skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a nano sized business to cover some server costs in Finland. Here are the EU rules as I understand them:

* Selling goods

- If selling to private persons in European Union fiscal territory (EUFT), add 24% (Finnish VAT).

- If selling to businesses in EUFT, no VAT.

- If selling to anyone outside EUFT, no VAT, but you may be liable to collect and pay VAT to the customer's country's tax authorities.

- Note that there are separate customs rules!

* Selling electronic services

- If selling to private persons in EUFT, you need to register to the customer's country's tax authorities and add the customer's country's VAT, and then pay it later to the customer's country's tax authorities. EXCEPT if you only have an office in one country and you are selling to another EUFT country, and you only sell <= 10,000 € worth of services, then you can use your own country's VAT like normal.

o Or you can register to so called VAT MOSS (Value Added Tax Mini One Stop Shop) where you use the customer's country's VAT but you don't need to register or pay to their tax authorities, instead you send a quarterly report to your own country's tax authorities about all the sales you have done, then you pay them a calculated sum, and they will divide the paid VAT to all the countries based on the sales. Of course there is now a new VAT OSS that is somehow different from MOSS.

- If selling to businesses in EUFT, use reverse VAT (buyer is liable for VAT).

- If selling to anyone outside EUFT, no VAT, but you may be liable to collect and pay VAT to the customer's country's tax authorities.

Now I'm not a tax lawyer, so this is all just my best understanding based on our tax authority's website. I just wanted to get some money back to pay for my ~20 €/mo server costs, and I had to learn all of this. I will be very interested in what this Stripe Tax can do to remove my headaches. :) Of course, since my revenue is so tiny (and thus the money I bring to Stripe), I can't access all of their services AFAIK. And I'm mostly one chargeback away from losing major revenue due to the 15 € penalty. :D

EDIT: Turns out I have no idea how to format lists on HN.
It looks like they’re adding interruption levels with iOS 15: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

See “Helping People Manage Notifications” section.
The impact of a lack of mathematical education on brain development
Almost certainly[1], my grandad caught it in hospital, then infected most of the rest of the family (6/7 people) when he was discharged.

He was admitted with suspected sepsis, and tested negative on admission. He had a new cough when he was discharged, but we didn't think much of it as he had COPD so periods of coughing weren't unusual. A few days later, he was readmitted with a recurrence of his original symptoms, but this time his admission test was positive. Six of the other family members tested positive the next day, and developed symptoms over the following days.

[1] The only other person in the house who hadn't been isolating subsequently tested negative. Everyone else had been nowhere but home for at least the proceeding two weeks, so the chance of another vector seems remote.
Wholesome, well adjusted peers to talk and engage in enjoyable activities with.

A safe, clean, and comfortable living environment.

Enough food.

The confidence in oneself, or their support network, to truly believe without fear, that they won’t end up back out on the streets.

A well paying job that isn’t dehumanizing, traumatizing, exploitative, or abusive.
Audrey, Alexa, HAL: A History of Automatic Speech Recognition
Hoover Dam reservoir hits record low, in sign of extreme western U.S. drought
Do they offer a way to set a final price including taxes?

In many jurisdictions your advertised price (e.g. for German users on your german page) needs to include taxes.
Yes, it's complicated.

All analogies melt if they're pushed loudly enough. And all models are wrong, though some are useful.

The notion of a work has utility, it respects the notion of different forms, variations, and evolution with time. If you're looking at, say, multiple editions of a book, or even of something much more dynamic, say, source code or a Wiki entry, yes the specific content may change at any point, and stands through many versions, but those are connected through edit events. A good revision control system will capture much of that, if the history interests you.

Ultimately, I'd argue that "work" is defined in relationships and behaviours. A record intermediates between author(s) and reader(s) (or listeners, viewers, etc.), concerning some informational phenomenon, perhaps fictional, perhaps factual, perhaps itself an action (as in a marriage record, divorce decree, or court decision). The work in its total context matters. (At which point we discover most works have very little context...).

