skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Are corporate taxes critical? Aren't most profits paid out (and taxed) as income to workers and dividends to shareholders or used for stock buy backs and taxed as capital gains?

The answer is that even if that is the case, it doesn't matter. But let me elaborate.

First - wages paid to workers are out of the equation, since they're deductible; see:

https://www.irs.gov/publications/p535

(caveat: I'm not a USer nor a tax specialist)

As for dividends for shareholders, those are sometimes/often "qualified":

https://smartasset.com/taxes/dividend-tax-rate

and there may be other loopholes I'm not aware of. And the non-qualified tax rate is not that high either.

But then, think of what remains. A business has gotten a bunch of income, untaxed. It is not simply a funnel of money to individuals: A business is a social entity, a social actor - and on a macro level, commercial enterprises are a very powerful part of society (especially the huge ones). Them not being taxed mean they control a larger fraction of society's resources.

Now, sure, when they use that money, it will often end up being taxed further along the way - but that's no different from your income being taxed when you use it. And just like with a business, the income we make eventually gets passed on to others through our purchases or gifts or what-not. So why should we pay any income tax at all? It's faulty logic both for us as individuals and for corporations.
Some games will have issues due largely to drivers. But I stopped booting to my win7 partition at least a year and a half ago, and gaming on steam has only gotten better. Just know that games with anti cheat tend to not work. Lucky for me the only multiplayer game I play much of is Overwatch on lutris. And lutris is still supported enough by blizzard that it won’t trigger a ban by itself.
As no one has mentioned yet: Cyprus (E.g. Larnaca or Paphos). Low taxes, nice weather all day long, and lots of expats here.
You can get an apartment with pool for 600$/month.
I don't typically drive on 205 to be honest, but I-5 is still covered in garbage and downtown is unbelievably bad. Really sad to see and I avoid downtown as much as possible because of it. It's been a couple weeks since I've drove through but I am going through tomorrow so I guess I'll see if there has been any improvement.
> which in general is better at recognizing faces than humans

Big citation needed there...

> we should release every person who is in prison because an eyewitness ID'd them.

in spite of my previous statement this is not wrong if an eyewitness ID (from a stranger to the defendant) was the only thing that led to conviction
> Getting rid of corporat tax would only make this gap grown even wider and bring down the amount of tax that governments bring in.

That's why this needs to be offset by higher individual taxes.

illustrative math:

company has $100M revenue, $50M paid in salaries+taxes, $5M "real profit", $0 paid in taxes today because they hide the $5M profit

new proposal

Company has $100M revenue, $55M paid in salaries+taxes, 0M "real profit", $0 paid in taxes

Government now gets to collect $5M in taxes. The burden is higher on salaries+taxes now. This would temporarily push wages down to offset, BUT in the long run it would either (1) the company would have to readjust wages for high performers and (2) increased profits to companies would mean more jobs. Either way, it would simply correct itself.
standing desk + balance board
Are you asking what it means? Or questioning the use of a term commonly associated with a military? Because, in English, it has another very commonly used meaning:

> a large number of people or things, typically formed or organized for a particular purpose.
> executables that I'm in the process of debugging

In my case, virtual-machines. When Windows 10 decided it had to reboot, it would kill them dead. You can't quicksave those, and even if you did they have a higher-than-normal chance of not coming back up cleanly.
You said:

> Who do you think they are buying the shares from? It literally directly puts money in the pockets of investors.

He's trying to explain to you why stock buybacks don't "literally directly put money in the pockets of investors". If your shares are sold back to the company as part of the buyback you are 1) no longer an investor obviously, and 2) have not realized any gains as a result of the buyback. Investors who did not sell see their shares appreciate, which is different from "putting money in their pockets"
This argument came up during the Affordable Care Act debate. The question was, if the feds can make you buy health insurance, could they also make you buy broccoli? There's this famous exchange from Justice Kagan's confirmation hearing:

Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who is also a medical doctor, asked, “If I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said, ‘Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day,’ and I got it through Congress and it’s now the law of the land, got to do it, does that violate the commerce clause?”

“Sounds like a dumb law,” Ms. Kagan replied.

She declined to presume that it would be unconstitutional. Justice Ginsburg had a similar interpretation.

https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

They believe the constitutionality of enforcing such transactions depends on the details of its application, and is not facially unconstitutional. So if the legislature could be convinced that pot is health supporting, SCOTUS may well find it to be within their power to mandate.
> If that beef producer was aware that his beef is selling at a much higher retail price, then he should be selling his product to the wholesaler at a much higher price

You can't be a retail beef producer in China boldly claiming to produce New Zealand beef. The value-enhancing fraud has to happen a bit higher up the chain.

