skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As much as the morality of tax avoidance has to be discussed, this article is confusing at best. The 2nd paragraph says (emphasis mine):

> Meanwhile, an estimated $8.7 trillion, 11.5 percent of the entire world’s G.D.P., is held offshore by ultrawealthy households in a handful of tax shelters, and most of it isn’t being reported to the relevant tax authorities. This is… not so legal.

Then later after the Google example:

> In doing this, Google didn’t break the law.
Because it would allow the opposition to trick housing-have-nots into opposing it, under the false rhetoric of, “You’re just looking for a blank check to build luxury bro frathouse towers for tech millionaires”.
Ask HN: How to get starting data for ML B2B product?
Chicken & egg dilemma: My team and I have an idea to improve employee engagement for enterprise companies, but it requires an abundant amount of employee data. We don’t have access to an enterprise employee dataset, therefore the idea/model is purely theory — we need data from an enterprise to even test if our models could work. Pitching companies for pilots have been hard because we can’t assure any value because our ask is more experimental / research in nature. Does anyone have suggestions/experience in getting medium-enterprise companies to give you their (anonymized) data for ML experimentation, with the precedent of hopefully giving value if the experiment yields validated models?

For background, we’ve played with a dataset from a friendly company of 15 employees and the results were positive.
I would say the coercion comes from people having the ability to say what happens outside of their backyard.
I'm surprised the article didn't mention CRUTs (Charitable Remainder UniTrusts). The idea here is that you "donate" an asset that has immense unrealized capital gains taxes attached to it. The donation sits in a trust, that pays you back a certain percentage every year until you die. Once that happens the remainder goes to a charity of your choosing.

The benefit of it is the following:

1. You aren't taxed on any of the unrealized gains the asset had when you donated it.

2. The trust receives tax free growth.

3. You are taxed on the percentage you get back using something called the four tier rules of CRUT taxation (explained further here: http://floridadomicilehandbook.com/2009/12/11/the-four-tier-...). Basically, any money you take from the interest is taxable, but the principle is not.

4. You get a tax deduction for the full amount (which can be spread over 5 years. For each year, up to 30% or 50% of your AGI can be deducted, depending on whether the original investment was long term or not)

It sounds fair, but in reality it's easily gamed. You just take out the highest percentage you are allowed each year, and invest in the safest low-earning investments possible. In this way, most of what you pull out is principle, which isn't taxed at all. Given that and the fact that you can deduct the donation from your other income, you can, in effect, pay negative taxes on it.

More info can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charitable_trust#United_States

It's a lot better than it used to be. In 1997, congress cracked down on it, (http://www.mclaughlinstern.com/docs/publications/pub_kosakow...) but it's still a mighty windfall if you're looking to store some of your wealth in safe investments.
Why exactly is being rich and pro-affordable-housing hypocrisy? Generally the ballot measures they vote for involve spending their own tax dollars on the policies they advocate for.
How the iPhone earned its security record
It's actually fascinating to see various constituency behavior in relative terms. Drivers are often overly aggressive and downright dangerous vs cyclists on the streets. Then you go to a college campus and cyclists behave as if they have the right of way over pedestrians (ex: stanford).

Perhaps it is simply a symptom of human psychology and entitlement/power.
NYC’s demand for housing is more than an order of magnitude greater than Tucson. If you want to argue that increasing supply doesn’t matter, you need to compare two examples with similar demand.
Presumably the "this is not so legal" refers to the "most of it isn't being reported to the relevant tax authorities," not the "is held offshore."
Your code does not work for me. I get syntax error in line 20: https://imgur.com/a/mqI29. What did I do wrong and how can I get it to work?
Interesting picture showing corporate tax income relative to other sources in federal budget:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Share_of...
I have a dynamo hub that could recharge it on the fly, with a USB adapter. It would mean wiring it to the handlebar, but I suppose I could live with that.
Similarly, you might have thought you were getting clean air...

You may not have legal authority over everything that happens, but there's more to the land you purchase, than the dirt within the lines.

Otherwise, why does anyone pay extra for a house near a school, or in a happening city? They didn't buy the school or the city, after all.
Dinosaury time periods were often much hotter and much more filled with co2.

They thrived. Plants thrived. The danger is in the change part.
1) O(linear) > O(logarithmic), I'm going to assume you mean polynomial instead of logarithmic. Soooo I'm going to address that. Increasing density in markets with large amounts of single family zoning is not a linear solution. Yimby is about turning 2-dimensional single family neighborhoods into 3 dimensional multi family zoned neighborhoods by adding a heigh dimension to the equation. It is by definition a polynomial solution.
“I’m committed to ... preserving the Tenderloin as SF's most economically diverse neighborhood.”

