skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unlike small businesses and individuals, most S&P 500 companies, like Facebook, pay less in income taxes than the official corporate income tax rate of approximately 35% implies, by doing things like booking profits abroad in specially created subsidiaries domiciled in jurisdictions like Ireland and Singapore, and never repatriating those profits, thereby deferring tax payments forever.

A couple of years ago the NY Times published an eye-opening interactive chart showing the actual tax rates paid by S&P 500 companies: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/05/25/sunday-review/... (Related article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/who-will-cr... )

Regardless of whether you think corporate income taxes should be higher or lower, it's dysfunctional to have a system in which large companies and super-wealthy individuals can avoid paying headline tax rates but small companies and individuals don't have a choice.

The IRS, understandably, wants to stop this charade.
Yes. And that's why every employee should spend some low amount of background effort constantly interviewing elsewhere. First, to get a feeler for what the rest of the market is doing. Second, to take a better offer if available. Third, even a committed lifer needs to keep the interviewing skills sharp, in case of layoffs or bankruptcy.
I was under the impression that thats what it always did...

A flag?! What kind of insanity is that?
Sorry, I was only responding to your first line.

Totally agree that the price fixing wasn't kosher.
It's true that it was executed as a resolution to an old dispute predating the current regime, but at the same time it's hard to believe there was no connection between the two events --that they were strictly independent and merely coincidental.
Could this be used to render React views on the server side?
I'd love to use something like https://github.com/markfinger/python-react but without the need to run node.js server on the side.

Is there an example I can copy to imitate this approach?
Right, she sued over lead in water and so far seems to be a very accurate assessment of her deteriorating mental health by the time of encounter.

If some police departments can deliver bombs via drones, maybe warrants can be too!
>I love Monday morning quarterbacks.

honest question, what does this mean?
> is propping up an undemocratic regime that murders its opponents, oppresses women, sponsors terrorism and extremism worldwide, starts brutal wars, etc.

I could have sworn you were describing the US.
Node-Data is now supporting graphql
> don't force them to build-out to neighborhoods where people can't pay $70+ per month. That...won't fly in San Francisco.

https://fiber.google.com/cities/sanfrancisco/ Google Fiber is coming to parts of SF using existing fiber infrastructure.
And the next competitor bids $12.

There are 10s of thousands of businesses in the US. It's hard to believe there'd be any remotely successful collusion in keeping wages down.

Non-compete agreements are invalid in many states. Also, would you sign a non-compete agreement in order to get paid 10% of your value to the business?
It does happen [0] http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/13/tina-brown-cha...

I don't think this is a left vs right issue. It's a greed issue.
Absolutely right. They have all day and night she needs food and sleep.
I don't like it more than most people would, but I think this is mostly a transactional relationship rather than one founded in widely shared interests. It's a necessary tool in getting things done in the world, unless we're looking at the alternatives of colonialism and empire --which are past their sell-by-date.
By the way, if a new employer asks this, you don't have to answer them. You can politely say "I'd prefer not to share my previous salary with you." If you're at this point in the discussion this isn't likely to hurt your chances of being hired.
I think his point may be: Don't be that guy who accepts $5k less.
Do you know what happened in Ethereum? The block chain split and now both chains are running independently. You can buy New Ether or Ether Classic. If this happens a lot it will be crazy and confusing.
Ah ok, you are trolling. it's just a waste of my time.
In large part because the wealthy, and corporations, have entirely shirked their taxpaying obligations. That is: paying for the services which enabled them to become wealthy in the first place.
> if your software can be modeled easily as actors then hey, that will work well, and mostly you can.

I feel like "if your software can be modeled easily as X then hey, that will work well, and mostly you can" applies to all languages/styles, and if only people who like different languages and styles could just accept that this then we'd all get along fine. It's just a pity when people (not saying you're saying this) go "X is the BEST WAY TO PROGRAM and all other ways are STUPID and are for STUPID PEOPLE" and it ruins whatever point they were trying to make.
The ACLU has an app that can be used to record police encounters. Fortunately, the ACLU won't be shutting it off at the police request.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. I like to be nice enough to the Help so that I can pat myself on the back. But let's not get ahead of ourselves and let these people fight for higher wages, which might impact my costs!"
> A tool like Terraform, from my perspective, should be stateless. It ought to compare its target to the world, and then attempt to converge the world to match the target.

This is how BOSH has been doing it for years for IaaS setup and other systems like Salt/Puppet/Chef/cfengine for servers. Compare-and-repair is a fairly well-accepted, trustworthy model.

Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, we donate most of the engineering on BOSH.

