skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a very interesting subject. Countries in the EU have competed to provide a better business environment to foreign companies. Eire has gone for the 10% corporation tax break. Other EU countries are threatening the companies with sanction. Witness the recent story concerning Google's UK tax bill:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6122329.ece

Google avoids £100m UK tax
"The website hailed as a ‘paragon’ is accused of adding to the public’s burden."

Google's advertising first, then Facebook's (er, pardon - Livre de Visage's), then Reddit's (LuLui's) self service ads.

To then dish it out to non-profitable ventures is astonishing, it's like the levy I had to pay on C60 tapes to save my programs, or the levy in some countries on blank CDs and DVDs that goes into the publishing pot.

Then again, I get money from the Lottery Fund and I've never bought a ticket so I should shut up :)
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 117 - Homage To The MVPs
Methinks some sarcasm was embedded in the tone of the original comment here...
Yeah, I'm actually surprised you can walk away from a mortgage (a legal contract) without also declaring bankruptcy.

Any legal eagles around to explain how this is possible?
Cell Phones Protect Against Alzheimer's?
Is there a success gene?
Cybersecurity: Here’s What Really Worries the Pentagon
The super() is magical. Functions aren't supposed to magically know what class or instance they are in unless they are explicitly passed on in Python. That's why you see the "self" argument in methods.

And in the 2nd example, he shows that if you copy super to another name, then it doesn't work. Presumably meaning that super which looks like a function, actually acts like a compiler keyword in certain cases.
Amazon.com attacks new and used textbook market
As the article noted, mortgage contracts in the US stipulate the penalties for walking away, and those penalties go no further than surrendering the house.
Snowed-in UK schools are using Twiddla to hold classes
The system you describe puts 100% of the onus of appraisal onto the borrower. It's in the bank's best interests to inflate the value of the home as much as possible and get a borrower on that inflated amount, because now, regardless of what the property is actually worth, the borrower is on the hook for the full amount.

The bank is normally the one who approves the appraiser, which is a clear conflict of interest. In our system, ideally everyone is best served when the appraiser is neutral and competent because the borrower doesn't over pay, and the bank isn't exposed to much risk since the collateral can actually cover the obligation.

The system you describe has a huge loophole because lenders hold all the cards and could easily collude on the sly with appraisers to drive prices up at the expense of the individual. It wouldn't even need to be an explicit collusion -- sort of like the default swap stuff, no individual player (who could see that the system was a sham) had any incentive to bring it down. On the contrary, they had incentive to keep up the bullshit in order to make their numbers. A similar pressure could result with laws that heavily favor the lender.
I get where you're coming from, and I would love to live in the utopia you're describing. But unfortunately I don't think that it is likely to happen any time soon...
Ah, thanks for the clarification. I was under the impression that the early termination fee was less than the difference, so that the black market value for an unsubsidized phone would be a good bit better than the official one.
But isn't the dying industry paying taxes on their revenues while the poor search engines are not paying taxes on their advertising revenues?
Sears joins Amazon, Wal-Mart in opening site to third party sellers
Usually, the company/agency hiring you would sponsor your clearance and they'd ask you to start if they're interested in you. Once it starts, expect it to take 5 months to a year.

edit: see http://www.opm.gov/Forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf
But why should search engines be able to escape paying taxes on their advertising revenues, while the music industry must pay taxes on their revenues?
One major reason not to hop on the cloud bandwagon just yet is issues like these. The more layers underneath that are not under your control the more layers you'll have to add to remedy that.

Systems with excessive complexity are hard to debug, especially when it comes to analyzing performance issues.

Given complete control of the hardware from the ground up it can already be quite hard to accurately pinpoint a bottle neck so you can solve it. Adding a lot of stuff between your code and the hardware is not going to make that any easier.

Typically a stack has 6 layers before you get to your application: drive, controller, driver, filesystem, database, app.

In a cloud environment anything under the filesystem layer is effectively out of your control and out of your ability to troubleshoot. The solution, to add another layer of complexity in order to combat the slowdown is really the opposite of what an ideal cloud environment would give you.

After all, the #1 selling point of the cloud is scalability and performance.

I think that it would be best if Amazon worked together with the OP to resolve the issue as a problem ticket rather than to try to solve it by adding a software raid.

Of course, that's just armchair reasoning, not being in the hot seat makes life easier.
Properties.

Properties make for some mighty clean code though.

I guess you have a particular bias toward protecting systems from crap programmers, which may serve you well in your environment. In my environment being concise wins because no one is an amateur.
VCs offer their best tech predictions for 2010
Well, if Lockheed's in the US, they you better be a US citizen. Better have a clean criminal record, and be comfortable with having your past prodded and poked. And you'll be pissing in a bottle, probably as a condition of employment, maybe more often. Probably good to not have connections with "unusual groups of people", and you might think of sanitizing your net footprint as much as possible.

