skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Privatized tax collectors are bad. Private collectors have every incentive to make collection as difficult as possible so as to cement their position (and profits).

A government that employs a tax scheme that is so complicated that it requires private collectors is signalling dysfunction and is presenting an attack surface whereby that government is open to undue influence from the collectors while simultaneously hampering the people's ability to direct the affairs of that government.

How much time does a person have to spend to understand and comply with the requirements of the tax scheme? Well, in the US, practically no one knows because they are paying a private collector to figure it out for them. Even when going with a private collector the time I spend at the end of the year is measured in hours. Without the private collector it would likely be more than a dozen hours, and that's just for filling out forms. There is also a significant time cost to maintain and store various documents throughout the year.

Now consider that those are the costs if you are already familiar with the scheme. If you aren't already familiar with the scheme, you're pretty much SOL. The government doesn't even notify you that you are required to pay any taxes until you don't and informs you that they are coming after you for penalties. Go check out the IRS's website [1], no where on the landing page is there an obvious explanation of what your responsibilities are. If you manage to make it to the form 1040 instructions[2], you've got a 100+ page PDF to read up on just to learn how to fill out one of the forms. There's also handfuls of other forms and and instructions all over their site, with no comprehensive structure or explanation for.

The above scenario is already a nightmare and it doesn't even touch on what the actual tax scheme is[3], which the IRS doesn't even bother to host, but instead links to the website of a the law school at an Ivy League university. When you try to read the scheme on the third party site, you have to click through several layers of titles, subtitles, chapters, subchapters, sections, etc. just to be able to read one portion of the scheme at a time. As you try to just get to an actual sentence in the scheme you get prompted by a pop-up to donate $50+ to an unidentified entity for an ambiguous cause[4].

At this point, I've given up researching the matter further. The current system is indefensible and needs to be abandoned as soon as possible.

[1] http://www.irs.gov
[2] http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf
[3] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26
[4] http://i.imgur.com/vSppOXX.png
If you really want to invest it, invest it in yourself. Get a good suit. Get a gym membership. Buy educational material on a healthy lifestyle. Get a good pair of shoes. Or two. Maybe a watch. Consider upgrading your drivers license.

25K is barely a yearly salary, don't throw it away by investing it.
Ettore Majorana was alive and living in Venezuela?
The repo. It's coreclr. .NET is now open source to the core.
Changing the Constitution requires 2/3rds of each house of Congress. [0] If there were such a strong majority for reform, the reform would already be law.

[0] Amendments also require majority agreement in both houses of 3/4ths of the state legislatures.
The countdown
This was a funny statement;

Without crooked districts, most members of Congress
probably would not have been elected.

I can say with certainty that without crooked districts every member of congress would still have been elected. I mean, I get what Anon is trying to say, but it hints at a very slanted / anti-voter world view. This is my surprised face :-|
Be anywhere. With anyone. At anytime.

Project Remote is the first real step to achieve complete telepresence experience. It allows you to pass beyond the borders and experience new places and events, by using 3D and panoramic visuals.

Our technology is composed of a camera that captures 360°x360° panoramic, 3D video and sound; and a headset to allow you to watch them.
You know why I want money? Why I always demand a lot of money as payment? Because money can replace everything - house, food, happiness, love - you can buy it all with money. Money is extremely important and yet, it is completely replaceable. I hate people who say "I cannot live with this or that". Your life is more important than any possession. All you need is money.

-- some guy I used to know
Because Chrome and Firefox now provide many ES6 features which are missing from nodejs. But iojs tracks the latest stable v8 so it is feature-wise at the same level as Chrome.
I'm not from Switzerland, but over here most people consider them to be the best example of government there is, so this statement seems a little weird.
A strange contradiction: the author claims that low pay is a problem with attracting talent but then explains how it's a stepping stone to lucrative lobbying jobs. I don't think there's a single person who would turn down a Congressional seat because they pay isn't high enough. Congress should have a salary that's equal to the median salary of a DC school teacher. In fact Congressional pay should be statutorily pegged to the average salary of cops, firemen, school teachers and mid-career soldiers. Those people don't get a raise, then neither should Congress.

Better yet, let's tie Congressional pay to fiscal performance: for every percentage the deficit exceeds the budget, congressional pay decreases by the same percentage. If they don't pass a budget, then they don't get paid at all. Maybe Congress (and the Executive) ought to feel the he same pain or pleasure they inflict upon the country.
"To ensure memory safety [given that you can't guarantee in the language layer that the bytecode we'll be operating is safe] you need a GC"

Rust invalidates the bracketed assumption. It's been known this is possible for a long time, but Rust is the first time a language with this capability has hit semi-mainstream audiences. C# sure doesn't do it, VB certainly doesn't do it!

