skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not trying to bicker. I'm merely pointing out that VAT is completely irrelevant to tax on profits. It needs to be left out of the conversation as it never forms a liability for a VAT registered entity. It's only connection to ethics as far as I can see is to the question of whether a VAT registered entity should arrange accounts so that a continuing pattern of running a loss account leads to payments from HMRC instead of the other way around. But of course in practice this makes no difference. Some other VAT registered entity will pay it instead.

This is important to clarify. There seems to be an idea here and elsewhere that VAT forms part of a companies liability. It doesn't.

As to arranging a lower tax rate on what are liabilities, then I will agree in the main. Ethics as pertaining to corporations are codified. They are a little subtle, but generally they resolve around the best interests of the company. This doesn't imply, as I'm sure you know, that the only consideration is profit. Shareholders are or should be also interested in larger concepts of value.

The fact is that the tax code in the UK provides for decisions that lead to the, in my view, somewhat hypocritical criticisms from these companies interrogators. It is grandstanding on well established and ordinary mechanisms of accounting. It ignores the history of the British isles in allowing tax havens like Jersey to prosper, and completely discounts the philanthropic activities of some of these companies, in particular Google.

Sorry if you thought I was having a go. It wasn't my intention.
I agree with you. Copyright is already automatically applicable. It's not like this further protects anything, it just browbeats the reader. A statement like this at the beginning of an article/talk is a big turnoff for me. Most researchers are excited to share their thoughts and ideas, not interested in jealously guarding them. (Especially when, as here, all the ideas are already known.)

For those saying that Stephen Hawking deserves a free pass, if we apply different standards to different people then that's not morality, it's just convenience. And anyway I doubt it was his idea to post that notice, more likely a misguided publisher.
That's changed, unfortunately. Their "Value Plans" now also require a two year contract. They have no contract plans, but they are pricier than the contracted Value Plans. I was pissed to learn of this change when I wanted to switch to a plan that would allow tethering (I have the old G1 plan, which is unlimited data, but won't allow addition of tethering, and they shut down my ability to tether with the native tethering app or third party apps). Since I paid full price for a Sensation 4G less than a year before, in order to avoid a contract, it's pretty darned frustrating. And, let's be honest, T-Mobile is not a great network.
People throw out the word feminist without actually thinking about what it means. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism - What does this have to do with feminism? The site doesn't claim that women don't have equal rights when it comes to start-ups.
Was half expecting some sort of salt powered electrical source to have been discovered in this article.
That was more true at a time when interest rates on CDs were 6%. Now they are 1%.

If you want a decent return today you've got to heavily leverage or take on a lot of risk. That's probably going to be the norm for a while.
Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
This is surprising. Not that it sold out after 10 minutes, but that Google didn't handle the load well.

I wonder why - surely they expected this (if nothing else, given the performance of the phone in other markets).
If anything the situation is worse than he makes it out to be because apart from Edgerank factors there's also the ease with which fans can permanently hide the visibility of page posts. All it takes is disapproval of one post, followed by a single unsubscribe.

No easy way around this maybe, since fans have to be able to easily unsubscribe, but it's another big reason why collecting a ton of likes for your Facebook page may be largely wasted energy.
Are Amazon Ripping Off International Customers?
BTW, there's NaCl port to Go in the official go.crypto repository: http://go.pkgdoc.org/code.google.com/p/go.crypto/nacl/

If you use Go, instead of hacking together things with AES from the standard library to encrypt something, just `go get code.google.com/p/go.crypto/nacl/secretbox` and call secretbox.Seal with unique [randomly generated is okay] nonce and your key to get the encrypted and authenticated "box". secretbox.Open with the same key and nonce will open it.

Bonus: on amd64 it's extremely fast (portions are written in assembly, and even pure Go versions for other platforms are hand-optimized), faster than what you can get from any non-hardware AES implementation (let alone authenticated with HMAC), and provides better security margin.
Luckily, I got my order through albeit with a good share of issues.

