skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sure they pay the taxes they owe and they do it within the legal framework they operate in, otherwise we would be reading a whole other article about corporate fraud.

Instead the article is about a company that paid zero in taxes on their profit thanks to "extraordinary use of tax breaks and clever accounting".

I'm not against any of the tax structures you mention, GE doesn't need the best tax experts in the world for those things. So even though I haven't read the 57,000 page tax return I am willing to guess that all of the tax breaks used where not of the same considerate nature as the ones you mention.

It just seems like the primary motivation is to avoid paying taxes, not switching to green energy or even pay health insurance. The article even mentions "inefficient ways that GE structures its businesses just to avoid paying taxes", which, if true, is a major indicator.

Of course I may be completely wrong, I don't know what the motivation is and why they seem to work so hard not to pay taxes on their profit.
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"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK" :(
well these are "ads" alright.. but not the google adsense type. Its just a banner of related (sister) google product. Its like the black bar on google pages. They also link to other google properties.. if you call this "ad" you might as well call the black site-wide google bar an "ad". Its just a bit more user friendly with an attached description.
I am based in India, and is self employed.
Typecast: Design in the browser with web fonts and real content
I totally disagree with you.

This is an unelected body making sweeping decisions without any accountability on a set of laws no-one voted for and a 'nation' that no-one voted for.

It may be positive for us, but in terms of democracy it highlights how ridiculous the EU and its unaccountable mechanisms have become.

I also believe my country, the UK, is trying to wriggle itself out of the human rights laws of the EU as they're too strong and (apparently) being abused, so expect other countries to follow suit and this judgement to be worthless in the long run.

After all this is in direct contradiction with explicitly passed laws in this country. Seriously worrying that an EU judge thinks he should start making these claims in direct contradiction to an elected body passing laws.
"Invisible Electrostatic Wall" at 3M adhesive tape plant (1996)
Foro armyocs
Most of what people take for granted in the US is not available in Europe. Here in Switzerland, the only way to reliably and legally get a Movie in its original language is buying a physical DVD or BluRay.

There are no TV shows in iTunes, we have no iTunes Match, there are only localized movies in iTunes; until very recently, there were only Gutenberg books in iBooks.

Until last week, there was no Spotify (or any other legal music streaming service).

There's no Netflix, no Hulu and TV stations are showing episodes of TV series that aired around three years earlier in the US. Aside of iTunes, there's no legal video on demand service.

Heck, I can't even buy most of the audiobooks I want on Audible or anywhere else. They still want me to buy them on CDs (and I will not buy 48 hours of Peter F. Hamilton on CDs and then rip them myself).

And then they wonder why people pirate content :/
Probably was supposed to be $10-15 on albums, since it's preceded by "I don't spend that much".
I've gotten it too, and complained about it here on HN. I'm only running AdBlock and I doubt they're advertising.
Right, but what if you want to make changes? There's like barely any documentation and I have no clue how the requests are handled nor where the data is stored.
This is totally moronic and a complete non-issue. Why is this on the front page?
Excessive Internet use linked to depression, research shows
FCC chairman opposes AT&T takeover of T-Mobile
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How to Kill Zombies With Your Eyes - Eye Tracker + Kinect video game demo
Except it appears on, for example, the "Most visited / apps" page, where there isn't normally any content.
Previously on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3262124
Windows Phone is actually quite nice. I have a few friends who have one (most of which work at Microsoft) and I've only used it a little but it seems pretty usable. What I like most is how fast they're both catching up and, in some areas, surpassing their competitors.

I think that, given another year, they might be able to get decent traction. Their biggest problem of course is going to be marketing and, historically, that's always been Microsoft's biggest problem.
h) I entered my credit card details and submitted, but couldn't proceed because zip code and state are mandatory. I do not stay in the US, so those fields don't make sense to me. You are alienating non US citizens.
Comanche had shitty detail because it was running on 19 year old hardware. Scale that up 10,000x and refine the algorithms over a couple decades and Dell's demo is the logical result.
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Oh John, I wouldn't call him a pilot, you know, he flies people in his small airplane and gets paid for it but he doesn't know how to fly helicopters or jets and he didn't study fluid dynamics, so he's a "Cessna pilot".
A large portion of the community is REALLY sensitive towards this sort of thing. Also, more people can upvote than downvote.
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Agreed. yes it is on an unusual place but i guess that is what the close button is for. You close the ad once and it wont come again. Thing is that if a user likes google chrome, he/she might also be interested in chrome OS. Hence the unusual spot. Plus i am in India and I don't see it. Maybe its US only since chromebooks are not available here yet.
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Yes. In the Internet of old it was called lurking. You have to understand the community of people and their practices. It used to be considered good netiquette to spend a few days or weeks lurking in a forum before contributing.