Ultimately it comes down to a promise of conceptual cleansliness from the entirety of a language Frontend. It's a big commitment.
How do you know? Was there a poll recently about who prefers stability over progress?
Oh god the health effects section...
Well, you need to look at it a little more objectively:

It "prevents" the individual from going outside because that individual has precluded the idea of going outside due to the possibility of being tracked/photographed.

I.e. Nothing about being tracked/photographed "prevents" an individual from going outside. But that, combined with an individual that fears/hates/morally_objects_to such a thing, makes it so that that individual is compelled to not go outside, lest they be forced to subject themselves to the thing they object to.

Additionally, it's not about "making people do things", and being not powerful enough to do so. That's quite an imposing/forceful line of thinking. It's about "thing X bothers me, what peaceful non-violent actions can I do to avoid X affecting me (negatively?)." And yes, making a regulation against X and forcing people to submit to it through the threat of imprisonment is quite violent.
It's certainly not intolerable to not watch movies on the train, but it's inconvenient. I spend a significant chunk of my time on trains every week where I can watch movies. And due to DRM the illegal product is superior. Guess what people are doing? I've never seen anyone watching Netflix, but I see VLC on a daily basis. It's a service problem.
There's a discussion on Reddit (/r/haskell):

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2v0bjf/ann_lambdacm...
Adobe got Flash (once one of their main products) wrong on the security side so many times that we can't even keep count anymore. Let alone the horribly bad performance of flash and the hack-slack way they added features. Why on earth would anyone want to trust this company to build another proprietary blob of their sub-par code into all browsers? They've proven to be incompetent in many attempts, let's not give them a 32nd chance.
Glad you enjoyed it :-) If you have a moment, leaving a review (e.g. on Amazon) would be most appreciated (there's a dearth of views as it is a bit of a niche subject!)
It's interesting because this sounds very similar to control legislation in terms of which citizens it affects while not having much effect on criminals who, by definition don't care about the law.

I think your point is exactly correct, DRM does little, if anything from stopping illegitimate actors, but it does serve to manipulate and control legitimate users (for example preventing them from using the DRM content on certain devices, thus requiring them to potentially purchae it again.)
LINKS

The project page:

http://lambdacms.org

The main repository:

https://github.com/lambdacms/lambdacms-core
The congresspeople are still technically free to vote apart from the party, so it's still technically a democracy. But that and other factors (incl. the gerrymandering, money in politics, etc mentioned in this article) certainly lower the "level of democraticness".
I think the current rumor is that he's now doing lots of drugs and working full time on bcache.
Do you have any interest in competitive gaming?
This pages talks about the false positive rate of some existing tests:

http://mobile.aidsmap.com/Accuracy/page/1323395
Git noob question here (but someone who has been working on that noobishness for a year now): Can't you just rebase the branch you're on before trying to merge to another branch?
A piece on the salaries of ex-gov lobbyists, which may be germane: http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/01/21/revolving-door...
You are wholly correct but even still, sadly, you can expect a barrage of down votes for stating the truth.
Paying a less than living wage tends to externalize the true cost of hiring someone - someone else picks up the tab for health care, food stamps and such.

It is still sad when small businesses have to close because they can't afford to operate without subsidized labor.
Shoot me an email, let's have a conversation. I've been studying this sort of thing for over a decade now.
Thanks! I'll look into it! :)
It doesn't work that way. You can narrow the range of possible authors down to a short list, but you'll never be able to publicly point the finger at someone and say "It was you!". And even your short list will be highly debatable. The analysis could be conducted easily enough and someone could make a strong case for why they feel the conclusions are accurate, but it would be far from hard evidence. Such a thing wouldn't be admissible in court today, but eventually it could be accepted in the same way that handwriting analysis was.

I really don't think this was written by an actual congressman. It seems like more of a political piece using the "confession" motif as a rhetorical device.
It seems that it also works on linux? So it works as a replacement for Mono then? I guess the compilers are missing. But I guess you can use the mono compilers and then clr.
If it seems like an excellent list of problems to people, doesn't that mean that it is just appealing to the thoughts that we already have? After all, if the problems seem obvious to us then how can it contain anything new? In other words, anyone could have written it. We have learnt nothing.
Agreed, the US doesn't rank first in virtually any metric that citizens would consider to be desirable (like healthcare, education, safety, freedom of the press etc). And it's no more democratic than say most European states.

