Elizabeth Warren recently proposed a wealth tax as part of her plan to partially pay for single-payer healthcare. I think this is significantly worse than other methods of raising the same amount of revenue from the same group of people, so this article describes the problems with wealth taxes plus an alternative if we want to raise tax rates on the rich (spoiler: just raise the income tax rate).

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To make your data faster to lookup, you can either store it in an order that makes it easier to search, or add one or more indexes. For practical work, you can let your file system do this for you, or use a pre-built database (either relational or not). I’ll describe from the lowest-level to highest level so you can understand what I’m suggesting, but my real-world answer is that I would store most kinds of data in a relational database like PostgreSQL and put indexes on any column that I want to do lookups by.

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When you’re documenting a project so other people can use it, whether it’s a library or web service, one important thing to do is to give people good examples to work with. Not only does this save people time trying to cobble together their first working program, but it’s also a good way to show how the library is meant to be used, instead of just what’s technically possible.

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I recently spent several days improving the OCaml FreeTDS C bindings for work, and I thought it might be useful to share the problems I ran into and how to solve them.

I tried to order things so the most likely issues are listed first, but if you’re trying to debug some C binding crashes, I recommend just reading the whole thing.

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Core.Command (and the closely-related Async.Command) is an OCaml library for creating command line programs with nice interfaces (including help text and argument parsing). This article is an overview of Command.Param, the newer interface for defining your command’s arguments (replacing Command.Spec).

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