skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tax avoidance in the UK is a big problem. We can't pay for our infrastructure because of these guys avoiding tax.

Tax avoidance is undefinable so this sort of statement is meaningless. The UK can't pay for its infrastructure due to a massive structural deficit. Even if you start defining legal behaviour as immoral and try to grab more money from targeted companies or individuals, the amounts of revenue collected would be trivial compared to the size of the problem - and it'd be a one off hit. Once a country demonstrates that the rule of law is optional, investors start to flee. And that's the sort of avoidance that you can't tackle with any law.
And I agree with that. Avdi can be a great layman-oriented writer, he has a knack for vulgarizing the cryptic, that article was not an example of that. It was rushed, obviously. My point was about something else though, which we seem to agree on.

Thanks for your response.
Sure there is. I have a creative skill to make information. If anyone in the world wants that information, they can pay me to make it, and then after that I've already been paid, I can release it CC0 and let the world go nuts with it.

The problems of online DRM / ad ridden websites / etc are all attempts to after the fact monetize information using obsolete IP policy while acting like there is any scarcity to it at all after its made.

A lot of people hear that first paragraph and go on a tirade about getting your brand out, but... that is the same problem, in practice, with either form of funding the creation of information, and is technically its own problem set. You need an audience whether you want people paying you up front to make it at fixed cost or try to use state granted monopolies to extort people for money after the fact.
It's a typo, it's been clearly stated and reported as less than 6 seconds.
Usually it'll go something like: sell product, pay VAT (easily 20% in many countries), take EBT and pay some form of corporate income taxes, then take those profits and pay them out as dividends and pay dividend taxes, or retain earnings and pay for cap gains tax. Or alternatively skip the first step and say you're paying VAT taxes which raises the costs of all your consumption. The end result can be quite high on paper. But then, there's lots of other factors that have nothing to do with Panamanian shady tax loopholes, that create a different reality from the top 'tax rate tables' people like to quote from wikipedia.

Anyway, for actual rates paid, just look at the tax revenues in a country in a given year, then look at GDP and take its percentage. It'll give you a pretty decent proxy for average effective tax rates, iirc in the US it's a little under 30%, on average. That's nothing to complain about. Of course some people pay more, and we call those people rich and some people filthy rich. Frankly, I couldn't care less about that but that's me.
Around here, they have used helicopters for years to prune trees away from high-line power lines. That chainsaw is like 10 feet long and hangs straight down from between the skids. The pilot hovers and inches forward alongside the lines, and the tree limbs fly!

Its got to be the coolest job ever - helicopter chainsaw operator. I put it above even wrecking ball operator.
Step-by-step guide for building your own LoRa network
I do that, the security questions and answers just get added to the site's entry in 1Password.
Of course its illegal everywhere to kill people with chainsaws.
I was writing a much longer comment but I figured it is better to put comments that long off-site, so here you go:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/the-problem-with-evs
> That sharing is or can be wrong is now taught at a nursery level.

Really? This is yet another step closer to "The Right to Read". Such a waste. We should end scarcity, not create it artificially.
The market cap already reflects the value of all future earnings discounted to the present. The timing of dividend payments is irrelevant.

If your argument was true, that a stock's price predictably fell the day after the dividend, investors could simply short the stock and get a guaranteed profit, which is not possible in an efficient market.
You have me wondering now.

A big problem I've always had is getting hardware to improve productivity. Most of the time the management chain can't grasp why it's worth a $3k machine and maintenance costs to save each dev an hour a week in development time.

I think this goes to just how often people I management like the title and the power but don't understand that they're supposed to be in charge of strategy. I don't think most of them would know strategy if it walked up and bit them.
New Polymer blog app available on Cosmic JS
Trade protectionism is an important tool used by developing countries to develop local industries. Nearly all the Asian tigers benefited heavily from high import taxes for many foreign manufactured and consumer goods. Once local expertise is built up sufficiently, these tarriffs are usually relaxed.

If you go further out in the past, you will see the same thing for the US as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_histo....
Well yeah, but that could be said for every political discussion, yet I see a value in keeping the discussion alive.
Miq, the micro jQuery like library
The laundering could be for a whole sets of reason. Two offhand examples; having money available for barred transactions due to sanctions[0] or having untraceable money available for intelligence or other related illicit activities. Some people rather have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during...
I used to use https://liquesce.codeplex.com/ which I believe was based on Dokan prior to being silently abandoned by the developer.

Is Dokan the appropriate library to build a disk pooling solution on top of? If so, can you recommend any such projects?

TLDR - Create a "Dokan" folder on each of my 5 physical drives, present a drive to my OS that shows all files from these 5 drives as if they were one physical drive.
The exact line drawn between tax efficiency and immoral tax avoidance is hard to pin-point, but I'm certain that I know a bunch of crooks filling their boots when I see it.