Taking into context its size is a whole different matter, though. It's relatively easier to build an awesome small country (say the Netherlands where I'm writing from) than a massive union of states spanning multiple time zones and climates. Perhaps if the US is compared to the entirety of the EU, then Congress and the American system of governing can be said to be one of the most impressive, if not the most impressive, experiment in government in history at that scale (although I'd much prefer Europe to the US even on average). But that's more a function of it being the only 300m+ country in the world that is also rich than it being the best among many of them.
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I'm not USAian, so I'm not familiar with the US system. But why would criminals want to fill in someone elses tax details?!
I think Rust demonstrates the quote is wrong, but the article was written in 2007, before Rust was public and well before the core system of borrow- and "lifetime"-checking was implemented for it, so it wasn't "obviously" wrong at that time. Also, Rust does provide reference counting pointers and these are sometimes necessary; this can be considered a form of GC, although I have a feeling its not in the spirit of the quote.

(I believe there were some research languages around that tackled this sort of task, but I'm not sure how many tried to tackle the general heap.)
Plenty of them. You don't even need a special language - with the right build system & build rules, you're more than welcome to have e.g. "make" build your generator, run your generator, and then build your generated code.

I occasionally write C# which writes C# (using .NET APIs to compile it at runtime, typically) and C# in T4 Text Templates which write C# (they integrate nicely into Visual Studio's build process right out of the box.)
While I agree that support needs to be dropped eventually. Printing a warning and only allowing decryption with weak keys would have been a better option IMO.

Keep that around for a year or two, then drop support fully.
Well he spared the details, but he makes some sweeping statements (nothing new). When he says that congressmen and women pander to large corporations rather than voters and that it's a stepping stone to more lucrative lobbying, you don't have to describe any disgusting details. You can already assume what kind of corrupt consequences that has in and of itself.
Thanks for writing! I actually read that article that day, and it was really on time. It's a good motivation, but it doesn't talk about how one should learn Math. I find the commends below very informative and I've concluded that I need to spend some time on finding better ways to learn, and what suits me well.
Just in case there are Californians here paying to file taxes, eFile is simple, free, and works well in my experience.

https://www.ftb.ca.gov/individuals/efile/allsoftware.shtml
Agreed. Misspelled brand identity is the equivalent of a shaky foundation.
They open sourced their compilers earlier: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn
For Switzerland there's a java based software that allows you to print a PDF in the end you can send by snail-mail.

See this page if you're interested: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

They also have a web based solution, but I personally prefer not to use it, because I don't trust it.
Why would you have to keep raising it?

You win the primary, then why spend the million in the chest as the seat is safe?

The arguments are contradictory. Either the seats aren't safe or everyone has to spend more time fundraising to fight than legislating.
This is a fairly large project, spanning 4 years, so there are quite a bit of moving parts.

There are a group of teams developing new programming languages, and are being funded to do so by darpa. Some of the teams are leveraging their languages, and networking/collaboration opportunities provided them through their participation, to kick off start-ups.

Because success of a language is largely dependent on acceptance by the community, there are also summer schools sessions that are hosted to increase publicity and provide strong feedback to the language development teams on usability.

Those who have interesting and well defined problems in the space of machine learning should consider attending the summer school, or submitting a 'challenge problem' to the Galois team for the language developers to solve.
Indeed. I notice he has a family to support, otherwise I'd have proposed "please use half of the money on wine, women and song, and the rest you can just waste". Whatever he decides to do with the donations, I'll say he's earned the right to do anything he wants.

I fear he'll anyway just hire some help for himself to work on this stuff...
It's not like the first time he's handling money like that the GnuPG development. In the past, he received two separate grants for exactly that by the German government, and he even employed developers for some time.
As someone trying to learn the basics of rendering, I was really pleased to see your project pop up on the github explore email today. It's very easy to follow, even for a non-Go programmer like me.

Performance question from a no-Go programmer though - does returning objects from functions incur a cost? For example "func Reflect() Ray {}" or "func Add() Vector" - do they create a new object on the heap? If so is that an issue in Go?
That's why Rust is so important. It demonstrates that it is possible to drop to the lower-level concepts which do __not__ need GC for memory safety, and then build the "easy" abstraction on top of them.

