skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What bothers me about this whole thing is that I never bought it like a stock. I mined it YEARS ago when it was worthless.

Now all of a sudden I have to pay tax on something I already own? Seems like the government is double dipping. After all I already paid tax on the hardware, the internet connection, the electricity, and countless other market products that allowed me to mine said coin.

I have a couple of choices now.

I can either sign up for Coinbase and sell it and kiss 15% of it good bye or I can go on Newegg and buy stuff directly with Bitcoin.... or go to a bitcoin meetup and sell with cash in-person..... or go on vacation in Europe and get Euro and again keep it off the books.

Which do you think I'm gonna end up doing?

PS: My address has never been tied to an IRL transaction.

PPS: God damn it's easy to troll HN. More salt than the dead sea.
When Bitcoin will crash – and how to make money from it
There is nothing harsh about it (in its current form; for all I know GP may have edited something out). The author of the study deliberately and explicitly limited it to top-10 singles.

I think a much broader study would be less interesting in the sense that the top ten music reflects trends in popular music production. The long tail is probably harder to generalize.

This study says something about how many people consume music, or at least how the big peddlers want them to consume it.
How would this government raise the funding to protect this economic activity?

Would they ask everyone to please be nice?
> AFAIK this is a fundamental principle of ML that has been proven mathematically and which is inescapable.

Well, the human brain manages to master several complex tasks using much smaller data sets than current machine learning algorithms. Natural language acquisition, for example, seems to require fewer than 10 million spoken words per year, and even academically successful 12-year-olds might be reading 1 to 4 million words per year. These are not exactly tiny data sets, but they don't require Google's scale to recreate, either.

Sure, the human genome probably "knows" what set of models to try when building the brain, which gives it an advantage. But I can't think of any reason why machine learning couldn't ultimately try similar techniques with similarly-sized data sets, and get competitive results.
Indeed. Not just a shiny rock, that Au.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/devices/smart-contact-l...
Is the Public Transport Company Fooling You?
Usual response I get is that its easier to switch search engines so its not necessary[1]. Neutrality seems to be a function of availability of choice and ease of switching.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15045653
In the UK Forex trading can be structured as a bet. This is called 'spread betting.' This gets around capital gains tax and income tax in the UK as long as it's not your main source of income.
I'm replying in the hope that Troy Hunt reads it, because I am commenting too late for conversation to happen.

This presentation involves a lot of complex terminology from the get go. This keeps it from engaging people's logical brains, and means that you are too easy to ignore. Our first pass at analyzing people is to figure out whether they can be safely ignored. This response is well before rational thought, and the part of our brain that decides it is unable to handle complex language. It doesn't matter how right you are, you are literally not heard.

You can't fix the document. But you'll be talking in person to lawmakers. You can address the challenge there.

Don't open with something like, Data breaches occur via a variety of different “vectors” including malicious activity by attackers exploiting vulnerabilities, misconfiguration on behalf of system owners and software products intentionally exposing data by design.

Open with something like, Anyone can steal your identity.
Your wife's as well. My site shows you some of the security breaches that criminals can use to pretend to be you. Nobody knows how many more are out there.

Make it simple and straightforward. Make the threat personal. This requires their full attention to figure out what you are saying. That makes their logical brains connect.

Good luck. You have an important message and I really hope that they hear you.
I could be intelligent enough to set up sone structures, but I would rather spend my time somehow else than thinking and planning taxes.
Bitcoin mining is inefficient compared to what? You have to see that mining bitcoin is getting more efficient by day, while hiring a bank clerk can only reach a certain level of efficiency.

In that sense bitcoin might be a better choice vs. hiring bank clerks.
In many (most?) cities in the US there is a local monopoly with just one or two high-speed providers. And this results in no real competition. I'm OK with my current (and only) provider but I'd like the option to change to someone else if they offered comparable speed at a lower cost.

I get that the cities don't want the poles along the road loaded down with a dozen different cables, but fiber optic is a lot thinner than copper pairs. Or perhaps they could have a couple of companies run the infrastructure at the wholesale level and resell to the "retail" broadband providers.
Might be more accurate to call out "Things that Thoughtworks like". Not all consultancies or organizations work this way.

Still, handy to know what is being sold so our contractor CVs can be tailored.
Que 14,355 people searching for "punishment for not reporting capital gain"...
Any tips or recommendations for a "note-taking and to-do" mobile app that would allow dictation, speech to text?

My use-case is recording quick notes and TODOs, which often come at the weirdest of moments (no computer, no paper).

I feel there's a market for something super simple: a speech recognition fast enough and good enough that I can later read and understand what I said.