> If shoppers can't tell the difference without this analysis

Provenance matters even if the difference is undetectable.
Stossel is far from an easily triggered blowhard.
posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28637111
I read your link and, frankly, I find their science shoddy at best. They seem to simultaneously dismiss and indirectly state that forest management is important.

For instance, they state dismissively: "While forest management practices, specifically fire suppression, have increased the fuel load, scientific evidence... [it don't matter cause climate change]"

The question that's not answered is whether or not we would have these fires had the forest management been done aggressively as it has in the past.

This guy (http://www.excelhero.com/blog/2010/04/california-climate.htm...) analyzed NASA weather station data for the last 120 years in California only (https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data_v4_globe/). The average temperature has increased by 1 degree over that time. He then filtered only to stations that have been in service for 100 years to produce stability in the dataset. That reduced the temperature increase to half a degree.

He then further filtered the set to rural weather stations only to remove the Urban Heat Island Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island). That reduced the number of stations from 114 to 26, but the temperature change actually showed slight cooling.

So given that forests in CA are largely in the rural regions where temperature hasn't changed much, wouldn't it stand to reason that the other change (reduced forest management) is largely responsible?
The value is that it shows the American media for what it is... CCP apologists more willing to believe the communist government of China than a sitting American president with access to classified evidence. And also their use of 'woke' language to hide truth.
What was the evolutionary advantage that being able to live at high altitudes 200,000 years ago gave you? There really weren't that many people around so finding land with available food and water doesn't seem like it would be that much of an issue.

One possible argument is that such people would transit high altitudes going between hunting grounds (for example) but is this really enough pressure to produce a genetic advantage like this?

Now nature does tend to want to find niches because having food only you can eat tends to be of more value than having abundant food other people can also eat (eg pandas and bamboo).

But it's not easy for humans to live at 14,000 feet elevation. Animals are scarce. Vegetation is limited (eg trees likely to be conifers).

This is different to just, say, living in Arctic regions as those do have much more available food options (eg fish, migrating game, plants that can grow in the summer) than high altitudes.

Has anyone put much thought into this?
That doesn't quite work out that way I think, if you compare it to solving a system of equations then the size of the input is irrelevant. Indeed a very large input is often the main reason for a problem to be under-specified.

What you should look at is the number of outputs times the number of data points for each output. If this number is lower than the number of parameters then it should be possible to find multiple solutions.

Of course in this case you're not looking for a solution, but an optimum, and not even a global one, so it's not too troubling per se that you don't get a unique answer. Though it does somewhat suggest you should be able to get an equivalent fit with far fewer parameters, but finding it could be quite tricky.
> when faced with ambiguity about jurisdiction it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission

Genuinely curious what has given you that impression. Regulators have been insanely slow to act on crypto (and there’s no regulatory overreach here).

In general, it’s a meme that regulators are slow to act and often without any teeth.
Such as the theory, presented often without evidence, that Sars-Cov-2 came from an imaginary population of bats in Wuhan?
Well, we used to have horses...

There's a reason all the old buildings in big cities are elevated a few steps above street level...
I loled that you were downvoted, I was going to post the same thing - they discovered multiple layers of testing? Congrats?
There is a thing that you are full of. I'mma be polite but you are full to the brim of it.

edit: Wow, flagged within one minute. That's not weird at all /s

So I'll expand: The comment above is ridiculous for 7 reasons. Try to find them all.
https://www.billemory.com/dillard/dillard.html
This has been a problem with Dell laptops since as long as I've been using them (2002).
I don't think startup job titles are worth much but they can be massive skill accelerators.

If you're in the first 5 years of your career you'll have more opportunity to learn more technologies at a small startup where everyone has to do everything than at a FAANG (especially compared to Google where you will only learn the Google internal stack).

You can leverage that into a much higher paying job in a way that you wouldn't be able to leverage experience at a mid-level company.
All those elements have already coalesced into trench stalemate during the Battle of Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese war, but even though most Western armies had their observers there, necessary lessons were either not taken, or taken in smaller extent than needed.

One of those lessons, of course, being "do not start a war under such circumstances".
> The hard part is getting the CO2 out of the atmosphere in the first place.

From the article: The Martian atmosphere is composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide.
It's a PDF document produced by Ankura Consulting Group.

I didn't read it, but it's extremely trivial to generate outgoing DNS traffic from many networks with their own mail and DNS infrastructure (i.e., any big bank that has their own IT department), to any other domain name. All you do is connect to their mail server, and provide the domain name to query in MAIL FROM via SMTP.

