skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First you were claiming that taxes don't generally spur avoidant behavior. Now you're claiming they do[1], and we want that.

We're talking about different types of avoidance. I'm talking about real business spending, i.e., on facilities, equipment, employees, etc., as a means of tax avoidance. High taxes encourage this type of spending because (a) businesses that are growing are going to do this anyway and (b) they effectively get a discount for this anyway if they're making enough money to actually pay taxes.

But most people are referring to tax avoidance strategies like IP shifting, off-shoring, etc. I'm saying, that based on my professional experience as a tax advisor for a decade, that these activities are not motivated by high tax rates, and indeed were highest during periods of lower tax rates. (In the examples I mentioned above in the earlier comment, the companies weren't engaging in tax avoidance strategies, they were making business investments. The difference is that tax avoidance is entirely or primarily motivated by avoiding taxes and is pursued despite the lack of an actual business need; business investment may be motivated in part by avoiding taxes but is primarily driven by actual business needs and will not be pursued absent a business case for the spending.)

Which is itself dubious. I'm pretty sure "we" don't want people to unilaterally exempt themselves from taxes by relabeling consumption as a business expense

I don't understand where you're going with this. You brought up examples that are considered legitimate business expenses by the tax code, and have been for decades. Hell, they're the basis for all the in-office perks tech companies gave their employees pre-COVID. If you have an issue with whether they should be deductible on moral grounds, that's a separate discussion.

And again, my argument is based on how my clients, and US businesses in general, have actually responded to tax cuts and tax increases, and not to how they were theoretically expected to behave by people who aren't actually running successful businesses.
Read the article (paywalled for me) and see who is mentioned. That is likely who paid for the PR. They're just making something normal into something topical.
This is the same guy who wandered around, maskless, unnecessarily having close personal contact with people, during a pandemic, and ended up in hospital on experimental drugs. Why would you assume he’d take security precautions?
Or maybe we're just disappointed and with this funeral we've got some kind of closure? After all this was hubris and arrogance all the way down. Founders failed to perform any kind of validation - after all you can't find a problem if you don't look after one, innit? - and the list of "investors" is rather a list of self sufficient rich boys with more money than sense.

PG is dishonest: these guys took no risk; their product did not have a hair of innovation on it; they had a $2Bn safety net.

This summer they had 72k paying users [1]; mix in the $2Bn investment; they could have distributed $27k to each of these paying users and would have still had some money in the bank. But no, they managed to burn their resources and the product with it. No pivot, no sign of adaptability whatsoever.

Let's be honest - it was just an expensive project that failed despite having the best resources at hand.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/8/21318060/quibi-subscriber-...
Segal Decorators – A collection of useful TypeScript decorators
yeah you have to actually put the order into the cart in order to get the availability of the product
I appreciate the amusement and humor, but you might want to be careful with phrasing on something like this.

I think researchers and people who implement interoperation on the Web don't want to run afoul of federal law, nor accidentally give misleading guidance to people new to their kind of work, nor invite new rules that could be overly restrictive.
A manager is doing it by hand. Their POS system has the ability to lock out individual items, and this information is available in real time to the server backing the mobile app (GMA).

The machines that I've seen don't have real-time telemetry, and are not networked.
I meant the kinds of food,and its packaging maybe, that is known to work well in the cold. Wrapping things, serving things excessively hot, etc.
"I'm laughing because it was an obviously stupid idea."

It's absolutely not a stupid idea, frankly, it's a great idea.

The execution was completely screwed up - were they to have done it smartly, organically, they could have won massively.

TikTok is not just an 'app' - it's a new form of content.

There is a lot of room there.

Quibi was a smart, timely concept - and would have made a perfect YCombinator type bet.
While I was reading this post, I felt the same way as I read the HN comments on the Mozilla layoffs two months ago: misplaced blame.

I admit I have a soft spot for Mozilla, having used Firefox since Firebird. I really want them to succeed, which colours my thoughts on this topic, and it makes me sad to hear them engaging in shady behaviour.

But the impression I got from this post is this: the author believes if Mozilla focuses solely on Firefox (no VPN, more engineers, Servo development full steam ahead) they would be doing better, with Firefox having more users and more money than ever before to go around. I do not believe this to be the case. The post frames "Laid off 25% of its employees, mostly engineers, many of whom work on Firefox" and "Used their brand to enter the saturated VPN grift market" and "Started, and killed, a dozen projects which were not Firefox" as Mozilla's self-inflicted failures, rather than wounds sustained while engaging in battle with corporate giants. I disapprove of the increased executive pay, as well as the advertisements and add-on changes. But I cannot quite find them to be totally at fault for all seven listed items.