I suspect that we will see more languages like Rust in future, because Rust has essentially proved the feasibility of the ownership model with working implementation.
In the UK the vast majority of people do nothing each year, they get a piece of paper called a P60 that just lists the money the earnt and the tax their employer deducted at source for them.
I do politics in the UK (and I'm deep enough in to know what's going on). I don't know if it's quite the same in the US, but as a broad description of how things work, this article rings true to me. There's no great corruption, but there's widespread apathy, getting things done is unreasonably difficult, and decisions tend to be made by whoever could be bothered to show up and sit through hours of tedious nonsense. The personal costs of getting things done are grossly disproportionate in comparison to the things you can get done, the pay is awful, and after you struggle for years to make things a bit better all you will get is bitching about how you didn't achieve more. That's why I won't take a job in politics, I just help/work with/fund people that do.

It's not a battle against people who are trying to abuse the system, it's a battle against people who don't care and don't see why they should bother, but whose assistance is needed for you to achieve your goals. The most common form of this is two groups of people who don't agree with each other, don't see why they should bother to reach an agreement, and don't care that the things you want can't happen until they do agree on what should be done.
Meteor is cool but component based architecture is even better and Meteor doesn't really lend it's hand to that. It's a lot of dom action binding/coupling.
How so? Which feature of the UITableView can not be replicated in JS? I'm struggle to think of one. Swipe left/right to remove rows in a table can be done with touch events.

What am I missing?
I'm not sure if anyone has ever done this before, but it might be worth considering what the US Congress has done correctly. Namely, they haven't really screwed things up. America is still here, and is still the most powerful and respected* organization of humans to ever exist. That does count for something.

There was talk here not too long ago about comparing programmers who fly by the seat of their pants and end up looking like heroes to programmers who write solid, maintainable and reliable code. The boss notices when you pull an all nighter and crank out thousands of lines of code to solve a P1 critical bug. But they notice less often the programmers who write good code that doesn't produce a lot of bugs in the first place. Congress is kind of like the second programmer. Their bosses, the voters, generally pay no thought to their passing of procedural matters, vetting various candidates, oversight meetings and routine votes. C-SPAN viewership will attest to this. People only care when there is drama, scandal or crisis. It's a surprisingly thankless job, and like the all the rest of us congress people tend to focus on money as a meaningless way to keep score.

On balance, the entire US government has done more good than bad. This generation was handed a finely tuned machine with one mandate: Don't fuck it up. And they haven't so far. Of course things could always be better. I wish that congress would do the things that I want them to do, and not the things that other people want them to do. But they haven't caused me any problems in particular, and haven't harmed most of the people that I know. It's very easy to complain about how someone else does their job, but obviously difficult to do it better ourselves. We have the option of firing hundreds of them at a time. We're just waiting for them to give us a reason to do so.

* "respected" in the "envied and feared" sense, not the "what a nice bunch of people" sense
Show HN: ZombieChat is free for the weekend
I think we have a web based application for simple tax returns now in Australia. I still download the free application from the tax office to do mine though because I have to put my business income in and share income and stuff. It's a bit crappy, but at least they finally have a Mac version as of about two years ago and it only takes about 45 minutes because it pulls most of your info in (bank interest, share income, salary, etc.) when you put in your tax file number (a bit like a social security number I think) and then you just add in anything missing and do the deductions.
What most apps need can be done by listening to touch events instead of scroll events. Eg hiding the top bar when user started scrolling down and so on.

I can't even think of an app that has a parallax effect. If your app is required to have complex animations then web tech is not the right tech choice in general imo
Impressive GitHub Data Visualization
Feb 6 would be the last legal work day
This makes me want to design a coffee cup lid... I could never drink my coffee fast enough because it was too hot, then I found a technique that let me drink very hot coffee very fast without burning my mouth. I should incorporate that method into a new lid.
Show HN: Cheapshot, a map-based shooter game for iPhone
I wouldn't say the US being rich is a question of government organization, rather of not having been a colony whose sole purpose was to export raw materials.

Higher dimensions also means more tax collection, which could be perfectly invested into making the standard of living of Americans better (it seems absurd to me that you don't have any public universal healthcare). The government prefers to invest 50% of it in Defense though. Consequence (also) of arms industry lobbyists and geopolitical strategy etc. but certainly not of size.
Creating a GUI with GTK and Python (tutorial)
Ask HN: What computer setup do you use?
I completely agree. I miss playing more games like that.

Some 6 months ago I decided to learn how to draw pixel art to make one myself. I should have a playable demo out in a couple of weeks. You can track my progress on my twitter account (@mbabuskov).
Dedication to physics and mathematics may be unhealthy.