I don't know whether TS is high enough, but there's a chance you'll be "on the box" as well. I assume you're aware of all this up front, before even considering such a job?
Actually, Y2k01. Engineers don't use decimal points - it's too easy for them to disappear during copying.
Nice one! Now that you mention it I remember seeing an article about FMRI being used in that role a while ago. Excellent example.
I'm really racking my brain here thinking of a way to fix my sentence.

What I'm saying is that our human power and dignity does not come from the individual but the whole species. Like a colony of ants. A sort of species mind. It is the intelligence that exists in the cloud of connections between humans.

Not self aware intelligence, but an intelligence that expresses itself in culture and societies. I am basically saying that we are all of the same branch of that four dimensional tree called evolution. I believe that this oneness mindset is healthier.

If you ever wondered what an off topic comment looks like, there you have it :)
Absolutely!

Maybe I'm not as good as I think I am, or maybe I'm too honest, ;-) but my resume+cover letter has never made it through the HR gauntlet. I almost always have found an email address of someone inside that is associated with the position I'm interested in and sent them a cover letter email and resume. I have always gotten an interview by doing an end-run around HR, but never through HR.

FWIIW, I see the same thing at my place of employment. When we have had big projects and were in serious need of more engineers (including HR giving rewards to employees for recruiting new hires), the new hires almost all got hired through a personal recommendation to a manager, doing the end-run around HR (in some instances, HR did not give the reward because they already had the resume on file and never acted on it).
US lifts HIV/Aids immigration ban
But I think his sarcasm is an extension of the snide tone in the article, while missing the major point (which the journalist actually made in the introduction before diving into the culture-maintainance mumbo jumbo) - i.e. one set of companies are paying taxes on their revenue, while another industry isn't.
Freak Current Takes Gulf Stream to Greenland
There are similar problems in astronomy, cosmology, geology - and yet, we can still do science in those fields. Management science is hard, but management mythology is worse.
It depends on the state. In most states the bank can go after you in court. But California is an exception, and it also happens to be the state that had the biggest bubble.
Taxation is also a tool to shape behavior.
Sounds too good to be true, and by golly, it is! What makes me come alive is writing fiction. This is not what the world most needs from me.

Not everything that sounds like deep wisdom is wise.
An additional and arbitrary tax. Google was given a tax break to locate in Eire and pays tax there, not France, so France want to tax them too..

Presumably it is expenditure of French companies being paid to Google Eire. But presumably the goods and services thus provided get taxed if they cross the border into France or if they originate in France then the French companies pay their usual tax on profits.

The justification for this is flimsy imho and is just a cash grab from a successful company. The European Common Market is being abused as far as I'm concerned.
I used to work in the "Merchant Technology" (third-party sellers) team at Amazon, and textbooks have been a very big part of that business for many years now.

The new thing here is the "Trade-In" program, which lets you ship your used textbooks to Amazon and get paid for all of them right away (instead of listing them and waiting for someone to buy them):
http://www.amazon.com/b/?node=2205237011

My old boss is the manager of the Trade-In team, if anyone has any questions about it...
Why we think Synaptic Web will focus on the users
The article says that fears of damage to your credit rating, if you do this, are "overblown". But surely the damage to your credit rating among rational creditors should be really severe?

If I were a bank and I found out a borrower had walked away from a previous loan leaving their creditors holding the bag, there's no way in hell I'd lend them a single cent, ever.
There is a possible upside to the borrower for an inflated valuation too.

As long as the market is rising the borrower can point to the increased valuation since the property came on the market and use that to 'pass the hot potato' to the next sucker.

Plenty of people made tons of money in this way in the '96 to 2000 period, especially in larger cities where property prices tend to go up out of proportion.
I phrased my point a little clumsily. What I was trying to say (and what I think we agree Schneier is saying) is that if you know about a type of attack and think that it's a type worth defending against, you shouldn't wait for it to actually happen before you take action.

Abdul Mutallab could have used his butt (or other things, like a prosthesis or a wheelchair) to stash the parts necessary to assemble a relatively reliable bomb. That's a known attack type, but we're not defending against it at the security checkpoints. Now that could be a wise decision based on the fact that checking for it is hard and, as you said, "effective security comes way before the departure gate".

But if some future terrorist carries out this quite-plausible attack and the government then decides that the TSA should start screening for it, it'll mean they learned nothing from the underwear bomber.
"The system you describe has a huge loophole because lenders hold all the cards and could easily collude on the sly with appraisers to drive prices up at the expense of the individual."

That happens here in the US. Appraisers I've talked to have been pressured to raise the value of the property, so the transaction will happen. The seller wants to sell it for X. The buyer wants to buy it for X. The two agents and the bank want the house sold for anything at all.