There's been a lot of engineering effort recently from big companies to make the Web more featureful, and its associated infrastructure faster, than ever before. I completely agree with the author (see the linked post) when he points out that the massive side-effect of this is that only a big company can make a Web browser. It's something that seems to have crept up on us, and will almost certainly take control away from individual users. It sucks.

So as far as I'm concened, Google has been the company complicating Web standards without talking to anyone else, developing infrastructure that's only appropriate for massive organisations, and (more recently) exempting themselves from opting out of tracking, all while pushing their browser through previously-unheard-of advertising channels to give them the advantage. All this means Firefox has to catch up, and the money has to come from somewhere — hence the layoffs and other projects. I don't see any other way for them to reach the future I want.

To repeat: it sucks.

While I wasn't old enough to donate, I liked seeing the 2004 Firefox page in the New York Times. A few years ago I walked through London and saw three electronic Chrome adverts in half an hour. I think Mozilla has the deck stacked against them, severely. And I think nothing would make Google executives happier than to find _Firefox_ is the one getting called names.
> It's possible short form TV will come into play first going through places like Netflix. But if you wanted to own the market this was an ok attempt.

One of the reasons many people doubted Quibi is because short-form content is something Netflix and Hulu have already experimented with.

The idea is like crack to product folks - habit forming! make the user get used to opening up the app every day! - but nobody has ever really made it stick for Hollywood-style or even just "a bit more premium than Youtube" content that requires a subscription.

Quibi to me looked like "Vessel/Go90, but with spending way more money" and that was a dubious proposition.

(And this was said by many people in threads before Quibi even launched, so...)
Anyone aware of something similar, but for teaching more C++ concepts (eg templates, smart pointers, move semantics) to someone with C or Java experience?
Justice cannot happen without input from the those who are on the other side, the indicted.

You quickly realize justice TRIES to be a really bad cop. And then the indicted /convicted have to make deals for something that is terribly unfair. Just imagine negotiating with a person like Kamala.

When I see light weight no benefit deals like this, I think that it looks like both prosecutor and defendant got away with murder with little effort.

Further, let's stop the rhetoric that severe punishments will stop bad crimes. Not true. Even the lightest of punishments can stop crimes simply with shame. If more people get caught and are able to reconcile for their crimes, that would be sufficient to prevent 95 percent of future crimes.
Amazon workers call on supporters to shut down warehouses for electoral justice
It's the first line of the article:

"The infamous megarich Sackler family will pay $235 million in civil penalties as part of a controversial $8.3 billion settlement with the US Department of Justice."

Further, the family owned all of Purdue Pharma. The company settlement is also a direct cost to the Sackler family. If the company has an $8.3 billion settlement with the DOJ, that is the family paying $8.3 billion from their asset as it was 100% owned by them.

The headline is slightly misleading, even if the Sacklers are scumbags. The headline is blatantly attempting to pretend the only cost to the Sackler family is $235m. You can tell by the article's opening, aggressive tilt; very colorful phrasing like "infamous megarich" - which is ars firing up the outrage machine in the first line to prep a reaction for the rest of the article.
Incorrect- the family has already drained $10.7B from the company and are only being fined $225M themselves- they are not responsible for any other portion of the $8.3B.

The family will lose control of the company in bankruptcy but they knew this was coming and drained it ahead of time. DoJ is letting them get away with it.
We have outdoor dining in Australia. Restaurants box in outdoor areas with "cafe blinds" and use patio heaters. Wasteful in terms of energy use, but gives the restaurant access to cheaper council space so they can expand capacity.
Tools like this can be used to empower the people against evil, whether government-sanctioned or otherwise. But privacy-activists are successfully making such tools "illegal" under the guise of "privacy rights", leaving it only in the realm of government use (for now).
What? It is directly related to Citizens United and associated precedent, these are independent expenditures by a corporation in an election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_National_Bank_of_Boston_...
It would draw way too much aggro for little gain without any "legitimate usage" traffic to draw any substantial objections to shutting it down regardless of any technicalities be they technical or legal. Fund ingress and exit points are fundamentally a weakness for any form of "stealth" money transfer, even cryptocurrency if they are to actually be spent on anything material. Spies have been busted by spending their bribes as clearly beyond their means even if they overextended lines of credit when they were specifically not to because of worries of compromise. Otherwise it is a big risk for nothing and well - if you are willing and able to get away with murder without getting paid why aren't you a successful serial killer already or taking risks by taking requests if you are?

Neat little cyberpunk device but doesn't quite work in reality without some other foundational assumption changes for things like "actually somehow provides substansially better life insurance even if it may also be used to place a hit on you".
Embedded systems are bare metal. There are tons of usage. Bare metal can be anything from a 8bit microcontroller to multicore Ghz system. Every modern RF modem has a cpu, and uses some kind of unikernel or rtos, if you have smartphone You have at least one such a system running.
Day late and a dollar short.
Throughput of a broken shake machine is zero.
This is not even comparable. The law already passed and is not banning Uber/Lyft/Dordash it just places the same requirements other jobs have.

