skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dark-matter hunt fails to find the elusive particles
Presumably each company will have their own approaches to these issues. They don't prima facie seem to be issues that require legislation. In that sense, "we" are not having a dialogue about this at all, any more than "we" are having conversation about cyclist detection, because "we" are not building self-driving cars. Waymo, Cruise, etc. are building self-driving cars, and we are not privy to their internal deliberations on these issues.
pecunia non olet
> One people finding this trick is ok, but big companies being able to buy these tricks is another scale.

Maybe using these tricks was what actually enabled these "one people" to grow into big companies?
I don't think it's as simple as "Small companies all pay their taxes, only big companies cheat because the system is unfair".

Imho there's plenty of opportunities to cheat without ever being discovered as a cheater, the vast majority of people simply don't notice them as such or when they do refuse to abuse them, out of a moral obligation to society.

That last part isn't the same for everybody. I dunno which election it was, but I think it was the GOP who ran on this whole "Maker" theme where they pretended people are all living in isolation and nobody uses public infrastructure for any of their success. That pretty much summed up the whole mindset behind "not paying taxes" pretty aptly.
Let's be honest here, lot of people should be, there are too many jobs in tech that are morally questionable and people just do it because they get a 6+ figure salary. I had a personal experience with that in a new company and within the first hour some upper head stated "we don't like opensource, opensource is a problem" (silicon valley company).
Lot of other related issues, see the threads on the homelessness issue that was posted today. Silicon Valley is living in a bubble
Also pretty ballsy and borderline consumer fraud... With no tradein, they are effectively walking a legal tight rope.
Which is exactly the point the original poster was making. Software development on "simple" consumer apps is death by a thousand cuts.
VC Jim Breyer on finding the next Mark Zuckerberg (and much more)
If it were to scale to millions of users, caching would help.

At that point, you'd have to cache the JSON responses just the same, so the complexity of cache invalidation would be there in the exact same way.

But you would still not have the additional load and bloat on the user browser.
I can just pull the network cable from the TV, which removes pretty much the entire attack surface.
New Insights on ‘Captured’ Electrons Could Improve Flash Memory
Just FYI for Mac users, latest Safari has this feature built-in.
>> Then there's the issue of how your proposed system requires FB to show users the porn that other users are privately viewing.

I think this can be addressed as "Show me all suspected compromising videos of me that is available to more than 10 users". The answer to that query can be produced with facial recognition and nudity detector, no?
It's not only foreign banks refusing American customers. American companies such as Fidelity, Vanguard, Charles Schwab and so on won't open investment accounts for Americans abroad and will freeze accounts if they discover you are abroad.
Splunk is a event logging system, compared to Prometheus which is metrics based. You need both types of systems to be able to properly observe your systems, they're complementary.
In reality, they all do. This isn't just a logitech issue.

Remember that Microsoft couldn't even keep up their DRM servers for their Zune. I would think out of any technology company, MS would be the last to drop support for infrastructure.

It's just safer to consider any "cloud required" device to be a rental. Now, its up to the user if that rental is a good deal or not. Sometimes it can be (chromecast). Other times, it isn't.
Could shareholders sue if Apple “opted out” of their legal tax avoidance strategy? We are talking about some very material money here, not an executive bonus pool sized chunk of cash, but like national GDP sized money.
On PH: Flight Deals Hound-Personalized cheap flight alerts dropped to your inbox
This. I run a small company as well, and taxes are a damn maze.

I just checked the tax authorities website in this country, and there are no less than 121 different tax-exempt health activities – things my company can pay for me, without having to also pay taxes. For most other things, there's sales tax (possibly other kinds of tax too, but let's limit it ourselves for brevity) that comes in at no less than three different levels, depending on what you're paying for. Many things, most things, my company can't legally pay for directly, but must pay me income, which I then pay for, as well as paying the taxes. This probably makes sense, except of course now I'm being taxed twice: once on the income itself, and then again on the expense. Oh unless of course it's a deductible expense, in which case I might be able to deduct it from my year end declaration. Also this depends on what it is I'm paying for, some services are subsidized and the subsidy is applied immediately, so I'm only paying half the taxes – unless I've used up my subsidy limit (which I can't check.)

I don't mind paying taxes, I really don't, because I can clearly see what I get for them for the most part. The streets are clean, health care is paid for and mostly seems to work for me, the garbage truck shows up on time, the water flows freely from my taps, and the electric grid never seems to have any issues. My friends with children get to take a lot of time off to care for their kids, and when they are old enough for day care that works too. I had the privilege of attending great public schools, and higher education is paid for. The list goes on.