[0] https://bosh.io/
Au contraire, it is actually you who is creating a Straw Man. rrggrr doesn't write that the US is perfect, but rather, s/he writes that the US is a "generally benevolent hegemonic power".
Well, that's a bummer, but you can not really understand it until you actually learn one of those languages. And yes, learning the first one is a pain.

Those languages will not save you from dealing with shared state and synchronization bugs. They'll just give you tools you can use to reduce the size of the problem to the minimum, and to organize what remains of it. It's still you doing everything.

And there are those situations when you reduced the synchronization problem into zero without noticing. Then you can simply tell the compiler to parallelize it to you. It happens - not every time, but it isn't rare either, mostly depends on your problem.
Yes, I've used Terraform since 0.3.

I feel strongly about two things:

1) I screwed up at the beginning so hard (there were _no_ best practices to be found so it was a bit wild west) that I've come to the point where I need to use something else, or rewrite everything.

2) Terraform is best when you are in a silo by yourself, or you're using something to do the state applies for you (Atlas, or DIY through Jenkins and friends).

It does a lot right that other tools don't do (stringing together resources is a cinch), but it also behaves in strange things and the statefile is both a huge positive, and a huge negative.

If you need to move fast it's not a bad tool to choose at all.

The BIG caveat here is as follows -- If you have a mixed-cloud setup and use AWS, GCE, Azure, DigitalOcean, etc.. at the same time; It's probably hands down the best tool for managing everything.

Notes:

- I only use AWS. I use some of the other TF providers mixed in with it. (Consul, Datadog)

- I started from scratch (no AWS resources -> 100% Terraform), the general opinion seems to be this is the better place to start from.

- I use a majority of Hashicorp's stuff and am quite partial to liking their products. Terraform is something I have the most opinions on. I have no problems strongly suggesting Packer, Consul, Vagrant, and Vault to anyone.

- One of the main reasons I'm considering alternatives is that, at my current position, I'm having trouble getting folks to wrap their heads around Terraform.
What proof?
Another win for Betteridge. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
It is poorly worded but I think effectively it's true. If I understand correctly a 10000 sq ft lot would be taxed the same regardless if it was a 1 story house or a 6 story condo... So effectively it's a discount compared to the way normal property tax is levied that values the cost of the structure on the land...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
The police could have left her alone and come back later. They were in her house, and she was only threatening to harm the officers, not her child.
People who watch a football game Sunday night and then talk shit at work on Monday about all the things they would have done differently if they were coach/quarterback/etc.
Hi everyone,

CareSkore, is hiring for a few different roles:

Engineering
Marketing
Sales

We're a Y-Combinator (W16) backed, well funded healthcare startup located in Mountain View, CA. Interested? Email me at: daljit@careskore.com

https://jobs.lever.co/careskore
Might have something to do with this[0]

>The definition of a Monday morning quarterback is someone who is always criticizing and saying how he would have done something better or differently after the event has passed.

[0] http://www.yourdictionary.com/monday-morning-quarterback
I've re-read your comment 3 times and I still can't figure out what you are trying to say.

Are you saying that Facebook and the IRS had already agreed on an Advance pricing agreement and then the IRS retroactively cancelled it?

If so where is this agreement? I haven't seen any indication of one being signed when searching through my terminal.

And what exactly do you think my supposition is? :)
12W LED Panel Light Round Shape Dia 170mm
> Mostly though, I love functional programming because it makes mucking around with data structures a lot easier.

Can you talk more about that? My experience has actually been largely the opposite: immutability actually makes working with data structures /harder/ for me. I'd be interested in hearing about any hidden advantages you've discovered there.
To solve a mythical problem, employers now have one more restriction on hiring. Pretty soon the government will just select a person at random and order companies to provide him or her a job for life.
I read the order before I made my comment, thanks. The order makes clear note of why these mentions were prejudicial in this case.

> Apple consented to the consolidation

IANAL but seems like you don't understand the difference between consent and objecting to but preferring consolidation to trying the cases out of order.

> there is nothing in this order to justify a new trial

The judge goes into detail on how mentions of the earlier trial were used in the consolidated one to "gratuitous" prejudicial impact, including the repeated mentions to infringement by FaceTime 1.0 when that finding had been reversed. He quotes several of these at length, goes on to cites multiple precedents, then goes into detail why VirnetX's cited precedent doesn't apply to this case.
> Yay, another shitty feature to disable in about:config.

As a minor plus, if you've already disabled the existing blocking options in previous versions of Firefox, then these new ones are automatically disabled.
You are looking in the wrong places, then. Not everyone without an iPhone wants one - the demand you cite doesn't exist.
The big win from FP languages isn't parallelisation, its the lack of shared mutable state. Shared mutable state is the bane of all software: the more you have of it, the less you are able to reason about your program's behaviour. Its not an all or nothing thing (a little shared mutable state is better than a lot), and the difficulty increase is probably not linear either; this is why hybrid languages also help.