These off-shore companies are not fair. Do your work, pay tax on it like the rest of us.

As for the rule of law being optional. I pay my taxes yet these guys choose not to by using loop-holes. That is not the spirit of the law.

I reject this kind of argument, it's very popular but it doesn't hold any weight with me.

They could stop this kind of rubbish but they don't want to because people like Cameron are using it.

Let's have land value tax now and stop this international hide and seek.

We don't want these "investors" in the UK. UK banking funnels dirty money into property which ramps the price for workers. Banks they "help" by lending us insane amounts which absorb all our income (and require ultra low rates forever). None of this is of any help to the normal working person who is doing stuff of actual use that makes the world turn, like food production, doctors, etc. These guys are taking and giving nothing back. Tax them!
Release: Fully operational dlclose exploit + Linux for PS4, by kR105
Even Texas? (yes I know, I deserve to be downvoted, guilty pleasure)
Penney Arcade had good ads. They actually play the games that were advertised and it was also a stamp of approval.
I like the metaphor that ants are "cells with legs".

Life really isn't constrained to any of our neat categorizations; life really is whatever works over time.
Google's Tough Alphabet Transition
Location: Kiev (UA) / Chiang Mai (TH)

Remote: Yes, please!

Willing to relocate: Depends

Technologies: Cocoa Touch, UIKit, Objective-C, Swift, learning

React Native

Résumé/CV: http://stackoverflow.com/cv/zrslv + http://zoreslav.com

Email: me@zoreslav.com

Hi, I'm an iOS developer with some pretty nice apps in my portfolio and I'm looking to add some more.
Microsoft embraces Linux – way too late
Where do you put this then? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV8dk0XucNA
That is true for the Swedish sites/system as well.
Multiple vulnerabilities found in Quanta LTE routers
Whether the company destroys the shares or retains them as treasury stock is irrelevant. Investors don't care if their share price went up by 10%, or if they effectively have 1.10 shares.
> "In more technical roles, we are fortunate that many companies support separate but equal career tracks, where at a certain level of seniority you can choose to go deep into the craft of your discipline or go into people management."

Something inside of me makes me feel like many (MANY!) senior managers like to only pay lip service to this. Something like "sure, we'll pay the senior software engineers/architects/fellows/whatever a pretty good salary, but you can gosh darn bet that their managers are making more/way more"

Please tell me that I'm wrong here.

(As for me, I really want to give management a try. I like meetings, I like people and I like making awesome things with awesome teams. I also feel like I'm starting to hit my compensation limit as an engineer. Lastly, I want to start my own business in the next few years and I feel that the skills learned from doing management are more cross-applicable than the skills learned as an engineer.)
It is also absolutely irrelevant for normal driving. 0 to 100 km / h in 10 seconds or even more is perfectly acceptable, and lower accelerations are actually better for the range.
It’s a known fact that electric cars have superb acceleration mainly because they deliver all power from the beginning, in contrast to internal combustion engines that need to reach certain rpms to achieve the same thing. Even if it’s 6 seconds instead of 4 it still is an impressive number for a car at that price range.
WARNING: Auto-playing video ads that are not muted
I think you're downplaying this more than you should. I got a very different impression listening to Nicholas Shaxson (author of [1]) on the BBC. Most if not all the world leaders involved in this leak are VERY likely trying to hide personal money from their own country, that alone is a huge deal.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Treasure-Islands-Uncovering-Offshore-B...).
There are several things that stop accessibility from being popular, here are the few I think about :

- developers generally don't need it, can't easily test it, and aren't even that aware of it

- "accessibility" can mean a lot of things. Are we talking about blind persons, daltonism, low visibility, limited motor skills, or something else I don't even know about? Each one has their challenge, and it's difficult to address all of them on purpose

- accessibility is often regarded as "niche" by stakeholders (unless one of them requires it or you really have a big scale), and thus not important. Unlike backward compatibility, it's not easy to have accurate numbers on how many of your users require it too.

That is not to say accessibility is not important.

Generally, the first steps to get it right is NOT to design anything specific for them, but instead to adhere to standards, semantic HTML (or whatever your platform use if you do a native app), have enough constrast, big enough fonts, and take user-settings into account (generally it's as easy as not overriding anything like zooming and scrolling).

The good thing about accessibility is if your app/website is accessible, it also benefits all your other users, in some ways.
"95%+ of the time it will be driving itself"

That's a shitty metric. Does it mean it will need intervention every 950ms for 50ms?
frankly when I saw it I thought, corruption in iceland? good luck making the US news.
> At this point, can it be anything other than full autonomous?