They could either treat them as employees and provide benefits that law requires, or make drivers to be truly independent.

They are threatening to leave California, but that's similar to baby making a tantrum to get what they want. While I don't use their services, and don't care about them leaving, I really doubt they will leave California, because of AB5.
The idea had crossed my mind.
Speaking to NixOps in practicular, I've used quite a bit at previous jobs, and still use it for my personal stuff.

It's very good and convenient (if you already know Nix), but it doesn't have a lot of maintainers so it's missing a lot of features compared to Terraform.

For a lot of people these features don't matter, but at companies over a certain size they're probably be considered table stakes:

* Not really a good story out of the box for teams, because the state file is just an SQLite database on your computer. Terraform has all sorts of helpful options for where to store its state file. There was some work in progress to improve this on NixOps last time I looked.

* Doesn't support AWS load balancers. There is support for Azure load balancers though, so maybe this will come in the future? You can setup a load balancer separately and point it at your NixOps deployed instance, but meh.

* Doesn't support AWS ECS/Fargate, which is a shame because that would be an excellent combination (building a customized NixOS docker image is very easy and space-efficient).

* Doesn't support authenticating with temporarily assumed AWS roles. AWS "best practice" encourages using these.

On the other hand, it does have one feature that Terraform doesn't: you can very easily build and deploy your code at the same time as your infrastructure. Whether it's actually a good idea to do so is up for debate, but it's certainly convenient.

It's also usually a bit faster than Terraform I find.
But Quibi was an old form of content. Standard Hollywood studio production type stuff, just sliced differently to awkwardly try to present it as something more like Youtube or TikTok.

But then still using an old-model business model (cable-style subscription+ads) that makes growth difficult without extraordinarily compelling content.
A back of the envelope calculation would say colon cancer poses a higher risk to you than the coronavirus.

The Infection Survival Rate of COVID19 for those 20-49 is 99.98%, according to the CDC:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

0-19 years: 99.997%

20-49 years: 99.98%

50-69 years: 99.5%

70+ years: 94.6%

This gives a death rate of 20 out of 100,000 people for the 20-49 age group who get COVID19. And there is no guarantee you will contract COVID19.

I don't know what proportion of people with your symptoms have colon cancer, but I assume it's unfortunately much larger than 20 out of 100,000. The survival rate for colon cancer is highly dependent on how early it is diagnosed.
They, personally, are paying 225 million.

The company, of which they likely will not retain control, is settling for ~8billion.

Importantly, the company itself DOES NOT HAVE THAT MUCH MONEY. It is expected to pay it off over time, assuming it remains solvent.

The Sacklers, on the other hand, have drained nearly 10 billion dollars from the company account into their personal estate, and are retaining all but 225 million of it.

---

My hot take - They can keep the fucking money, let them buy as much ramen from the prison commissary as they'd like.
I've not heard that term used, and its bad. You shouldn't dehumanize people for being "cheap labor". Honestly, that guy flipping burgers is doing more real good for people than any number of highly paid software devs working on VC funded projects that will mostly end up in the trash.
Oh fuck everything about that article you linked.
It's difficult to say in hindsight, because most "good ideas" seem obvious after the fact. Eg Twitch seems like such an obvious idea now (but I don't think my bad bet meter would have given Twitch a good score in 2008 - why would people watch other people play games instead of, you know, playing the game themselves?). In all honesty, I don't think I would have predicted the meteoric success of a search engine or social media. Who wants an app that just deletes pictures from your phone? Why would I trust a stranger enough to get into their car? The Wright brothers sound a bit wonky in the head, trying to get something that heavy to fly. Etc.
What was the smart idea? Short videos? Limited only to phone? I'm really trying to see the good idea and I just can't.
What if the owner in that situation is telling the truth though, i.e. they believe the club will become insolvent if it doesn't pass? Can they not say it?
> In the past, the Mac was more open. Believe it or not, there was a time when code signing didn't exist, and you could modify your system however you pleased.