I really don't mind paying a reasonable amount of taxes, and I'm not even that upset about companies and people investing their money wisely. But when there are legal ways of "optimizing" your tax foot print, if you can afford the expertise to do so, it becomes really demoralizing to pay your taxes as asked.

Corporations and individuals aren't going to change their ways, so government has to step in and fix these things. It's probably real hard to do, but it needs to be done.

Either that or provide tax optimization services for free, so we can all enjoy these same incredibly low tax rates. (At which point tax reform probably has to happen anyway.)
Explore Wealth and Income Inequality in the World Wealth and Income Database
Greek Startup Douleutaras.gr raises third funding round of 1.8M €
I think what you are describing is a company not based in the US not having to pay this tax. Effectively companies fleeing the US. Agree that this would likely be a consequence. But that's the price to pay to maintaining high tax rates. Countries don't like competition but the reality is that this competition exists among them.
They're all graphical IDE's
:)
Google Secretary = Google.
Google Search = Duck Duck Go / StartPage / etc.
Huh?

They had to change some things in the European market, them not doing anything at all is completely bogus.

I'm not delusional enough to think the fines were high impact though.
No, addiction is never harmless. If you have never been addicted to anything, it is difficult to empathize or understand.

That doesn't mean it is wrong for a game to become addicting because it is so damn fun it just happens to become addicting. What is beyond despicable to me is to create a game that deliberately manipulates the human mind to become addicting without being of any real value.

If nothing else, it's a matter of opportunity cost. You are stealing attention away from hobbies, friends, family, and more likely, more wholesome forms of entertainment, possibly even more intelligent video games. Through in-app purchases you are funneling people's income from their bank accounts to yours and your employees'. This is fine when people are making a choice to waste their resources, but when you take people's choice away by addicting them, then you are effectively enslaving them.
> I'd much rather type "takeaway pizza chicago" than have google mind-read where I want the pizza delivered. Search is not always about looking up something already connected to you. It used to be about unfettered exploration.

And so would most HN readers. However, the rest of the world outside of the tech industry cares more about convenience and simplicity than exploration. Most people are willfully ignorant, driven from dawn to dusk by their own habits, rather than some intrinsic desire for self-actualization and the acquisition of knowledge.

Give them more convenience, even at the cost of flexibility, and non-technologists love it.

That doesn't make us better than them, or vice versa. We've chosen to be a little different is all.
If you are like me, while browsing the net, you've come across thousands of banner ads. Generally, I am the type of person, that if I want to buy something, I'll google it, find it, and purchase it. I rarely if ever actually pay attention to those annoying bandwidth wasting banners that appear on almost every site.

Come on, there has got to be an easy way to prevent this garbage from hitting my computer. https://theporndude.com/useful-software

This is accomplished by using the HOSTS file. The HOSTS file contains the mappings of IP Addresses to host names. The file is loaded with Windows Startup, and Windows checks the HOSTS file BEFORE it looks to your ISP to find the site. Editing the HOSTS file prevents access to the outside sites by redirecting traffic back to your own computer.

* It can block applications (viruses, trojans, downloaders) from accessing specific sites, by redirecting any (would be) outgoing communication back to your own computer, preventing it from accessing whatever material it was trying to get.

* It also blocks the ad servers from tracking your movements - in many cases the banner ad would open a separate connection to your computer, which is active even after you leave the banner's page. This connection reports all the cookies you send, even to other unrelated sites. Yikes!

* It can speed the loading of pages, by skipping the animated GIF files, hit counters, annoying ads, and can block data miners from ever seeing your IP address, and tracking you on the net.
Have you got any products to trick people into liking your product? Your comments in this thread seem to be having the opposite effect.
I have a Logitech Harmony Hub with simple remote, and I would say the radio control (non line of sight) between remote and hub is great. The hub has the ir transmitters in it, and it's sitting inside a cabinet with everything else, and there's an external ir blaster that sits just above to control the tv.

Mine controls tv, Nvidia Shield, Logitech z5500 speakers, and a Blu-ray player. I believe the Shield is controlled by Bluetooth.

Because the Shield is a Google cast receiver, I can press the music button and it leaves the tv off but allows us to cast music (or just play something from the shield with sound only). Everything else is as straight forward as you'd expect, one litmus test is that visitors are able to figure it out easily. I used to have one of the remotes with an lcd screen and I'm not sure it was as straight forward, partly because the remote was so intimidating.
Look at the innovation pace of products delivered by free market vs those by government. If government made computers, they would still be big as room and only the rich could afford them. Meanwhile free market delivered computers into your pocket with power and capabilities that just 10 years ago no one would believe.

Our education system preparing our kids for future is still basically the same as our grand-grand-parents was.

Just imagine where our hospitals and schools could be if not crippled by government..
A seriously traumatising bit of literature, and I'm on the fence over whether it was a positive influence in my life or a negative one - and whether I want my own kids to now read it/experience it, or not.