On American roads? Not likely.
I ordered some stuff yesterday and I only had to provide the SSN and it filled out the adress and everything. Then, I specified Klarna and the order was away.
The Intercept, edited by Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald of the Snowden Disclosure group, is exactly that.

https://theintercept.com/

Their website is clean and I have yet to see intrusive ads anywhere.
I created a profile but I don't understand how it works.

Good luck.
I seriously want to start a drone defense company.
MIT Media Lab members launch tool for US open data
I've been researching some alternate history stuff recently and it's really
interesting. I haven't really made up my mind about it yet but the idea that
most of our history is fabricated doesn't really seem as crazy to me as it did
when I first heard about it.

There is a chronology written by Fomenko et al. that questions most of the
official history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_%28Fomenko%29

Here is a nice youtube channel that talks about the topic, a big portion of it
comes from the New Chronology but there are also other sources.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y5FmyiEnEs

Not that anyone would ever see this comment anyways since I am shadowbanned.
The goal posts seem to keep moving, but this whole discussion began because of a disagreement about whether this would qualify as a "mass produced" car because "Normal people do not spend $35-40k on a car".

Yet the #1, most popular vehicle sold in the US, the Ford F-150, sells for over $41K generally. There are many other completely ordinary, most certainly mass produced, vehicles in that price range. Bought by entirely "normal" people.

These discussions always remind me of a great Onion article (http://www.theonion.com/article/sociologist-considers-own-be...) about projecting one's own lot across the population at large, and using our own situation and choices to define "normal".
By definition, fully autonomous means that you will never have to take over.
Building the UI for the new the Times website
Which is why sites like the Sydney Morning Herald are utterly screwing themselves over. Seriously, go to the SMH now, and check out your ad-blocker. There will be about 60 blocked ads and sites. Then check out the headlines - all click-bait.

Ironically they now have a 30 article a month limit (easily bypassed by switching to private mode in your browser) which actively reduces their ad revenue and messes up their statistics tracking when people switch to private browsing...

In the meantime, Fairfax have been progressively cutting staff. Before it was outsourcing subeditors to New Zealand (and it shows, there are an unbelievable number of unreadable sentences, along with grammar and spelling errors - even in their headlines they show on their main page!) and now they are about to shed more than 100 jobs in actual journalism.

I once subscribed to the SMH, but then the quality got so bad that I just cancelled. They can't even get their comments section right - it's barely usable, and they don't even get threading reasonably correct.
What I just don't get is how these teens who were supposedly so internet and media savvy and established huge followings based on "being honest" or somesuch couldn't see that deliberately posting low-quality content which was fundamentally dishonest (the opposite of what they'd been doing) was just as certainly going to hurt them. ...and that thousands of teenagers are apparently involved in this kind of thing, it's probably safe to call it "widespread".

Clearly there's a lapse here, but I'm uncertain if it's an ethics problem or simply an educational problem (we didn't teach them not to deliberately poop into the internet).
Open-Source Processor Core Ready for IoT
If you can't walk the equivalent of five lengths around a standard track without stress fractures you have a serious, debilitating disease and should see a doctor immediately.
It seems impossible that they could have it be fully autonomous to the point of not needing a steering wheel though. You can tell an autonomous car "take me to the mall", or "pull out of the garage", but there are so many edge cases that seem like they would still require manual control.

How do you tell it which spot to pick in a parking garage? Or how do you tell it to, say, drive on to a lift while inside a building with no GPS reception? It seems like they must still have some kind of manual controls: even if they somehow implement full autonomy, and take care of all the edge cases, and get past the regulatory hurdles...people just like to drive cars sometimes.

So I could believe you're right, and they have massively improved autonomous driving features, but to me that still doesn't quite explain his comments about the steering controls being massively different and "feeling like a spaceship".
"Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing programming." --Jamie Kellner, former Warner executive
forget regions. they can show it to positively-disposed individuals.
My equity is extremely small, if not negligible. The company continues to grow, but the engineering teams grow slower than other parts of the company. This puts more and more strain on engineering as work continues to pile on. The good news (and the bad news) is there's never a lack of work. I feel like slave labor for being a tech lead for bottom 35 percentile pay in the area.
I'm hoping we'll indeed see some tweaks to the nose -- it looks like a blank waiting for a cut-out to fit a grill and will leave the car feeling nearly-finished if it stays that way for production. Only bit that wasn't really a home run for me (for a pre-production, anyways).

But otherwise... shooting for autonomous-first at launch will be interesting indeed. How would that effect the opinions of the folks now on the wait list? I wonder how much we're really going to need/want these levels of performance with the car doing the driving for us, of if having the go-fast will end up being mostly a safety feature for collision avoidance?
> At this point, can it be anything other than full autonomous?

There is no way that autonomous driving is going to work in most small European town and villages. There are so many downtowns which were never meant to be used by car and it is already difficult to navigate those places as a human. I just don't see how this should work over here in Europe.