I don't know why the material for learning FP languages is so bad, but I would guess its the math roots. Most math material is really bad in the sense that it requires that you turn off parts of the brain that are normally useful and helpful, but in the case of math are actually just harmful.

(e.g. the part of the brain that continuously looks for "real world" examples of the patterns its seeing i.e. it tries to find X in "this looks like X". Often times, there simply are no useful "real world" values for X and thats okay)

My hopes are with Reason (http://facebook.github.io/reason/). It takes all the best parts of OCaml:

lightning fast runtime
great realtime GC
strict evaluation with predictable performance
excellent module system
algebraic datatypes
objects and polymorphic variants
compiles to JS cleanly via bucklescript
not completely crazy about purity
great type inference (there is *almost* no need to write down any types)

and puts a simple JS-like syntax on top of that.

With multicore support right behind the corner, I think it has a good chance of taking over.
Prosperity in Scandinavia Is Despite Welfare States, Not Because of Them
Some of the practical aspects that favour functional programming lies in parallelism, not concurrent programming. Parallelism as in multi threading. It's an order of magnitude easier to write parallel programs in Scala than in Java. I don't mean a simple hello world but real world applications which will involve transactions and potential deadlocks. Agree Yes, the parallel constructs in Scala work with Java threads underneath, but you write a lot less code.

I don't think Functional programming makes any task easier. In fact I'd argue the opposite, it's quite difficult to write functional code, to unlearn imperative programming. Once you gain mastery over FP, you do write less code. Reaching that level of mastery is an uphill task, it has been for me at least.
Reminds me of a core principle of Sir Patrick Geddes: "its task is to find the right places for each sort of people; place where they will really flourish."

Vivendo discimus
I hate tipping. I am happy to stick to a deal we agreed to up front. Uber offers that model. As long as Uber doesn't force the drivers to work for them, I don't care too much what deal they accept from Uber.

Most drivers seem to work with multiple apps. Uber probably paints working as a driver in the most glorious light possible---so you can call that deception, but it's not too different from any other job, and easy enough to leave. I don't see how they are deceiving the users though? I get a ride and pay roughly what the fare estimate says.

(The drivers are sure worse off than me. After all I work in tech, and they are driving cars. But my discretionary charitable budget goes towards more efficient approaches towards relieving human suffering, than helping people in first world countries.)

For the record, I think Uber's management are mostly jerks. But as a service provider they undercut regular Sydney cabs by around 50% and provide better value. By comparison, in Singapore regular cabs are mostly alright, so there Uber isn't nearly as appealing for me.
Infrastructure, particularly transportation and communications.

Ports, navigational aids (from lighthouses and buoys to GPS), railroads, telegraph, transoceanic cables, rural electric and telephone service, highways and interstates, airports, air traffic systems, standardisation of parts, measurements, communications, frequencies, procedures, accident and incident investigation.

We devalue commodities because their price is low, but the value if often quite high. I'd knocked an argument against supplying California agriculture with water in favour of municipal use, in part on the basis that ag prices are depressed in a highly distortionary fashion.

But if you want the real winners, look at coal, oil, and gas, which are underpriced by factors of hundreds, thousands, or millions, and which make the modern world possible. The end of that gravy train will be painful.
Do you have quarterly goal setting reviews? People generally find that a formal process such as this will answer the questions you pose.

For example, you may discover that someone else got that promotion that you were eyeing, because they provided 15x value compared to you - 7 patents, 3 products architected that opened up new areas for growth, etc.
I think that opening changes in state via a CLI is a fast path to making things worse.[0]

I greatly prefer the BOSH model: "give me a manifest and I will make the world look like it".

Documents are easily versionable. Commands aren't.

Documents narrow scope and can be more easily made idempotent as an automatic guarantee. Commands require us to remember to check the state ourselves, manually, before doing something.

That said, Terraform has a significantly different low-level model. BOSH looks at the size of the problem and imposes non-negotiable primitives to scope that complexity. Terraform is more ambitious. I suspect Terraform will be easier to adopt incrementally, but harder to manage on a per-unit-of-state basis.

[0] Loosely related: http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign...
Functional languages make concurrency easier (particularly the statically typed ones, but also erlang thanks to its innate concurrency model) because they generally encourage low coupling between components of your system.

OO languages have not done this as a language feature (it's touted as a good thing, but is often ignored). It's too easy to call directly into another class, or to add a method to a particular class rather than via an interface. This means your system components know too much about each other and it's too easy to get around problems by reaching into one area and directly managing it.

OO languages or libraries implementing actor models allow you to design your system in a more decoupled fashion. But, of course, this leads to issues with performance.