On the one hand, it most definitely highlights the fragility of the human condition. On the other hand, it definitely highlights the fragility of the human condition.

In my case, back in 1978 as an 8-year old kid, the movie was definitely a major cause of upset and trauma. Would I now receive cathartic relief by introducing it to my own ~8 year old kids? I'm wondering if I'm going to gain anything by inducing my own children to confront the reality of the mob at such an age - even if I, myself, went through it and seem to have come out okay. The conundrum is, perhaps I've become Watership Down, all the while resisting it ..
At the same time, given the quality of the code base and the test coverage, I can imagine supporting a code base that I believe in and am extremely proud of, and that is extremely popular and widely used, for 35 years.
Manjaro Cinnamon. I love everything else about it.
Too many are on prescriptions unnecessarily. If they would change what, and how much they eat, they can likely get off the pills. Food is the best prescription.
This was shared by the New York Times regarding the revelations of the "Paradise Papers." For example, on this site you can explore global inequality - consider how recently the elite have had wealth growth rates nearly double that of the total wealth growth rate.
I agree, I don't want to sound like a Zuckerberg apologist, but it's simplistic to view the Zuckerberg and Facebook of today as we would a 19-year-old Zuckerberg and his elaborate PHP script.

As a trivial example: In 2005, when Facebook was a non-trivial company, Zuckerberg [0] guest lectured at a Harvard CS50 class. When asked if Facebook would contribute to open-source, he said that he didn't foresee it being worth the trouble (can't find the exact timestamp, so this is all IIRC with a grain of salt). Now of course, open-source is a substantial part of Facebook. Is it because Zuckerberg in the following years had a Road to Damascus experience with Richard Stallman? Maybe, but it's more likely that Facebook evolved into the type of organization where OSS became a benefit to the bottom line, and it was a decision made by people lower than Zuckerberg at that point.

Even if Zuckerberg is still as much a creep as he was in private IM messages as a 19-year-old, he's no longer the sole captain of his tiny boat. Him breaking the law means that many people end up getting in legal trouble, i.e. it doesn't really much matter what he alone thinks is moral when he has dozens of people/potential whistleblowers looking over his shoulder with greater moral concerns.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFFs9UgOAlE
Kant's notion of synthetic a priori knowledge, that is, the innate abilities for geometry in the human mind, the preprogrammed understanding of space and time, seem somewhat related.

The mystery remains for humanity itself: How can we have synthetic truths, like E=mc^2, without direct experience? We may have experimental evidence that implies the formula is correct, but nothing in nature will directly confirm the simple and elegant expression of such a mathematical formula.
From one poison to the other.
Yes. People who disapprove "tax avoidance" or "tax optimization" should reflect on the idea a few years back:

High-earning professionals like medical doctors in a North European country had a very high marginal tax rate (well over 50 %). They also had long working hours. Thus, many opted to reduce their work amount; it's better to take unpaid leave and mend your house, rather than to work in a responsible job, get close to zero net compensation, and have a leaking roof in your house.

This is called tax optimization or tax avoidance.

Now, the government notices this and proposes a "tax on work that was not done with the purpose of avoiding tax". Will you approve?

This kind of mechanisms are what we talk about in tax avoidance and tax optimization.
OK could someone explain to me why people in US would be complaining about evil Apple or any other major US company ?
It's not owned by some evil rich dude largest Apple shareholder is Vanguard second Blackrock and so on. It's owned by you it creates value for your pension I'd rather trust Tim Cook than Donald Trump with my pension $.
A short journey into DarkVNC attack chain
So, what is a "capsule" exactly?

(please provide a textual explanation, not video)
Now that is true. You also can't use reified generics (which is a bit hacky anyway).
I bought a Visio specifically because it could be dumb relatively recently (1-2 years).

I think a dumb screen option will always be available because it's always going to be a value player in a world of Sony and Samsungs. The question is will the screen be a nice enough panel.
But will people travel to this tax haven to buy their computers? Will Apple's employees all move there to write software? Nope.

What we mean by Apple operating in (say) Germany is these things: they make sales there, and they have employees there.

Where the letterhead says they're incorporated... isn't this just an implementation detail? It's like asking where their datacenter is located. It's in the cloud, who cares? It seems to me that making the tax laws care about this is crazy... why do we this?

Why not simply tax the things which cannot move, transactions involving real people who live in particular places?
We should be arguing that most people use cars and don't need to take the plane for some simple CRUD apps...
Maybe this video from the HMRC.gov.uk helps you to understand why evading tax is bad and it is better for all to pay the full tax ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3_VwZ-Cmac
Out of curiosity, do you care about migrating the data online, or would a brief Prometheus downtime (and thus gap in data) be ok?
It's not silly. It's the first step in a long chain of events that hopefully will end up with a better tax code. Giving companies that do this bad PR incentivizes companies towards reporting loopholes instead of exploiting them.