Which is basically the whole evidence that connects the parties together.
> Though in the long term, it might be useful to do what you propose to produce carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuel for things that need exceptional energy density. Like air travel or space launch vehicles.

Yes that's what I had in mind - thanks.

I do remain sceptical that electric cars will save us. If everyone buys an electric car, and then plugs them in the evening to charge - I'm not sure the grid will cope very well. IMHO there is still a valid case for running cars, trucks and trains on hydrocarbons.
From what I know, it's electricity intensive to make the fuels. Now, if only we had a very scalable way to make immense amounts of electricity that didn't depend on weather in a world where the climate is now in disarray. Hmm...
You can if it's BSD-licensed.
You need to consider the volumetric energy density, not the specific energy (which is energy per mass). LH2 has a high specific energy but pretty low volumetric energy density which means that much larger tanks are needed to store the same amount of energy than for other fuels.

The conditions for storage of LH2 and demands on materials in contact with LH2 are much harder than for e.g. methane.
Yes... Many people claim 'global warming' or 'globalization' make pandemics more frequent and more likely and want us to spend lots of money preparing for pandemics. However, if this pandemic turned out to be engineered or modified, then there is a political solution to this enhanced likelihood of pandemics from rogue nations.
> And yet people here have no trouble crying about electricity wastage of crypto

Which is many orders of magnitude more energy-intensive, on the scale of a small nation-state, and in most cases fundamentally wasteful by design. A very large pre-trained model can be reused very cheaply once it's finished.

> Also from my limited knowledge I think DNN models are not very transferable in real world setting requiring constant retraining even for a small drift in signal or change in noise modes.

This is FUD, promulgated by people who expected deep learning to solve all their problems overnight. All models will suffer from "drift" whenever the underlying data changes.

Part of what made deep learning so good was that it was able to generalize exceptionally well from exceptionally complicated input data.

It is unreasonable to expect that a model pre-trained on a huge generic corpus will be a perfect match for your very specific business problem. However it is _not_ unreasonable to expect that said model will be a useful baseline and starting point for your very specific business problem.

We are not yet (and might never be) at the point where you can dump a pile of garbage data into an API and get great predictions out the other end on the first try. But nobody ever thought you could do that, except the people selling expensive subscriptions to those kinds of APIs. The fact that they work at all should be taken as evidence of how amazing deep learning is; the fact that they don't work perfectly should not be taken as evidence that deep learning is bad/useless/wasteful/hype/whatever.

Don't let the clueless tech media set your expectations.

Professional data scientists and machine learning practitioners for the most part take their work very seriously and take pride in delivering good outcomes, just like professional software engineers. If deep learning wasn't useful to that end, nobody would be using it.
So you're saying that being a Uighur is an equivalent crime to committing robbery or assault?
This exaggerates the range over which the rivers in question move. They aren't regularly destroying houses and other buildings that need broadband. Rather, they take various paths through low land that is already devoted to the passage of rivers. Rivers on alluvial plains are more movable than rivers in mountain gorges, but they pose no greater threat to cables than they do to other permanent facilities like roads, buildings, power lines, etc.

Even in the rare cases when a section of cable must be replaced, it's still just plow it into deep soil rather than bore through rock the whole way.
From my perspective, I think it's a big deal to get the details right, without needing to obviously exaggerate ("everyone claimed ... disinformation", WaPo says "it's legit" [some is, some remains unproven], 90% of the media [by what measure? Certainly not reach, as Fox has a significant minority of the market], "all the fact checkers in cahoots" [there does not appear to be any evidence of cahooting]).

You may have some good points, but it's unlikely anyone will dig through your screed to be influenced by your ideas. (But thank you for at least making it short!)
Is China a bigger problem than the pandemic? Hmmmm….
Geoblocking, and a practical way around it, could be a great motivation for them to change that!
> If your oldest Facebook post is from 2015, how likely is it that you've been using the internet before 2005?!

My Facebook account dates back to 2015, but I have been using the internet since the mid 90s. (As far as I'm aware, there's no evidence of the previous account I had from 2006-2010ish)

> Let's give some benefit of the doubt to our fellow researchers.

Agree here
You lost me at “fabricated Steele dossier” because as I was closely following everything Muller related in real time, including reading all 300+ pages of the report (which it seems few bothered to do) one thing became abundantly clear is that Steele got it so much closer than anyone could have expected
Hugely enjoyed The Hunters of Prehistory by Andre Leroi-Gourhan. Such an inspiring introduction to paleolithic archeology, even if it's inevitably a bit dated these days, and it is Eurocentric. Great as an introduction to structuralism too, and philosophy of technics.
> When people are mad about 230, what they're really mad about is the 1st Amendment.

