skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends a lot on the crops and the actual production methods, but from talking to my neighbors at the post office, in organics, sometimes more land is consumed (since production per unit area can be lower) and soil erosion is higher (you cannot no-till without herbicides.) I am not very well versed in this but simply wanted to point out that our assumptions may not be correct.

As for traditional production, herbicides, pesticides, and genetic contamination are big issues.
Renamed to CPP by the time I left. The "Breit"ling spirit remained though.
"Perhaps this work will finally prompt widespread change."

I sure hope so. I've argued this to various languages and libraries for a few years, and mostly they don't really care, other than they've heard of M-R and not of anything else.

One bottleneck I ran into are the "Prove that the probability is smaller" argument. The probability bound for BPSW is actually not very good, but empirically we see that bound is grotesquely conservative. One can always add more random-base M-R tests if desired.

There is also the problem that statistical thinking is hard for people. This comes up with using fixed bases and not grasping that this ruins the "2^-80 probability!" (for example) claim. That only applies to a random input.
If you own a company ran by sales you end up going for short term gains. You have to push back on sales requests that dont add long term value to your company (value others want into the future). Companies often die in a feature loop ran by sales that need a checkbox for their presentation.
Netflix and Hill: The True Story Behind “Afflicted”
AWS cuts in half the price of most of its Lightsail virtual private servers
Sonder Raises $135M to Turn Airbnb Apartments into Hotels
A positive EPS isn't a requirement for paying out a dividend though of course it's usually a pretty good idea.
No, Toronto. Why?
Google Account -> Sign-in & Security -> 2-Step Verification

Or just click:
https://myaccount.google.com/signinoptions/two-step-verifica...
Ask HN: How are you handling sales tax for your SaaS sales?
The Supreme Court recently overturned Quill [1, 2], which opened up for states collecting sales tax from remote sellers.

The states are responding to this in various ways, but at least HI, LA, UT, and WA now claim the right to assess sales tax on remote SaaS sales when total revenue in the state exceeds $100k OR 200 transactions (the thresholds SD had set as part of the Supreme Court case).

1. If you bill monthly and assuming each bill counts as a transaction then you pass the second threshold after only 17 customers, even if the revenue is modest. E.g. $5-10/mo => $1000-2000, meaning $50-200 in sales tax.

This is in stark contrast to the text in the Supreme Court decision [2]: "The Act applies only to sellers who engage in a significant quantity of business in the State, and respondents are large, national companies that undoubtedly maintain an extensive virtual presence." - looks like the Supreme Court were thinking $100k _AND_ 200tx not OR.

2. With regular e-commerce you always have a shipping address, and this makes the sales tax location reasonably clear. With SaaS there's usually at best a billing address, but with e.g. PayPal you may not even be collecting that. Does that mean we have to start collecting the location of the buyer? And what about existing subscriptions in unknown locations? Do we have to email people to confirm their locations? And what about those who don't respond?

3. Sales tax rates and rules are varied and changing, so using a service provider seems unavoidable. However, they charge an arm and a leg. While developer time is mostly a one-off, it still feels like the direct cost to our business will be a significant fraction of the sales tax collected.

What is your SaaS company doing about sales tax?

1: https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2018/jun/supreme-court-sales-tax-decision-201819203.html

2: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-494_j4el.pdf
Sure. I’m just saying worker pay issue is largely orthogonal to stock buybacks or tax cuts. It’s not like, all things being equal, the revenue would be spent on workers anyway.
> They seem like they are. Is there another app store that iPhone users can use? Android users? Does the operating system on these phones let you easily change your "app store" preference?

Companies are not forced to change their hardware to run a competitors binaries really. There's choice in platforms which means iOS or Android phones in this case.
If this were true every game console was a monopoly.
You seem to have forgotten about the existence of rap music.
Very good point! But keep in mind one difference: unlike crashed planes, crashed companies tend to leave survivors who can tell the tale.

So maybe read post-mortems of failed companies - and worry most about the reported mistakes that do not also show up in post-mortems of successful companies.
Not quite true. Qualified dividends tax rate are 15% nowadays, while capital gains are 20% (or 23.8% if you make a lot of income).

