skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because of diminishing returns.

The tax burden follows the Pareto Principle as much as income does. When you read that rousing NYT headline, what you have to keep in mind is, these taxpayers may have well "saved" a substantial fraction off their tax bill, but it still was a mere fraction. For example, in the UK, the top percentile contributes a third of the overall income tax[1].

When you have a tax bill for a few dozen million US$, it is not that difficult to justify paying a team of accountants and lawyers who bill $1k/h each to shave 20% off the top. When your tax burden is in the thousands, you will be best served by a chartered accountant who can shave the same 20% for you, but in your case that will be several hundred dollars.

There are no "loopholes" in the tax code in the sense that the Congress didn't foresee tax avoidance techniques, or the courts are somehow ill-equipped. There are (1) tax incentives, (2) bribery, and (3) notoriously underfunded IRS. (1) scales pretty well, whereas (2) and (3) don't.

[1] http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2107031/UK-B...
For the Trivial one -

http://www.fbpurity.com/

>F.B. Purity is a browser extension / add-on that lets you clean up and customise Facebook. It filters out the junk you don't want to see, leaving behind the stories and page elements you do wish to see. The list of story types that FBP hides is customizable to your taste.
The general "you". You (some entity) can't issue your own fiat currency successfully unless you are sufficiently government-like.
With a little ingenuity, an ethernet port could have fitted [1].

A new Macbook Pro is my first Mac (provided by work), and I was surprised how much crap like this there was, which the other developers mentioned over the course of my first day. "Oh, you'll need a Magsafe to Magsafe 2 adaptor." "Careful with the Thunderbolt to ethernet adaptor, we've had to replace two motherboards when the cables snagged on the port." "Here's a USB hub."

And the Mac keyboard has a non-standard USB plug [2], as well as the non-standard keyboard layout.

Apple have very effective marketing though, the other developers didn't seem to think there was any other laptop which had a metal body, or comparable battery life.

[1] http://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_migrated/pics/Sony_V...

[2] http://i.imgur.com/YhjBHOI.jpg
The stars have aligned and the circle of dumbness is complete. Arise great Dumbthulhu!
Thanks! Phaser.io has a great tweening/animation system I use for some things, but the momentum animation was just a few lines of custom code. You basically just set the angle to a smoothed (distance travelled in last 500ms).
“Further attacks have resumed on our Linode Manager, Website, and API”
His shelf seems to be an almost perfect superset of mine, the only obvious thing I don't see is Fire In The Valley by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger, a very nice history of the early PC revolution in Silicon Valley. I should probably get him a copy so I can just use a picture of his wall with the stuff I don't have blacked out.
I think that's fair enough. I guess all we can say is best of what we've tried so far.
I've definitely heard of someone having the "gift of the gab", meaning they speak convincingly (I think I've only heard it used to describe sales people though).
I think if you're already on PIP you'd have this problem anyway.
Most other first-world nations would disagree with you.
Super 8 was designed for magnetic sound from the start.

I suspect this would allow you to record digitally at the same time you were exposing film perhaps, or even use it as a digital video camera without film.

I'm excited, I want one.
+1 for autopay. I typically put all I can on a credit card and just set it and forget it(water, electric, cable, etc). I'll check that periodically on personalcapital.com (similar to mint but better investment tracking IMO).
Aren't Cuban goods legal in the US now?

Ah, apparently only sort of: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/can-you-buy-cuban-cigars-n...
This sounds like Weibo, a very popular service in China. There is some history of such a thing being very succcessful.

However, I've never used Weibo. Can any describe the differences between Weibo and longer-form Twitter, and talk about Weibo's strengths and weaknesses?
With rare exception, if I read a good book, I then gift it to someone, loan it to a co-worker, or donate it.

Ironically a bookshelf might be a collection of books the owner wouldn't recommend reading over some other title. Not saying this is the case in the OP photo.
I think the term of art in this case is "retweet".
1) How does one become a Magic+ "Magician"?

2) Do the Magicians post a surety bond to Magic for liability-related losses? Does Magic have third party fidelity bonds to help defend against suits brought against them due to fraudulent actions by (I assume) contractor Magicians? Disclaiming all liability and hold harmless agreements can be problematic in reality, given the example market of impulse iPad Pro buyers could easily be envisioned to have enough resources to litigate Magic into oblivion.

3) Do Magicians undergo any kind of background checking?

If I'm going to trust a service with information otherwise protected by regularly rotated credentials and TFA - and I'm not beyond doing that, since the pricing for dependable and trustworthy (and bonded/insured) assistants for ad-hoc tasks doesn't seem too offensive to me - I'd want to know my risks.