The file-hashes-to-work mapping is all but certain to play a large role, but even that is only a means of indicating a relationship that is established by some other means.

The notion of selecting an arbitrary set of ngram tuples to establish highly probable relationsip is likely to remain at least one of those means.

And yes, the incremental / tuned approach is also likely a useful notion.

Paul Otlet had a lot to say about "documents", though I think "records" is a better term for what he had in mind, as any persistent symbolic artefact: book, painting, music, photograph, film, etc.
Trains leak more
This is all true, but reads more like a PM-type role, which is absolutely critical.

I understood GP's point as more directed towards "pure Eng. manager" type positions, often when there's also already a PM present. And I've witnessed first hand how his criticism rings true in that case.
My last isp used to to cycle ip addresses at 1am every night. The modem would disconnect and reconnect every device on the network.
A Pattern Language is applicable when putting lines on paper or nails in wood, i.e. actually designing and/or building. Though interesting, A Timeless Way of Building tends to be mostly useful for complaining about the way something has been built. Nobody talks about the third book in the trilogy The Oregon Experiment because the resulting buildings don't look like what people want to be the result of A Timeless Way of Building.

Anyway, in the actual practice of architecture, A Pattern Language is by far the best of the set. There are other books that make approximately the same case as Timeless Way of Building. [1] Most of it's fame is from standing in relation to A Pattern Language.

[1] e.g. How Buildings Learn, The Timeless Way of Seeing, Structure of the Ordinary, etc.
This is true but I've also seen developers add ten percent more revenue to an organization on a rewrite of an existing billing system and it wasn't due to any insights from management. It was many conversations with key business users and developers. Management knew enough to step back and loosen the reigns. Everyone can make a huge difference on a project, and a team of non hero's that just care about learning the business and the craft can deliver greatness.
Subtle and not so subtle. I'm pretty sure someone's implemented Tetris in it.
> It's also important to remember that many "simple"
operations, such as "print the date one hour from
now", or "read the user's name" hide huge complexity
encoded in human context and history.

obviously true. but are those operations more complex than, say, what a modern cpu does? think of the effectively infinite number of details of computation that the cpu i am using to
type this message is hiding from me. i don't need to know. it's all taken care of. but for some reason, we can't embed "print the date one hour from now" into the operating system, so that particular bit of code only has to be written once and then reused infinitely, like my cpu's microcode?

programmers know why this is harder than it looks, of course. but is it really unsolvable? i hope not.
isn't knowing every member of a cluster and the leader a core function of raft?

I feel like this post is leaving out critical pieces of information, like why the URL can't be deterministic or data about comparisons of different approaches.

At what cluster size and concurrency does asking every node break down?

I have been meaning to take a closer look at rqlite and want to understand more about it.
These are sad times when someone who wants to "hack" and learn and disassemble and reassemble and just "understand" gets shit on "hacker news". "Limited world view"? Really? They are the one with the "Limited world view"?
Partnering with Anki
Ah man, I’m so glad this exists. One of my biggest concerns in monetising side-projects has always been running afoul of sales tax law, and this should hopefully help to assuage some of those concerns.
All of that is completely valid and I appreciate it. But you are addressing a group of people most of which are already overbooked and have too much on their plate every day. How viable is it to preach this approach to them?
Hold up.

Let's go back to the end of the story, where Satoshi was found, not by the work of a community coming together in peace and harmony, but by creepy-ass Clearview-AI wannabe spyware that was fed the original photo and matched it cross the collective surveillance of third-party photos on the internet.

Does that not strike anybody as a little bit unsettling?
The real question here is: what insights do computing professionals, whom work with neural networks or parallel distributed processing as their day job, bring to the table?