Everything I've tried so far was either too cumbersome (I need it to start recording fast, just like taking a snap picture) or its transcriptions too crappy (no idea what was said, even conceptually).
I distinctly remember comments like this one being extremely common on HN a year or two ago, and my replies along the line of "no man is an island" or "'Taxation is theft' is like 'Surgery is assault'" quickly turning invisible.

I wonder if something has changed for the better, or if I'm misremembering.

Edit: Never mind. The Ayn Rand brigade is just getting slower with age and untreated mental conditions.
Numerous tax haven countries? There are like dozens.
What are you thinking of contributing to? Also, don't think that your contributions won't be "good enough" just because you're a student.

I've seen amazing stuff built by students - the React Create App was created by a student !

https://mxstbr.blog/2016/12/a-dream-come-true/

Incredibly inspiring story, and it shows you don't have to build something huge or amazing to help !

Closer to home, a coworker wrote some simple Javascript helpers for the same reason, he didn't find anything that helped him online, and it's amazing to see them everywhere.

The Javascript environment in particular is ever-changing and can use some help :) , and there's new stuff every day where you can contribute.

OTOH, I wouldn't go to contribute directly to the Linux kernel or any big, mature project where serious experience is needed (and even then, they do need help although they might direct you to help with the docs or stuff like that).
Who said anything about the cloud? I know what you mean though; if I had to use a cloud service, I definitely wouldn't want it in my house. In my experience it's easier to set this stuff up without the crummy proprietary cloud services anyway.
Selfishness. To exploit the fruits of a system without providing a means to maintain said system.
This is very interesting, thanks for sharing it.

Would also nice to have later series on it, like a Series B or C employee and so on, if there is data for those cases.

I am on the later series and it's really hard to know where you stand on the scale of "got fucked" to "Yay!"
If your house uses good standard local communication protocols, like Z-Wave, ZigBee, or Insteon, you can take your cloud devices, and a new owner can just buy a new hub device with their own cloud account and connect the devices to it. Doesn't matter what the other person has in their account at that juncture.

That being said, if I was ever to leave home automation hardware behind, it'd be a "if you want to pay x on top of the already agreed upon price for the property, I'll leave it", where x is the cost for me to just buy new modules for my new place.
Like a stock, you pay taxes when selling for a profit. You don't owe anything until then.
Because I like living in a civilization [controlled by Private Finance Oligarchy].
Agreed. We use PHP for automation scripts (this decision was made a long time ago). In terms of features it's a good language but it's not fun to work with.
You know the author of this piece is Brendan Gregg, right? DTrace author, performance guru, ex-Sun engineer and lead performance engineer at Joyent. And now a full time Linux guy. He doesn't think it's so bad apparently!
Smartphone Addiction Creates Imbalance in Brain
Well if your intention is to do what you seem to imply maybe stop talking about it?
"Google's search results should contain exactly what I personally think they should in every case," said the HN commentator. "But they mustn't be personalized," said his boon companion. "Oh no, personalization is Evil." They nodded in agreement and upvoted each other's comments.
Not that I want crumbs on my phone, but how does one ground a snack bag with a phone in it?
Search is now as vital to the Internet as DNS. As such, having it be run by an unregulated, for-profit monopoly is looking less and less acceptable. As a minimum remedy, Google should probably establish a defined email address or web site where complaints like this are answered within 24 hours by a human. It's not like they can't afford it, and it might hold off full-on regulation of their activities a while longer.
Where does Apple Notes store it’s files? What format are they in?
> What bothers me about this whole thing is that I never bought it like a stock. I mined it YEARS ago when it was worthless.

If you mined gold, planted corn, or raised chickens and then subsequently sold any of them you'd pay taxes on the proceeds as well.

> PS: My address has never been tied to an IRL transaction.

Short of using a tumbler to anonymize your source bitcoins and fraudulently declaring a different or fake person as the recipient of the purchase, I don't see how this is possible if you're buying something online.
> Now all of a sudden I have to pay tax on something I already own?

That's why it's called a capital gains tax -- it's collected at the time of sale (when/if you realize a profit), not at the time of purchase.
There are some countries which are really rich (like UAE). And some countries only tax inside country income and not things from outside (there are many countries doing it that way). It's not a model for every country... countries which are doing that are usually not very big.
Whether you're moving out of a smart home or moving into one there a few things you'll want to keep in mind to ensure it's a smooth transition.
> In fact, a few optimizations only work if you're using scalar types for parameters

This is the first time PHP has used typehints for optimization, isn't it? It was all safety checks prior to now. Looking forward to more of this!
> Factor in no need to advertise services

I've seen plenty of advertisements for government services.

> no duplication of effort (and greater scale)

The "duplication of effort" is a plus for a functioning market bringing competition, cooperation, lower cost, and increased standard of living. [1]

> no sales department

Whether they have this or that department will be greatly outweighed by the massive bureaucratic burden and special interest groups.