However, you can defer the capital gains tax (by not selling), thus allowing that money to compound and work for you.
Absentee landlords don’t mean that properties are neglected. If they use a property manager, they can be just as well-run as anything else. Conversely there are plenty of “local” landlords that don’t do a good job. The location of the landlord is irrelevant, it’s the property management that matters.
Meh,

Up until the 17th and early 18th Century most of global wealth was located in China and India. Its what made them prime target for the militarily strong Europeans.

I have been to Europe, Asia and the Middle East and people are almost the same.

So how can I explain the widely different living standards ?

The only answer that ever made sense to me was colonization.

You can see the equalization happening with Britain and
US having third world style politics, corruption, etc due to having to learn to live in world without their hegemony.

As for democracy, do you think China could have survived
democracy ? It would have ended up like Iran. Democracy only works if the country has strong institutions which China doesn't have, they still send their best and brightest to US universities.
I wonder why we developed the STING protein in the first place. Was it perhaps an early form of immunity, or a precursor to an immune response?
Kizz Daniel Signs on Two New Acts to FlyBoy Inc
Not good enough. The quality of benefits from Lionbridge or similar companies is much worse than the benefits offered by Microsoft. Microsoft is getting a tax break (they don't pay FICA on health insurance or certain other benefit-based employee compensation) dependent on making those benefits available to all employees; they need to hold up their end of that deal instead of scamming taxpayers by using subcontracting loopholes.

That’s not how W2 contracting works.

LionsBridge is paying FICA, the contractors are considered LionsBridge employees. LionsBridge is passing the cost on to Microsoft. Microsoft is not saving money on FICA.

Not necessarily in this case, but full time employees overindex on the value of company provided benefits. It’s just another part of your compensation. You can get health insurance on the open market, without depending on your employer. You have to set your hourly rate high enough to compensate.

I’ve done W2 contracting, I made damn sure that my hourly rate was high enough to cover the absence of benefits, the lack of paid time off, etc.

In the case of W2 contracting, you can usually buy insurance through your consulting company - full price, pretax. If you are a 1099 contractor you can buy insurance through the exchange and it’s tax deductible.
If you hire a contractor to prep your house so you can sell it at a higher price, is the contractor entitled to a percentage of that gain?
Paywall and no abstract.
> It’s not like, all things being equal, the revenue would be spent on workers anyway.

It's possible it would be if it was more tax advantageous to pay workers then to pay out profits as buybacks through the most recent tax cuts. Clearly, taxes matter in corporate decision making, as large multinationals were keeping their cash offshore as long as possible, waiting for a tax holiday.
Scary looking headline on a discussion forum with instructions to perform a task that the average user would not really understand, with no explanation of attack vector or even consequences for any user who doesn't want to take the time (and energy, frankly at this point) to follow security news.

I'm pretty close to not caring anymore. I hope somebody figures out how to at least fix the security news infrastructure, if fixing security is still a ways off.

EDIT: Scratch that, I assume attack vector is a browser since they mentioned JavaScript.
The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter
If you are interested in more information about Autophagic processes, this video interview is great: https://www.reddit.com/r/fasting/comments/6qobj7/rhonda_patr...

Rhonda Patrick interviews Dr Guido Kroemer, an expert in Autophagy. Its one of the most accessible, well-referenced and thorough discussions on Autophagy (including Mitophagy), that I've come across.
> But there is absolutely no evidence that saturated fat causes any of the diseases of civilization. Why should people limit their intake of it?

This is indisputably wrong. There is a mountain of evidence linking the consumption of saturated fat to cardiovascular disease. The article linked to a recent summary study from the American Heart association. Plenty of others are a simple google search away.
What I want to know is how they plan on steering these things. How do you get a multi-gigawatt laser on Earth to not only hit a ping-pong ball sized thing in space, but propel it in a particular direction, precisely enough that it will pass through the inner solar system of a star system 4 light-years away? Wouldn't an encounter with a tiny bit of gas or something near our solar system cause it to be like a few billion miles off target?
Right. It's just habit.
> "But when money is invested it is used to buy capital goods–houses or office buildings or factories or ships or motor trucks or machines. Any one of these projects puts as much money into circulation and gives as much employment as the same amount of money spent directly on consumption.

This is nice in theory but certainly false in practice.

In practice much of the price paid for capital-goods is not for capital at all, but for land and monopoly priviliges. In real estate, the land share of real estate value can be 60% of the total investment.