Then the user experience designers came along and said that anything that requires more than a modicum of brainpower was a "bad user experience". And everyone bends over and listens to them rather than considering the point that actually requiring people to learn the culture they are going into is a good thing.
I shall join you and learn what you have to teach me!

Give me the dates, times, and place you will be teaching immediately!
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It's trivially easy to clicky the X and never see the ad again, but that's not the point.

Chrome doesn't serve ads normally, so when it suddenly does that's (to some people) an unwelcome change in behaviour. If Google decides that Chrome is allowed to serve me ads on my "Most Visited / Apps" page what other Google products might I see there?

And I'm someone who doesn't block ads! If I'm uncomfortable with Google suddenly changing my software to allow it to push this ad at me I can only image what the extreme anti-ad fringe is saying.
I wouldn't say "fringe", but you might be on to something if you say "exclusive". From LiveJournal to orkut to Facebook and Twitter to Google+, whatever had high barriers to entry is perceived as "exclusive" and therefore "cool".

It's cool to be in a social network before everyone else. It's cool to give out invites to your friends. Lacking an invite-only system, it's cool to be in an English-only social network.

I know I'm generalising a bit (and I should point out that I'm not ranting—the whole thing amuses me more than anything else), and of course I'm only accounting for half of the issue here, wherein something becomes "cool" (how the place ends up being ultimately stormed into by the entire Brazilian population is a problem I honestly haven't thought about much). But this is really how it starts, every time.

Now, why Badoo is popular is an entirely different question. I've no idea. Then again, to call it fringe is to elect a mainstream alternative: from my understanding of the article, Badoo IS the mainstream location-based dating site, isn't it?
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the UK is part of the EU? .. let me double check that
How is it moronic?

I don't turn on my computer and get pop-ups from MS telling me to buy Office.

I don't want my life to be one long sales opportunity for someone else, I need some respite from the constant bombardment of marketing drivel.

When I first started using Chrome was this there? No.

This is a classic bait and switch from Google.
Thank you for your valuable and insightful comment. Please let us know what other moronic non-issues you don't want us to discuss on HN.
Or switch to a browser that doesnt allow a website to disable your back button.
I have one and I think that the out-of-the-box experience is better than on Android. Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Maps and Office are integrated in the system. Everything is also pretty fast and fluid even on a year old phone.

Plus you get the most recent OS version pretty fast compared to Android
But doesn't that make the initial "observation" nonsensical? What could be meant by "would this have gotten by in another administration" other than, "wow, we're so blessed to have these guys" yet it's just cherry picking (same as I did, but for the opposite point-of-view).
Forgive my ineptitude, but how does this differ from 'The Deep Web' available on Tor minus the cable coming out of your house?

While I agree SOPA is a terrible idea, internet censorship and having a central controlling organization (Or group of organizations) isn't such a bad thing. Look at Deep Web, it seems, to me, to be primarily used for illegal operations (drugs trade, child pornography and other nastys). The way I see it, this effort would be much better applied to resolving the issues we have with the current internet, reducing centralization and reliance on ISPs rather than "to shit with the working system lets start again".

And that's not even touching the technical aspects, the internet as we know it still isn't anywhere near perfect (IPV4 as an example). Are they expecting this to happen overnight? Some of the greatest minds of the last few generations have worked to make the internet what it is now, if university's are "experimenting" with this stuff it's clearly a long way from a realistic option.

That being said, wireless technologies are always improving. I'm sure the military already have some similar mesh based network (all be it on a smaller scale) far more advanced than anything we've seen (Assuming this since the majority of technological advances in communication originated from or were improved by the military). It's by no means a worthless project but I think the idea that in 6/12 months you can buy a box that gives you access to an un-modorated, unfiltered, private internet is a little ridiculous
Isn't the definition of Justice, that it's a 3rd pillar and should not be elected ?
I have a Samsung Focus with WP7 and love it. I don't work for MS in any capacity.

The phone suffers from poor marketing and "Oh gross, MICROSOFT makes it" response. The average person automatically buys an iPhone or Android because they think those are the only options. Techy people automatically assume Microsoft is awful at everything.
I use one running Mango as my main phone and love it - very useable, and live tiles are awesome. My only real beef is the the turn by turn, which is not nearly as good as what I had on the Andriod (but then again, my iPhone also drove me into lakes once in a while - I just think Google did best with the out of the box turn by turn driving experience).
Sorry to be a bother, but the title of the section should be "Rationale" and not "Rational"

...just a pet peeve of mine. :p
That ad is a pretty small price to pay for such an excellent browser. If the ads get more obtrusive then the price may be too high, but at least there are other great free alternatives to pick from (Safari, Firefox, Opera and even IE).
Nokia Offers Free User Experience Evaluation for Mobile Apps
Keen position. I find it interesting when men and women of intelligence attempt to stop debate or discussion on a particular issue.