Re Tenderloin: I understand it’s part of District 6 and her campaign website needs to say something, but that sounds like an anti-gentrification line, which in SF is usually used as an argument against new homes. Is Sonja anti-development in the Tenderloin?

The area is rife with homeless and drug use. It feels to me like an area that would greatly benefit from some gentrification. (I.e. add some rich techies demanding cleaner streets and more policing, and the existing low income residents gain.) Yet I’ve heard more than once that to change the planning rules there is politically “untouchable”. Can anyone explain why?
Yeah but think about it - imagine government employees shift their entire focus onto "securing US networks". What would they do, exactly? Build their own open-source chip designs from scratch? Because that's pretty much step one.
Ugh, I hate this nonsense. You say "you can do X" as if it's so easy. I assume this isn't something you're just pulling out of thin air and that you're at least saying this because you really know how to do it (i.e.: you've done it before). So, please do all of us a huge favor and explain how to do the MITM on Android step-by-step, which you seem to think we're all so lazy & unwilling to do. Not merely "in theory", and not merely on some random app, but in actual freaking practice, on the Facebook app. Because every single person I've caught saying this had evidently not tried it on the Facebook app himself to realize how nontrivial it is. People don't have the time or energy to switch their full-time jobs to being reverse-engineers of the Facebook app, so if you think it's so doable, please do the world a favor and show us how to put this myth to rest. (And to make it even easier, no need to assume zero prior knowledge. You can assume people already know how to do this on a desktop, and just teach them how to do it on the phone. I assure you that the knowledge does not simply transfer over.)
If rational arguments about market-rate housing worked on the San Francisco electorate, the bad housing situation would never have developed there.
I am so conflicted about the morality of this pull request, it's a work of art.

He insults a bunch of unknown people in a terrible way, but kindly points that out and then proceeds to tell you he'll now justify the statement.

And to sum it all up, it's attached to a commit that actually fixes the problem (its not just a rant without a solution).

I've never been so conflicted how I feel about something.
For a straight middle aged dude, sitting by the side of the Med on perfect day eating sea-food, drinking great wine in the company of a beautiful and interesting woman ... is pretty near the height of civilization, yes.
Luck does play a role. But crucial to that is putting yourself into a position where luck can help you. I.e. if you're waiting for the wind to blow your way, you have to be out on the water in a sailboat with the sails ready.

I've read about many successful people, and in the early days they would take every opportunity for luck to happen, and one day it did. For example, the Beatles spent years playing for anyone who would listen to them, until one day it mattered. There's Ray Kroc, a 52 year old broke failed salesman, who one day noticed an opportunity to run McDonald's. It goes on and on.

Keep trying, and I wish you the best of luck(!). There's no country on earth with more opportunity than America, and it's never been easier in America. Heck, just recently on HN there was that guy who noticed he could buy stuff from Walmart and sell it on Amazon for a profit, and was making millions.
Yimby solutions are almost always based on less regulations, or just changing the parameters of the regulations we already have. Usually, there is a bullshit terribly regulated onerous way to build housing, where you can follow the rules, and then get deined at the end by a random decision. YIMBYs want to take the baby step of not allowing the random reckoning at the end of the process at which a project can be randomly denied.
AI FAQ Index
Sure, but by that logic, why not extend rapid transit -- it's far more traveled than all of the commuter rail lines combined.
who are you quoting?
There's a problem there, in that "Right to a View" is protected in Common Law. There is specific provisions in the application of this law (like all laws), but this is a case in point that view is and has been protected.

https://www.samuels-solicitors.co.uk/news/right-to-view
these are great achievements for sure but they aren’t related to the domain.

random sampling and building a profile overtime that can be used to enhance the sampling is a very easy method to snoop at times that gives you good results.
The Brave browser people are working on a weird cryptocurrency-based solution to this problem called the Basic Attention Token. Hope you don't mind being paid in some Ethereum tokens, though. https://basicattentiontoken.org/about/
GDP per capita is a more interesting metric: https://i.imgur.com/nLnvfPq.png

All your graph shows is that China has a huge population.
I'm not sure that makes sense as a single rail route. If Toronto and Detroit are intermediate stops on a line from NY to Chicago, that would mean the train either goes the long way around Lake Ontario (pointlessly adding travel time) or it goes to Toronto via Niagara and then doubles back west (pointlessly adding travel time for NY-Detroit-Chicago passengers).