-> Google Wallet pane opening empty

-> Google Wallet pane opening with an error message

-> Google Wallet pane not opening and me receiving a top of the window notification saying they are working hard on resolving the issue

-> Google wallet opening, with info. I then clicked purchase and it wouldnt go through.

After multiple times trying it, losing my cart a few times, I got a N4 8GB order through. Should ship in two days.
It sold well enough in the US to bring Google's Play Store to its knees.
Security is a series of tradeoffs. Remember the Debian SSL fiasco? Turns out even when every Debian/Ubuntu user's SSH keys were essentially useless, the world did not explode. Or consider the state of the internet in the 90-early 2000s - security was basically a joke, article author would've bust an artery raving about all the ways YOU ARE PWNED RIGHT NOW. Oh, and it looks like people are okay with Dropbox even though it occasionally fails horribly and lets you see other peoples' files.

It turns out for the vast majority of use cases, even broken crypto is Good Enough. That has to do with two things.

For you to be worrying about initialization vectors and block modes you need to first have a reason to be working at that level - answer "no" for most webapp use cases.

Secondly, and ignored by security fearmongerers: you need to have something of value commensurate with the efforts you've put toward security.

This is the mindset of a cryptography professional: true, chances are what you're using is broken. But whether that's a problem depends on who you are. If you're the NSA, you might be concerned with crazy shit like China building quantum computers and factoring all your primes (I'm making this up). Whereas you might be the latest social.ly startup, your users have no privacy anyway, security is more of an image concern (it looks bad to be on the front page of HN with security bug) than a real one.
Hi, for us, this would have been a great visual addition to the HTML preview features built into Beanstalk...
http://beanstalkapp.com/features/collaboration

Maybe the Wildbit boys would be open to some affiliate program pricing for you?
I also drive a 1998, and I would love something like that. My temp controls are sliders, and the two options seem to be "is this thing actually on?" or "blast furnace".

Voice controls would be better. Press a button on the wheel and say "set temperature to 72 degrees".
The Google Play store is completely down now.
How to name your startup: A 9 month first-hand journey through rebranding
Lessons Learned After One Year of Writing Online
His vision of Facebook makes no sense. There is no chance in hell Facebook will allow every "Liked" product, service and company to spam the users' newsfeed as much as they want, considering the primary purpose of it is to keep up to date with what friends and family are doing.
ARM atomic transactions
What is the size of Lanyrd data?
I'm curious to see what your think is considered "big data".
This happens every time google sells something directly, just like Google I/O tickets for the last few years.
Good, so the fear mongering is only targeted at crypto library authors.
I can't see why many comments label this as "gambling with one's future." What are his alternatives (if he chose to self-fund)? Saving up cash to use as startup funding is pretty much the same thing - and as ezl stated in his post, retirement money isn't sacred.
Actually, to be more specific, "401k" money isn't more sacred than "cash saved up that is liquid." Using either can affect one's retirement/future.
The Real Silicon Valley
Moxie Marlinspike wrote a great blog post about this: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/the-cryptographic-doom-prin...
Huh? Fear mongering? Crypto library authors?

If that's what you think this post is about, stay away from crypto. I don't mean that offensively. Most developers should stay the hell away from crypto. They all know intuitively that they shouldn't be hacking together, say, kernel modules. But since crypto comes in library form, they assume it's safe to build with it. It isn't.
would this be an indicator for any future trends in contract subsidized phones vs others?
Brush Up Biology - Classification of Micro-organisms
Google - I am sure you lost some sales by releasing the 4.2 update for Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 on the same day as Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 were released! Not that I am complaining - this same day update is fast even for Google :)
From what I understand, this is an example of why tranched VC investments are bad. (See: http://cdixon.org/2009/08/15/the-problem-with-tranched-vc-in...)

