skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
... The UK lockdown was very strict, but it was also very late. Lockdowns work fine, they just don't work when you call them after everybody already has it.

Strictness and timeliness are unrelated characteristics.

Being afraid to leave your home has, for large parts of the last year, been very reasonable behaviour. The coronavirus has already killed 5 times more people than the blitz. Being an at-risk person in the middle of one of the UK waves was about as dangerous as regularly riding a motorcycle without a helmet.
“I am angry with this company for their past transgressions. I don’t want their new venture to succeed so I’ll bad mouth them. To make it seem relevant to the thread, I’ll spin this anecdote as emblematic of a culture that can’t succeed.”
Maven Central automatically scans Java projects for vulnerabilities
"Starting this week, we will be scanning all staged repositories on OSSRH automatically as you’re publishing things to Central"
This is so nicely written, good job.

It's a topic that captivates me every couple of months, most recently I've been interested in the power of YouTube's recommendation system. If you show interest in a topic you're slowly guided into more videos on the topic, to the point where you're more likely to buy items surrounding the topic you have become interested in. Then eventually the recommendations change, your interest in that topic weans and you're on to your next interest. It's a cycle that's easy to fall into and easy to break if you notice, but how many people don't notice?
That's exactly why wikipedia prefers secondary sources. You can 'prove' almost anything by citing junk articles in journals.
Natural Language Understanding chatbot that authenticates users on your website
It's reasonably well established that humans systematically underestimate low-probability, high-cost outcomes. Getting hacked is already pretty high-cost for most organizations.

Given that, I think there's more to be gained by looking at the "low probability" side of things.

Some historic examples of attacking the "low probability" side include building codes and speeding fines - both have pretty strong evidence for their efficacy.

A comparable initiative for software might fine those found keeping data after they do not need it (like GDPR), or mandate that sensitive data is stored behind appropriate access controls (like PCI does).
Show HN: Commons, private “Clubhouse” for your team
Hi everyone, today we’re launching Commons https://www.producthunt.com/posts/commons-2, an audio-first communication platform that makes it incredibly easy to talk to your team. No more invites or planned video chats. Simply login from Slack and tap to talk. Plus, video, screen sharing and all the tools you need to get back to working like you’re in the same room. Would love feedback on the product!
Why not F/T/F? I mean, both F/T/F and F/F/T are consistent states.
The same thing is happening in _all_ countries.

I'm from Scandinavia, and plenty of large US corporations pay zero taxes because of very complex arrangements. Regular people with smaller companies have to pay high taxes though.

It's called soft imperialism. The US / Transnational empire forces all countries to "open their markets", either via direct war, og in allied states, via soft power.

Then various firms like McKinsey or Goldman working more or less as extensions of the CIA sets up shops to takeover markets and siphon money from local markets towards a tiny US / Transnational elite.

It's a system that promotes "free markets" but is actually just rule by the VHNWI's.

In Europe in particular this power grab came especially after the clauses in the Marshal Plan that helped rebuild western europe after WW2, but in effect making them vassal states to the US.

So there is no "choice" here, that's why even in the richest northern European states american corporations pay zero taxes.

It's not just a US empire problem though - after a certain size companies just become above the law, just as with private equity for individuals, when a company can hire someone like Ernst & Young, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers etc. they can essentially just avoid taxes.
That is also why media is one of the first targets of most "electoral" autocracies. This can be seen in European countries like Hungary and Turkey where independent media has more or less disappeared, and they are massively attacked by other governments like Poland.

Furthermore, that is why public broadcasting is a primary target of populist/far-right campaigns in most other countries too: their propaganda focuses on the unpopular "unjustified" broadcast fees, while they really want to get rid of these largely independent stations, and replace them with commercial competitors that are controlled by media moguls instead of democratic structures.
whoa - that looks like an interesting project! Thanks for the link. Slightly OT but I tentatively agree with the premise: this kind of service seems far better at trying to assess credibility of an unproven claim than general chatter to and fro. Looks like their track record backs it up too.
Yup, this is what I was getting at. Wielding the truth as a blunt tool isn't productive. I'm looking to strengthen my relationships and build trust through honesty, not fool around with 'radical honesty' for the sake of it.
On the flip side you are bailing out a company for neglecting to have a disciplined security practice and a failure to build and execute their disaster recovery plan.

Rather than bail out the company perhaps nationalizing it is the better recourse. It would certainly make other companies seriously reconsider how they invest in DR and security.
What exactly should they pay tax on?

AFAIK, most countries like the US go for a tax on profits, but profits of a multinational country are extremely hard to "locate", as in: in which country was the profit made?

Some obvious examples are IKEA stores licensing the rights to the IKEA brand from some company in the Netherlands, which means most stores in the US almost have no profits.
Or starbucks USA buying extremely expensive (but high quality they say) beans from a company in Switserland... which is also part of the multi-national Starbucks holding.

