phone in the sense that it doesn't need to connect to your phone in your pocket (most likely via bluetooth) to make/receive a call.

It has a built-in SIM so it stands on its own without needing to be paired to a phone. However, they refer to it as a mirrored SIM which means it can have the same phone number as your phone.

I fail to see the difference between a mirrored SIM and a cloned SIM (illegal in the U.S. as far as I know).
While a democracy bestows each citizen with a vote, it is just not true that everyone has a "roughly equal say in how things go". Power, influence and money are all unequal. Martin Luther King had more say in "how things go" than i ever will even though we each can only cast one vote each. The authority rests in each citizen equally but power will always be unequal
I think it generally sounds like a good thing too. I'm just wondering if rights-holders and courts will end up agreeing.

Thanks for the latter clarification.
No-IP sells managed DNS, which you can get with Azure as well, so in that particular service they are direct competitors. But with an as large company as Microsoft there will be overlap with pretty much every other company on the planet, so that's not necessarily relevant.

I was speaking in a more general sense. If Microsoft could do this, other companies can. If they could do it against No-IP, they can the same thing to others.
> Also, Companies actually contribute more in taxes than people like to admit. They pay workers' wages..and those wages include tax money that goes to the government.

That's still a tax on the workers' wages, not a tax on the company. If we shifted all income tax into a payroll tax, then by your definition workers aren't taxed at all? Anything that increases the cost of employing a worker will reduce the marginal net benefit of employing that worker, which will result in either lower salaries, fewer employees or both.
I've worked 15 years as a programmer, architect, boss... I have one year of college. I found that once you hit 3-5 years of experience, getting a job was never hard. I also found that people who are mostly self-taught and self-motivated are almost always better hires than people with a 4 year degree.
What's fascinating is that the colouring pretty much lets you see how the city grew, area by area, at least in cities like London and Boston that grew more organically.
Your friendly neighborhood tweet watch by kev – IFTTT
I'm not sure if the github authentication is working. I go to Apply for this job, it takes me to github, I click authenticate, then I get this error on on the github_oauth_callback page on remotecoder.io:

{"type":"MongoError","msg":"E11000 duplicate key error index: remotecoder.users.$email_1 dup key: { : null }"}

(My github username is the same as my HN handle)
Registration-Free Deviare COM in 32-bit and 64-bit platforms
Thanks for your notes. Maybe you can send answers to support@gaiagps.com, but I have a couple of questions...

1) What version are you on, the latest iOS version we pushed, 9.1.3?

2) When you say it switches zooms randomly, is this just while looking at the screen, it jumps? Any other info?

3) You can also "Download Map Along Track" too - for any saved route or trail. We never considered polygonal downloads to be that useful, and also adds complexity to the UI. We'd do it, but it's not a priority, and we'd want to do it just right.

4) When the Guide Me line is wrong, in what way? Does it not end on the waypoint? Does it not start with where you are?
When I wrote PHP, I never felt comfortable with associative arrays and sequential arrays being almost indistinguishable. Part of that is my Perl heritage, I'm sure, but the slight cognitive load it reduced in choosing your data structure always seemed vastly dwarfed by the extra complexity of umpteen different functions that work on arrays in different ways and the confusion it can cause when you didn't receive exactly what you were expecting and ended up with non-numerical keys when you expected numerical ones or vice-versa (as in this case).

I guess it's just another example of the Waterbed Theory[1].

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory
I tend to find a lot of the folks coming out of online or bootcamp-level courses start off as front-end or app (usually web app) developers, and then gradually pick up the backend and architecture pieces as they grow as a developer.

There are also simply those who want to pick up these skills and apply them in their job -- one of the Thinkful students I mentored was a GIS data analyst who just wanted to be able to write scripts around the data he was working with.
> Out of 8 million licensees, plus anyone who wants to with a clean record in Vermont, Alaska, Whyoming, and Arizona, there's going to be people who screw up. Police do at a much higher rate, in my observation over the years (there are, after all, a lot less of them).

