skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The VAT MOSS scheme we're talking about (currently) only applies to digital services, not physical products. The problems you mentioned don't apply in this context.

There is absolutely nothing about this scheme that is better than before it was introduced. Nothing.

Several years after it was introduced, as others have noted, some of the payment handling services have kind of caught up, to the point where if you can use one of them then you'll probably fly under the radar.

You'll still have to spend time/money on the integration itself. You almost certainly still won't be fully compliant, because 100% compliance is practically impossible. You'll potentially be giving up a significant chunk of your margin in extra fees. And you'll still have the extra paperwork to do and the potential for an expensive audit by any of 28 member states' tax authorities if your number comes up. But at least you can carry on doing business in the meantime and hope for the best.

This tax scheme is my go-to example of what happens when politicians who see a problem but have no idea what they're doing try to fix the problem anyway. Your final sentence is right on point, sadly.
Digging Up the Future: On GK Chesterton by David Langford (1980)
Wasn't there a similar argument (linked to here on HN a few years ago) against early screenings for prostate cancer using highly sensitive techniques?

If I remember correctly, the argument went like this: early screening may detect some forms of prostate cancer which, given the estimated natural lifespan of the patient, would have failed to kill/discomfort him before he died of other causes. But once it's been detected, the recommendation will be to treat the cancer; and treatment has a chance to cause discomfort (such as impotence) right now. So in effect, early detection of some forms of prostate cancer may negatively impact the quality of life of patients who would have otherwise lived a normal life without noticing the cancer.

I might be remembering some details incorrectly.
Not at all, you just list the whole dump right-to-left. Then it works out regardless of word size.
Let’s hope so because one of these is not better than the other but one is much better than two.
I half-agree, but Spolsky also makes an excellent argument in "Hitting the High Notes" [0] that there is disproportionate value delivered from excellence, as opposed to mere competence ("Five Antonio Salieris won’t produce Mozart’s Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years.").

FizzBuzz + short work sample + strong communication skills is probably not that far from optimal if you want to hire lots of people who are competent and work on problems that they have solved before. Note that I said "optimal" and not "good"; this is still a noisy process.

But if you're doing something where you need to people to excel beyond what they've done before, and perhaps beyond what your company has ever done before, then I think it's naive to think that additional testing for things like on-the-spot thinking, creativity, and diligence under pressure convey no useful signal. This, in my opinion, is an extraordinary claim and requires strong evidence before anyone should take it seriously.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-n...
Helles is regional to Bavaria and also the dominant beer. Hefeweizen is secondary choice but strong in export to the world :)
I don't know but corrugated boxes is one thing that my local recycling service doesn't pickup... I'm not sure why.
I find the concepts in this reactor to be pretty awesome, and the word is they are going to be testing one at the Nevada Test site so its more 'real' than a lot of conceptual small scale reactors.

At 10kW it would be a fun way to have free power for life in your typical urban single family detached home :-). 10 of them could power the ISS without solar panels.
I live a quarter mile from McDonalds. Google is convinced I sleep there every night. I MIGHT be significantly less bothered by Google's incessant stalking if literally any of it turned out to work. As it is, Google asks me about places I've never been, doesn't pick up on package notifications in emails, and warns me about an "upcoming" bill after I get the "Thanks for paying" email.

What the hell are you doing with all my free data google?
> I would counter that while driving is certainly a privilege, the roads themselves are a right, or a public good, comparable to schools. So regardless of what hoops you have to jump through to purchase and license your car, once jumped, the roads are analogous to the schools.

FWIW, roads were for people first, not cars.
Another important piece is being able to verify that the manufactured hardware meets the open specs they claim to (and wasn't tampered with, or contain errors). Something like an md5 check for hardware.

With open software you can read the code, compile it and run it << zero trust. With hardware you can read the spec, but must trust the implementation.
Just a heads up that the YC blog spits out far more data than it should when it errors out. I received a 503 and encountered this:

Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Additionally, a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Apache/2.2.24 (Unix) mod_hive/5.5 mod_ssl/2.2.24 OpenSSL/1.0.0-fips mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_fastcgi/2.4.6 mod_fcgid/2.3.6 Server at blog.ycombinator.com Port 80
>> just a preference for a high demand school

Sometimes this is also a preference for safety, as I learned attending k-12 in NYC. And sometimes the safety isnt a result of bad students, but a result of the entire system just allocating more resources to some schools over others.
Relative stability, and good written records are probably a reasonable part of the answer.
Miller's Law - The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.

