skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first bar chart shows how many cents it costs to make one of each of the coins and a dollar bill. The second bar chart shows how much it costs to make a dollar's worth of each coin and a dollar bill. Shouldn't both charts have the same cost for the dollar bill? Am I missing something?
No, because I'm including National Insurance (both employers and employees) under income taxes. Employers NI is 14% of headline salary, so the effective tax rate for high earners is more like 50% than 40%. Meanwhile middle income people pay 12% NI on top of their income tax and 14% employers national insurance so the real rate of tax on the cost to their employer is about 40%.

Go do the sums & you'll see. Like I said, the reality is much more complicated, but the figures I gave are roughly in the right ballpark.
That is literally what you have to do in order to be a sommelier. That's the whole test! If you can't do it, you don't pass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sommelier

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2204371/
I'm unreasonably disappointed that he failed to include "on error goto next" from VB6.
LittleBits: electronic modules that snap with magnets
Technically, it was a contract put forth by some citizens of the several states in confederation, to create a government with enumerated powers. That is, it both enabled and limited at the same time.

In a strictly technical sense, the US Army is prohibited from disarming citizens of Iraq in their own country, for instance. But they might just do it anyway. Because said foreigners would not be able to petition for relief anywhere else but in a US federal courts, and there are currently several barriers to them initiating an action there, which largely do not exist for citizens in the US, that foreigner is usually unable to exercise those rights using strictly peaceful means.

In short, it's far easier to form your own militia and kill any agents of the US that you find in your own country. That seems like bad policy all the way around. It would be much better if the US just obeyed its own laws anywhere it goes in the world. It might even be prudent to set up a 12th federal circuit, with at least one district in each country with which the US has an extradition treaty, to support cases with jurisdiction established by Article III, Section 2, Paragraph 1: "and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects." Such courts would be authorized by the Constitution, but as far as I am aware, none exist.

If there were a foreign circuit, it is likely that Guantanamo Bay detainees could file Habeas Corpus motions in it. Foreign banks could fight to restore their privacy safeguards while still serving US customers. Private military contractors might face civil suits from the families of people randomly gunned down in the streets of their own cities. If the US had to obey its own laws everywhere around the world, it would certainly devolve into pure chaos~
Introducing the Priceonomics Analysis Engine and API
Why big companies slow down, and what to do about it
Others have noted that the hackers have latched onto the movie as a reason only after there was speculation that the movie was the reason. There was no mention of the movie when the hackers released their first press release.
Taking personal responsibility sounds all very well (leaving discussion of the impossibility of meaningful free will for another occasion), but private health insurance is a special kind of stupid. For example, some people are born with diseases or disabilities that we can say with certainty will cost millions in care over their lifetimes. Those people are obviously uninsurable. So health systems that don't leave people to die must involve an element of the collectivisation of risk.
I actually really love this idea. Signed up. Will give it a try for a month.
How is Uber an excellent way, when it requires you to be identified and records who and where you picked up the client?

Much safer to paint your car like a taxi, put a fake sign on top and pick up anyone hailing without any records of you having ever done so.
I thought, or hoped, that this would be an “Unload this tab” Firefox plugin. Sadly, I was wrong, and such a plugin seems as yet merely theoretical.
And as soon as any trouble is realized you will be in a world of shit since you are a registered driver with your SSN/background check/other personal info on file. Uber is not the free for all everyone is making it out to be.
you can think of sidechains as alt-coins that are technically still Bitcoin.

If you own Bitcoins, they can now do more and are more valuable because why would people still use doge when you could have bitcoin + doge in one?
While I like the construction of the column store and the corresponding API. The claims of the author don't really make sense:

> "... columnarization, a technique from the database community for laying out structured records in a format that is more convenient for serialization than the records themselves."

Column stores in comparison to row stores don't offer any serialization benefit per se. The main benefits are the following, I will be using a record (A,B,C,D,E) as example with all types u32 (4 bytes):

* If you only use some fields you have to load less data from memory/disk into the CPU cache and your working set is more probable to fit into cache. For example when filtering only the records where A=22 and B=45 you only have to actually load x(sizeof(A)+sizeof(B)) = x8 bytes instead of xrecord_size=x20. This can make a very significant difference.
* When using compression to reduce the size of data, columns can often be compressed better because they only contain data of the same type and nature and thus probably share similarities. When using such a small record consisting only of integers it probably won't make a difference. But if e.g. some fields are country abbreviations, textual description or others are ids, one could easily imagine that there are gains.