The sort of reasoning that neuroscientists are struggling with is that very same kind of reasoning that computer scientists and practitioners use when thinking about ANN/PDP and deep learning.
The Value of Standards-Compliant Authentication
> the entire concept of making money off binary blobs was inherently evil

I feel like all of this is trying to escape economic realities that someone has to do the work to make those binary blobs and that person deserves some sort of compensation. There's a line somewhere between supporting Bill Gates and supporting rank and file developers, and I don't purport to know where that line is, but I don't understand how "all software should be freely written by volunteers" is sustainable. Perhaps that's not the position advocated?
>Don't try to think about genomics in programming terms.

At some point, some Newton person will figure it. It always happen.

As for now, it might be interesting to understand why exactly the analogy between genomics and programming fails. It might bring interesting insights into both fields.

So why not try to think about?
But that’s discounted if they’re not attractive.
Exploring the Vasulka PDF Archive
Products and services in the real world have marginal costs.

Digital products and services have near-zero marginal cost, so they pay.
Side question but what solutions exist for managing withholding? That presents a huge barrier to entry for certain business models, even more so when you have users living in multiple tax jurisdictions.
New posts get down modded randomly for whatever reason (iirc it was to disrupt some bot karma farming). Wait a day and the post will almost always be back to to the default (1) + any user mods.
Said like someone who has never dealt with clinical tolerance before. I've been up in that territory before. Even that was done under the regular visits to a therapist. I've dedicated myself to suffering through learning how to cope with a lower, highly tolerance dampened dose. I will say there are days I miss it terribly. It's a bit like having an overclocked capacity to process information and learn. The multi-month adaptation process to the decreased dose is quite literally like being brain-starved. You want to think, you know you could at one point but you just can't get things to fire as fast as they used to.

You dampen your ability to forge paths of understanding in novel contexts, but the trade off is you're cut off emotionally from anyone around you because no one else is holding onto or working with the context you can throw around. When the impedance mismatch is that high, misanthropy is a hazard one has to actively decultivate. The practical upshot of coming down from it after acquiring your context/understanding though is you tend to generalize what you learned and render it more communicable. The anhedonia is also a #$&-+.

Point being, the medical literature is based on averages. Not everybody lives in the hump of a Gaussian distribution.
To be clear: my criticisms are primarily about taxis vs car ownership. Uber just cranks the taxi problems up to 11.
Why would the investigation budget be capped at $600k? Those criminals probably won't stop there and who knows for what they are using the profits.
> Stripe and Swish solve different problems. Swish is mobile phone based direct bank transfers, Stripe is credit/debit card transactions.

At a higher level of abstraction, these are are the same problem -- conveniently and safely paying money to another entity (whether person or business). If we assume that normally someone has a phone at the same time they have their credit/debit card, then the how isn't really that important is it?

> The big problem with Swish is that it only works if you have a phone with a Swedish SIM card and a Swedish bank account in a supported bank (which admittedly is most of them). With Stripe you can take money from anyone with a Visa or Mastercard

This is why I asked inside countries like this -- if you're in Sweden and (I saw a documentary on DW a while back about how cash is actually becoming so rare that handling it is starting to be disincentivized -- ATMs disappearing, banks not wanting to hold cash because of relative liability, etc), let's assume you have a phone with a Swedish SIM card and a Swedish bank account and a phone.

Swish in Sweden is just the only good example I know of, but I think that after a while something that looks like it will be everywhere (US, EU, UK, etc). Cashless economies are generally welcomed by governments and most businesses, most people don't even know the usual privacy/accessibility/etc talking points (opposite from the usual HN reader).

So again, in a situation where it is very likely that you could use Swish with ~0 fees or Stripe, do people continue choosing Stripe?

Or a better question -- how easy would it be to compete with Stripe (without having to offer the key lower parts of the stack that Stripe initially solved)?

