skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Then be indignant I guess? Countries pressuring each other to do things dates back as far as the existence of countries. And it isn't like this is a broadly unpopular idea either. Most people do actually believe that multinational corporation should pay their fair share of taxes.
True... But it makes you suspicious...
I worry that this may lead to an embrace/extend/extinguish by Google given that they have a tremendous influence through Chrome.

After all what's their angle here? Almost every browser extension under the sun has a Chrome version due to its immense market share. It seems like a good way for them to later potentially push for changes that would make, say, ad blocking easier (under the guise of performance or some such).

I consede that it's a bit tinfoil-hatty, but I have very little faith in Google these days.
It depends. In my country there are examples of employers who were paying extra their employees (who were not taxed due to their pity salaries) and were requiring them to return part of their salary as cash.
More taxes is always good, can’t wait for 100% taxes so I can use my gucci bag voucher while playing ps5 at home
Also worth noting that the Nigerian government has explicitly been using China/the CCP as an inspiration for its information & communications policy for a while now.

Alas, they're not interested in copying the economic growth or infrastructure development to go with the authoritarianism. Not even a crumb of carrot to go with the stick.
Thank you for the clear explanation. I know little about graphics, but this was easy to follow.
India will be next to ban Twitter if Twitter decides to NOT abide by social media laws made by the country government which other social media companies have promised to / are working towards.

Sorry, Key context was missing.

Personal opinion: I do not think they'll outright ban it, if they do, there will be some change in public opinion for sure.
Note that apparently attestations just validate that a certain bank account had a certain number at a certain time, which obviously does not account for loan obligations. In Tether's case

> https://www.singlelunch.com/2021/05/19/the-tether-ponzi-sche...

> [Tether was] Failing to complete an audit and settling on an attestation “for transparency”. The morning of the attestation, tether moved $380m from sister company bitfinex into a bank account to pass the verification
Physician Associate. To apply for PA school, one must have health care work experience.

https://www.aapa.org/career-central/become-a-pa/
You do realize the average lifespan is about 80, and people have kids in their 20/30s, which puts the typical age of inheritance in the 50/60s, who themselves are already near retirement age. It’s not as if you have a bunch of 18 YO using inheritance to gain edge. There are taxes on gifts, so parents can’t just give their kids more then $15k without massive taxation. Hell, you can’t even invest more than $2k/year tax free for college savings.
No it’s not. Where trans women should be allowed to go is far from decided in our society. Combat sports? Sports generally? Bathrooms? It’s nothing to do with an irrational fear or hatred of people who suffer with gender dysmorphia. Comparing it to black vs white segregation is ludicrous.

It seems like a complex question and you just being outraged and wanting to instantly shut down the debate as if I’m a terrible transphobic person is very toxic behaviour. Shaming as an argument tactic might work on weak people when you have backup in the room in places like Berkeley, but it’s bullying. Fact is, it’s far from a consensus in our society, unlike racial segregation. Call me the same as a racist? Fuck off :)
Not an expert on this part, but I'd imagine that problem isn't having an API, it's more that running native executables is the problem if you can't sandbox them or limit their resource consumption. Also, relative to running Javascript, their base resource utilization per tab is significantly worse (especially for Java or .NET-based ones that have a base resource utilization from the VM)
They can't afford a legal department and the paperwork and compliance involved in setting up and maintaining a bunch of international subsidiary companies.

It only makes sense with large amounts of profits to launder through such a system.
Do you happen to have a link to that research handy?
Yeah, pretty much this.
Yes, they will - as they did with Swiss bank secrecy [0].

It's actually quite simple: if you want to do business with the G7 countries - with close to 40% of the world economy [1] - you follow their rules.

While 60% is a lot, it's a much different blend of markets to work with - hundreds of other countries, legislations, etc. - and it would be a much larger effort to cover.

So: wether I like it or not the truth is: if the G7 countries agree on something, other countries will follow.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-secrecy-idUSKCN1MF1...
[1] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/groups/Group-of-7-...
There’s no requirement to get a “certificate as a farmer” and you can get European subsidies to fund converting fields to forrests. The only thing you can’t do is build more housing on the fields, because everyone in power in Denmark is doing everything they can to fight affordable housing.
R's such a fantastic language and is leagues ahead of all others for data work.

I do however recommend picking up data.table along the way because that is easily one of the best reasons to continue using R today.
This is just to make the silly socialists happy, we all know that friends of the government will get tax rebates and not pay any taxes just as today.
The idea that companies should be able to control governments is a very american idea, and is pretty much not accepted anywhere else.

When a website actively supports destabilizing forces against a nation, the least that nation (and it's people) can do is to block said website.
Ye. It is like those adds in Android apps that happen to load where the button you try to click was.