Payments for land and investment in land purchases are always surplus payments beyond what is necessary to bring land into use as a factor of production, because land is a fixed natural resource which does not have a labor cost of production.

When investment in land increases through land banking, this increases the opportunity cost of investing in businesses which employ labor to produce goods and services, which decreases the demand for labor and lowers wages.

Policies which are designed to increase investment and savings over consumption typically decrease economic output and slow growth, because while increased consumption of labor produced goods and services increases the profits for investing in productive businesses supplying these services and the demand for labor, increased investment does not necessarily increase the demand for labor or the supply of labor produced goods and services at all.

It's possible for policies promoting increased investment and savings to promote nothing more than land banking and investors holding empty parking lots while waiting for a speculative increase in price.
The only alternative would be for a single business to eventually grow to such a size that it essentially becomes the entire world economy.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/275/986/c57...

;-)
It's a proxy that targets Redis actually.
I'm aware of the distinction between wealthy and high-income (was a tax lawyer in a former life). I was objecting to the if-then in the prior post that said: if you're wealthy and don't have OI, then your dividend rate is 0. This is not true. It is only true for the first chunk of income, as you note.

Also, this is equally true for LTCG, so in the context of this discussion (qualified dividends versus buybacks, which increase LTCG), it doesn't move the needle one way or the other.
> I'm going to give the progressive movements of the turn of the 19th/20th century a lot of credit for antitrust and worker-protection laws. I'm also going to ignore anyone whose response is to try to nitpick and split out individual acts and try to attribute them to completely contextless utterly independent forces that had nothing whatsoever to do with anything else happening at the time in any way.

Nobody's saying that these were "utterly independent forces". I'm pointing out that the relationship between them was the exact opposite of what you claimed. Labor unions opposed antitrust laws which outlawed the sorts of behavior OP described; they certainly weren't responsible for it like you tried to claim.

It sounds like you're interested in ignoring the actual details of the history which disprove your point, in order to paint a certain narrative. In that case, there's probably not much point in discussing further, because that's not what a good-faith discussion looks like.
In many places, houses that were previously owned and managed by someone who lived a few blocks away are now owned by someone far away and managed by a (remotely owned) for-profit company whose goal is to cut expenses as much as possible.

I agree that many local landlords are terrible, especially in my experience those who own many properties.

Personally I think professional property management companies should be very strictly regulated, and both owners and management companies should face severe financial liability for mismanagement, and landlords should be taxed as much as the market will bear, with the proceeds spent on local residents.

But even in the best case, a property management company is never going to care as much as a good local landlord, and the best local landlord isn’t going to care as much as an owner-occupant.
Thanks for the information! I'll try to let you know if we ever get something going.
2012: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3536340/
Personally, all my dividends are qualified dividends, and thus are taxed at the long term capital gains rate.

I think the tax efficiency is more about avoiding the immediate taxation on a reinvested dividend vs. no taxable event when I don’t sell into a stock buyback.

If you model this as one event, with the same terminal state (sell all stock), the tax rates are the same. But if you model it as many capital return events, and in the end I make one sale of all my stock, the government gets less money.

The government gets even less money if my heirs get a step-up in basis when I die (which they generally do).
Yes. Then click U2F. Then start messing around with that.

It takes time. And I have a ton of accounts. I like my U2F key but it is still a pain in the ass.
They'll probably do it again.
One issue Im surprised never comes up in discussion of buybacks vs. dividends is, apart from the tax issue, whether buybacks drive stock prices up because of how large orders to buy stock at market price interact with the outstanding order book - ie that in a buyback you buy specifically from those of the current shareholders who attribute the lowest valuation to the stock at any given time. To simplify lets say 2 mutual funds each hold 50% of the stock of a corp. Mutual Fund A values the stock (ie is willing to sell at) $100, and mutual fund B is willing to sell at $120. Other potential buyers value the stock at $99 or less. The company decides to buyback 50% of its stock. It buys all of A’s stock, and thereby drives the new market price to $120. Meaning it drives up the market price even before you consider the effect of reducing the # of outstanding shares (fewer shares > higher EPS > higher stock price at a given P/E multiple). Of course, in the real world stockholding is less concentrated, the gap between valuations in the order book wouldn’t be so wide, shortsellers would also play a role and over time one would argue that efficient-markets-hypothesis factors in. But still... any thoughts?
Try consuming something before it's produced.