BTW Stripe also does ACH -- I use it for larger payments when dealing with clients and it works very well.
Autonomous driving startup backed by Geoff Hinton gets $83.5M in Series A
I worked for a big consulting firm and stupidly raised my hand in a regional rollout meeting for our new “strategy.”

I got like five minutes from a few partners saying that it was actually unique and no one could replicate because our people are so awesome.

That helped form my idea that these things are ritual, not content. It’s just about focusing attention and building community, not actually meaning anything. These are corporate mcguffins.

They are useful for trying to find meaningful work as people who say these things are probably “not cool” or are sacrificing their “cool” toward some greater purpose (eg, money, fame, martyrdom).
Yeah technical pm or a pm that understands the business deeply are critical.
That looks great, but that's a ridiculous pricing scheme. If you invoice $100k in a year, you're paying $4000 to Stripe to manage your sales tax.

A lot of the issues with sales tax are not knowing your regulatory requirements and set up. I'd say that's probably worth $4k, but then going forward you still have to pay them that amount. I'd say it would be more worthwhile to pay an accountant to do that for you, and save the ongoing fee. You will have to pay an accountant anyways to do your tax returns. I'm an accountant and my firm often does sales tax returns for our clients. Now, if you're making $1 million a year, that's $40k you need to pay Stripe for the privilege of not worrying about sales tax, compared to a few thousand you'll pay your accounting firm to do it.

The API and integration options are great and I hope Stripe is successful. Really, if they are, it means I can just charge more for my services.

Edit: As others have pointed out, I'm bad at math. I'm going to leave my shame up here but I realize it's $400, not $4000. Just goes to show you that accountants are just like regular people, and that you shouldn't rely on your accountant doing things off the top of their head not using Excel. The order of magnitude difference really shifts my opinion of it.
How did you end up at the conclusion that it is Firefox that is the problem and not one of the add-ons? Or maybe you didn't? Some add-ons can do less in Chromium based browsers than in Firefox. Are you sure this isn't what you are seeing instead? Like slower DNS because of add-on settings or bigger block lists?

FYI I'm asking, not doubting or blaming or whatever.
It 1000% depends on what kind of role you're hiring for and what your company does. I've never asked nor been asked a leetcode style question. I don't think they're useful for anyone building webapps or any other sort of line-of-business software. The handful of times I tried ended up being mishires anyway. I've worked at a few places with standard take-home coding assignments, and they were used to whittle candidates, but I'm not really clear on their value.

My tactic for a mid or jr dev is to poke into some specific things in their resume. They say they know JavaScript, then hit them with a bit of JavaScript trivia. Basic stuff that anyone who has worked in the language would answer in 2 seconds. Also some domain stuff, like if this is a web dev, then have them explain CORS or HTTPS. Then have them talk in detail about a specific project or two. Try to get them to articulate not just what the code does, but why that direction was chosen. Have them explain their role and the other roles and the project team to show they understand teamwork. Ask them how the estimate work. Try to elicit an opinion (PHP or Python, strict or loose typing, AWS or GCP) not to question their thinking, but rather to see that they can make qualitative arguments.
> Patch-perfect commits are an idealistic goal.

Indeed they are, hence the need to rewrite the history. Managers, tech leads, or users of your OSS project don't care about the "fix typo" comments. They are interested in a meaningful history that tells a bigger story.

And to be frank, I am interested in the same, mid-term and long-term. While I am grappling with a very interesting problem for a month then yes, I'd love my messy history! But after I nail the problem and introduce the feature I'll absolutely rewrite history so the squashed PR commit simply says "add feature X" or "fix bug Y".
Computing Performance: On the Horizon by Brendan Gregg
Preventing crystallization of water is the function. And again, on what basis so presume? Trivial literature review would have sufficed to reveal that there is a whole, mostly very nonhomologous, class of these proteins, not just the one. [1] It is precisely for this reason that near identity observed in the proteins used by these three unrelated fish species is surprising.