Google has long since stated it would do no evil, however bundling advertisements right into a browser is a sign of decay of what was once a glorious company. They have made another misstep that they don't want people to talk about.

Silence the Lambs, Google.
This infographic was posted on HN a while back, but I think it is very telling regarding the Android/Manufacturer relationship in terms of updates:

http://c27718.r18.cf2.rackcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10...
My free sandwich has pickles in it! I hate pickles!
"We use Wikipages as IPC for bots and users. We use Wikipages for user messaging. I mean it's everywhere."

And that's actually a big part of the problem. You're extending a paradigm far beyond what it's good at. When you're researching, you're looking for all of those deep nuggets of information that you'll get from poring over reams of data. Those tangental links are a joy to discover.

For a user trying to accomplish something quickly, however, it doesn't work. Reporting an issue, contributing to discussions or even FINDING them, navigating a voting page... Basically everything PROCESS related is a place where a wall of text is the most unwelcome thing you can be presented with.

It's great that you dogfood; just remember that the old unix hacks ate their own dogfood too. But rather than make things friendlier for people, it just made the unix hacks more defensive about their unfriendly system.
>I do not think it is as black and white as you describe it. The way I see it: if somebody falsifies a complete repository

No, it is. You can't "falsify a complete repository". We will all have checked out from that repo and as soon as someone replaces it with a fake none of the hashes will match up.

>the only way to detect that it was changed is by comparing its content or a hash thereof with that of a (supposed) copy that is more trusted.

Which happens in the system automatically. Have you actually worked with Git? Go change history on something you've pushed and other people have pulled.

>number of people keeping a copy who will not blindly copy changes from the 'main' repository.

It's not about "blindly copy changes". If you pull from a repo where someone has tried to rewrite history you'll see duplicate entries all over your log. If you have a graphical tool you'll see right where they started their modification.
That still does not solve the issue that current games have a lot of moving assets and really not that much static geometry. Trees, shrubs and grass move in the wind, water flows, walls crumble when hit by bullets, that kind of thing. Everything is animated.
This is fine by me. I want Google to make money thanks to Chrome - they deserve to.
I really want to see all this thrash/unreadable Scala code that everyone is talking about.
I haven't done any great projects on Scala, only smaller ones. With a few exceptions (of operator overload and implicits abusing) I've read many Scala sources and after you pass the "functional programming WTF moments" you come to understand pretty much everything.
September 2nd, 2011 – Michael Moore Diagnosed with ‘Shit for Brains’ Disease
Isn't this "invisible wall" basically a force field like they show on various Sci-Fi shows? Can it be replicated and used on a spacecraft to protect it from radiation and more importantly, small meteorites? That would be really cool...
Switch to Safari, Firefox, IE, or Opera?
The issue is not that we don't want Google to make money thanks to Chrome, but that such behavior must be disclosed. At least, according to Google's own software principles: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3262155
Sourcing most of my news from the NYT would seriously impair my knowledge of the world. It would be like going back to the bad old days before access to the internet.
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Do you make a branch every time you change something? Do you make a branch for every developer's local copy?

The thing is, when you solve the problem of dirty local workspaces by making them actual branches svn becomes just as complex as git, probably even more so given that all the branches exist for all the users. And you still don't have has good interface for cherry-picking, you still need multiple local copies, it still isn't as fast and you still don't have all the other benefits associated with a DVCS.
Testing for the end of a for(each) loop
Ask HN: What's a hacker to do in Buenos Aires?
I'm in Buenos Aires for a couple of days, laid over by volcanic ash. What's especially interesting for a hacker in this impressive city?
Did you forget about Sprint? If AT&T and Verizon merged wouldn't you have Sprint to choose from?
It seems to me that voxel worlds could make this problem easier, not harder: you can deform the world algorithmically, voxel by voxel, rather than using polygonal approximations. Imagine an acid blob eating an outdoor environment in a fantasy game: in a voxel world, this is like a fancy seed fill. In a polygonal world, this is much harder to simulate.

I'm not saying voxel worlds solve every such problem; just that there are likely to be as many things that are easier w.r.t. animating elements as there are things that will be harder.

