skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now I'm not a supporter of calling taxes a good thing - they are violent theft after all - but for better or worse those 39.6%ers would have had 164% less of anything without the taxes in the first place.

No society on the planet has organized without violent taxation, and there is no way those less fortunate could foot more of the bill. You can of course argue about reducing that bill - I am all for it - but arguing that the affluent are not benefiting their share from taxes is insane - they are only wealthy because those taxes exist.
By odd coincidence, tomorrow I'm recording the first episode of a podcast called 'Zero, One, Infinity', so this was a bit weird to see today. If it had been posted in a couple of days, I think I would have assumed from the title it was a bad review ;-)
The chart shows that the top 1%, which the 3 million people making over $615K/year, pay 45.7% of the income tax.

For people with $1 million/year or higher of income, most of the income is from sources other than salaries and wages. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/UploadedPDF/2000134-compositi... .

If all 3 million people decided to take a year off then the worst case would be a 20% drop in income tax or 10% drop in the US tax revenue.

More than likely, some of the people under 99% would suddenly have new jobs, with a higher income.

I find it hard to think of 3 million people as a small enough number to be in the unpredictable range for a ~1 year fluctuations. 300? Certainly. 30,000? Maybe. But the 1% is still the population of Iowa.
This is true as well, I think the most common mistake I see marketers make is _over_ marketing. You shouldn't have to fabricate a clear message, the product really should speak for itself. Just present an idea and solution in a unique way.

Here's another saying, "The number of ideas to use in an ad should be odd - and three's too many."
Both.

When it comes to technology, I find books to be a secondary citizen. If I look at things I know and use in my day job. Things like stack overflow, blog posts and reading man pages have been my primary knowledge sources.

But off late, I've been reading books and mostly enjoying the titles I've read. But the biggest problem for me is finding my next book.

Amazon mostly recommends titles very closely related to what I've purchased, and I haven't had much success with goodreads lists. So I'm curious how HN users find their next book.
51.3%
I don't and won't forget that event. It was part of a tendency to hysteria that prevailed at the time. I read the report on it, and there were many flaws in organisation, communication and action, from the commander level down. There's certainly a thin blue line, and crossing it can lead to trouble. But not trouble with weapons usually.

Occasionally when a police officer is shot the tabloids and even the public can be more inclined towards arming the police. Perhaps counter intuitively, it is the police themselves that decline the offer. The reason for that is that policing requires the cooperation of the public to be better effective, according to those police who find the Peel approach effective.

I was only sharing an anecdote or two. Just to show that getting along helps to keep things civil. It becomes even enjoyable.
Note the word "income" - this kind of "X% of earners pay Y% of income taxes quote" deliberately excludes what are called "payroll taxes" in the U.S. Payroll taxes (basically Social Security and Medicare taxes) are regressive (fall more heavily on lower incomes). They're also paid as a percentage of income (like income taxes) so it's easy to think they would naturally be part of "income" taxes.
IMHO everybody has to contribute as much as he can. That's the only way a society can survive.
Unfortunately, while Exec (the kernel) and DOS (the file system) were not really tied that hard to the architecture, Intuition (the GUI) was very tied to the hardware. Change the video, and you have a new GUI to code for. Also, it may not have been all that possible to enhance the hardware from the given design [1].

[1] A bit-plane video architecture. For example, say the video is 256x256 (for simplicity) 1 bit color. That's 8 bits per pixel, 8K video buffer. What 2-bit color? Okay, the low bit of each pixel s in one 8K video buffer; the high bit of each pixel is in another 8K video buffer. Want 8 colors? Add another 1-bit 8K video buffer. Now you have one pixel spread across three bytes.

Never mind that Intuition also allowed control access to the Copper [2] so you could also specify the screen resolution and color. You could split the screen (upper half, 320x100, dual play fields (three bit planes defining the background, three bit planes defining the foreground) with 32 colors, and the lower half 640x200 (interlaced) with four colors). You could also specify up to 8 hardware sprites.

Yup, Intuition was very tied to the video hardware.

[2] A special 3-instruction CPU to control the hardware registers based on the video beam position, allowing you to change the entire video setup virtually anywhere on the screen (any given scan line, within four pixels horizontally); colors, memory used for the video buffer, resolution, sprite locations. You could literally display all 12 bits of supported color on a single 1-bit video page by mucking with the register settings on a per-4-pixel basis using the Copper. It'd be a long Copper program, but the 68000 would be completely idle.
I've worked at 4 big name tech companies. None of the HR departments could block a hire based on these sort of issues. If the applicant fails to pass a background check for issues like criminal, etc, that's different. But some intangible 'industry risk' has never been a veto power that HR gets. I'm sure there's some company out there that could do this, but I haven't seen it.
You're right. Its weird how little people think that the infrastructure provided by government for civil society benefits them. Contract enforcement and property protection come to mind. The 20% in question benefit greatly from the taxes they pay.
Google the title of the article and you can read it for free.
Composition would be strikingly different. Elements which are rare in the Earth's crust (and therefore, expensive) are rare because during the formation of the Earth they sank under gravity and now reside near the core of the planet.