This seems inevitable as computers become more accessible to less technical userbases. Foot-guns are fine(ish) when your user group is composed of specialists, but companies have incentive to minimize support requests.
Just so this doesn’t come off like too radical an idea: legalization of all drugs has been a position of The Economist since 1989. “Legalize, Control, Discourage.”

https://www.economist.com/leaders/1989/01/21/hooked-on-just-...
In my office I have chosen to invest in “no cloud” design software dependency. We don’t believe in collaborative UX/UI design workflow outside the office. We use our own code based workflow for prototyping. I am in design field 18 years, there is a way to deliver quality in pure form without using trending tools, cloud based plugins and direct collaboration. Convenience is not always the king. But this is strictly my decision and I don’t imply thats is for everyone.
I think it more arrogant that the people so established thought they could build a tech company without technical innovation, but that's just my opinion. Quibi was more arrogant than bold in their ambition.
I'm a little confused as to the use case here. If I want to post a photo on the internet without knowledge of how to perform color processing, instant RAW is basically an alternative to however Apple would normally process images in their own camera app right?
What kind of operation happens when you pointwise multiply two probability density functions? It wouldn't even integrate to 1.0 any more (it can even integrate to 0.0, like in the example 4). Rather than taking the convolution, which corresponds to adding two independent random variables that generate said density functions.
True, but this is HN. We’re all privileged here.
That alarm thing has happened to me several times and is why I recommend to people to not use their phone as alarm at as a dedicated device makes much more sense.
An eigenvector would correspond to the "stationary distribution" of the Markov transition matrix represented by the graph. (think "page rank")
I'm spending an extra $300-$500 / mo in home office expenses (food, coffee, power, internet, AC, sq footage, etc.) now that I work from home.

I'd love to be back in the office to be near the gym and enjoy the amenities.
I'd be very interested to hear what are you are using! Nothing from Adobe either?
Genuinely curious the alternative you would suggest.

I think people can still access opioids legally, albeit much less easy than before. There are plenty of treatment options and the right answer isn’t to let drug addicts keep on ruining their own lives and the people around them. The train has to slow down and people have to get off the train.

Granted, the government can do much more to help people get treatment and stop punishing users. But they damn sure do need to punish people who intentionally create drug addicts and that’s what this is about.
I doubt these machines are internet-connected. Most likely is that the store manager notices the machine has gone into its cleaning cycle and manually marks the item on the menu as unavailable.
It matters. It may trick people into thinking that longer = more secure. Which is only the case up to a certain extent.

If you reach beyond 256 bits of entropy, there is no added security. No current system will use more than that. And going beyond that is not future proofing, because you're storing it in a current system, defeating any added entropy.

I don't see good reasons why you would use a password generator embedded in a password manager for non-security purposes. Security purposes here are always more important than other uses.

But if you do have a good example, feel free to prove me wrong.
But the $8.3B is not coming out of the $10.7B that the family extracted.

The title is not misleading at all- the family which profited $10.7B is paying $225M.

The company already entered bankruptcy proceedings last year.
Any cool, trendy and modern thing tend to stay if it can save some money for a company. Good example is open office. I haven't heard companies pointing to studies that shows a nice cubicle with walls is better for employee's mental health than open office. On the other hand they keep telling how open office promotes open collaboration etc because it saves them money.

People keep saying that productivity will go down will all remote arrangements. But so far assumptions have that company has to worry about it. However I feel once employee/team/projects been identified for low productivity it's them that have to worry. The reason is simple, barring few top percent of employees most do not have any negotiating power on whether to work from home or from office or few days from office to preserve their office seat etc.

So to think that low productivity will bring every one to office seems unlikely.
FB made $100s of billion off of selling users privacy and were only fined $5B.

Lots more examples of other companies as well.
Imagine KFC had invented it and called it Kentucky Fried Cloud
I have never encountered a "broken" ice cream machine and this makes me wonder how clean were the ones that prepared my orders?
So, you're saying nearly a quarter of American CEO's won't even say they "may" reduce office space by some amount? That is so vague (and non-binding in any case) that I am kind of surprised they didn't get 99%, with only the CEO's of office space subleasing companies not joining in.

I have WFH for several years now, I'm not opposed to it, but the idea that it's going to become the "new normal" seems, at the least, premature. My guess is that the long-term impact will be less than currently expected.
It doesn't even work! Ctrl-F "commonmark" shows zero results, even though the text is in the article. Pressing Ctrl-F twice to get the actual browser search does let you find it, but some fuckery has broken the scrolling to the result so you still can't find it easily.
And just for encryption, you can self-sign.

Obviously that doesn't work for the web, but "TLS cert feudal lord" doesn't track for me at all.
Well, as I pointed out in yesterday's Quibi thread, short-form content absolutely predates Quibi. Where Quibi went wrong is in its focus on producing short-form content by chopping long-form content into small pieces instead of adapting narratives to work in short-form content.

And you also point out yourself that every idea Quibi had that differentiated itself from other streaming services (save the short-form content) didn't work. It's hard to call it brilliant if every original idea it had wasn't a good one...
If you build a greenhouse around your outdoor dining area, is it an outdoor dining area any more?
Favorite recruiter pitch: "And they have that trendy open office space layout!"

I mean, where does the conversation go after that?