It is obvious someone at Google is trying to game some metric with accidental clicks.
Twitter Ban in Nigeria

31 points, 19 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27404125
If anything, I'd say HN and reddit (or at least circa 2014 reddit, I haven't gone there since then) should be reminded of the opposite.

Skepticism is fine, and critical thinking should always be on with no exceptions, but HN is more prone to armchair quarterback bleeding edge science with no qualifications to do so (and predictably comical results), rather than uncritically accept results.

I myself am more likely to do the former than the latter.
what does it mean "opened directly"?
It's best to define these words with feelings, and I feel like plugins are like a little box that is free to do "plugin" things within the box, but is otherwise merely co-existing within the browser, rather than integrating. Things like Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc. always did their own thing. Extensions are often tightly integrated into browser functionality, with interactions potentially happening in both directions. Custom buttons on the toolbar or context menu, with extensive access to your browser profile and perhaps cross-cutting concerns.

Another way to think of it is something you just plug in and use, like a vacuum cleaner. But an extension needs access to the browser API and may entangle itself.

I'm sure there are exceptions to those boundaries, such as Javascript being enabled to interact with Flash applications, but a plugin might operate without any real crossover with the browser functionality beyond existing in a window.
> At the moment Twitter is freely accessible in Nigeria.

It very much is not and has not been (fully, freely) accessible since around midnight today local time. See https://twitter.com/netblocks/status/1401075546604322817 for example.
another example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2Xb2GFK2yc

There is probably a lot more out there, just found it curious because youtube already have their video ads running in parallel.
> So how do you imagine you disagree with me?

Ah, ok.

Then, I imagine that you really think it's fine for people to do politics, as long as it's politics that you agree with.

You simply see politics that you don't agree with as an "activism first" attitude.
The way the government creates incentives is by creating loopholes

https://smartasset.com/taxes/tax-loopholes

"The basic definition of a tax loophole is a provision in the tax code that allows taxpayers to reduce their tax liability."

And corporations readily exploit loopholes (or incentives if you prefer) to dramatically reduce their tax burden below 15%. See, eg, here:

https://itep.org/amazon-has-record-breaking-profits-in-2020-...

Amazon has enjoyed an effective tax rate of 4.7% over the last 10 years by using tax breaks, tax credits, and depreciation, that have nothing to do with offshoring cash.
A flat tax on business without deduction seems like it would squash smaller players that must devote a larger percentage of their profits to fixed costs.
> All I remember from that class is hours every week googling unreadable python pukes from R studio (because apparently everything data mining/ML related in R is actually just python)

I’m curious what libraries you were using, I’ve had to go into the source of quite a few popular libraries and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered Python. Lots of C and it’s derivatives, lots of Stan and FORTRAN, but I don’t think I’ve seen Python yet.
Best Practices for Building a Microservices Architecture
In this video, we shall be looking into some best practices that will help us build great microservices.
Scrolling through their incident feed, it seems to be a bit more frequent than "extremely rare".

Remember that critical industry is a sector where patching software is viewed as risky, because changing anything when it works is seen as unnecessary, and would often have weeks or months of pre-deployment testing. They work on a different time-base to the IT world.

The ability to do a "bypass" is nice in theory, but the need for this option will resonate with the "old guard", who will be able to use this external dependency to keep it out.

Personally I prefer smartcard-based solutions for MFA, since you can do all verification offline without requiring any third party to inject themselves into the chain. I found a good example of a vulnerability this year in Duo that just shows their validation logic is complex enough that one user was able to pass 2FA as another user [1].

That's probably your second worst case scenario, with the worst being an outsider being able to pass 2FA. A well-implemented smartcard scheme shouldn't fail in this way, as you're distributing validation logic to each device, rather than centralising it and relying on a "trusted outsider" to give a "yes or no".

[1] https://sensepost.com/blog/2021/duo-two-factor-authenticatio...
Probably better than a huge lump of vibrating plastic plummeting out of the sky at them
Our society is not capitalist. New currency is constantly being printed out of nothing and pumped into the system. That's not a free market. Businesses just follow the money. It can be as inefficient as society allows it to become. As long as most people can ignore the reality.

If the banks were only loaning people money to collect sea shells, then the entire global economy would end up revolving around sea shell collection.

Then some rational people would eventually write books claiming that seashell collection is a bullshit job, we don't need so many seashells... Then people like you would post comments saying "That's not true, obviously we need seashells because capitalism would never allow for such inefficiency."
Why bother running analytics then if you can get everything you need from wikipedia?
Genuinely curious, what makes this different from the factor.io, satisfactory, etc.