That's to be expected. And there's a solution to this. Hide the implementation. I have a database server, I need it to be fast but an actor model implementation was too slow. Fine, I implement it in C on an exokernel with direct access to the hard drive and the ethernet interface and it's really freaking fast. But everyone else sees it as an actor. They don't need to know the implementation details. They just need to know how to talk to it. That that one component of your system wasn't implemented in a "pure" fashion is irrelevant. The rest of your system can't reach into it directly and become dependent on it (outside performance) in a way that makes your system fragile by becoming too tightly coupled.

EDIT: Also, concurrency != parallelism.

Concurrency is more an element of system design, less an element of system performance (though it lends itself to better performance). Parallelism is an implementation detail and all about the performance (how many tasks can we do at once).

Actors may or may not help with the latter. They certainly won't for scientific programmers, on their own, because they're likely too heavyweight in most implementations. Instead you want something like what OpenMP or MPI offer. Some functional languages allow you access to similar parallel computational models. But that, again, is separate from concurrency.
The Dangerous Ubiquity of the “Office Blanket”
Ok, that's one. The claim is that it's widespread for left-leaning groups.
Apparently the Iranians don't believe it was merely coincidental:

> Iranian press reports have quoted senior Iranian defense officials describing the cash as a ransom payment. The Iranian foreign ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment...Revolutionary Guard commanders boasted at the time that the Americans had succumbed to Iranian pressure. “Taking this much money back was in return for the release of the American spies,” said Gen. Mohammad Reza Naghdi, commander of the Guard’s Basij militia, on state media.
This is pleasingly precise, but besides the point.
Angle (the OpenGL -> DirectX thingy) actually acts as a sanitizer for GPU commands so in a sense browsers which use Angle already have some protection over this. While I think complete protection is impossible through the use of Angle and GPU process I think you reduce it as much as you can since you can't control the driver itself aside from what protections Windows gives you by default.
Actually, they're all against TPP except for Gary Johnson.
This seems to only make sense in the case that I'm sure I've been able to read the most recent writes from all replicas, no?

I feel like there should be some other method to carry on this discussion besides this thread about Noms :-)
Broken link. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technology...
The normal justification (the only I've heard) for that is you don't want to give the suspects an advantage. Clearly that justification doesn't apply when the suspect is the one livestreaming it.

Can you give another justification?
It creates the incentives for creating more housing, in that land is most likely to be brought into efficient use.

It won't create more square-footage of land in which people can live, but it makes it more likely that cities will grow in ways to sustain more people.
SP500 companies don't pay anything while Joe in montana whom gets by with his family on 40K a year pay 35% or whatever the bracket is.

law is the law and they are not breaking it but its time the IRS crackdown on this practice.
And the Windows equivalent (win32k lockdown)[1]. This restricts a number of win32k syscalls including all GDI ones. Chrome already uses this mitigation for renderer processes and has support for PPAPI plugin processes on their dev/beta channels.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh8...
Ask HN: Need advice for consulting (market research)
Branching out to offer freelance market research - in addition to 9-5 day job of similar nature. Consists of a mix of conducting competitor analysis, user research, and quantitative reporting - surveys, prototype testing, etc...

Specifically, I'm focusing on new products and companies (startups included, of course). Does anyone have any suggestions for best practices, helpful resources, examples of things not to do? I have one client I'm speaking with (via UpWork), and they just notified me that they don't actually have the "funding" to pay me until the end of this month. So here's 10% in the mean time.

Worst case worse, it's one more project for the portfolio, but it would still hurt to not get paid.

Failing that, what's been your current experience as a freelancer/consultant?
Input received from other viewers that would hinder the police. "Don't forget to check the backdoor", "Your safety is on", "They won't shoot if your child is in front of you".
Back when I was still practicing law, I was in-house with a large company. At the time, we were a small GC office - under 10 attorneys - for a really large organization. As a result, nearly all of us were generalists first with a little bit of specialization on the side. Given my background, that meant I did more or less anything tech-related. Anyhow, I now realize most of that buildup is unnecessary, but backspace takes time -

I was reviewing a couple of our web TOS when I realized I had no idea what I was doing. I figured hey, we're not first to market with this thing, lemme go look at what Competitor X wrote. So I do that, and it bears striking similarity to ours. Actually, it's identical except someone CTRL-H'ed the company name. So just for shits, I went and looked at the other two big companies in our market. Identical, other than the company names of course. All of us.

To this day, I have no idea who wrote it first. And I guess since I'm somewhere else doing fintech, I suppose I never will!
One such example is the Scala List data structure. It's fundamentally a linked list but the built in routines for Lists such as zip, reduceLeft, map make it easier to transform List elements. By easier I mean, you write less code to do the same task as compared to an imperative program such as Java and without side effects.