Chondritic asteroids, on the other hand, are left over from the primordial solar system and have the original relative abundances of rare earth materials. Hence the interest as a source of industrial resources.
Okay, so I just had a look at BuzzFeed - let's see what we got there:

- The Battle for Brazil

- 17 Iced Teas That Will Quench Your Thirst This Spring

- 10 Things That Look Exactly Like Kylie Jenner’s New Hair

- 12 Things You Only Let Your Bff Do

- FYI The Twins From “The Suite Life Of Zack And Cody” Are Like Really Hot

- Can You Guess The Season Of “Law & Order: SVU” From A Screencap Of Olivia Benson?

- ...

Now, worrying about the integrity of BuzzFeed strikes me as slightly hypocritical - I mean, it's yellow pages 2.0 at the end of the day - isn't it?
We won't even put the stuff in a cave in a desert that will be stable for the next 10,000 years with probability of .999999. Rockets? Those things blow up quite regularly and spread their debris over vast tracts of land. Also, radioactive waste is about as dense and heavy a payload as you could possibly imagine.

Just mine the asteroids, they require lower delta V than Mars (yay no gravity well) and there are, as demonstrated by this site, better economic incentives to do so.
Berkshire – Past, Present and Future by Warren Buffet (2014, P. 24) [pdf]
I think what happened is that the word "field" won over the word "ether", probably because there was a not very successful "aether theory" on the days of old.

Certainly if you read this[1] 1999 article by Wilczeck it is clear that he just points out that we got an awful lot of field theories around, and that fields are basically a sort of ether. Which, you know, sure, but why not keep calling them fields?

Since then he has proposed that you can have a current spike travel endlessly around in a super conductive loop and named it a "time crystal", so I guess he likes fanciful language.

1: http://ctpweb.lns.mit.edu/physics_today/phystoday/Ether.pdf
When you start measuring "profit" in the trillions, doesn't the measurement become somewhat meaningless? Like, imagine Planetary Resources or SpaceX gets into this and brings back a haul of metals worth approximately 100 trillion. How devastating would that be to the economy? What would it do to the price of the metals involved?

I'm not saying that bringing this quantity of metal into the economy is a bad thing necessarily, but it would have enough of an impact on the market to make these values completely inaccurate.
Yahoo isn't even keeping up with inflation... much less kept par with average IT-industry growth.

If it were a private company, she would have "as long as Yahoo is in the black"... but Yahoo took money from other people. Those people are going to want a return at some point.
I would love to see the tails of this distribution. My bet is that the top 20-2% of earners pay almost all of this 84% of income tax (adjusted for income), and the the "real money", that is, the last 2%, pay a vastly diminishing percentage of their income in tax. I suspect obfuscation: trying to give a free pass to the mega rich 2% by amalgamating them into the successful and hard working upper middle classes who are being soaked on both ends.
Ask HN: What 5 classes would you recommend for electrical engineering education
I'm in a unique program at my university that combines design, business, and engineering education in a single degree. There is a set "core" curriculum that every student takes that covers basics in coding, entrepreneurship, design, prototyping, etc. Each student also chooses two "emphases" in the areas he/she wants to focus in. The current emphases are: technology (practical CS), visual design, audio design, venture management, communications, and mechanical engineering. Going into the program, I told the administration that I would like to take an electrical/computer engineering emphasis, and they are happy to accommodate this. The only issue is that the university's EE department doesn't want to officially participate in this, so I basically have to design my own curriculum.

I need to figure out what four-five courses to take to get a foundational understanding of computer engineering/ electrical engineering. I came to college having taken four years of CS classes, so I have somewhat of a background in data structures and algorithms (I know Java, Swift, and JavaScript). However I have no education in pointers, memory allocation, etc. which I know is necessary for higher-level CS and any EE. I also took a graduate level Fourier optics course this semester, so I know the basics of linear systems and Fourier transforms. I have not taken any linear algebra or multivariable calculus.