Journalists already do try and explain the failures of the tax system. For example, check out this graphic:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/28/business/Doubl...

The tax code is complicated and boring and people would much rather read articles with outrage directed specifically at companies.

Should I say that you're silly for getting angry at journalists for following their incentives rationally?
Even if it were carefully crafted into their original TOS with the device?
See also brutalistwebsites.com for combining the old and the new.
You're right there, free markets take while to break monopolies. Time is a price we have to pay.

Because the alternative, govt intervention, in the long term is much more expensive: it corrupts the market and impedes the natural mechanisms from working. Interventions beget interventions.

This leads to heavily regulated markets, where the biggest players buy themselves monopolies. Exactly what we were running away from. :)
Fortunately there are a lot of good options for mechanical keyboards from smaller vendors. I haven't been able to find a decent trackball (I miss the old corded thumb trackball Logitech used to make), though :(
I use normal computers and they work just fine. I see some colleagues using Apple computers and it doesn't always work for them. The world would be as normal as it is without apple products please.
Same exact experience. It’s been fairly recently that I stopped routinely checking up on DuckDuckGo’s search results. On the rare occasion that I do, I’m mostly surprised at how Google’s results are inferior to DDG’s.

Some of this may be the “what I’m used to” factor though. Maybe I’ve just habituated to expect the results I’ve gotten from DDG. Either way, I don’t miss Google. I used to DDG out of principle; now I DDG because it works better.
If nothing else, I hope this leads to less produce waste in grocery stores.
Only related, and maybe it's because it's hard to differentiate themselves but I always felt there was only mediocre products and companies in the space of mouses and keyboards (other than kb with cherry mx switches). Moreover their softwares/drivers are usually even worse than their hw.
Ah, well, when you Google for "smaller firefox [interface/menus]" you just get results like:

"How to make the menus in Firefox larger" (no thanks)

"How to install a compact theme in Firefox" (which doesn't really help)

Thanks though! Between your response and notes on how much more responsive the new FF is, I'll give it yet another shot. :)
An art professor instructed me that black pigment paint was to be avoided as it makes the image look flat. Rather, a black-like colour is to be built in layers of darkening shades. I could see this applying to graphic layout with multiple colours, but I'm not sure if it fits for printed type.
I do those things inside emacs.
What taxes does Apple, an American company, owe Germany? Are you paying taxes half way across the world from your place of business?
So now we're in the shadow of Google/Apple instead of Microsoft. Whoop-de-fricken-doo. The larger problem of corporate feudalism remains unaddressed by the "invisible hand". Lords come and go but in the end we all remain serfs.
If everyone in the US has on average 5 apps on their phone which use your service, and it makes people on average engaged for one extra minute... What would the cost be of all the lost productivity? Does the extra engagement lead to more revenue? How do the 2 compare?

Also, if this is designed to release dopamine or any other neurotransmitters, is there a risk that this will ever be classified as a drug? Or at least be treated legally like a drug?
The most important part:

>To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
It's similar in many places in Europe, where you see houses laid out like this:

http://c8.alamy.com/comp/F56ABW/old-and-narrow-houses-in-str...

Your property size, and subsequent taxes were decided based on how much of the road you took up, ie the width of the house. This practice dates back surprisingly far (1500s?)
I'm not as heavy of a FB user as I was 5 years ago, but my impression was that false positives were at an acceptable threshold, but not nearly a solved problem. And the face recognition tech was heavily augmented by social data, such as the fact that me and a friend were both partying at the same place on the same night and that we had just 3 days ago posted and tagged photos of each other.

That secondary data does not exist reliably in the context of revenge porn videos that go viral. Nevermind that the penalty of a false positive -- which would presumably involve exposing the user to a bit of random porn -- is substantially higher than it ever is with mistagging friend photos.
~I didn't believe you~ (Update: the video was at the very bottom in the linked article, I'm sorry): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awPVY1DcupE

Description below the video:

UPDATE: After public uproar, SF Rec & Park removed the policy that allowed this encounter to happen. The City - without posting the availability of the park rental on their public website - had been marketing the Tuesday and Thursday slots initially only through an app so that the demographic portrayed in the video - a tech league - was taking the space from neighborhood kids twice a week.
It's perfectly OK if that company actually operates in that country. It is not OK if the only presence they have is a mailbox and the actual act of operation is done somewhere else.

A taxation race to the bottom is not what the fundamental principles of the EU are about. At best they are an unwanted side-effect.