Police also frequently have long shifts where they are exhausted and are carrying a firearm. Its not surprising they'd screw up more frequently than a population with relatively ideal operating conditions.

> Years, as in the wave of "shall issue" concealed carry regimes started with Florida in 1987, and now includes 43 states and most of the population. Every time a state goes shall issue the usual suspects scream "blood in the streets", yet it never comes to pass, as they mean it. Here you're stretching quite a bit to go form "normal" accidents to postulated future bad actions in a shooting event, because you can't find any of the latter. (You can't because there aren't any, at least that I've learned about since the early '70s and my readings of prior modern history.)

I didn't scream blood in the streets. I pointed out that questioning the competence of people who carry weapons as they've been shown to be injure themselves through carelessness...is very reasonable.

You are attacking other people and somehow relating that to what I said.

You've pointed out there was 1 event at which someone with a CCW permit and a weapon existed in recent history. Attempting to draw conclusions from such a small number of events is idiocy. But you go ahead.

> There are going to have to be a lot more, and much more worse screwups, before the toll is a fraction of the massacres in NewSpeak "Gun Free" zones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/children-and-guns-the-h...

1) They are undercounted because they are sometimes labeled homicides.

2) Lets use the CDC #s:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_03.pdf
Firearm (*U01.4,W32-W34,X72-X74,X93-X95,Y22-Y24,Y35.0) 32,351 10.4 10.2
Unintentional (W32-W34) 591 0.2 0.2

591 "Unintentional" deaths in 2011.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/03/26/1077930/-Statistics...

2008-2009 was over 1000.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/21/mass-sh...

This puts the number at 934 over 7 years.

So you are just ignorant is the underlying problem. 2 years of unintentional fatalities is more than 6 years of mass shootings.

I'd say that is a problem more dangerous than the delusion that the guy with the CCW is going to alter the outcome significantly.
The majority of these comments are "tax the rich!" with no regard to current government spending trends. Oh and the obligatory, "BUT WHO WILL BUILD THE ROADS!?"
"I have always thought that von Neumann's brain indicated that he was from another species, an evolution beyond man."

--Nobel laureate Hans E. Bethe

Yet we have no evidence that von Neumann's supergenius intelligence was due to any specific genetic traits that he inherited. And even if some of these could be genetically isolated, we have no basis at this point to believe that any of these (as of yet unspecified) traits can be "engineered", singly or collectively.

The article gets worse from there. Presumably the author is aware of the Fallacy of Linear Extrapolation, yet he boldly goes on to say:

Given that there are many thousands of potential positive variants, the implication is clear: If a human being could be engineered to have the positive version of each causal variant, they might exhibit cognitive ability which is roughly 100 standard deviations above average. This corresponds to more than 1,000 IQ points.

This aside from the fact that no one really what (high) IQ is, or what an IQ of 1,000 points (or even "100 standard deviations above average") could possibly mean (or even be measured).
This difference in viewpoint is why, in 50 years, we'll still be celebrating Woz, and Thiel will be a footnote if remembered at all.
Yea it's much better than man,finger,touch. Wait a second..
CalTopo is awesome... that's who we get USGS maps from for gaiagps.com.

I can say with some pride that the reason CalTopo has nationwide coverage is because we made a deal with them a long time ago to get that done. Matt originally set up CalTopo for his search and rescue efforts in California, hence the name!
You paint the most damning portrait of America I've ever heard, can you help flesh this out?

Can you source your 40% figure? The only child poverty number I found is 21.8% for 2012. [1]

For those in poverty, can you provide more insight to why you think they have "virtually no chance at all of being able to even play in the capitalist economy"? I think everyone would agree they are at a disadvantage, but there are several people on the Forbes 400 this year who came out of poverty. Both of my parents came out of poverty, even you said you made it out of poverty.