[Edit: maybe I'm not explaining this well, but I guess what I'm saying is that I don't see any reason why any voxels in a voxel world have to be static. The data structures don't force that; in contrast, in a voxel world with a clever data spatial structure, every single voxel can be a dynamic, particulate object, subject to computing power. As I argue above, though, this is not practical until computing power improves enough. Perhaps this is your fundamental point, in which case we're in violent agreement.]
How come IE9 2D was faster than Chrome and Firefox?
future tech of awesomeness. loving it!
We (well, you) may very well be "blessed" to have that administration in terms of the choice of the FCC commissioners. That GP was making an overreaching observation is an unfounded assumption.
I've been looking forward to adding to the list of unsuccessful inclusionist Wikipedia forks.
Dammit, we spent years working toward a unified lighting model, and now we want to split it apart again?!
> If true: We're imbeciles If false: We're imbeciles.

What does that mean?
>If your marketshare is based on amount of resources, then your position is sustained by entry barriers, not your skills.

So what. Even if I were the best programmer to ever live today, I won't always be. I don't want to starve when I'm older and not as good.

>If you can't stand someone to do better than you and you can't learn from him

It's not about learning. I have no problem learning. The problem is I need to eat to live, I need a place to stay and so on. I have to compete in a free market against others and there are plenty of people out there who will try to undercut your prices because that's easier making a better product. If I give them my work I've just made their job that much easier.

> I think that is for lazy people, they want money for an idea from people who actually implement it - work.

Complete nonsense. The issue is; technology advances take research. Stealing something you've seen someone else do can be done very quickly. If a person comes up with a new way of doing things, a novel new take on an old idea (e.g. the iPad), as soon as they put it out there everyone could just steal the idea if not for patents. They need to charge a certain amount of money to make the time they spent researching worthwhile but the people who just copy don't have those expenses.

>A free market relies on perfect informatios on whatever technology is being used

Could you provide an example of any market anywhere in the world that has perfect information? Markets are neither efficient nor entirely rational.

>if the supplier fully opens and doesn't lock in them

But this isn't "open source". When a company outsources software development they demand the source be made available to them and no one else. They would never pay if the source was going to be made available to their competitors upon completion.
Library News
I remember http://amasci.com/ from over 10 years ago. A fun website. The hand-drawn holograms, for example, are great.
did you see the speculation about recreating the effect but horizontally instead of vertically? you could effectively have an invisible platform!
Wouldn't this be an argument in favor of having a non-elected bureaucracy? I mean, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. Even if the current ideology is that democratic governments are much better.
I agree, I see this as Google promoting their own products - which I'm used to. Would anyone say anything if it was a promo for gmail? I doubt it.
This is hardly an apples for apples comparison. The quality and implementation of these features are more important that ticking the box labelled "voice recognition".

Tellme is very similar to the original iPhone voice commands, requiring certain key words and syntax to be adhered to. Siri on the other hand allows for quite a bit of flexibility in how instructions are given, or in many cases instructions aren't given but a situation is stated. e.g. "I'm drunk" will prompt siri to bring up the number for taxi services in the area.

Despite that difference the voice recognition in siri is also (in my opinion) far better, a culmination between it being very fast and in my experience suitably accurate.

You won't see microsoft comparing them side by side, because it's a dismal race, but someone else did, read it here: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20111124/tellme-on-windows-...
I'm the author of the above post.

I am in fact making a living off of making indie games, and I admit the market is now in fact better than it was ever before (in sheer size).

However, we keep seeing people gushing all over the various bundles and steam sales & with little to no discussion of the possible long term negatives.

EDIT: although you are right that there is a lot of competition making games, there isn't that much competent competition.
I have a WP7 phone, and I like it quite a lot. The OS is very snappy, the visual styling is unique, and the whole experience is cohesive in a way that not even iOS can match. (On the iPhone, features still feel like they are beautifully designed but entirely separate apps, each made up in their own special mix of wood paneling or linen upholstery...)

Two of my friends have bought WP7 devices after toying with mine. That's fairly remarkable because I live in a country where it's not advertised and the UI isn't even translated to the native language yet.
So this is the kind of thing that's going to make our hovercars hover?
My Congressman and Senator here in Massachusettsmust understand the ramifications of this bill and protect the individual's citizen from corporate and government control of the internet. They must be educated and read up on this abrogation of civil rights and government protected and constitutionally guaranteed free speech and discourse.
Dan Osterman, Boston
I live in the UK as well.

Clearly there is a "democratic deficit" in the current structure of the EU. This is a problem that will have to be righted one way or another.

In the long run I am optimistic and pro Europe, I don't have a problem with a certain level of federalisation and a supreme court in the style of America.

Of course I also completely agree with this judgement, but my views on Europe have not changed in the last few years. Despite what you may think at the moment, the things that unite European countries (compared to the rest of the world) far outweigh the things that divide us.
ECMAScript 6 looks promising
>the war on culture sharing

What a powerful concept as an anti-dote to 'war on file-sharing'.
How to Recognize a Great Boss, or Even Be One
Where Eric Ries’ methods break down