These are obvious examples, but it is almost inherently hard to define where profits are made for a multi-national company as they almost always have revenue streams going in many directions and who says which national company is really adding value while others are almost profitless?

Otoh a revenue based system would also be rather hard to manage, especially if you want to prevent double taxation (both countries in the equation taxing the same revenue) as that almost requires profit based taxation again.
An important aspect of this is that it is located in Singapore. Singapore is a heavily regulated sandbox in many, many areas. And it is small. For example, there is only a single companies registry and only a single tax authority. And Singapore has a history of mandating big changes. And a lot of effort sunk into presenting itself as cutting edge in terms of government services and management of its population. I'd suggest that it may be possible for Legalese to try some things in Singapore, perhaps in concert with one of the government authorities, that could be an interesting demonstrator.

(Disclosure: One of the founders is a good friend, and I am wishing them success.)
Do you know why it tells me it "tried to access my data 28 times" but won't let me retry the extra question I failed or tell me which one it was? There are 29 in total, no?

https://imgz.org/iCT476pV/
Sounds like solving the problem from the wrong end. The payment infrastructure is the service provider's responsibility, not the state's.

Instead, set up strict SLAs with harsh fines; make it more expensive to shut down than to provide free service.
runs on Android, too
https://www.irl-labs.co/
Also, one of the women he approached, the one that took him up on his offer ended up having decent life and sizable fortune. And others just rejected him and so far there's not much evidence that it wasn't the end of it in nearly all cases. And we know just about one women who took the offence.
And here I thought this was for applying for jobs :( For people like me who live in SSH and C. Sadly, it appears to be some sort of MUD with a slack channel.

Oh well.
And that's a (culturally induced) opinion :)
Converting stroked primitives to filled primitives (2020)
Flaws in the Black-Scholes Model Revealed During 1987 Black Monday Market Crash
I was very confused by the title. I was wondering if Uber was doing some sort of tax avoidance deal involving gasoline or something.
Full Spectrum LED Grow Light: All You Need to Know
I recommend the book "Neuropath" by R. Scott Bakker: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3170310-neuropath
SaaS abuse unfortunately isn’t new.

On our SaaS app, we had to introduce a Captcha when adding users to an account. Spammers would write scripts to continually add, send welcome emails, and then delete users (getting around the 5 free user limit). They would place their spam in the account name, and the users first and last name.

Before we caught it, they were sending thousands of emails a minute via our paid-for upstream transactional email provider.

If it’s free, it’ll get abused eventually.
Thanks! And I read The Road Not Taken years ago when I was considering leaving San Francisco and it turns out I'd taken the completely wrong message away from it. Thanks for pointing that out
Oh yes I forgot the kings are 2 already.
Was on Crete just before Covid hit. People there told me it is more or less impossible to reconstruct most of the language because there just isn't enough base material for references. He explicitly told me not to believe people that claim they would be able to translate. Although he probably just meant tourist scams and this is on another level of course.

Wouldn't recommend Knossos, a bit too oriented at tourists, but there are other ruins that are well worth the visit. I believe there is a picture of a women in the building in the picture, but it was very crudely restored. They just used the next IKEA picture frame they could find. But I wonder what archive they mean when they mention the sources. Cannot have been that much, because the area is rather small.
Absolutely no expert, but afaik stability is not about the market going up, but closer to a measure on how much the participants in the market agrees on where it's heading. It might often mean that it's more stable when an index like S&P 500 is going up, but I don't think you can compare them.

I'm prepared to be heavily corrected by financial experts here.
Cyberinsurance giant AXA hit by ransomware attack after shunning ransom payments
That was until 15-20 years ago.

*nix OSes may have been as far superior to Windows as you can imagine, but the development ecosystem certainly wasn't. There were Delphi, VB and other RAD tools for Windows, with tons of GUI and general purpose libraries and toolkits. Bun on *nix you basically had just GCC and vim/emacs. There were no GitHub, no npm, no AWS, nothing. If you'd compare TCO of an enterprise app plus necessary infrastructure, the Windows-flavored one would come a clear winner. Even mixed environments were too much of a hassle, due to poor interoperability.
Yes! I can't wait till its gone altogether. The whole AMP experience from an end user, really sucked. Pick a reason, but nearly every article always has something broken, missing, or misrepresented. Fifty percent of the time I would either need to click the original link, or give up on the content.
Semi-related: Jillian C. York’s recent book “Silicon Values” talks a bit about the “digital apartheid” in Palestine. Media companies like Facebook often have no presence in the occupied territories and let the Israeli office and policies apply to Palestinian accounts, often resulting in censorship of war crimes.

https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Values-Future-Surveillance-Ca...
The US has ensured it gets its own share of the pie with jurisdictions like Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and Delaware. The OECD offshore grey/black list is just a farce that ensured dark money moved from the traditional "Hollywood-jurisdictions" like Switzerland, Vanuatu and Cayman to places that are considered "clean".