I know that doesn't make for magical copy on a landing page, but it's a selling point. I used the original Magic pretty early on, getting a rather esoteric accessory for some discontinued on-ear studio monitors, and I was impressed by their professionalism. If the pricing goes to the next level, the professionalism needs to follow, in my opinion.
Reproducibility in science doesn't mean "easy" reproducibility of experiments. Some experiments in science are famously known to be a one-off. Example: the first test of general relativity was during a solar eclipse, with pictures that were subject to poor lightning conditions. Of course, the reason why we know it was right is that many other tests have been made since then, even though the original one can never be replicated. Same reasoning goes for other areas. A scientific experiment with software doesn't need to be replicated with the same software to be relevant (although it would be nice to do be able to do that). As long as other people can come up with their own implementation and arrive to similar results, the researcher achieved his/her goal.
Never mind audio, this is, sadly, proprietary bullshit, and has been since the 60's. "Super 8 film cartridge" - what? I'd be far more interested if they were just doing reeled 8mm with development services - I have a perfectly serviceable 1930's 8mm that I haven't been able to find film for (well, at any sensible price) for twenty years. I'd love to be able to shoot with it again.
I think (?) Scala has proper monads (but they're a little weird) which would let you avoid the verbose extra code.

Generally it just involves implementing map and flatMap on your Either type, or something like that.

Disclaimer: not a Scala developer.
I think you understate the extent to which one can use a tax-deductible non-profit organization to benefit oneself. For example selective private schools are all (at least in my area) not-for-profit organizations to which contributions are tax-deductible. So you "give" to these organizations and essentially pay for private school from pre-tax income. There are even country clubs that are non-profits. I think the only thing that really prevents these organizations from being formed are if they have documented written policies of racial discrimination, in which case the IRS will go after them eventually.
Thank you for your disclosure.
Common misconception. The prices are highly negotiable. Nobody with significant traffic is paying anything close to book rates.
My perspective on Lumosity and its "science" is different because I was a paying customer.

I found Lumosity in 2009-2010 and played occasionally, eventually converting to a paid membership in 2012-2013 and playing weekly on desktop and iOS.

I was even quite proud to make it to the 98th percentile of all players [1]. (For reference, that's statistically consistent with my score on a standardized IQ test.)

Eventually something felt off about the scoring. At one point I distinctly recall them catching flack for changing the algorithm to boost you higher for playing more without necessarily playing better.

What I found anecdotally was that playing their games while I was in a distracted state would help me regain focus to the point where I could work on a cognitively challenging task, like a programming project, math problems, etc. afterward that I wouldn't have been able to before playing. I don't claim (or know) whether any longterm difference was made, but I also didn't join for that reason and never really cared about that. Lumosity games gave me a brain reset not dissimilar to a short meditation.

I don't know the science behind this idea, and perhaps it's purely placebo effect, but personally Lumosity was helpful to my life. That was my experience.

1: https://twitter.com/kicksopenminds/status/426760502128041984
I've been in environments where it worked just fine. Bug fixes (and exceptions = bug fix) always took priority over features. And yet not only did we never get delayed, we routinely were ahead of schedule.

As the article points out, the trick is to get it into your blood -at the start-. If it feels like fixing exceptions takes all your time it's probably because you have let a lot of them creep in.

How many known exceptions do you introduce per sprint? It should be zero; nothing new that you're writing should be creating an exception, that isn't fixed in the sprint.

So what's left? Exceptions that are uncovered outside of the sprint. That is, you had a feature written, tests for it written, QA test it, client demos show it off, and any exception you saw you fixed already. So outside of all of that, where can exceptions even occur? Well, after release, obviously. Weird race conditions, deviations off the critical path, users doing unexpected things, etc. But the frequency of those should be pretty low. Maybe one, two a sprint, max? Surely you can take the time to dig in and fix those without causing the sprint to slip.

Now, as the article also mentions, when you start getting a huge, complex codebase (either due to time, or team size), this gets harder. More complexity = more edge cases. That's one of the reasons to reduce complexity wherever possible, to isolate functionality as much as possible. And this also assumes you have a development process that has you delivering every sprint, and having the stuff used. If you're doing some waterfall "we'll code like crazy for the next year, then test, then deliver", yeah, you probably can't do it. You already said the feature was done; no time to fix that bug! Sorry.
This is like Tesla entering the market with a high end sports car, or Uber entering the market with only black cars. They're targeting a smaller niche of wealthy early adopters to tweak the service and revenue model and will eventually move downmarket to address a broader customer base (if they're successful with this initial niche). This is an ideal niche to start with because a) they have the money for it b) they're more tech savvy and generally forgiving of product shortfalls for bleeding edge services and c) they have lots of connections and can spread word-of-mouth more effectively (think Chris Dixon). It will be interesting to see if this becomes more of an API for other on-demand platforms such as Seamless or if it will be standalone. Also curious to see how this will stack up to Facebook's M and if they've built something defensible enough to pose a real threat.
Tendermint founder here. What we're doing with Tendermint is creating a new protocol. See TMSP from the tutorial from Tendermint.