Coming back to the point about serialization, using the same technique as described in the blog post, there won't[1] be a performance difference between column storage and row storage (e.g. using a struct). The method described in the blog post just lets the data array of the original vector be wrapped by a Vec<u8> without even moving the memory, so the method is independent of the data type that is stored in the vectors. Of course it will only work for data types that do not contains references, otherwise we could get illegal memory access after deserialization (which should be guaranteed by the rust type system because only Copy types are allowed).

The only thing this benchmark is testing is how fast a vector can be initialized.

[1] There can be an space improvement of keeping the data in a column layout compared to row layout when using normal structs. Normal structs normally align the total size to the size of the largest field in the struct. A struct containing i64 and i8 would contain 7 bytes of padding. In a column layout this overhead would be avoided. Still there would not be an improvement in this serialization scheme as it does not actually copy any data.
This could be tricky. As far as I understand most open source software comes without any kind of warranty.

"THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES"
BEBO is back
Key word here is accused. Nothing is proven yet so let's not jump to conclusions. Also as asn0 has said, traditional taxis have more rape issues and they have nowhere near the level of record keeping Uber does to help authorities solve these issues.
Internet authority ICANN says it was hacked
What Internet Backbone is that? The one that closed in 1995?
Improving PicoHTTPParser further with AVX2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax#Comparison_with...

VAT taxes sale, but it's not the same as a "sales tax". The rates don't mean the same thing, and it doesn't make sense to compare them directly without taking that into consideration.
I sincerely apologize, I just now noticed you've answered my same query on other threads.
Freenet has really sped up since the last time I tried it. I'll definitely dive into it again in the upcoming weeks.

The Freenet has a wild array of content and much of it is not particularly interesting to the common man. And the web interface is kind of not so user-friendly. But the mechanism itself is great: you could use Freenet as an anonymous shared data store for your application.

For example, PirateBay could move to live on Freenet and have its own client (either a local application or a locally run webapp) just fetch the torrent listings from Freenet data blocks. For now, Freenet can't do big files so that must still be done on the opennet but much of the metadata could be irreversibly stored in the decentralized system that is Freenet.

As computers and the internet get faster and faster, we might be able to sacrifice some speed for safety, anonymity and plausible deniability. At the simplest, big files could be distributed in the open by simply xoring them together with other big files. You'd have to download two big files to construct the one you want. On the other hand, a single file would host information from several files so downloading it couldn't possibly be considered infringing anything. It could just be genuinely random data that, when xored with another file, turns out to be an mp4 of a film.
Most taxi companies in big cities track their cars with GPS these days. It's really too cheap not to do it these days. They've already got cellular transmitters in them for credit card processing, so adding a GPS phone-home isn't incredibly costly.
You Do Need Independent Technical Reviews
There's a huge difference between telling two wines apart and telling a meat patty and a veggie patty apart. The later is more like being able to tell wine and root beer apart.
I could see tax authorities going after consumers that are not paying VAT - they reside in the EU and are easier to prosecute than foreign companies.

In the past in the United States, the providers (such as Amazon) have placed the burden of paying state taxes on the consumer - I wonder if they could, somehow, also make the consumer responsible in this case and thereby continue to operate in the same manner?
Tell the jerks that call you not a geek to explain how to make a one instruction set computer off basic logic principles. Or whatever your speciality is really, if they flounder just go never judge a book by its cover. Then walk away and sashay it up is how I would handle those situations. Good luck!

In my experience - as a bystander, since I'm a man - that'd be a good way to provoke insults and (if the jerk knows you) defamation behind your back.
Worse languages are used in industry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BANCStar_programming_language

https://github.com/jloughry/BANCStar
Not actually the same family, typically the new owners will "adopt" a son, who is just the highest ranking manager: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_adult_adoption
Have you ever read Socratic dialogues? It's a bit like that, where characters come to embody certain philosophical positions, except the scope is broadened beyond just discussion/debate and into action (which allows it to be a novel).
The quorn line of products made with mushrooms is very similar in taste to chicken. Best imitation meat I have tasted.
A feature matrix isn't a bad idea (and I opened an issue to track https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst/issues/267), but it's kind of hard to compare as they are such different pieces of software. Spectacle is manual window management and Amethyst is tiling window management.

Manual window management generally gives you better control and generally less overhead in terms of complexity. So it works well in the case of "I want to be able to move this window to the upper half of the screen", "I want to be able to make this window take up the entire screen", etc. You have to trade simplicity to get flexibility, though. What if I want to be able to move window to the upper right hand quarter of the screen? Or what if I want my screen divided into a grid of 3x4 and I want a window in the [0][1] position? You can accomplish all of those things, but you have to specify how to go about it, thus adding complexity. Slate, for example, puts that complexity upfront in writing a config file. Divvy, for example, puts that complexity at runtime.