To give you an idea, this is the mechE emphasis curriculum:

(A one semester course that's supposed to cover all of physics and calculus using Matlab)
Statics
Strength of Materials
Mechanical Behavior of Materials
Dynamics
Computer-Aided Analyses for Aero-Mechanical Design

And this is the technology emphasis:

Coding basics and Android app development
iOS app development
Mobile Development for Content and Media
Advanced Coding
Cloud Architecture and Applications
>An extremely progressive tax policy

Except for the fact that effective tax rates on "money received" (income + cap gains + net carried interest) is extraordinarily regressive, with people paying <10% on tens of millions earned per year (cf., most famously, Warren Buffet).
Of course wealthy people make up the bulk of the total income tax payments. Even a constant tax rate would result in the wealthy making up the bulk of the payments. Take a simple example of two people, both taxed at 15%. One makes 100 (pays 15 in taxes) and the other 1000 (pays 150 in taxes). Of the total taxes (165), the rich person pays ~90%, yet they are both taxed at the same rate.
If only there were a way to assert mining claim rights over space resources :(
The US government derives a disproportionate amount of its revenues from income taxes compared to other developed countries, which rely more on consumption taxes. http://www.wsj.com/articles/tax-proposals-would-move-u-s-clo...
For those complaining about duplicates, if the post is on the first page or if it has any upvotes it means someone found it helpful. Deal with it.
Safari doesn't support OpenBSD either.
They earn 51% of income but own more than 84% of wealth, especially the means of production. Also, talking about fifths of the economy skews the conversation in the wrong directions, because its only the top .001% of income earners that are outliers. The 80-99.9% quartile is paying a fraction of taxes and controls a fraction of wealth, and the 200k above them are skewing that entire bracket hugely.

If you are in the top "10%" (ie earning around 200k) you are not paying magnitudes more in tax than everyone else, relative to your wealth. You are just being grouped in with extreme outliers that make these statistics pointless.

Even if you want to make a war between the 80-99.9% and the other 80%, the alternative perspective is that the poor are so poor they have no money to pay in income tax. If median wages have not been stagnant or declining in the US for half a century the bottom 99.9% of income earners would be paying a larger percentage share of the tax burden.

Just look at all the investigations into how SV companies conspire to keep developer income down. The real value of a lot of engineers, especially the industry veterans, is way beyond the 200k they are often paid, but just because you are doing "so much better than the average" engineers in those income brackets are condemned for asking their fair share, when the real problem is that 99.9% of people are not getting their fair share because of a systemic loss of labor organization.
Rand Paul Pledges to Immediately End NSA Mass Surveillance If Elected President
short version: software is eating the world
It worked! Thanks again. It's also playable in Audacity at ~4000hz sampling rate...
I just published this module, any comments are welcome. =)

Thanks!
You can be sure Facebook and Google will be first in line to harvest your thoughts if that ever becomes possible.
Also, I'm pleased to see there's been recognition in the BSD world that ports was not up to snuff and efforts are being expended to fix it. For many years all I ever saw in these conversations was denial that there was a problem, or that anyone should ever need/want the capabilities provided by apt/dpkg or yum/rpm. I consider good package management to be the primary selection criteria for choosing my operating systems, and I'm always surprised when people consider package management as anything other than the central feature of the OS. Of course, this means Windows and Mac OS X are right out, due to sucking much harder than most at package management.
RPC Backdoors? Care to elaborate on this for me?
Except that this article gives both of the relevant numbers -- the top 20% earn 51.3% of the income, but pay more than 80% of the income tax.
Just so. It's either stupid or deliberately misleading to only look at the distribution of one tax in isolation.

As I recall, the total tax rate including all types of taxes is almost equal across income groups. Poor people pay a smaller percentage in income taxes but a larger percentage in things like sales taxes.
Such an operation would take decades, and centuries probably to exhaust and return to Earth the entire asteroid. In the process and in response the size of the Earth economy will grow due to the introduction of a vast new supply of industrial materials.

Introduction of extraterrestrial resources will cause these commodity prices to fall. But falling prices will cause industrial use (and world GDP) to rise. How much will prices fall, and how much will demand rise, and therefore how much maximum revenue can be extracted? This is not an easy calculation.
Thanks for the calculations.

I expect there are ways I can improve upon that though. Note that there are lots of inefficiencies in the method I described, such as the resulting fresh water being hot.

Perhaps with the use of a heat exchanger to recover the waste heat...
This is bad advice. This is living life on hard mode. I wouldn't testify. You don't have anything to gain other than morality points, but you'll have everything real to lose.
IANAL - but I don't think your first paragraph is accurate.

I agree completely with your second paragraph.

Let's say Sally is suing Joe for wrecking her car. I was driving Joe's car, and I fled the scene of the accident.

I'm subpoenaed in the civil matter to come testify for Sally to say what Joe did.

I'm pretty sure that you can tell the judge you refuse to answer due to 5th amendment right.

Source: I did this once in a federal civil suit (no vehicles involved)
> If all 3 million people decided to take a year off

Well, the risk here is over-dependence on capital gains. Not only it's a voluntary tax with people choosing simply not to sell, or sell less than they originally intended to, economic downturns bring in capital losses, which can be deducted against the gains, which then accounts for dramatically volatile shifts in capital gains revenues.