I feel like the sandbox/simulation genre is extremely over saturated.
But that’s the rub, a job is bullshit iff the worker doing the job considers it bullshit. Also, it’s a matter of degrees. You don’t have some part of your job that you honestly don’t consider to be bullshit? A meeting that could have been an email? Some interaction with HR? You’ve never once been effected by political infighting or careerism?

If so I’d love to hear what you do.
What you described is a common phenomenon in stats / data mining / psychometrics / econometrics. They all need students to use certain programing languages, such as SAS / Stata / R / Python, but they don't really spend time to teach those programing languages. I guess this could also be the same for MATLAB in math?
> I could go into a 30 page essay on what might be considered within the category of 'proper'

I’d read that essay!
"Plugin" generally refers to adding custom code to the browser itself, as a dynamic library or something, with the full ability to do anything the browser can do (i.e., it's equivalent to downloading an application). Plugins are usually written in a language like C.

"Extension" generally refers to code given limited access to certain APIs, a bit more generous than the access given to an individual web page but much closer to that model. Extensions are usually written with web languages like JS and HTML.

The multi-decade security trainwreck that was Flash was possible because it was a plugin - both in that bugs that corrupted the code could let an attacker run unrestricted code on your machine as if they'd gotten you to run a malicious application, and in that Flash was on its own for implementing rules like "can this website download files from this other website," so it was often possible to break the web's security model via Flash. Extensions go through the browser core to do all their work, just like JS on a website.

Conversely - Flash allowed doing a whole lot of cool things back when the web platform was nowhere near as capable. An extension can't directly access, say, the clipboard; it has to go through a browser API to do that. But back when there was no browser API, Flash could access the clipboard just like any other program on your computer.
Am very political. I've witnessed this many times. It's a recognized problem.

The new hotness in activist circles is empowerment, helping people find their own voices, making the space for them to be heard.

Change is painful, slow. But it's happening.
There's a fixed cost to administer such arrangements.

But the system is not fixed - people do start exploiting these arrangements, and once the number reaches critical levels they get whacked. An example in the UK was "employee benefit trusts", which were used by a lot of celebrities and footballers. https://www.rossmartin.co.uk/disguised-remuneration-zone/302...

You need to be big enough to (a) pay for enough legal bulletproofing and (b) have political cover against the law going after you.
Doesn't this already apply though? I don't know the details here, but Steam seems to apply both state- and country-specific taxes at checkout. Steam is not a multinational corporation as far as I know.
The main point is, that when you view everything monetary, you might miss out a bit of life in general.

The guys in the article had fun, doing what they did.
Its similarly difficult to find examples of competent propaganda ; because anything easily labeled propaganda is not competent.

Scientific and logical principles of "evidence" to not apply to human political systems, b/c the method of inquiry are too compromised by the power the system wields over them. Even information about Afghanistan comes through via the government. But today? There is us nothing modern the government wants you to know about.
A Brief History of Browser Extensibility
I already said that the pandemic would force the entire world to lean to the left in terms of politics. It's inevitable.

I'm very happy about that decision, but I'm not really confident it will lead to something. I'm also a bit cynic that it took a pandemic to make countries realize they need money.

I'm also waiting to see if government are really planning to fight against tax havens.

The problem is that it's impossible to protest against those small Island tax havens because they're just too far away. Maybe protesters could block flights or boats that go to those tax havens?
That’s the thing with Walmart, they aren’t shady enough to play the same game. Once you break out of the Amazon bubble of faith based “Amazon is amazing!”, it’s just retail.

Once you get out of the Amazon funnel, why go to Walmart? There’s a hundred retailers that sell genuine KitchenAid mixers. Pick the one with the best price, or color scheme you prefer.
> Probably the best solution is a minimum tax worldwide.

Wouldn't that make companies pay taxes in countries they are based in (as opposed to where they make money)?

Anyway this could be the push that the EU needed to start their own Silicon Valley.
Right, so the question is will those 'deductions' still be allowed or not? If so, then get ready for endless deductions from countries that want lower tax rates than 15%.
Finally a politician (Joe Biden) is fixing one of the major area of the rigged economy. If workers auto-deposited their paycheck overseas and didn't pay taxes, they would be in jail. If small businesses did fraud that their profits were over seas, they would be in jail.

Our politicians have been selling us out, as big corporations did this. Big corporations are doing fraud at saying their profits are happening in these other countries.

Hopefully Joe Biden can actually fix this. Big corporations will fight him hard.
I am interested in knowing which readers are technical enough to know or care what cURL is, but not technical enough to understand that the vulnerability isn’t in cURL itself.
You are using the wrong DEX then.
Pro tip: Dont use one that runs on a PoW system. PoW chant be cheap.
Found the APL programmer
From long and unfortunate experience I don't really expect better but I am honestly begging non-Nigerians (specifically westerners to be very honest) to have a shred of empathy for people outside your comfort zones when commenting on foreign affairs.