It's not an investment until the money is in the bank.
Cellular Data Network for Inanimate Objects Goes Live in France
Apple Gives In to Employee Perks (Finally)
There nothing disappointing about strictly controlling that type of research and the experiments they're allowed to do. If superhuman's were to be developed it could spark off the same type of arms race that defined the cold war. Every country would want to have better humans ot risk being left behind
How about not posting shit as a way to prevent people from unliking? I see more and more companies posting things without any value just to make sure their logo pops up regularly on user's news feed.
Show HN: Read summaries of Hacker News links without leaving the front page
How to Board a Plane Quicker Using Math
Considering a few weeks ago, you could 1M Facebook users information for $5, I'd say 3K is pretty expensive.
https://bitbucket.org/zalew/django-readonly

https://github.com/streeter/django-db-readonly
This means that the price of the Nexus 4 isn't $299. It's actually about $490, the current buy-it-now price on ebay.
What the hell? I clicked through and I have no idea why you are so disgusted. As far as I can tell:

* This is on a site for expatriate women in Japan.

* This page belongs to their monthly series of profiles on various women living in Japan.

* A substantial part of her profile discusses how being pregnant and taking maternity leave affected her experiences at work.

* Nobody made you read it.

The pregnancy focus seems entirely relevant to me. And, come on, it's a major life event. Why shouldn't she be allowed to be excited about it?
Is there an available Hawking text-to-speech converter? Or perhaps a recording of this by him?
Here is mine:

I did it!
Did I?
No, it seems
This index is a disease
Why this explain query want me to die?
Oh, I can see now... I won't cry
I will try
Mongodb Covered Index to fly
But I can't lie
It has to scan my collection hard
better a compound one, the docs reply
my expectations were too high
They'd lose even more sales by holding the update back for any significant amount of time. ~Day-0 updates are effectively part of the Nexus brand.
The US Federal government subsidizes agriculture to a certain extent, using price supports to keep prices above a certain floor, and the US is also a net exporter of food, so that may be blunting the impact of rising food prices.
I pay for netflix.
They don't support Linux decently to begin with.

I just watch on wii.

Another sucker goes great lengths to make their crappy software works with linux, get's called an edge case.

Why is that?
Is This School the Next Harvard or Just Another Website?
OK, I get it. Encryption is hard. But just look at that post--there's so many acronyms and tech-talk that my head is spinning and I'm not halfway through. How can you expect anyone to do encryption properly when it's presented like that? In fact I'd say this post is literally useless FUD for anyone without a crypto background. It's unreadable unless you're an enthusiast.

Worse still is the huge amount of conflicting advice and methods available on the internet. If you had asked me today if AES-256 was the best there was, I would have said yes, because that's what I've read, and I'm not a crypto expert; but now this posts makes it seem like I'm wrong. The truth is that now I have no idea.

Crypto is hard, but it's so important today that it shouldn't be presented in such an obtuse way. There should be one resource that in big, bold headings and simple sentences outlines the best available crypto methods for each particular use case. Hashing password? Bcrypt. Asymmetrically encrypting plaintext? Algo XXX. Etc. Bonus points for step-by-step instructions on how to use those methods in common programs like GPG.

Without a human-readable, trusted, official resource, it's just going to be crypto scientists shoving acronyms down our throats till we don't care any more. Please simplify it and eliminate the bad choices for us, because you know better! I want to be as secure as possible, but it's outrageously hard to do with the way things are presented today.
Show HN: Voicemail hasn't changed in 15 years. We're reinventing it.
IOS 6's Swoosh Sound Sending Email Signifies: Nothing
I had the same experience. The 16 GB went first, then the 8GB about 20 - 30 minutes afterwards.

I expect LG will be able to make more, but this is a standout phone.