http://tendermint.com/posts/tendermint-socket-protocol/

Yes, we're moving away from "PoS" from the time being, because our clients are more interested in posting collateral external to the blockchain. That said, the original security properties still hold. It's the combination of three things that create security on a non-PoW blockchain, for Tendermint.

* Validators have posted collateral (either on chain or off chain) that is not immediately transferrable, so there is something at stake.

* The BFT consensus algorithm ensures that at least +1/3 of validators must deviate from the protocol to attack the network.

* If there is a fork, then we can find out who had caused the fork. The validator-set is held accountable.

That hasn't changed. What has changed is our client base. We don't want to launch a cryptocurrency ourselves because as US/Canadian residents, that's a legal gray area. On the other hand, fin-tech clients and banks are interested in utilizing this technology for creating a distributed multi-write database. Thus the change in direction.

That said, we're very much interested in support the original PoS design. Other designs as well. For example, we're building out an experimental governance app that allows for arbitrary proposals. Perhaps we can use that to empower users or designated administrator groups to decide on updates to the validator set.

https://github.com/tendermint/governmint

There are many ways to update the validator-set, PoS just being one of them. We will build out our platform to accommodate a wide variety of strategies for managing the validator set. For all strategies, they will make use of our robust BFT consensus algo.

Finally, there are sound technical reasons why a BFT ledger should utilize a hash-chain of blocks (list of txs). It is both a speed optimization (validators only need to sign block hashes, not each tx) as well as a security requirement. To expound on the latter, note that the original PBFT implementation does not provide any guarantees when more than 1/3 are Byzantine (see http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.121...). But the hash-chain ensures fork consistency. So there you have it, a chain of blocks of transactions is fundamentally important for non-PoW ledgers. That's why we use the term "blockchains".
>The whole point is that these kind of people find these questions ("is rape really bad?") really intriguing rather than obvious.

That isn't the question the story is asking. Second of all, Eliezer says:

>This is a work of fiction. In real life, continuing to attempt to have sex with someone after they say 'no' and before they say 'yes', whether or not they offer forceful resistance and whether or not any visible injury occurs, is (in the USA) defined as rape and considered a federal felony. I agree with and support that this is the correct place for society to draw the line. Some people have worked out a safeword system in which they explicitly and verbally agree, with each other or on a signed form, that 'no' doesn't mean stop but e.g. 'red' or 'safeword' does mean stop. I agree with and support this as carving out a safe exception whose existence does not endanger innocent bystanders. If either of these statements come to you as a surprise then you should look stuff up. Thank you and remember, your safeword should be at least 10 characters and contain a mixture of letters and numbers. We now return you to your regularly scheduled reading. Yours, the author.

The point that the protagonists legalized rape, is to demonstrate that the protagonists morals are just as far from us, as the baby eaters or super happies. That the story isn't about two alien societies, but three.

Second of all, what "these kind of people" find intriguing is that our morals are for the most part due to our circumstances. That in the future, people may very well accept what we find today to be abhorrent, and find abhorrent what we accept.

That is the point of "is rape bad?". Because it is simply an example of something that is obviously bad. Just like some time ago there were other things that were considered obviously bad, that today we accept (same sex relationships for example). And if we are aware that the future will look back and mock us for our obviously wrong morals, then maybe we will be faster to get on the ball with the next gay rights or what ever.

Are there moral beliefs you hold today, that you think the future might condemn you for? Or do you think in this time and place you've acquired a perfect set of morals?
has this really slowed down at all, even since refunds were introduced?

people buying greenlight votes in bulk and selling unchanged asset packs hasn't gotten any better from what I can see, and Valve has made it clear they don't mind letting shovelware through the door as long as they get 30%.

why would it stop?
It says I'm either stunning or hot in the 4 photos I tried. Is that real? I don't really get oogled by women or anything like that.

http://imgur.com/Td11aoI

Yeah this site is bogus. So many inconsistent ratings.
OOOOOH YEAH, CAN DO!
I have a lot of the books on his shelf, but his do cover a lot of dense material that I avoid through sloth.

But seriously, he's _very_ good at what he does.
Greetings.

I know I migth come late, but being one of your very satisfied Customers, and having experienced this type of issue multiple times with other providers that didn't even bothered to even ackowledge that there was an issue, I can say that I wil remain with you regardless.

