Hacker News Reader

thowfarawayon First they came for the Iranians

It would be healthier for everyone if there was less speculative outrage. This doesn't affect anyone in the country. It just says if you are trying to get a visa from a country where we think there is a terrorism risk, that country needs to be able to provide screening info on the person, or else we won't provide a visa. It is targeting Syrian refugees, not Iranian PhDs.

thowfarawayon Chrome 56 will mark HTTP pages with password fields as non-secure

So if we have an http page with a password field that posts via https, it will be marked non-secure?

thowfarawayon FAP80, a retro computer without the retro baggage

It is juvenile, and hurts the project. Too bad because it is pretty cool.

thowfarawayon Harvard Museums Releases Online Catalogue of 32,000 Bauhaus Works

Classic example of what's bad about modern web site design. 1.5MB of javascript and misc overhead with a spinner over a blank page to load < 1KB of text and 5 small thumbnails.

thowfarawayon The Real Value of $100 in Each US State

Tax receipts are low in the midwest / south also because tax rates are low. This study rewards California and NY for having extremely high state taxes - it doesn't reflect actual federal dependency.

thowfarawayon The Real Value of $100 in Each US State

That's only 1 of 3 pieces of data. If they only used the one you mention, then you wouldn't get the red/blue divide, you'd instead get a small/large state divide.

What this study does to get the red/blue divide dividing federal revenues by state revenues. So low tax, low spending states look bad because the Federal inflow is a bigger percentage of total spending.

thowfarawayon The Real Value of $100 in Each US State

Maybe you are being willfully ignorant, or maybe you live in such a monoculture, different ideas are like a foreign language you can;t deal with or understand?

thowfarawayon The Real Value of $100 in Each US State

Can you show the calculation where subsidies to food are greater than the cost of regulation of food?

Sugar is particularly regulated, with the government strict quotas and tariffs on imports, and domestic allotments to produces. If you produce more than your allotment, it is illegal to sell in the US. The whole scheme is to hold prices high to support famers (agribusiness really), not low.

thowfarawayon The Real Value of $100 in Each US State

From 1876 to 1992, 116 years in a row, Mississippi had a Democratic governor. Do you think it is poor because The last 2 guys running the state were Republicans, or that 116 years of policy, and the legacy slavery on top of that?

thowfarawayon The effects of living in a poor neighborhood

Why would you expect them to do better after centuries of being taught to obey

The insinuation that a reason blacks don't do better because they are trained or bred to be obedient is pretty gross, and not that different from the racist "docile negro" rhetoric of a century ago. Why not start with expectations that anyone can better themselves, regardless of race? If you want someone to move up, do you think they have a better chance of doing it if society tells them the can, or they can't?

thowfarawayon The effects of living in a poor neighborhood

The main goal of the 1986 tax deal was simplification, eliminating tax shelters was inherent to the plan, not something traded for lower rates. If there was any exchange for lower top rates, it was raising corporate and capital gains taxes to keep the plan revenue neutral.