I dearly wish I could have lived the sort of life that would make a social media platform removing people's posts or banning their accounts the great injustice of the day. I don't begrudge anyone that privilege but for goodness' sake try not to project your pet peeves on situations you barely know anything about. Nothing on this earth should bring you to the point of applauding a government headed by a literal ~former~ military dictator (and erstwhile genocidaire) because you are mad about a damn forum, especially when said government is in the business of killing its citizenry (both small and large scale).
You’re gonna need tens of thousands of something. Classes, functions, functors/monads/combinators/whatever you guys are always going on about
Haters will always hate JP. It's fine.
Blame crappy software and bad security for ransomware, not Bitcoin
It gives Google an ingress to weaken adblocking and privacy controls in other browsers.
I do wonder if we wouldn't be better off eliminating corporation tax entirely.

The revenue of a corporation can, roughly, be:

1. Spent on goods or services from another company (including freelancers, contractors, etc.)

2. Spent on rent

3. Spent on capital purchases

4. Spent on wages

5. Spent on debt repayment or other forms of financing

6. Paid out in dividends

7. Spent on share buybacks

8. Invested in something else

Items 1-5 are all good things that we want companies to do, and corporation tax is normally applied after this spending is accounted for. Items 6 and 7 ought to be taxed, and frequently are (dividends and buybacks create income for individuals who will pay tax on that income). Item 8 is a bit vaguer, but probably shouldn't be taxed in most cases (if we're worried about companies parking cash in very low-risk assets, then super-low yields are effectively a tax on that anyway).

All that the corporation tax adds to this picture is the creation of work in tax avoidance services, and an unjust inequality between those firms that can afford those services and are structured to take advantage of the rules, and those that can not and are not.

It's not obvious to me that corporation tax /can/ be fixed, and so it may be better simply to scrap it and replace it with something more difficult to dodge.

EDIT: formatting
It's a fancy word for raw files.
Essentially countries are forming a cartel to set bottom income tax. Forming cartels by private companies to „fix” prices is illegal, but countries are free to do it.

However, the actual mechanics of that tax is hard:

1. Countries can still do subsidies, but avoid touching income tax.

2. Taxing by income where revenue is generated is hard to compute. It would make sense to enforce it only on big multinationals. E.g. Big tech pay income taxes proportional to revenue from different countrues or/and where they employees are located.

3. Looking at statistics the ideal income tax floor should be around 19%.
Is it though? I personally would argue that most of the population is not tinfoil enough.

To me, it is fascinating, and terrifying, how quickly narratives change and people seem to take that vhange in stride.

Admittedly, it does not help that I am now watching mr robot.
The internet is not a person. People centralize power using the internet. It could be used for the opposite too. Sadly, most people believe it's for the greater good.
Putting the safety nets in place so the nations can gear up against corporations when time comes due to reap back everything that has been poured int the economy during the pandemic. Your can’t really raise interest rates and taxes if corporations will just move to Ireland. And you can’t fault Ireland for accepting them with open armes in times when they need money.
Google's pages are some of the worst for this.

It's not hard to build pages without these problems but everyone is way too caught up in fancy web design they ignore UX.
This is their charter: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/blob/main/charter.md

And the twitter announcement from the co-chair: https://twitter.com/xeenon/status/1400862543673921536

I'm cautiously optimistic that this will work well, but somewhat concerned that this will cause Manifest V3's de facto limits on ad blocking and the like to become endemic. It will be interesting to see how they balance "compatibility with popular existing extensions" against their foundational focus on security and privacy.
> Two demonstrably true observations:

> - China actively works to remove mentions about the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

When you say “China”, don’t you think you are being unnecessarily ambiguous?

Any Chinese national can identify with the word “China”, yet unlike Western nationals they’d have absolutely no say in these policy matters, even indirectly through an election.

Think about the effect you want your message to have. With careless phrasing, some of the audience of the message might have two choices: either be left feeling put down in a non-actionable way, or start taking offence—which, if we simplistically pretend there are just two sides in this issue, might mean your message would end up slowly fuelling the opposite side throughout its lifetime on the Web (which would probably be many years).

I personally am trying to be more precise and stick to “CCP” in such context, and in this situation support the sentiment in dang’s note.
Elegant Terns are considered 'Near Threatened' - so they are not at imminent risk of extinction. However, the wetland - Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve - where they live is home to other species that may not be so secure.

> I wouldn't discard a deliberated action it somebody wants to develop the area.

If we gradually lose all of the migration endpoints the species will eventually suffer.
That semantic/legal quirk stuff will get harder and harder as the government’s need for funds grows:

https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2021/02/new-tr...

The only protection I would count on is if you were high up politically, like Putin or a Saudi prince.