Exactly. Facebook are exercising their 1A rights to call him misleading. This is not complicated.
DARPA Unmanned Ship Work Moves Forward
Who cares about the exact amount?

We couldn't technically make it stop exactly at $150.00, but only at $167.89 or whatever, so we are letting it run to $15k.

For catastrophic cases it doesn't matter. If it saves a person from an unexpected $15k bill then it works. Even for many businesses it would be ok to drop everything - I know some which can withstand being offline for a day, but not a $250k bill.
I try to see these corporate politics more as a thermometer of society. If a huge corporation is willing to throw marketing or lobbying behind your cause, it means it has reached high enough acceptance in society. And that acceptance definitely only came about because of those decades of effort by social movements

So it's a good sign, isn't it? Even though I understand it might taste bittersweet.
The rule: If you need to call an async method, then you make your method also async. As such, your callers will then also need to be async.

Visual studio will actually give you a little warning if you make a method async and then don't await on any async methods.
much smaller, less wealthy companies attract far fewer reports
Fun fact, that post 3 months ago was what got us folks at cloudflare in touch with the author, who then interned with us for 2 months (today was his last day!)
It's based on anecdotal evidence, particularly with sales training.
Very nice, always running into confusion and lots of restarting with nginx. And reminds me of how great REPL development is in things like Lisp, very much like what is so helpful here.
IBM Engineer Has Been Exploring Possible Rust Modules for GRUB
Many market places have an optional royalty to send a percent back to the artist on every sale.
Gain of Function.
No, have had multiple recent better offers than that. They're trying to rip you off.

If they want to keep you motivated for the long term even if value isn't increasing rapidly then they can do bonuses, refreshers, etc.
> You're absolutely right. Gensler has cited the Howey test inconsistently. Well, under that definition, stablecoins are not securities. There's no expectation of profits.

Uhh, the Howey test is not a magical test to determine what a security is. For many things, Tether included, we have very simple rules based tests.

The Howey test is to determine things that might not qualify under letter-of-the-law but absolutely are investment contracts in substance.

Crypto (stable coins included) runs afoul of both types of definitions pretty much universally.
If this were true, the US is also involved. That would mean both countries are responsible.
Sounds like government needs to step in if its a safety hazard
This, I've basically never felt external pressure from management or deadlines in my job.

I have however, on more than one occasion, found myself up far too late (or in the pre-pandemic times having nearly missed the last bus home) because I just want to figure out what is causing this damn bug. It could wait until tomorrow, no one would care if I waited until tomorrow, there is no pressure for me to fix it today. But I want to solve the problem.
That comes off similar to "what matters in the stock market is to buy low and sell high". Sure, it's true enough, but not really valuable insight.

The trick in hiring is how do you identify and hire those individuals. Diversity is one way to reach those outcomes - it's not a side quest, it's how to increase your odds on the main quest.
They'd just use shell corporations or friends/family in that case. The only people who would still trade under their name have nothing to hide to begin with and aren't the problem we're trying to solve.
> Cable companies had to literally make a series of controlled explosions to run cables underground or to even set communications poles in the ground.

Trench blasting can be expensive at times, but its not an unknown quantity for infrastructure projects[1]. That expense of installation can be weighed against, as you mention, service cuts of more vulnerable surface lines.

[1]See the first video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZc2gAMxFzg
When facebook launched in February of 2004, America had already spent nearly a year in Iraq due to the misinformation that CNN (among many others) widely distributed. Climate change denial, the anti-vax movement, and various conspiracy theories long predate that point. For decades we've been dealing with misinformation campaigns, such as for smoking and the AIDS pandemic. Back before it all went online, newspaper stands filled with tabloids as ridiculous as today's worst clickbait were a common sight. And that was still nothing compared to the state of communication historically.

The idea that companies like facebook could defeat misinformation, nonetheless that they should, is absurd given the failure of every other attempt throughout history to do the same. Those championing the idea either do not understand the problem, or wish to benefit from its inevitable failure.

The fact is the internet has made it easier than ever before for people to communicate with one another, to access legitimate and accurate sources of information, and to challenge those who have long benefited from keeping people uninformed. Yes when people speak and read and get angry, they may sometimes be speaking and reading and getting angry at the wrong things, but the ability to do something wrong is a necessary condition of freedom.
I think cryptozoology. China should ban bigfoot, loch ness monster and chupacabra.
> Fine China? Sanction China? Demand accountability from China?

If China caused this and then lied about it, there would absolutely be geopolitical will to organize and extract concessions.
What is the reasoning for thinking they came from the top? You’ve said they had already reached Australia via boat. Couldn’t they have reached some other part of the Americas by boat, maybe South America via Africa or Easter island?