Selfdriving on the highway or in a typical suburban sprawl in the US? Yes, that might work in the near future. Navigating twisted one-way streets in some old town from the middle ages during rush hour? That will take a long time to do this fully autonomously.
Either you're stupid, or there's a misunderstanding. Probably the latter. Let me try again. Assume that δ is the discount factor (δ = 1 / (1 + r)), P is price, and D_i is the dividend in year i.

Before dividend:

P = D_0 + δ D_1 + δ^2 D_2 + δ^3 D_3 + ...

After dividend:

P = δ D_1 + δ^2 D_2 + δ^3 D_3 + ...
Intrinsic value does not exist. Which is why we have markets in the first place.

The obvious way to demonstrate this is you sell 10 shares for a higher price than 10 billion shares.
Clever. I suspect that would eventually be noticed by a researcher, but it may take a while.
What? The state flag or the city flag? I just double checked and I don't see what you're talking about.
Nah, 10 minutes in a room doing live coding would have found that out faster than 3 hours of coding and 10 minutes in the room.
Hey guys,

We have done a user research on LinkedIn App on 30 users across the globe, giving them a task to "Create and share an update on LinkedIn."

Can you guess how much time and interactions does it take on LinkedIn app?
"Vehicle" in this context just means legal entity. It's the jargon of the space, it doesn't mean a mode of transport.

The principle of offshore tax shelters is very simple. Countries tax activity that happens in their jurisdiction. Only America tries to tax activity that happens outside of America, and it's attempts to do so have caused huge problems for Americans everywhere (whilst raising trivial amounts of revenue). All other countries recognise that legitimate taxation is inherently region specific: a country that raises taxes from other countries is more properly called an empire.

So countries tax things that happen inside their borders, and countries can set tax rates independently, and the world is full of small countries that don't require much revenue to operate. Hence, if you can shift your business activities from a high tax jurisdiction to a low tax jurisdiction, you can legally pay the lower rates of tax.

Essentially all discussion of tax "avoidance" you may encounter revolves around the inherent difficulty of figuring out where a business actually is. For a person it's easy. A person is where their body is, and simply counting days spent in a country is sufficient to decide on tax residency. For a company it is not so easy because a company can do things in many places simultaneously. The rules that try to resolve this conundrum are extremely vague and thus, easily gamed.

The case of the UK PM's father is instructive. His company had most of its meetings outside of the UK. This allowed them to argue that it wasn't a British company and thus shouldn't pay British taxes. If the British tax collectors want some of that revenue they'd need to argue that actually the business was done in the UK, really. That's a tricky argument.

In the case of companies like Apple or Google, they set things up so their business is done in Ireland. They do this because the Irish people have repeatedly opted to allow very low (effectively zero) rates of corporation tax in order to attract skilled employment to a part of the world that would otherwise be fairly unattractive. Whilst technically Irish corporation taxes are not zero, their rules define the location of a business differently to some other countries, which means arrangements like the Double Irish become possible and that allows for moving profit out of Ireland essentially untaxed. The Irish people know this and allow it, because it has been a very powerful strategy for them and has made Dublin a business center of Europe. Some other countries like to complain about this, stating it's unfair competition, but all countries compete to attract businesses in various ways - often with direct subsidies rather than low tax rates. So their complaints ring somewhat hollow.

In practice the money these big companies stash in the Bahamas will eventually get taxed anyway, because taxes apply when the money moves, and eventually that money will move. Probably back into the USA if/when a 'tax holiday' becomes politically acceptable.
It doesnt seem too reasonable to compare a businessman to someone who supports terrorism and radical islam.
6 Essential Libraries to Use on Your Next React Native App
We send our 3 hour test after CV/GitHub/etc screening, and after a phone call, the next stage after it would be an on-site technical interview. I agree that sending it before the CV screen would be bad.
I highly doubt it. At least the meaningful ones that I saw. If they have automated systems that good, they probably would be very rich by now.
Depends. If they are holding back from IPOs because they don't believe they can match their private valuations, that would be a sign of weakness.
Smart watches two biggest problems
ETW is definitely great to get started and I am sure you find a lot of hotspots with it.
The benefit of APM tools such as Dynatrace (keep in mind that I am also working for them) is that they automatically tag & trace requests across thread and runtime boundaries. So - besides stack traces of individual CLRs you get a full end-to-end (browser to database) view including capturing method arguments and return values where it makes sense, e.g: SQL Query, Bind values, Web Service URLs + parameters, ... - as we hook into the profiling APIs we get some good information about GC and the impact GC has on your execution times, ...

Good news is that all APM vendors provide free trial versions. So - give it try if you want to see if it gives you more than ETW!