Also to those saying "I have all my business running at Linode so this is unacceptable", I only says this:
You get what you pay for, and for a VPS Service you won't find better than Linode, and if you have something critical running for YOUR Clients, than it is YOUR responsability to ensure resiliency against this type of situation. Linode is a VPS provider after all, and the reason why you are making money out of someone who doesn't know enougth to go to the VPS hoster themselfes.

Good luck making a profitable business and milking your Customers running on AWS or AZURE. You'd be broke and in debth at the first DDOS and Over-Bandwith charge from any of them.

I work at a service provider myself, and I understand what you guys had to deal with the last 10 days, and you have my full support.
I wish they would have resurrected 9.5 mm instead. 9.5 mm was an amazing format in that the emulsion went from edge to edge with no pulldown claw sprocket. Instead it used a single sprocket hole between the frames. It was still very cheap film but more than 50% larger emulsion than Super8.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9.5_mm_film
The number of interactions (over email) that I need to have with them to get even a simple request like a restaurant reservation done from Amex Platinum concierge has made me look around for alternatives.
FWIW, even Facebook's assistant 'M' is far better at handling tasks that Platinum concierge.
Or alternately learn to do manual colour positive processing. It's really not hard, and with a big tank you can do half a dozen 120 reels at a time.
RegData: A database quantifying federal regulation by industry over time
I agree that US migration processes are a bureaucratic nightmare also. I don't think it's an exaggeration when I phrase the term as 'overly unnecessary bureaucratic process that causes people incredible frustration'.

Note that the OP said that the list was the effort of months of trying to understand and negotiate the system. Just because it appears to be 'a couple of web forms and email verification', it's in no way similar to signing up for a web site because it's behind so much opacity. You can't judge the effort involved in producing something simply by its final output.
This is basically the market TurboTax and H&R Block are going after. Each taxpayer's circumstances will be different, so it would be impossible to hire a single company to perform blanket tax-dodging maneuvers for an entire class of taxpayers, and if they did it individually, the payoff wouldn't be large enough unless they charged an amount that would be too high for lower income tax payers to justify or afford. However by taking the complex tax code and distilling it into a series of user-friendly questions, TurboTax is able to scale up to a mass-market offering that is feasible because the time spent by the filer is inexpensive enough to justify. The market in between is the market local accountants typically fill.
Is there a way to set a maximum price or time you're willing to pay for each request? My biggest hesitation about using something like this would be that it would end up costing way more than I anticipated - something I expect to take 30 minutes could take 4 hours cost $400 instead of $50.
The landing page seems like a joke or a scam. I was honestly confused as to whether this was a legitimate service.
This seems very US centric.
Even if the time is broken down, what's the incentive to be as efficient/cost-effective as possible? I get that cost is not the primary driver here but surely it is not open-ended.

Also, invariably with a complex task, there's going to be a lot of dead time spent waiting while coordinating.
It's common in urban Japan to have a courier company take your luggage to the airport a day or two before you leave, and then you can just take the train or a bus without taking up so much space on it.
I expect it is somewhere between the complete dystopia you suggest and the rosy double digit growth the party suggests :-).

But yes, it would be good to know what the reality is.
Because you need substantial income flows (B2B or B2C sales), preferably not all coming from the same jurisdiction. And a reason to do something ("economic substance", i.e. come up with a good story why you need to route that money through the BVI).

Every situation is different, and offers different opportunities. Technology companies can use different techniques when compared to a retailer. Some "loopholes" have genuine reasons to exist and are hard to fix. Something as simple as corporate interest deduction comes to mind, which can be used to help grow a business through debt financing (the way most companies use it). However, if you set it up properly, it can also be used to strip earnings away to a different jurisdiction. But whether you want to use this technique depends on how your corporate structure is set up and capitalised. What works for an american company might not work for a UK company, for example.

Think of building an extremely complex custom system (where if you mess it up, you get a huge bill a few years down the line); that's essentially what tax optimisation is at the multinational level.
It's interesting, original Polaroid film was probably one of the most color stable (and accurate) films around - I have Polaroids that were stored is less than ideal conditions and nearly 40 years on have much better color stability than their print contemporaries.
I understand the intent, my point is that there's very few situations where you are not transmitting information if you have any connectivity whatsoever, so the law appears overly ambiguous and far-reaching. It should be more specific about its aims.
> 1-2 percent gdp growth, 300 percent gasp/debt ratio ...

Are these numbers real? If so, what are they based on? If they are just examples of what might be found under the hood, that's fine; I'd just be interested in some reliable non-official economic numbers.