> no executive bonuses at all levels

If they are to have competent people to run the program (which is probably asking too much of a government program) then they will have to be compensated similarly as they would be in a private organization, whether that includes bonuses or not.

> no legal department

Will be replaced by the armed enforcement department.

> no billing

There is but it is outsourced to the IRS or other department

> no metering

Like it or not, access to the internet is a scarce resource, and regardless of who operates the infrastructure there are technical bottlenecks which have to be managed. If there are no caps, no metering it will be guaranteed to be overrun by abusers and be an overall horrible experience. This will essentially turn internet access into tragedy of the commons.

[1] See the first two-ish minutes of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB2gBgsqPac as Friedman compares duplication of economic efforts to duplication of intellectual research (a point which I think some on HN can appreciate).
Actually Google AdWords says that you have an average of 40k searches per month for "bitcoin" in Nigeria and more than 1 mio. searches/month in the US.
The old Death & Taxes rule still applies, even for Bitcoin.
They are not anonymous if you used Coinbase but you don’t have to use Coinbase. You can generate your own bitcoin address in JS and transact bitcoin
My intention is to HODL and have a discussion. These are all hypotheticals.
Yes, I understand it's a disaster waiting to happen. I mean if we want to edit a stored proc in the db, right click it in SSMS, script to modify, make the change, F5.

Hope everything doesn't blow up.

It's not ideal.
No it isn't. If you want to ensure that you're in the search results then you're supposed to buy an ad.

Edit: To everyone downvoting, can you explain why you expect to be provided guaranteed service from a business that you have no business relationship with?
How pilots cut corners make up for lost time on delayed flights
Best times from a few "do nothing" runs of Node:

$ time node -e ''
real 0m0.098s
user 0m0.084s
sys 0m0.010s

Of course on my desktop it's a

$ time node -e ''
real 0m0.002s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

tiny bit different.

Python on my laptop is just slow enough that I really notice it:

$ time python -c ''
real 0m0.032s
user 0m0.022s
sys 0m0.009s

Of course PHP is all 0.014, 0.010, 0.012, etc.

Incidentally, this T43 is a backup machine I'm using while my desktop is on indefinite loan to a family member after their laptop broke. This will be fixed eventually; I'm not sure how.

But I've discovered that this old machine is a remarkably good performance catalyst; something that runs blindingly fast on this machine will run really, really well on a faster box - and the thing is, if I write stupid or inefficient code on this older laptop, I'll notice I'm doing it wrong sooner, because it takes less to make this machine fall over from inefficiency.

If only I could tell the above to the Chromium team, though... sooo many Chrome issues... (and Firefox is unfortunately slower on old hardware than ever before! >.<)
You don't have to pay any tax on Bitcoins you own. You have to pay tax on the USD proceeds you make from their sale. This is no different from any other source of income in the US. Even bartering you have to pay taxes on: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420

You can of course disagree with the concept of income tax, but Bitcoin is no special goose in that regard.
earlier submission on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15814907
> This site is used by all major Linux distributions to provide metadata for clients such as fwupdmgr and GNOME Software.

Actually means: "This site is used by author's apps 'fwupdmgr' and 'GNOME Software'"

Wants you to believe it means: "This site is used by all major Linux distributions to serve firmware for all your devices".

What all major Linux distributions use is this git repo hosted by Linux Foundation:

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-...

which is made available and automatically upgradable as "linux-firmware" system package.

Sorry for sounding harsh, I just couldn't stay quiet on that misleading claim.
This is largely how the Cayman Islands operate. There's no income or capital gains tax, but everything brought to the island for consumption is subject to 20%+ import duties. Non-citizen professionals working there must pay $10-25k annually for a work permit. It's a very expensive place to live, on par with some of the most expensive cities in the US, but there's no direct tax on wealth. If you're a US citizen, however, you have to pay taxes to the US (beyond roughly the first $100k, anyway).
Either my experience and that of my social circle is unrepresentative or YouTube is far more successful than these statistics indicate. Facebook may be larger, but it's not 40 times larger.
FDA approves first medical accessory for the Apple Watch–an EKG sensor
> Records on Ribs gives away its music for free.

> To sell music for profit is to deny its worth. It is to reduce it to numbers, spreadsheets, targets. Desire cannot be quantified thusly.

> We accept donations, but do not expect them. What we do costs us little, but we cannot avoid making a loss. Nor can the artists who have to buy equipment and take time to rehearse, perform and record. Any money you give us will go to loosen these burdens and will be gratefully received. We want to beat the system but we have to survive within it.

Do you fund the recordings? Are these a lot of home studios?