Can you provide some anecdotal insight to your peers who fell "prey for the tech titans, who fill their eyes with glittery visions that make them forget their hunger and cold."

[1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/sotu/SOTU_2014_CPI.pdf
Some bootcamps do teach computer science principles. Many do not.
It wouldn't be that hard. You can think of ASCII as a simple substitution cipher - practically a Caesar cipher, really - and simple frequency analysis makes cracking such a thing literally child's play. It might take a bit longer if the data were presented as a bitstream, and you had to work out what the char length was, but even that wouldn't be too hard as there's a lot of repetitive structure in ASCII bits.
Is eff only for US? Seems the form from the link you provided is only for sending messages to US politicians.. would be nice if all countries involved had a form like this.
> The Guardian witnessed this practice on a three-day visit to the company’s Los Angeles headquarters last month, as part of a trip to explore the possibility of an expanded journalistic relationship with Whisper.

So they look to partner, don't like what they see and turn it into a story? Whisper has two problems: violating its users' trust, and letting an external group in without an agreement in place. The Guardian also looks bad flipping this into a lede in my mind.
Your number is way off (435+100+more than 1 executive branch), and furthermore, if you don't follow the money that influences these actors (lobbying, revolving door, non-blind blind trusts, etc) then you don't really understand what or who is driving those decisions.

Fighting politicians is like whack-a-mole - even if you get rid of bad ones, the replacements are often just as corrupt as the ones that got replaced.

Fight the corruption first.
This seems like a good idea.

Could I get you to dump your idea on UserVoice here: http://help.gaiagps.com/forums/118985-ideas-for-gaia-gps

Then you will get updated if we make progress, or if others comment/vote.
Right! What we are trying so hard to hire are not programmers, but good engineers. For candidates who don't have much industry experience, we are looking for potentials. Some crash courses won't grant potentials to candidates. Speaking frankly, we expect the new hires to learn fast, to have a great jump after working with good senior engineers for one year. This one year helps the new hires to connect the dots of their knowledges. That requires a solid background, which can't be acquired by crash courses.

There are genius programmers who don't need a CS or related degree. They are exceptions, though, not norm.
http://imgur.com/zaZTRns

Compare to when enabling "OK Google" where OK and Cancel are flipped.

I guess they couldn't fit it in on Android?
Company culture: unwritten rules are worse than badly written ones
Head of Apple Education, Alan Greenberg, Moves to CareerFoundry
Very clever. Get people to pay you to "argue".

I am going to guess a gambling site is going to "win".
This was an international case. The Bill of Rights of the United States of America does not apply. To impose the BoR on a non party would be a violation of their human rights, guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
What about keyboard cases such as the one with the Surface or the one Google announced yesterday?
Hacker Myths Debunked
Is this device a wifi device that makes calls and texts over wifi? Is it a GSM / CDMA device? Which carriers will support it?

The article states "Those in the U.S. will need to purchase a data plan through AT&T and those in the U.K. will go through O2."

The line at the end, "This is the first device to ever offer a phone free calling feature" seems patently false for most common-sense definitions of "calling feature."

I believe their intent when they say "phone-free" is to say that it stands on its own and doesn't need to be paired with a phone in order to make/receive calls.
Microsoft was willing to hand over No-IP’s domains, but only if the company met certain terms.

Unbelievable. Microsoft was willing to hand over someone else's domains to their owner only if they play the ball. I hope they get targeted by malware even more after that.

On a side note, I wonder what's to stop theoretical malicious code from switching to bare IPs instead of domains? Were those exposed to the user somehow (to make it more user-friendly?)? Or is it because using domains grants the ability to actually switch remote IPs without altering malicious code?
I don't think it's very realistic.

You are not guaranteed to get anything by outbidding someone. You could be outbid immediately by someone else and lose your money.

The FAQ compares it to the The Million Dollar Homepage, but there you are guaranteed your pixels, no one can take them from you.