Tiling window management gives you a more hands off approach. So things like "I want all of my windows to be laid out in this orientation, but I don't want to move them myself", "I want all of my windows to be visible at any given time", etc. You don't take actions to lay windows out, you just define algorithms for how they should be laid out and let the software sort them out. You have to trade simplicity to get control, though. Defining those algorithms can be complicated if you're not doing something really straightforward, and if you're not doing something straightforward it can sometimes be non-trivial to grok what's actually going on. Or you end up doing a lot of runtime massaging to get things working the way you want.

To each their own, though. I prefer tiling window management, I have coworkers who prefer manual window management. They're just different tools.
As I understand it, Microsoft spent a lot of effort integrating their desktop environment with the browser. Blurring the lines between files on the machine and hyperlinks, making the desktop a webpage, etc. The idea was that "using Windows" and "using IE" were designed to be synonymous -- so much so that the popularity of Windows could be used to monopolize the internet. Nobody would even be able to use another browser without crippling their ability to use Windows, and you couldn't use another OS without crippling your ability to use the internet.

At least, that was the fear.
The really major f-up is that of online sellers (it's a major pain for sellers of physical goods as well, it's just easier for them to at least know which country they're selling to) who did absolutely nothing during the entire process of creating and implementing this change, and only now start to whine when it's way, way too late.

The reasoning behind the law is perfectly logical, and the problem they're trying to solve very real. The actual implementation utterly impractical, and a major burden on pretty much everyone.

But the only people who could have told the political dinosaurs and clueless civil servants just how impractical chose to pretend the change would somehow magically just go away.

This is one piece of legislation that could probably have been stopped or redirected quite early on, if those affected had just bothered to try.
percept is winding me up ;-) Cooper Press is my company and I wrote a book called Beginning Ruby many moons ago. I wrote the first edition while learning the details of Ruby myself and I'd consider writing a Postgres book under similar circumstances if only I had the time! ;-)
Nothing. This really is a storm in a teacup.
"VAT is and has always been a tax for the buyer, not the seller"

Does this distinction actually mean anything material?

Buyers start with all of the money, and it ends up split between the seller and the government. From the buyer's perspective, it doesn't really doesn't matter if this is an income tax on the seller, or a VAT tax on the transaction.
I know this is a complex issue but this reads more like fear than reason:

"The next Stripe, or the next Google (GOOG), is one annoying visa application away from just starting in Canada," he said. "We're losing out on the next Zuckerberg just because of stupid visa applications."
There have been tests that show people can't tell the difference between 7up and cola - especially when the drinks are served at traditional cold US serving temperatures.
Absolutely. It's a really hard problem. I think predicting the future data accurately is also really hard though, and I'm not sure how much value is there for end users. That said, I haven't built a successful company and they seem to know what they're doing.
That is right. At least, they should have promoted the minimum amount to be taxable (I don't know the right English word) to the new system. In the old system, smaller businesses which did less than amount x business could be excluded from the taxation. They should at least have a small amount left for real small businesses that have few foreign customers .... So, a business owner must decide, if he takes the hassle for one or two customers or just says that he takes no foreigners at all!

They could have said, that business with less than X "foreign" income could still comply to their own countries taxation ... but no, with such a thing, they just created more bureaucracy and support the big players like Amazon, against which the regulation should have gone in the first place ... (at least, that was the explanation).
Even then it's still really hard. I'm at one of those schools and many of my friends don't even get interviews with the best firms. My impression is that the supply of capable people for these jobs is much higher than the capacity to absorb everyone who is capable of doing the job.
Well, he would claim that he was anti-EU, and not anti-European. But if he has the figures wrong, you should tell him (and me!)
One difference with taxi cabs is that many of them have security video systems in the car. These are primarily for driver safety, but can also be for passenger safety.