Genuinely interested. Music is way more interesting than programming to me. I may have more questions for you.
Ah, sorry, I used to work in the Opera House on the West side of West Wacker, which doesn't have a connection.

Blue line => East side of the loop is pretty navigable.
But even if you do set it up without the cloud services, can you prove that to a buyer who isn't experienced with the technology?
Internet of Things (IoT) 2018 Market Statistics, Predictions and Trends
>Both mining and transacting are impossible (or at least very difficult) for many people/in many areas.

This is just not correct. You can mine with the same equipment you use to transact (something with a CPU and memory and internet access). Is it expensive to do so? Yes. But it is possible. Your argument could be "anonymity is expensive".

>Transacting for most goods with real value without de-anonymizing the currency [...] is also extremely difficult [...]

That is a "how I give you what you bought" problem and not "how I pay you for what I have bought" problem, i.e. it is not solvable by changing payment technologies. If I pay you a dollar over paypal, paypal automatically knows who gave what to whom. If I pay you bitcoin, I would have to give out this information voluntarily (it does not come with the money).
It's not (just) "the fruits of your labor". You are a member of a society, which has invested in your schooling, the infrastructure you use, the police and the military to keep you safe, etc... If you want to opt out, there are a few deserts left with weak enforcement of the rule of law. Good luck.
Yes, I'm in favor of eliminating NN rules because NN currently does not work, did not work since 1995 and people pretending that NN works would make it impossible to encourage competition which is needed to make "ISPs cannot mess with authorized access" happen.

If we are to stop pretending that NetFlix does not pay Comcast and Verizon directly to get content to the customers of Comcast and Verizon without sucking in addition to paying others to deliver the same content to customers of Comcast and Verizon ( like an upstart MyFlix.com ), we can have a conversation about Net Neutrality 2.0, traffic engineering and settlements.
US certificate seems to have been replaced. UK still expired (https://uk.linkedin.com/)
Apple Launches Heart Study App in the US in Partnership with Stanford Medicine
> "no computer, no paper"

Sounds like you really just ought to make a habit of keeping pen and paper near you, or your mobile phone. Either of these fit your use case nicely at (probably) no extra cost.
I don't think advertisers care about the impartiality of the results, so long as their ads are getting eyeballs/clicks.

An advertiser might care if there were another, more impartial search engine that was drawing those eyeballs away, but that seems vanishingly unlikely given the current ubiquity of Google as a household name and company.

Sure, DuckDuckGo or whatever might draw some of the more tech-literate or paranoid crowd if Google started aggressively filtering results (which, for the record, I don't think they are doing or are likely to do), but why would advertisers care? Those people represent a tiny fraction of their eyeballs, perhaps so small as to be lost in statistical noise. Besides, many/most of the tech-literate folks use adblockers anyway, and the paranoids probably don't want to transmit their personal information online to buy things.
Not necessarily true... again it depends on the tax rules that apply to you. In the UK you can buy Gold Britannia coins and Sovereigns which is Capital Gains Tax (CGT) exempt because of a loophole where British Legal currency (which the gold coins are) is exempt from CGT.
Reminds me of the time that a Russian paper had quoted The Onion as if it was true, then later had to publish a retraction saying they got their information from "an American paper known to spread falsehoods".
And the last change really changed music itself.
Cracking the Complexity of Lifetime Value in Freemium Games
This is pretty much my hard requirements as well. It's why I have smart light switches instead of smart bulbs, for example. The controls are intelligent, but they also work the way even I use them most of the time: Hitting the switch as I enter or exit a room.

The requirement I add to yours is that none of my devices are permitted to talk to the Internet except my PC. That means no Wi-Fi devices, for the most part. (I do have some IP cameras, but my network disables their ability to talk externally.) Any communication between my house and the outside world goes through a single network device which I can depend on to implement reasonable security practices.
Agreed 100%, someone should give names and strength compared to PHP instead of just saying alternatives are better.
An astonishing old calculator (Cliff Stoll discusses the Friden EC-132)
Ok, so we can forget it was initially sold as anonymous currency.

The current spin that passes my twitter timeline is that it is state independent. Technically it is, but the sense it conveys is 'out of the reach of governments'. (c.f. "Prince Ibn so-and-so should have put his money is bitcoins. haha".)

It is always helpful to take the old history books out of the dusty shelves and read up on e.g. The Opium Wars to have a 'better' understanding on the er 'softer' aspects of "money".
I generally agree with you, but what about this argument:

Someone transfers their bitcoins to a paper wallet then meets someone in person for a cash exchange. When the IRS comes by, other than say, the Lambo in the driveway, how are they to know whether or not to believe the man claiming that the coins were stolen?
Yes. But in the US it was never given much respect, and thus no mainstrean viability. That changed. I'm suggesting it could be because the gatekeepers lost their control.