Buyers and sellers should choose and pay for their own appraisal, even if the bank requires the buyer to pay for an appraisal for the bank.
That reminds me of one of my favorite Onion News videos: Is the government spying on paranoid schizophrenics enough?

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/in_the_know_is_the_gov...
Yeah, I can sympathize with that. I definitely would not want to be in that situation. I'm sure there's a workable compromise in there somewhere.

I definitely think that most countries need to think about the crimes that they imprison people for. Imprisonment is super expensive partly because it's used so often. If only serious criminals went to prison, the social impact of imprisoning someone would be much greater and the overall cost would be lower...
The DMCA: The Coward’s Online Censorship Tool
I believe it is supposed to be content "producers" but this seems to be conflated with content distributors.

From the article:
"This may explain why the French first lady's producer, Patrick Zelnik, was tasked with leading the commission, which came up with the proposals. One of these suggests taxing internet service providers to raise tens of millions of pounds for developing the online music business and other creative sectors.
The funds would go towards financing schemes such as a government-subsidised digital subscription for 15 to 24-year-olds to download music cheaply to wean them off illegal piracy."
Does anyone know if this type of data is released by New York City?
They are required to: BGP ports, Telnet Ports, administrative ports...blah blah blah.

What will the router route without ports open?
The way I see it, is that if someone's willing to go to these measures to compromise your data and hurt you, you're pretty much screwed no matter what you do.
Software patent disputes are uncommon in the little league, but unfortunately not uncommon in the big boys' league. It wasn't more than a few weeks ago that Microsoft was ordered to stop selling Word due to software patents.
Automated Translation of Indian Languages
A robot house cleaner that might actually work
There's also applying the scientific method to what you do--A/B testing against different web designs for instance.
More movies, fewer new DVDs after Netflix, Warner deal
Sounds like a fun experiment and learning experience, anyway. (Your thing, I mean.)
> And then, ARM-based Windows notebooks will not run x86-based Windows software.

Yeah, loss of platform is the real problem. Windows isn't that great; its software is. Same for intel. Hence the "wintel platform".

However, we have this new "web" platform, which might not be good enough, or have enough products, or be fast enough - but it is improving all the time. Perhaps, call it the web+arm = "warm" platform (though the ARM isn't part of the platform; any web will do).

BTW: if windows is written in a high level language (C), it just requires that the compiler targets a different processor. Of course, any tweaks written specifically for x86 (esp inline assembly) would have to be dealt with, and perhaps performance wouldn't be adequate with a simple retargeting - ARM would also need tweaks (again, esp inline assembly).
After all, the #1 selling point of the cloud is scalability and performance.

I think you're missing the key component that it's scalability and performance that you don't have to manage yourself. And, yes, when you don't manage it yourself, it's going to be much more difficult to diagnose performance problems. But someone else managing the infrastructure also means that people who would be incapable of diagnosing the problem anyway (either from lack of expertise or lack of time) have access to the resources.
My most recent startup created a marketplace for customers to buy and sell virtual goods for their 3D avatar

The author in a way has answered his own question, when he wrote the above. Entrepreneurship - the way understood by the rest of the world is developing the skills to make a profit out of a business. Entrepreneurship the way understood by most us here at HN is developing the skills to create and sustain 'start-up' that will make f*ck money!

You can use Science as part of your product development and management of the Company but Entrepreneurship itself is not Science.
Lenders typically lend up to a maximum % of the purchase price - 90% is typical.

So if you default on the loan, they'd have to sell it for less than 90% of the value for you to owe them anything on it. If you default though, it's their home, they're free to sell it for whatever they like.

As far as the actual house sale goes, the bank/lender has little/no power in the UK. If they don't want to lend the money on the house there are others that will. The price is decided by the seller/estate agent, and the obviously the buyer. The main critera the bank has is that you pay a % of the purchase price - they'll lend typically only up to 90%-95% or so.

I like the UK system personally. I think it's responsible. Not to mention the silliness of yearly home tax?! in the US and other craziness.
If they had a dedicated server stack, they would probably have done the same thing as a hardware RAID anyway. They just replicated in software what they would have done in hardware.
Federal law limits how long you are allowed to do that. 7 or 10 years I believe.
Does anyone know if reddit is doing anything special to create the RAID? Or is it just mdadm?
Why wouldn't devs use Twilio directly?
The beginnings of TECO [pdf]
The thought of Apple getting a 30% cut of all apps sold on all of their platforms makes me cringe.
Yeah, I learned a lot. I sometimes think about restarting it, but instead of building features people request, allowing people to make any reasonable contribution to the github repo, and then seeing what happens.
They'll have trouble getting another mortgage, that's true. But that's surmountable if you're happy with renting and/or can find a co-signer for your loan. Similar things are true for automobile loans.