There is an order to things. It all begins with first producing/making something, no matter what segment of the economy you're talking about. Sure, you can start by borrowing (from someone else that has produced something), and eventually you still have to produce to pay for that front loaded consumption.
Salaries are indeed low on average for locals, but are much higher for the kind of jobs westerners get in tech.

Taxes are high for corporations, not that high for individuals usually below a quarter of your salary, including insurance, pensions and local and national taxes.

Overall Japan is not the country to go to if you want to maximise your salary.
People are not quite at the point of revolt.

If the path we are currently on continues, though, it will happen. It's only a matter of when.
The two main problems with classic models of economics are: (1) the tragedy of the commons: the tendency of the environment, biology, sustainability, public space and other shared concerns to be ignored until monetized/privatized to the general detriment; and (2) the false 'equilibrium' analogy used to justify supply and demand with newtonian physics (and to a lesser extent, to wrap the whole thing in a shroud of self-serving ivory tower rationalism): needless to say there is no such equilibrium - market behavior at the macro level is actually driven by mass psychology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

[2] https://www.georgesoros.com/2012/06/02/remarks_at_the_festiv...

Edit: I agree with you. If you'd dropped the lead sentences you wouldn't have been downvoted. HN as a whole seems to react badly to hyperbole, but positively to unjustified, broad, faux-intellectual claims. Haha :)
Sometimes the full debt is not repaid. In that case the money comes from the lenders and bond-holders and they never get it back. And the shareholders also lose everything in that scenario, of course.
Yes, sure, but! in order to save you also have to have people who will later be willing to provide goods and services in exchange for your savings, and that requires having children. No, I don't mean that everyone must have children, but that in a world where population pyramids are inverted, older people will have a hard time getting much value for their savings.

Taking this to an absurd extreme, the last human alive could have all the money in the world and it would do them no good at all -- all that money would have exactly zero value (well, the cash could be used as fuel or toilet paper, but that's it, and most money isn't and wouldn't be cash anyways).

Now, a society might be able to survive having an inverted population pyramid for a while, or even a very long time (generations) but e.g., dedicating more of its economy and people to elder care, by automating more of elder care, and so on. So it's exactly not all bad. Nor am I saying that fertility rates should be above replacement rates -- we all know that we can't have exponential population (or even economic) growth without end on Earth. But do note that an economy with a long-term inverted population pyramid tends to be inflationary: the elderly will have a lot of money (as usual), yes, but it will be chasing a smaller population of service providers.

Talk about Childhood's End.

Sustainability yes, self-destruction no.

In the long-term I do assume -perhaps wrongly!- that countries with negative population growth will eventually stabilize their fertility rates at replacement rate (probably with an overshoot on the upswing).
Anderson-John-Voice-Actor
The point is that the market is not competitive. Tweaking rates doesn’t suddenly make the market competitive.

For just one tiny example, consider web browsers—iOS doesn’t even allow browser engines aside than WebKit. Now compare this situation with that of desktop operating systems, which are still not a super competitive market by any means, but where the fact that Windows users could install browsers other than IE meant that web browsers became a competitive market, leading directly to the increasing capabilities of web apps, leading in turn to the possibility of Google’s office products even existing, making office software more competitive, and that in turn making Chromebooks feasible, which leads all the way back to making desktop operating systems more competitive.

You can’t consider the effects of tweaking one number and conclude that a market would be changed/unchanged by competition—these sorts of things are extremely interdependent.
I can think of some sites on the order of 15 - 20 years old that work better on mobile than sites made in the last 5.

And while the various accommodations for accessibility that have come up over the last two decades are nice, the fact is that most of the web was fairly accessibly using specialized user agents (or even just Lynx) by the very late 90s.
Engineer at a large manufacturer late 90's. After a week of rumors. All hands meeting. Parent company VP on the stage with "Great News for our Location!" Full enthusiastic pitch. Message: We bought a smaller company in a small town in the North East, they were profitable, good product, but we can do better. Will be laying off 200 of the 210 employees. Moving half of their products to our plant, the other half to the Mexico plant. Later we learned the work coming to our plant would be done by new workers as the current workers wages were to high.

I decided to quit whilst standing there listening to him. As he spoke, he was thrilled, and was telling us how thrilled we should all be for what great news this was to the company. Distinctly remember thinking, oh! these guys are evil.
That's a great point!