I actually needed to research this claim for my dissertation, and found that some researchers believe it is more complex than as presented by Miller. The number can fluctuate depending on what is being stored, the individual, and a number of other factors. A worthwhile starting point is the Wikipedia Page [1]

[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...
Roads have only been a public good since 1888 in the UK. Before this it was common to pay a toll to be able to use a road.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_roads_in_Great_Britain
Yes and no. I purposely chose the mathematical notation rather than the more common economical terms to convey a different idea.

If you look at the instantaneous\* derivative, it's not the fact that you owe the federal government $2M for that MD that counts but rather your monthly obligation. Debt doesn't matter, required repayment per unit of time does - so almost like cash-basis accounting.

Finding a $100 on the street or borrowing $100 from a friend are the same in terms of their addition to your instantaneous wealth, it's the fact that one needs to be repaid that detracts from your "actual" wealth, and the repayment period matters. Compare the lifestyle of two neighbors working at the same institution making the same amount of money that each took out $500k mortgages to buy their identical houses, only one took it out for 15 years and the other for 30. On day 1, they both take the same hit to their net worth, but that doesn't change their wealth derivative in and of itself, it's the rate of paying it back that you should be counting.

That explains why one college educated individual can get a loan for $1000 from the bank and at time 0 they are, under this metric, better off than someone that needed to hit up a payday loans place for the same loan but at a higher interest rate. They both "earned" the same amount of money, and may even "spend" it on the same thing at the same rate, but when you take the repayment period into account (let's say 1 year vs 2 weeks, respectively) you can see why the graduate student is measurably better off.

Just like stocks you hold aren't actually contributing to your day-to-day wealth (and as such aren't taxed) but it's when you cash out that you've either made or lost money.

\* let's define an "instant" as a month, just to make things easier.
Sadly there is not very much overlap between that kind of logic and poverty. Remember all the people that blew their FEMA debit cards on strippers and shoes?

$150 was a huge amount of money when I was poor. It represented several-days to a week's worth of earnings. You've got to be doing alright for yourself for $150 to only be a day or two's worth of pay, after taxes and expenses.
Prime is just a sunk cost. You think, "Hey, I have prime!" and order from Amazon. "I was going to anyway" you think.

You stop price checking. Amazon is far from the cheapest place to order things now. Depending on the item of course.

Next time price check an item before just grabbing it on Amazon, I did. Saved over 40% by doing so.
Indeed. It's gotten to the point that if I want something fast, I'll actually avoid Amazon and instead find some merchant who will ship the item USPS Priority Mail which is very reasonably priced and reliably arrives in 3 days.

The biggest problem are merchants that for some reason insist that they can only use UPS/Fedex, which is a complete ripoff to Hawaii. I don't understand how they get any business for their "ground" service here, given that it's usually about the same price as 2-day air but takes a week.
This works in Python 3.6:

>>> {**{1:2,3:4}}
{1: 2, 3: 4}

:)
But it's all shades of gray. While you might like Prime Video - others may find it useless but enjoy the free Kindle books or Twitch discounts or other included offers.

Personally, I order enough things throughout a year that Prime pays for itself in shipping costs. Any additional items are just that to me. Nice to have, especially since I'm not being charged extra, but are not why I'm paying.
Cryptocurrency a Prominent Topic in Upcoming ECB Youth Dialogue
> instead of keeping their optimizations proprietary

There were no magic secret optimizations to release. It just straight up did not work. They had to add back dynamic branch prediction, and even then the load store latency was such trash that they had to put ginormous L3 caches on it to get even close to reasonable performance.
API Docs That Automatically Stay Up to Date
Some uses in apt will have python3 then have python3-3.4 subdivision but usually that's because an update broke something and it's usually removed when the issue is resolved (also this is distro specific)

I don't know if brew does anything like this however, but I know in the apt environment that's usually how multiple versioning is done.
> Finally, let's be frank: all game developers big and small are affected by piracy, so it's a mostly even playing field on which they are competing. A studio that fails and blames it on piracy is not looking hard enough.

Except the piracy rates for PC is vastly higher than consoles(by nature of barrier of entry to break modern consoles if nothing else).

Since the majority of Indies publish on PC(or publish there first) it is not a level playing field by any means.
You could also do all of this yourself if you consider yourself smart and limited on cash. Frankly it isn't that complicated to understand.

The basic principle is easy enough to understand.

I doubt that there is a single person alive who fully understands the technicalities, and I doubt that there is a single person who worked on the scheme at the EU who understands why full compliance is essentially impossible for most if not all businesses.
I certainly don't get more money if I accidentally introduce critical crash-to-desktop bugs, and then spend more time fixing them. I get paid to do the job to a minimum standard of quality. The customer is paying for the outcome they want, not for the amount of work it takes to get there. The Labor Theory of Value rears its ugly, no-good keister again.