Really, Lake Ontario makes any NY-Detroit train line much longer than it could be otherwise.
> make sure large international companies do not have an advantage based on their ability to hide funds offshore

The problem with this is that most international companies I've seen with funds offshore made that money offshore and ultimately, the cost of paying US taxes is unlikely to be worth the negligible benefit of being a US company. If the loopholes are closed I think it likely that companies will move. There are plenty of places with free trade and low tax.

The US should limit taxation to US-sourced income. If there's no penalty for a company to bring its revenues to the US, it will likely do so and use it to drive local investment.
I have recently had a question about this. When a foreigner owns a fraction of a corporation, what taxes do they pay to the US government on their dividends and appreciation? It occurred to me that if the answer is, "none," That would represent a material, difficult-to-otherwise-arrange advantage of the corporate tax: levying taxes on foreigners. (I don't mean advantage here in the moral sense -- just in the practical one.)
Yes, but gallium doesn't support arm [1]

[1] https://wiki.galliumos.org/Support/ARM
Algorithm Enhancement for Relative Elements Processing and EPUB to PDF Conversion
A person selling a good is protective of the value of the good they're selling. Selfish bastards. If I'm renting high-end apartments why would I want developments that make them or the area less attractive?
> Why exactly is being rich and pro-affordable-housing hypocrisy?

Because some would claim they are the reason there is an affordable housing problem... I'm not one of these people though. Again, I believe markets set prices.
The depth and illegibility of the field he is describing make me believe that we are much further away from general purpose ai than I previously thought
> On raising kids: Jeff and his wife let their kids use sharp knives since they were four and soon had them wielding power tools, because if they hurt themselves, they’d learn. Jeff says his wife’s perspective is “I’d much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid.”

Sounds like, they are exaggerating the risk for dramatic effect :)
Letting your kids help out in the kitchen, etc.. do wood works, etc.. is not without risk, but the risks are tiny.

Dramatic exaggeration is just a provocative counter balance to the many parents who won't let the kids peel potatoes because they could get hurt.
Covert and targeted disinformation campaigns can be far harder to detect and counteract.

If a media campaign, even a deceptive or attacking one, is made by way of broadcast or display advertising, or flyers or mailers, it leaves traces and can be detected. As it moves to a whisper campaign -- rumors, direct phone calls, etc., the traces become harder to find or demonstrate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whispering_campaign

Targeted online advertising -- urban black males in Philadelphia is an example from the 2016 US presidential election -- becomes very hard to detect. If you're not specifically in the targeted group, you don't see the campaign, and unless someone captures a screenshot or audio message, there's no trace left. The scope, size, and targets are unknown regardless. Just such targeting, aimed at discouraging voter turnout, is what happened.

The source is the Trump campaign itself:

Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-th...
There are 2 problems to combat here.

1. Difficulty of building trust between individuals remote
2. Lack of understanding concerning communication skills & tactics required for remote work (upholding trust)

Anyone that has played the older generation of mmorpgs actually has these 2 skill sets well practised. But that is a very small portion of the workforce.

For this group I hypothesize a high upfront(2-3 weeks) time spent in person building trust. Once trust is established, remote work time could increase in a cyclic manner. But this required back and forth travel, but the intention is for the new employee to become 100% remote over time so they don't stress about moving and solidifying housing in the expensive markets. They can maintain a cheaper more remote long term lease, and only short term expensive leases when in person time is required for teams to synchronize.
> Are you saying people should just run away from whatever problem they have?

People are complaining about moving to an expensive part of town and finding that it's actually expensive. That's not a problem, just poor judgment.
Ok, but the whole "Is it possible?" section is predicated on a totally false assumption:

> To make it happen, Facebook would need to record everything your phone hears while it's on. This is functionally equivalent to an always-on phone call from you to Facebook. Your average voice-over-internet call takes something like 24kbps one way, which amounts to about 3 kBs of data per second. Assume you've got your phone on half the day, that's about 130 MBs per day, per user. There are around 150 million daily active users in the US, so that's about 20 petabytes per day, just in the US.

No, all they need to do is use the client device to perform speech-to-text and send the tiny amount of resulting data.

I don't think Facebook records people's conversations, but I also don't buy this article's other arguments that 1) conversation data is not useful to advertisers and 2) Facebook would not at least make a semi-successful attempt at analyzing natural language data with their existing NLP tools.
Your assumption is that the overhead is only a "one-time cost", but its never going to be that simple.

Most of the time there are a multiplicity of overlapping cost; Opportunity cost (you have your money safely in a tax-haven, but now to move it out for legitimate production use has another cost and associated accountant / lawyer overhead). Or simply ongoing inefficiencies - You've opened an office in Country Z because doing so allows you to save on taxes in your main area of Country A, but the truth is you have no real need for an office in Country Z - its simply an ongoing and perhaps ever growing cost subject to a whole new need for budget forecasting, currency fluctuations, etc.