In my case, my Nexus 7 basically opened the horizon up for me, as far as moving from my iPhone 4S. The fact that T-Mobile hasn't yet marshalled many towers to support 3G on the iPhone 4/4S makes the switch to a pentaband phone a real plus as far as utility is concerned. Edge works, just, but really sucks every day.
I'd love to see numbers to compare this to the sale of previous iPhones. My gut instinct says this is a supply-side issue more than a popularity issue. Could google be keeping supply low to keep demand up? Or was this such a popular product (people reporting that this bringing the google store to its knees) that it sold out within minutes and google was just ill prepared for the popularity?
One example of this "climb" is Wagner, who was found to be excessively dissonant by many contemporary listeners. Nowadays, I think even listeners with very conservative tastes in music don't consider Wagner all that dissonant.
Google checkout just shutdown us down
5 months ago, one of my projects signed up and began using Google Checkout to allow customers to charge service available on our website. A week ago, out of the blue, Google erroneously flags our Checkout account for violation, indicating that we are not charging items from the website we say we are. The email indicates there are 5 days to take action. I double and triple check that all the information in our account is correct. Then send emails and feedback indicating everything is correct. I hear nothing, then today, 5 days later, Google shuts down our account. After franticly trying to fix this, or call someone, search this out, I find there is no phone number to call, just a feedback form which does nothing. The account is suspended with no further action to take. My website it dead in the water. What can I do?
It does if it can't find matches for your tracks. This will happen generally with obscure tracks or live recordings, but sometimes it just fails to match things that are clearly in the iTunes store too.
I think the jab was more about making a deliberately inflammatory statement like that, on a complete tangent to the discussion, based on what seems to be a clear distaste of the whole concept of pregnancy, and then misidentifying the organ involved.

Yes, you can get away with calling a uterus a "stomach" in some contexts. If you're going to flame about it, get it right.
I just got a 16GB model after hitting refresh on and off for the past hour
3D printing photo booth
Just sold out in Canada as well. Bummer.
bup looks like a great tool; thanks for mentioning it.

But ghshephard and danieldk are using VMware, which already creates snapshots using deltas, not entire copies. So their snapshots should already be very efficient.

VMware virtual disks are copy-on-write disks. When you open a VM and start writing to the virtual disk, it creates a new .vmdk (virtual disk) file and writes the changes to that file. (Persistent disks are an exception; changes are written directly to the original .vmdk file.)

When you take a snapshot, it simply freezes the current .vmdk file(s) and starts writing to a new one. It's very quick and efficient. Restoring a snapshot is equally quick and efficient: VMware simply goes back to the .vmdk(s) that make up that snapshot, opens a new scratch .vmdk for further disk writes, and you're ready to go.

You can go back to an old snapshot, make some changes, and save this as a new snapshot. Then you end up with a tree of snapshots, each one using only the disk space needed for the changes that went into that virtual disk.

Of course, even though these delta disks are fairly space-efficient, it still adds up when you use a lot of snapshots!

One trick I use when I create a Linux VM is to create three separate virtual disks for it: a normal .vmdk with snapshot capability for most of the filesystem, plus two smaller nonpersistent .vmdk's for swap and /tmp. I start those two .vmdk's as persistent disks (no snapshot, changes are written directly into the original .vmdk) and then switch them to nonpersistent mode immediately after creating the disks. Nonpersistent disks write their changes to a temporary delta .vmdk when is discarded when the VM is powered down, so writes to /tmp and swap do not go into the snapshots.

I should do this with my Windows VMs too - putting the temp directory and swapfile on nonpersistent disks would help cut down the size of the Windows snapshots.
We could do quite a bit better than that.