Here is an excerpt from Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World[1]

> American corporations could cook up a version of what was known as a “Dutch Sandwich”—set up an oﬀshore ﬁnance subsidiary in the Netherlands Antilles, then use it to issue tax-free Eurobonds and send the proceeds up to the American parent. The United States could argue that it did not have to tax this income from the Antilles, under the rules of its tax treaty with this former Dutch colony via its postcolonial relationship with the Netherlands.
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service could easily have decided that the Dutch Sandwich was a sham and taxed the
income. But it looked the other way. “These were Eurobonds, bearer bonds, which were virtually impossible to
tax,” explained Michael J. McIntyre, a top U.S. expert on international tax, who was one of very few people in the
United States to have opposed this at the time. “You British people were quite happy about (the tax-free, secretive Eurobond markets). And we wanted in. We wanted to attract the hot money too.”

> The United States sells ﬁnancial secrecy not just at the federal level but at the state level too. Delaware is the biggest state provider of oﬀshore corporate secrecy, but Nevada and Wyoming are the most opaque: They allow
bearer shares, a vehicle of choice for mobsters and drugs smugglers, and they are particularly lax on allowing
company directors and other oﬃcers to be named, hiding the identities of the real owners. Nevada does not share tax
or incorporation information with the federal government and does not require a corporation to report where it does
business. The IRS has no way of knowing whether a Nevada corporation has ﬁled a federal tax return. Arkansas,
Oklahoma, and Oregon are also routinely used for fraud by eastern Europeans and Russians, and, as noted, Texas and
Florida are havens for illicit Latin American wealth. In the 1990s, the U.S. government gave millions in aid to
help the former Soviet Union countries improve the security at their nuclear power plants. Much of it went missing. When the U.S. Department of Justice went looking for the money, investigators ﬁnally tracked it to anonymous shell
companies in Pennsylvania and Delaware. Most cases involving ﬁnancial market manipulations that the FBI has
studied have involved U.S. shell companies from these states. The notorious “merchant of death” Viktor Bout,
inspiration for the character played by Nicholas Cage in the Hollywood ﬁlm Lord of War, alleged arms runner to the
Taliban and other murderous organizations around the globe, operated through businesses in Texas, Delaware, and
Florida.

[1] source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands:_Tax_Havens_a...
That sort of thinking brought down the USSR, nothing was paid for and the commie elite sold shit for US $ and wasted it.
In time this system would have no oil as well as no $$ and all the pipes would be trashed...
> its unfair and destroys local competition i.e a Starbucks vs mom's coffee bar.

Do you think tax compliance is higher in small local businesses than large mega corps? Based on my experience in the US, tax fraud is much easier and more common with small businesses. Think about how many small shops don't even have a proper point of sales system, encourage cash, and hire under the table. Stackbucks would not be able to get away with that

> The agency [IRS] estimates that it collects $458 billion a year less in taxes from all Americans than the government is actually due. Most of that “tax gap” is income that goes unreported, and the biggest chunk of it, by far — $125 billion — is individual business income.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/16/business/smallbusiness/wh...
Depends on the org. It definitely makes a diff to look professional.

Keep at it. Thats the secret. With covid everyone has their hands full. If you are that guy who shows up every 2 days for a month or two someone will remember you and decide to respond. Otherwise the chance of forgetting about you and your mail within 2 minutes is quite high inside a busy workplace.

Best way ofcourse, is to get someone you know to put you in touch with someone inside. Then you spend time circulating till you find someone with authority to take the decision. Unless you are extremely lucky or your project is extremely interesting the whole process can take months (depending on what type of data it is).
Alpha Zero and the other open source deep learning Go engines seems to be able to give 2 or 3 stones handicap to the top human players.

In my experience, between two strong players:

2 stones means "I can lose some even games against you but not often"

3 stones means "I won't lose a single even game unless I'm drunk"

4 stones means "You really didn't understand this game yet"
well, the European rule is that the HQ of a company for tax purpose is where its orders are actually coming from. I don't have this vibe here.
Speaking of dads and third shift, I'm fully convinced that working 3rd shift for as many years as he did contributed too him developing diabetes.
Securing a swift return: how a simple brick can help migratory birds
Texas recently shut down their power grid when it got cold out because it was cheaper than weatherproofing or suffering the regulations to interconnect with other neighbouring states.
Its pretty much pointless though, if you can't move all your revenue to an ip holding company, you just have to make it slightly more realistic.