But generally when people talk about "damaged credit", they mean an inability to get a credit card. And there, I'm willing to bet there are plenty of banks willing to do business with people with foreclosures on their records. The revenue model for credit cards is based on fees, not loan risk.
If that treaty gets ratified in anything close to it's current form I'm pretty sure I would not be alone in saying that I would immediately start looking for a new country to move to...
Customize the Magic Mouse: middle-click, taps, pinch, etc. 
Awesome utility called MagicPrefs.

This was the clincher for me to buy a Magic Mouse. Extreme customization options. 2,3, and 4 finger clicks. Taps (including a "stem tap" on the apple logo). 2 and 3-finger swipes in all four directions. 2 and 3 finger pinches. And it's free.
Both companies are paying taxes on their income, it's just that Google, MS and Yahoo choose to derive their revenue in a country that is more friendly to their operations (Ireland). France wants to tax the action (the click) instead of income (the advertising which is purchased in Ireland).

IMHO France is putting up the digital piracy bogey man to satiate the content industry while also allowing it to pass a tax onto it's populace. Once people become used to the tax they will increase it and divert the profits elsewhere. Of course I can't prove because it involves future actions that may or may not take place and the intent may not currently be there.

The irony of it all is that the telephone example is an example of my point that gov'ts keep taxes around long after their initial reasons for existence have passed. Income tax being another great example. I think the debts of WW1 have long since been paid.
And if a new method of testing evidence appears and the alleged criminal is cleared of charges 20 years later, you can't give them those 20 years back. I don't see how capital punishment differs from incarceration as more than a matter of degree.

Pragmatically, I think capital punishment is a good thing to have since it causes us to give the criminal justice system an extra degree of scrutiny. I'd rather be falsely convicted of a capital crime than a life in prison crime. I lose my life either way, but more people are motivated to exonerate me if I'm facing the death penalty than for life in prison.
Not really. I'm a sole developer at the moment, so I value efficient easy to read code. Mainly a matter of taste though I expect.
Exactly. And as the house is the collateral for the loan, that makes perfect sense. If the bank was dumb enough to write a loan that they can't get back by selling the collateral, why should the borrower be expected to bear the burden? Frankly, I like the US system; it places the burden of analyis and risk management on the party most able to do that competently.
What do you think will the IRS do if Google relocates its world HQ to Ireland, shifting its tax burden there and avoiding tax in the US?
I never reared the criminal and have no knowledge of the crime whatsoever. Nor was I old enough to take care of someone. Nor did I encourage the kind of environment that help cause the criminal acts. Nor did I endorse the punishment of death.

It is easy to use "we" to name collective responsibility, but you must also remember that behind each "we" is a group of individuals.

Society does not act, move, and feel, have goals, beliefs, etc. It is a heterogeneous collection of individuals, each with their own belief system, predisposition, history, relationship, and other distinct characteristics.

Society can be more understood as a force, which its sum is greater than its parts. Yet, we also know that society cannot exists without individuals.

Ultimately, responsibility alway lies with the individual(s).
Yes,
how much money did you make at Amazon ? : D
I think you should stick with the framework, at least until your requirements exceed the frameworks capabilities.

There is always a simpler solution that you can one off. But is it worth your time to reinvent the wheel?

Also, I'm curious - were you able to do the same thing in Python that you did in Scrapy because you tried Scrapy first?
It definitely looks as though they ended up having to manage it themselves.

Basically this seems to put a fairly low upper limit to using 'the cloud' for something a little larger before you get back exactly the same kinds of issues that you were dealing with when using self-hosted hardware, only at a higher price point.
Before 9/11, you didn't even need to have a weapon. Often saying that you had a bomb on you would be enough (just like how some robbers only use a note they pass to the teller). People don't do it anymore because they know passengers will fight back after seeing what happened to the hijacked 9/11 flights.
Volunteer Match is great.. I worked with a non-profit to redesign their web site and it was a great experience.
Even if we did develop a lie detector with high accuracy, how would we know?

There's good reason to believe that lie detectors might work much better in the laboratory, on test subjects telling inconsequential lies to experimenters and knowing they'll go home, than on real suspected criminals telling vitally important lies (or truths) for life-or-death stakes.
The Generalist's Dilemma
NVIDIA Introduces dual Cortex A9 based Tegra 2
8 really useful websites you've never heard of
Be pragmatic and join them.
Many have and will continue to have their homes foreclosed during this recession, and they will have "bad credit" for a long time. If/when the economy turns around in a few years, any bank that decides to not fund these same peoples' mortgages the next time they shop for a house will miss out on a huge piece of the market. The banks won't stick to this policy. They'll follow the credit card companies who are very eager to issue new cards to those who just finished their bankruptcy proceedings.
Tell HN: I'm giving away 3 pairs of tickets to Drupalcon San Francisco
"It's like Twitter. Except we charge people to use it."