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
Anyone have any guess when it will be available again, based on past "day 1 sellouts" like this?
>Day-0 updates are effectively part of the Nexus brand

For current Nexus devices may be - but for older gen Nexus devices I am not sure I have ever seen a same day update.
It's easy to regard ideas themselves as having evolution. Only those ideas that resonate with humans are preserved and passed on. The rest die.
SAMSUNG HD 43″ Plasma TV Review
That's the point. The post is hard to read because the subject is hard. If that post --- which is pretty breezy --- is too hard for you to grok, the message you should be taking away with it is "I shouldn't be designing systems with crypto". The headline is good enough for you.
The fact that it is 2012 and stores still refuse to just let you give them money and then have them ship you a product is ridiculous. I don't want to sit here and wait for a store to open or for things to come 'back in stock' to buy a phone. That's why we invented computers, to automate boring tasks.

I give you money, you put my name on a list, as phones come in, you ship them in the order of the names on the list. Problem solved.

Of course, that won't happen any time soon, because being sold out inexplicably generates buzz like the present article.
Murfie and Sonos want your CD collection in the mail
It may be an indicator that the iPhone lifetime is now exceeding 2 years, and rather than being desperate to get the next Apple iDevice, people are instead casting around for cheaper cell-plans and thinking about moving to Android.
My gut feel is the opposite. This is a ridiculous phone, for a ridiculous price. I personally wanted it and couldn't get it Today yet, and I know of at least 5 other people (outside the US) who've been pinging me to see if it's going to be available anytime soon. Pretty sure it's a demand-issue this time.
What's Your App worth? Here's how to know
I am almost done my three year contract with Bell. I don't mind them so I don't mind staying with them. I want the N4 and I talked to retentions about what I could get post-plan if I brought in my own phone. They seemed quite confused and couldn't give me any better deals than a new customer. If I had gotten one of their subsidized phoned on a new 3-year deal they would have been able to give me a better deal. I would even be willing to go on a 1-2 year deal with an N4 but alas they seem like they don't know how to deal with this situation.

I could just go with the Samsung Galaxy SIII which wouldn't be a bad phone but it wouldn't be carrying the vanilla Android but rather Bell's variant (which I am not sure how bad it is).

I've looked at other carriers, Koodo, Fido, Wind and Moblicity. Either their deals aren't any better than I have now or they have little coverage. Wind is much better than Moblicity in coverage so I am not sure how much roaming with them would cost me on average a month.

So I am not sure which way I should go with my new phone.
As an older guy on this page I want to point out how valuable even just a few thousand dollars are when they are put away in your twenties in a tax free account. Money in a retirement account is not the same as money in other accounts because in many cases you can give it to your spouse or your children on much better terms then other investment accounts.

You may have read about Mitt Romney's IRA. It is huge. Obviously that is a guy that goes to great lengths to invest wisely and avoid taxes. When you are rich you will wish you could get more money into that account because of it's preferential tax treatment.

That said, I hope your company does great and you end up so wealthy it doesn't matter. People who are hardworking and ambitious usually end up OK even if there financial planning isn't perfect. Good luck.
PHP Fog to be discontinued on December 21st
I switched to teksavvy and it's great. It was twice as fast a Rogers and cheaper. I routinely use about 250GB/month on teksavvy.

I had a lot of problems with quota when I was on Rogers because my VPN connection to work could use up 30G/month when working remotely for long periods of time doing 60-70 hour weeks.
The difference lies in that companies think that Facebook users are an audience which is there to listen to them (aka. eyeballs), whereas a normal user is on Facebook to interact with their friends, to share photos and funny stories, organize parties and share their thoughts. With friends, not with companies. But brands, in their pursuit to monetize the "audience" somehow forget that it's not them the users are here for. And so they ruin the experience for everyone.
They're pretty good about notifying you if someone signs on from a significantly different IP address. I've had it pop up after most flights to new locations - my next visit back home (or after some time) will ask me if visit X was me, and tell me to change my password if it wasn't.
No, that's exactly what that particular permission is (from a technical standpoint). What's at issue here is that the tweet the software generated wasn't exactly an authorized use of the account.
The 86-year-old Startup Guru
If the numbers are good, they'll brag about them. If they don't, it's a pretty good sign that it's supply.