In case of Starbucks: they move a ton of their profit to a coffee bean exporter from Switzerland which they own themselves. And how should a government say how expensive those beans can be?

Any company can outsource part of their revenue to a subsidiary in a different country like that and it would be extremely hard to encode in law when they wouldn't be allowed to do this "because of taxation". Uber could for example move their cloud management costs to some company in a low tax country, or maybe have their developers outsourced to some low tax country. How would you decide that is "valid" outsourcing vs "tax cheating" outsourcing?
I've never realised that hallucinations could occur so early, comparatively speaking, into sleep deprivation. I been awake for far longer on a few occasions (longest was a little over 110 hours), and only experienced minor visual effects (trails behind moving objects). I wonder to what degree it differs between people.

Mentally though, I was a bit of a mess. I was more or less whilst I was focusing on the thing I was working on, but as soon as I stopped, everything just felt muddy and unclear. I wasn't even sure I was going to find my way to a building I'd walked to multiple times a week for the last three years.
What you're saying is not entirely false, but it is naive at best.

Ireland, the Netherlands & co are fully aware of these tax loopholes, even if we give them the benefit of the doubt that they were not originally intentional. They like the arrangement because it gives them a tiny - compared tot he dodged taxes - tax benefit for basically free.
Actually Ireland demands that some percentage of workforce plus some percentage of revenue is in Ireland.

So no these are sometimes very large offices, and a bunch of actual business is also routed through these offices.

Unless you mean in the Netherlands, yes, there you can have a post office/lawyer office, something along those lines.
Why? I have no problem with the non-sarcastic interpretation of the comment you're referring to.
> There's no need for that when no one profits from a false arrest or false conviction.

You underestimate the power of racism, homophobia and other things that drive some people, plus the feeling of having power over other people (and also, if a crime has been committed, the drive to make culprits out of innocents if police cannot find the real ones).

Sure, the US has some amazingly broken systems that seem to foster endemic corruption, but even without them it’s not enough to guarantee that a police force behaves appropriately (we just had a case in france where at least two people have done 1.5 years and 4 years in detention based on a made-up testimony forced by police officers caught on video, and the police unions and the far-right are still screaming that justice is too lenient and the liberation is a scandal).
That's a great page.
I'm always looking for fact based news (they say evidence based). Having it as a git repository that people can clone and push to is a great way of doing it.
Thanks.
One Month of Building GoodJobs
I've seen the same. It starts off faster and then as the business grows and features are added the problems scale up. Some symptoms I've seen on projects I've been asked to look over include but aren't limited to throwing Redis around when an in-memory structure would normally suffice because Node is too slow, scaling to 200 CPU's and using up at least 200GB gigs of RAM for a single servioce, when a 25 instances with 8 CPU's, 25GB of RAM could do the same job and cost a lot less, scared to write their own data structures/algo's that may be required as their business scales, etc.
Lol. The government provides stable society which allows for any company to function. Without government, Musks and Jobs of the world wouldn't even get to their first million, as they'd just be robbed and killed on their way there.
>> "highly problematic individual" is as lazy as saying someone's "bad" or "evil" just in more modern wording.

> People tend to react in a less that perfectly polite manner when being called "lazy"

Parent poster didn't call you (as a person) lazy. They called the wording you chose as lazy. FWIW, I agree with that characterization. It's lazy to just call people "problematic" without bothering to specify what is problematic about them (which you have since done in a subsequent post).
"Did you know that marketers lobbied for underground design and architecture? Long labyrinths and slow escalators allow marketers to exhibit hundreds of hypnotising billboards." I did not. Are there any evidences for this? Tried google something but found nothing.

Marketers must be really powerful if they can affect the way underground stations are designed, I thought design is done to be as cheap as possible, since digging all those tunnels is expensive anyway, so making it even more expensive by digging some more tunnels to make them longer sounds indeed horribly.

Next:

"Angel is the station with the longest escalator in London. The vertical rise is 27.5 meters and the total length is 61 meters, making it 3rd longest in Europe. Flashing pictures don't bring me joy but the long escalator reminds me of the time when I was living in St. Petersburg. The average underground escalator in there is deeper and longer than the average escalator in London, and probably anywhere else. "

Ok, so marketers were so powerful also in Soviet Union, as most of the Underground was built then. This gets really interesting. I would never say communists fell into ads tech stuff too.

There are obvious shortcomings of ads tech, like intrusive tracking, gathering information that can be used against people (to sell them products for a higher price, refuse job, renting flat, selling insurance, etc.). But article is not mentioning that, only the fact that "ads are selling a dream".

Well, they are, believe or not, on the markets of ancient Rome, Babylon or Cuzco sellers were also selling the dream of having the tastiest vegetables, the most durable pots, the best spears and daggers.