You're right, though, the situation is much more distributed within that 1%, and thank you for the graph.
Sure. The people getting taxed at 39.6% of income over net income over $430k are almost certainly in some sort of business, whose profitability almost certainly depends on the prosperity of the 99.5% of Americans making less money.
The 20% figure has no value out of context, since what matters is their share of income, not their share of the population. Happily the WSJ article does include that figure: the top 20% earn 51.3% of the income.

It also goes on to say that "The share of tax paid by the top 20% of Americans also changes when such social-insurance levies [Social Security and Medicare] are included: It drops from more than 80% of income taxes to about 67% of all federal taxes."
From the very last paragraph of the article:

>The share of tax paid by the top 20% of Americans also changes when [Social Security and Medicare taxes] are included: It drops from more than 80% of income taxes to about 67% of all federal taxes.
The article does address this. It says "The share of tax paid by the top 20% of Americans also changes when such social-insurance levies are included: It drops from more than 80% of income taxes to about 67% of all federal taxes."
That's a good start. The wealthy need to pay more. The marginal utility of money declines rapidly as you move up the income scale. $1,000 matters a lot less to me than $100 does to an average schmuck who's struggling to pay his bills. If I pay only $500 while he pays $100, the taxation system is unfair.
But then I miss all the good stuff.

The problem I've got is finding the stuff that will genuinely help me in my work, and having the time to read it.

I was using noprocrast for a little while, when not getting any sleep was getting to be a real problem for me.
What don't you like about that? If you heat the vegetables and oil together, they can slowly lose their water and essentially boil, and taste boring; if you let the oil get to the right temperature and then add the vegetables, then they'll cook up nicely, with plenty of Maillard reactions (browning), and taste delicious.
My first post about my conservative relatives quoting this was downvoted to invisibility.

My point was really to illustrate the way what is essentially a class issue where the defense of one class is taken up by people who aren't even remotely members of that that cohort. There is a great deal of emotional investment in the idea that some out-group is benefitting heavily without contributing back.

I just wonder what the utility of that belief is.
What about the large number of other taxes people pay?

Note also that 67% is getting close to the proportion of total income commanded by the top 20%, and that's without including other regressive taxes.
Contract enforcement and property protection? That accounts for what? Less than 1% of total government spending? Unless of course you consider the military "property protection".
Cool. Let 'em pay even more.

Okay, that was meant to be flippant, but in my view, there is still a healthy gap between the highest bracket in the US, and how high it could be. Tax revenue could still be increased substantially by shifting the brackets higher.
Mediocre people are getting pushed out. This is a good thing for the efficiency of the economy.
you can kind of do that now. of course it doesn't work for everyone's occupation as easily. you just have to decide not to care how you compare to other people. most of humanity lived with nothing!
lots of tumors end up being larger than the host. I don't see how that makes anything I said any less relevant. if RH/Debian/Arch move away from POSIX and GNU, they aren't Unix anymore. with the RPC GPL/LGPL backdoor, they're barely free software.
You only need a few sympathetic hardware engineers to put in hardware back doors, however, and it's practically impossible to verify that the hardware you have is trustworthy by the time it's in your hands. A million engineers all making sure they don't implement surveillance functionality can't undo the work done by the handful of bad guys unless they're somehow able to inspect every piece of hardware down to the lowest level and verify manually that it's safe.

The user has to do the same thing when they receive their hardware for obvious reasons.

And software is no different. There are lots of FOSS devs who would refuse to help implement surveillance systems, yet there's no practical way to prevent one small team of bad actors from injecting code somewhere between software-conception and delivery-to-end-user.

The only possible way to be confident about your technology would be to build it yourself from the ground up. You would need to design and fabricate the hardware yourself, from passive components up, and re-implement the entire software stack by hand.

Even if you did all that, if you're a desirable target then you still face a very high risk that one of the people working somewhere in your project will be employed by your opponent and will compromise your system.

The conclusion I have come to is that if you have anything you don't want intercepted, you simply can't use any modern device.
‘Great Cannon’ of China Blocks Websites Like No One Else Can
It almost sounds too good to be true.
For EE make sure you study at least some analog. At UCSC I took the analog class that was taught by the Physics department, with the aim of teaching us to build our own instrumentation for physics experiments.

Dr. Dorfan pointed out that analog wasn't required for a EE degree. He said "I can see how they can design digital chips, but I can't understand how they get them to actually work."

Consider problems like capacitive coupling, and hot spots due to frequently-used parts of your digital circuit being close together.

Learn the assembly code of at least one instruction set architecture. Pointers will make a lot more sense then. These days I would advise that you learn ARM; Steve Furber's ARM System-on-Chip Architecture is quite good.

Intel assembly may have more widespread application however it is far harder to make sense of than ARM.
So Where is the Outrage?
This isn't surprising. The income tax is currently the most progressive it has been since the 1970s. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/05/business/after-fiscal-deal...