I have no idea what the number is, but currency fluctuations alone could make a corporation decide to simply pay their 15% and escape headaches and split brainpower, trim staff of lawyers, consolidate offices, etc.

Now, if the corporate tax rate is 36+% well, thats a different story.
The perceived need to continually conduct meeting is itself a problem.
To everyone looking at this, please visit the site to make up your mind. There are no details on how she is going to do what she wants apart from using catchy phrases such as "more housing for homeless" and "taking away cars away from roads".

Also, this is irrelevant to the topic.
I wouldn't expect you to be pleased about it, but you would have purchased a parcel of land, not the right to freeze the world in stasis in the vicinity of your land.
Well, technically, he wasn't making millions. At best, that was gross, not net.

The odds seem pretty stacked against me for various reasons. Though I am currently 52, so I appreciate the Ray Kroc snippet. ;-)
Usually things I get inspiration from;

Dream Park series

William Gibson Stuff: Difference Engine, Burning Chrome, Neuromancer

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Series

Hackers - Steve Levy

Graphic Idea Notebook & other pasteup era graphic design books

Greetings from Route 66

Old Travel Guides

Old Issues (50s-60s) of home technical Magazines Like Popular Science and Mechanics
I've given this a lot of thought and I'm increasingly concerned that this is an existential threat to society as we know it.

Being able to legally avoid tax by allocating it to zero or low tax states is obviously one problem. The fact that US politics is bought and paid for by a small number of very rich interests is actually a bigger problem (since that diminishes the chance of the first problem being fixed).

But the biggest problem is the increasingly ultra-wealthy who feel no obligation to pay any tax whatsoever to contribute to maintaining the infrastructure, stability and government services that made their wealth possible. Extreme wealth simply isn't possibly in anarchy.

I favour a number of reforms here:

1. Allocates profits by sales in each country. Now this isn't as easy as it sounds as the obvious next step is to create holding companies to mark up sales (ie transfer pricing).

2. Every $1 borrowed in the US repatriates $1 of profit held overseas. This should include borrowing money overseas and repatriating it to the US.

3. Companies that are substantially present in the US should be treated the same as citizens: you report worldwide income and pay US taxes on it all with credits for any taxes paid overseas. Such things like a "substantial presence test" are common and well-travelled ground in the law.

4. Charge withholding taxes on any money being transferred to any entity in any jurisdiction that doesn't report or disclose ownership. Being able to hide ownership behind CAyman Islands corporations, Panama foundations, Panama bearer corporations, Swiss holding companies and the like is a cancer. Make the entity transferring to such an entity responsible for the withholding tax. This can be simplified by creating what's essentially a Schengen area for money. Create a zone of countries that all abide by rules on ownership disclosure and reporting that you can transfer easily between. Leaving that incurs a cost.

As the article notes, banks can and do violate their reporting responsibilities here. Fine. Just remove that country from the zone and suddenly all transactions to that country incur a withholding tax.

I personally applaud the leakers and whistleblowers who have brought much of this information to light.
I know regulation is necessary and I know it's not a bogeyman. That's why I addressed this specific problem and this specific proposed solution.

Less housing available in SF because of too much regulation. That's why the market is not able to satisfy demand. The correct solution is not "more rules" and "government-built housing". This is a typical case of trying to solve an issue caused by over-regulation with more regulation.

So will you address my point or just pick up some other strawman again?
http://wiki.c2.com/?IntelligentDefaults

http://wiki.c2.com/?SecureByDefault

http://wiki.c2.com/?DefaultObject

http://wiki.c2.com/?DefaultValue

http://wiki.c2.com/?NullObject

http://wiki.c2.com/?NullValue
For the python example, instead of using "\" and "/", you could just use the PETSCII characters that the original 10 PRINT as they were ported to unicode.

This is my version

python3 -c "while 1: print(chr(int(9585.5 + __import__('random').random())), end='')"
Just the approval of housing developments that radically changes their neighborhood and communuty. Good thing those things don't influence a person's housing choices or property values.
Whoa that's pretty crazy. 200 mph flying cars in LA in 3 years? Interesting that it's a NASA project. Hopefully that means we'll get the see how the system works even if it doesn't doesn't pan out.
Really? In my personal life I find that BCH and BTC are just as widely accepted. :)

(...which is to say, precisely 0 vendors accept either, of course. Most people are not picking a crypto currency based on their ability to conveniently buy a coffee with it just yet.)