Some taxis also have a driver safety system that when engaged will flash a light on the rear of the cab to notify folks to call the police that the driver needs help. I wonder if thieves will start robbing uber driver (car jack) because of a general lack of security systems?
I meant my comment more as "as someone who can taste the difference between certain things, it's really hard to imagine what it is like for people who can't" than a general "I can't believe some people can't tell the difference between how some things taste!" I don't think people are lying or stupid or anything else, just that it's hard to imagine. The color-blindness analogy in another comment is apt I think - if you can see color differentiation, it's really hard to imagine not being able to.
Quite possibly, however I have low tolerance for those kind of jerks in real life. I've long since given up caring what they think or say behind my back or in front of it.
Both search (they looked at it) and seizure (they took/copied the information). And as I already said, whether it's manual or automated should be irrelevant, if the end result is the same (authorities taking that data without a warrant to fish for crimes - which is what the selectors and alerts do anyway).
Do you really want to do this?
Yup, and for startups this tradeoff is usually a no-brainer.
> bugs showing the developers haven't bothered testing in other browsers.

I see this a lot and it's clear that most designers are building for Chrome and that they trust Firefox to render everything the same as Chrome will. The assumption that following the standards ensures a page will render the same in at least Chrome and Firefox has started to feel safe. That's a big improvement from the era that preceded, when you knew with certainty that cross-browser issues would exist. But it's not a completely safe assumption yet and may never be. Always test.
It must have been painful for him to give up on NeXT's beautiful hardware. To see his beautiful software running on lesser computers probably did hurt.
Let's hope it was the company which got them the valuation, because no Powerpoint presentation is worth $865M
DeepSpeech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition
What about https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unloadtab/ or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-tab/?
So the article inspired me to try some white pine tea for the first time. I'm sipping it right now, and it tastes quite good. If you live in the north try it out.

Here's the recipe that I followed:
http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Make-Safe-Healthy-Pine-Needle...
I totally agree. I also wrote my own opinion as answer to another post.

The regulation should in the first place go against the big players like Amazon .... but such badly as it was done now, it hurts the small businesses and start-ups. Another reason, that Europe is bad for Entrepreneurs!
but you only hear about it locally. Even so, when you hear about an uber incident, it's information aggregated across multiple markets (boston, india, etc.)
Apple 'failing to protect Chinese factory workers'
This is trash science.

Nobody else has been able to replicate their "results".
What???!!
Fossil fuels will not run out anytime soon. Depleting all the deep gas and coal deposits will take centuries.
>Sony has no plans to release it on video which I found astounding.

Sony should make some sort of TV-connected "console" to let people buy and download media over the internet. Waaaaait a second.

I know the movie studio and consumer electronics divisions aren't the same thing, but if they really wanted to get this video out I have to imagine that the Sony-umbrella companies are capable of working together.

My bet is they change course and still show it in theaters. Maybe not on the original launch date, and maybe not everywhere, but (caving to terrorists aside) they spent a pile of money on this and they want to make it back.
Neat idea. Sometimes I use Instapaper for articles and blogs that I want to save or just read later, but sometimes I end up leaving tabs open as a reminder to do something. (currently I have 9 open "reminder" tabs that I need to deal with at some point, just not today)
With JSONB here, JSONPath starts to become very interesting...

http://goessner.net/articles/JsonPath/

http://blog.redfin.com/devblog/2012/03/json_in_postgres.html

That article was written before JSON/JSONB showed up, but the idea remains the same.

I didn't have plv8 installed, so I did some plumbing code in plpython. plv8 would be more suitable though.

https://github.com/jvinet/pg-jsonpath
> For small tools and utilities, the JVM requirement is quite onerous, especially when one does not know if the end user has Java installed, or if they do, what version.

There some efforts in this direction with the OpenJDK.

As of Java 8 there is an application packager that brings everything together.

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/deplo...

And the size of the native runtime has been reduced.

http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/148

> I'll just keep hoping a good and free (or inexpensive) Java AOT compiler becomes available some day. I would even donate money and/or code if a serious project started.

If you are on GNU/Linux, Mac OS/X check RoboVM.

http://www.robovm.com/
> If I'm riding my bike to commute, I might easily be able to stop, but I might not be able to carry it.

You could get one of these: http://www.christianiabikes.com/en/ :)

I see a lot of then in Copenhagen these days. Mostly families though, since they use them to carry both kids and shopping. Also probably requires a certain infrastructure to work; you wouldn't want to ride one of those in traffic (esp. with kids), only in dedicated bike lanes.
there's a fundamental mismatch between an urbanizing population and a big box store in the suburbs that everyone has to drive to and lose their car in a massive parking lot.

There are Wal-Marts all over big cities, though. Public transit takes you to them.

Amazon's new service is more expensive than public transit. Also, you also don't get any exercise when using it, whereas many people like going out for a walk. That's a minor point though.

It's probably more accurate to say "There's a mismatch between Wal-Mart and San Francisco." Possibly cultural.