If an actuary can quote me the price of a life insurance premium 40 years before a person is expected to die, such that the company doesn't lose money, a hospital can figure out how to price its services such that it doesn't go bankrupt. Those wailing about too many uncontrolled variables are just trying to suck the last available penny out of the patients. How can they possibly nickel-and-dime people to death on their itemized bills if they don't know exactly how many cm of plastic tubing will be needed for the surgery?! How can they charge $25 per 500mg analgesic pill if that is already included in the published price of the procedure?! It's really only a problem if your mission is to suck out all the consumer benefit of trade via price discrimination.

If my auto mechanic blows past their original quote, they don't stop work and ask for more money. They fix the danged problem, charge what they said they would, and try to estimate better on the next job. And they certainly don't plow ahead, replace the engine and transmission and exhaust system, laser-scour the rusted body panels, put on new tires, repaint the exterior, reupholster the interior, clean all the crap out of the trunk, fill up the gas tank, and then try to charge me $120k to get my 2001 Civic back. The doctor can't stop working, but they can stop charging extra for it. If I knew ahead of time that it would have cost that much, I probably would not have consented to the procedure in the first place.
TLDR: The curse of knowledge.
Walmart.com has free two-day shipping on orders of $35 or more and there is no subscription fees.
40 years of lazy journalists affixing -gate to everything to garner eyeballs.

Because yeah, batteries going bad over time is exactly as scandalous as the President of the United States deliberately breaking the law.
> I think maybe the best solution is to just leave things unregulated and let dumb money get burnt

There are a lot of unsophisticated "investors" who cannot differentiate investing from gambling.

We have experience with extra-systemic irrational exuberance. Too light-tough and the risks contaminate broader markets, thus fomenting a crisis. Too heavy and the risks go underground. There they (a) fuel broader criminality and/or (b) metastasize into the broader markets, thus fomenting a crisis.

A strategy focussing on three things emerges from the literature:

1. Stomp out obvious, easy-to-enforce-against fraud. This keeps regulators engaged, helps keep everyone wary and removes fuel from the fire.

2. Monitor lending channels. In the late stages of a bubble, the devoted few will borrow to buy. Run properly, this transfers wealth from them to those exiting. What you don't want is for said zealots to re-transfer their risk to lenders e.g. by buying on a credit card.

3. Support prudent, de-leveraging instruments used by sophisticated investors. You want a controlled place where the smart money can slowly exert countervailing pressure without causing a panic. Bitcoin futures, which encourage sober shorting while causing the effects of a bad bet to come home to roost every day, are a good example.

The best general-use analog I've found for bubble control is riot control, some principles of which are described in this video [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg
It's funny to see an inline Amazon Prime ad in an article that sheds such poor light on Amazon.

It's also troubling to see inline ads at all, but hey.
> FWIW, roads were for people first, not cars.

That isn't true. They are for people. First people in wagons, then people in cars. But always for people.
The linked tweet mentioning it[1] has 500+ retweets and 1k+ likes, so presumably a lot of people know about it.

[1]: https://twitter.com/itsdreebetch/status/953111010092621824
It's affected by several factors.

Survivor bias, most prominently. "To be listed, a brand or company name must remain operating, either in whole or in part, since inception."

Surviving was helped by continuity of social structures: Japan and Switzerland have seen very little external upheaval, while Germany's contemporary territory, despite unable to claim the same, has also seen a strong adherence to local institutions throughout. These companies tend to be, disproportionately, small, local affairs, so a tight-knit group of people was able to sustain them throughout generations as borders were being redrawn on the macro level.

In places where warfare and demographic change led to the movement or fall of entire populations, the continuity of such institutions was put at risk.

As a related factor, survival of documentation and the quality and continuity of recordkeeping also plays into this list.
You apparently haven't tried looking for a web design house to work with lately. Maybe not that dated, but often 10 to 15 years behind the present times.
>We found that the premiums pharmaceutical companies earn from charging substantially higher prices for their medications in the US compared to other Western countries generates substantially more than the companies spend globally on their research and development. This finding counters the claim that the higher prices paid by US patients and taxpayers are necessary to fund research and development. Rather, there are billions of dollars left over even after worldwide research budgets are covered. To put the excess revenue in perspective, lowering the magnitude of the US premium to a level where it matches global R&D expenditures across the 15 companies we assessed would have saved US patients, businesses, and taxpayers approximately $40 billion in 2015, a year for which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported that total US spending on pharmaceuticals was $325 billion.