As I have already noted this morning, it is at best pointless to attempt to reason out genomics based on first principles drawn from computing. Thank you for taking the time to demonstrate the kind of error that invariably results!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifreeze_protein
I just tell myself it's their loss.
do you possibly have a list of those to share please?
GP's post makes it sound like the father is stuck with wanting to love it, and needing to show how much he loves it, to justify his choice and stave off buyer's remorse. That's fairly common when people make a purchase that's too expensive and then is not quite as perfect as they had hoped.

Obviously we don't know GP's dad, but that was clearly the intent of GP's post.
I had no problem with parsing the type. I thought it was clear.

But I found it odd that there is no copyright information, date of publication, etc.
rqlite author here.

Yes, you're right every node knows the Raft network address of every other node. But Raft network addresses are not the network address used by clients to query the cluster. Instead every node also exposes a HTTP API for queries.

So code needs exist to share information -- in this case the HTTP API addresses -- between nodes that the Raft layer doesn't handle.
This part struck me as odd: “… from McCarthy’s discovery of Lisp in 1959 until Lieberman and Hewitt’s discovery of generational garbage collection in 1980…”. Does the author really believe that Lisp (and garbage collection) was created by God (or an analog for God i.e. Nature) and was discovered by McCarthy? Lisp is a human invention not some immortal mathematical principle.
This is one reason I'm wary of any big structural changes to the US tripartite system. "Abolish the Senate!" or "abolish the Supreme court!" sounds like a fun adventure in governance but, regardless of personal political tilt, the system gives people time to organize against bad policy. It's hard to get policy I like, but the same processes slow policy I don't like down enough to organize against it.

Even the most blatantly tyrannical presidents through history hit a wall of bureaucracy. It's slow, but people like me tend to get murdered when tyrants take over, so I'll take it over a quick changing system that can easily turn against me.
Paper is home-compostable and stable enough for use as packaging. I imagine the key factor is always moisture in such cases.
> Serious question, have any of their products had a poor rollout?

Yes. Payments with SCA2. Very poorly documented when rolled out, and TBH the docs aren't much easier to navigate now once you get off their "do everything immediately client-side" happy path.

I've never known them to be buggy, but in this space there isn't room for bugs.
I have a small percentage of ownership, and I receive K-1 for my tax. I don't have a contract, because our startup was purchased and spun out, and when it spun out from the parent company, I was given percentage of the company.
In some countries you could even get a real driver (sitting inside your car) for that money...
I've been using Stripe for years for my website, codehawke.com. Once you get over a certain amount of revenue and or sales transactions, they file 1099-K directly with the US IRS, they won't miss your failure to report that. I'm not sure if this is new, or I reached some new threshold? They are definitely in communication with the IRS at this point. PayPal does the same thing.
Poor adaptation of stress response is associated with depression
Ah, first, we both (I assume based on your use of "old") made the common mistake of confusing the Deckel and the Bremse. So to clarify, I am assuming you meant "the old Mietendeckel" and that is what the court struck down - the Mietpreisbremse is still in effect. If this assumption is wrong and you rather did mean a pre-2015 version of the Mietpreisbremse implementation, sorry.

> The issue with the [Mietendeckel] was modifying existing ownership of land and buildings.

Was it? My understanding was that the decision ended purely on jurisdictional grounds. (Quick summary for anyone following along from the US, Germany has a kind of "inverse 10th Amendment" - the states can regulate things only as long as the federal level does not.)

https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit...

By passing §§ 556 to 561 BGB, the federal legislator conclusively exercised its concurrent legislative powers extending to the law governing rental fees as part of civil law... the Berlin Rent Cap Act constricts the latitude afforded by federal law to the parties to a tenancy contract and introduces parallel legislation governing rent at Land level that contains statistical and not market-dependent stipulations.

In other words, I thought the problem was only that the law intruded on a legal framework between private housing providers and the federal government, not any particular aspect of what it changed.