Curious to hear your thoughts.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20170307.05903...
These are great examples of dark patterns, but the conclusion that designers should appoint themselves user representatives is dangerous and self-aggrandizing.

Companies should be user focused... if your business or product metrics aren't aligned with user value, try to fix that or leave. Declaring yourself liberated from metrics, planning processes, or other structure because you are the user advocate at the table is so unproductive -- whether it comes from a designer, a sales person, or anyone else.

At the very very least, if you are going to claim authority for advocating for the user, you should be held to the same standards as PMs (should be): do user research, be data driven, and make the outcomes of your research useful to other people in doing their jobs.
Might high middle class people too -- those not wealthy enough to live in posh Manhattan townhouses and go over the river to more affordable areas at the expense of lower/no subway coverage.
I think a couple of networking chips still use it.
This is actually a great idea and somewhat obvious come to think of it. Having outsized penalties to compensate for the probability of getting caught and deterring others considering partaking in the same type of fraud would be much like what many regulatory bodies have found to be a very effective way of curbing unwanted market behaviour.
How to record SSH sessions with OpenSSH servers
Google Ends Fact-Check Project
This was a great read, thank you!
Yeah you definitely want to keep in mind that this cert, and especially Course 1, has to be accessible to anyone. So it's building a foundation of common knowledge for the other courses which absolutely go into much more details.
The biggest difference is there are cheap alternatives to driving in your own car (foot, bus, subway, taxi depending on distance, etc). Public schools are akin to walking on foot, charter schools are the cars using public school land, which I learned is fairly common on NYC under some kind of timeshare arrangement (but I also mainly say this in jest).

As someone who moved from the Los Angeles area and enjoys driving (sans gridlock), it personally seems bananas to me to be driving in the city unless it's a cab/bus/freight/handicap vehicle.
I think the harm is in increasing the parties that have to know about and conform to the embargo.

If FreeBSD should be notified in this case, even though they aren't really in most of the high impact areas, should OpenBSD be notified? What about QNX? What about OpenSolaris? Apparently Joyent got late notification as well[1], and since they actually are a cloud provider, I think they have a much better case for being notified before FreeBSD.

In the end, if there's an information embargo there needs to be a decision about who's in and who's out, and most times there will be some excluded party that really wishes they were included. You can't make everyone happy, but I don't think FreeBSD really needed a huge advance warning, given what it looks like Google's criteria was for notification. The fact the hyperthreading bug that keeps being referenced was handled differently seems to me to be mostly an artifact of a BSD developer finding the bug.

1: https://help.joyent.com/hc/en-us/articles/115015938847-Secur...
Surviving these millenia requires avoiding the situations where businesses are mass-confiscated or the population is destroyed by disaster. So:

- not being colonised (rules out New World, Africa, middle east, India)

- not going through Communism or one of the less business friendly dictatorships (rules out Eastern Europe, Russia, China etc)
> This is such a good explanation of why I have a hard time working with folks who always approach technical problems with the attitude of "why don't we just do this?"

The flip side of this are the people who can’t accomplish anything novel because they’re unable to simply try. At some point you have to “just” do it.

You can do research and seek out advice, and indeed you should. But for most things, you will not develop a perfect understanding or solution without jumping in and finding the practical gaps in your knowledge. You generally will have gaps and you can spend infinite time trying to fill them. Or you can learn enough to start and understand that you will likely make mistakes and learn along the way.

I’ve never done anything substantial that didn’t involve mistakes. Every major new system I’ve built had mistakes. Every home project I’ve done has imperfections that annoy me. Not once have I completed something substantial and novel and then said I’d do it exactly the same if I were doing it again. That only happens for things I’ve done repeatedly so I learn the optimal way to get it done. Build one deck and you’ll screw up at least three things. Build a dozen and you’ll get it down to a consistent product.

This is of course why trades have apprenticeship programs. You can screw up stairs a dozen times and eventually figure out all the details you missed, or you can work with someone to learn to do it correctly more efficiently. The person you’re learning from can probably fix your errors, too, so the end product is better than you’d have produced.
The 21 shades of entrepreneurial emotion (90 second video)
I don't know what kind of websites you were using in 2006, but most small companies in Europe were literally just getting online, and their owners' ideas of design were vastly different than what the designers would recommend.

Those kind of simple HTML websites were going for over 1500 Euros, which is insane, since Wordpress and Drupal existed and had way better themes and functionality.

People just weren't interested or seeing the possibilities of the Web, even in 2006 (and even today!), they just got a website because it was a "new fad" or someone said they can get more customers.
Switzerland and Japan, maybe. What is now Germany was not particularly stable during the Middle Ages. Or the Early Modern era. Or the 20th Century for that matter.