skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With spotlight at command-space, why not option-space for Alfred?
He isn't a military officer anymore. He resigned from the army to become head of the CIA. If he were still in the army he would be facing charges.
Ask HN: How many of your YC applications get questions about your submission?
Google still has 20% time, in the aggregate. About 20% of engineers are Real Googlers and get to work on whatever they want, 100% of the time. The other 80% have one job: appease your manager, because your manager is a SPOF for your whole career. In other words, it's no different from a typical dysfunctional corporation.

Google claims to be a "peer review" driven company, but if you're below the RGL, then the odds are that your peers are too, and then they have no clout and can't protect you from a priapic manager looking to get some bad Perf on.

Senior SWE is the traditional Real Googler Line, but now it's closer to the Staff rank.
1. Ahh right. I wasn't aware that happened.

2. Web sites are a classic example of scripting languages being used for real time performance critical systems (though I'm not arguing that all web sites are real time).

Sometimes the ability to modify code easily is as important to the choice of languages as the raw execution speed of the compiled binaries.
Why question is why do we tax company's incomes at all? Direct taxes on companies such as PAYE (payroll), VAT (sales) and business rates (premises) are easier to enforce and scale fairly.

Instead of taxing corporations' profits, why not tax individuals more and re-coup the taxes from the owners and employees instead of the corporations?
For example, I've applied before and until this round never received a question. I'm wondering if this is common.
All-in-one iPad Mount and Stand
I don't think anyone is arguing against these sentiments, it's more a question of upholding the spirit rather than the letter of the law.

I doubt much 1930's money was being filtered through Bermudan or Lichtensteinien shell companies.
People stumbling upon this: please make sure you read the comments on that blog post.

Apparently Starbucks changed the original writing; with huge semantic differences. It seems they divulged something they shouldn't have…
So in your mind there's never a loophole in a law or a conflict between the law as intended and the law as written or enacted by the courts?

Interesting worldview there...
Umbrella Stand Hack with Rain Alert
I absolutely love your podcast. Thanks for this !
Btw, my original tweet was this: https://twitter.com/StackSmashing/status/268083612765806592
Nothing new here. Even bands like U2 and Rolling Stones operate like this. As a citizen of a tax-haven (The Netherlands) I can tell you we the citizens are not able to use these tactics, only international corporations can.
Who cares what Clarkson thinks? He is a bore.
" There isn't a talent shortage. There is, however, a shortage of great developers."

Not sure I understand the distinction here?
How is paying taxes not in the interests of shareholders?

I think this attitude is at the heart of the problem.
TalkTo Brings Its SMS-Based Communication Platform To The Web
great article, however: the concept of conversion rates can not be applied to retail business.
I am angry with Amazon and Starbucks. I feel both of these have a large presence in the UK. They employ thousands of people. Amazon has done a large amount of damage to the UK high street. Starbucks has pushed out a number of independent coffee shops. The fact they are paying almost zero tax while being here I find abhorrent.

I want Amazon and Starbucks here. However I feel both are taking the piss when it comes to taxes. Amazon say they run a distribution network or something and so only have to pay minimal taxes. I feel the fact that these companies failed to justify why they pay the tax they do prove that they are doing something wrong - even if its not illegal.

As for Google I feel it is less of a problem. They mainly deal in digital goods. They don't have a big presence in the UK. They just offer their online service's here. As most of the tech work is done in the US or Ireland I don't think they have much to justify with their tax situation. I work for a website-as-a-service company and we have thousands of clients scattered around the world. Around 500 are based in the UK. I don't really see how we could accurately be charged tax based on geographical location of Sales.
So, for example, Starbucks should pay taxes based on how many km of roads they consume?
They didn't 'divulge something they shouldn't have' what they did was say that in the £160m in taxes they are saying they paid they include PAYE. PAYE is the portion of an employee's salary that is automatically taken by the taxman; so Starbucks were saying they paid taxes that in fact their employees paid.

It would be interesting to know what other taxes they include in that figure (such as VAT which a company would merely collect from customers and pass onto the government).
No, more accurately a corporation is an autonomous legal 'person'.

http://hbr.org/2010/04/the-myth-of-shareholder-capitalism/ar...

"Shareholders do not own the corporation, which is an autonomous legal person. What’s more, when directors go against shareholder wishes—even when a loss in value is documented—courts side with directors the vast majority of the time. Shareholders seem to get this. They’ve tried to unseat directors through lawsuits just 24 times in large corporations over the past 20 years; they’ve succeeded only eight times. In short, directors are to a great extent autonomous."
I'm not sure that "simplifying tax code" and "reduce/remove loopholes" go together, do they? The simpler the language, the more "wiggle room" there usually is. If you want to reduce/remove loopholes, you're going to definitely be complicating the tax code else you leave too much room for interpretation mistakes.
Few things...

1. The dot isn't required, your email will still work without it

2. I'd imagine people would be more appreciative if you actually pitched your idea. I know you responded below but more details in the original post is better. As well as more info about you i.e. what is the mystery school, what your background is before this, did anything else, where are you even located, etc...

3. I saw your response to another commentator and I don't agree that you need to build something to see if people will use it. Part of doing business is to go out, and get committed users who are interested in the idea. 130 pages is obsessive and it sounds like none of which included actual customers committed to the idea and feedback. 130 solid leads would be better than 130 pages at this point.
One reason might be that (as we see here) it's easy for the company to make its profits disappear overseas, and the owners may well reside outside of the market in which the company operates.

I agree there are probably easier things to enforce. OTOH a tax on company profits seems inherently reasonable to me - it scales down and is less of a burden on companies that are having a hard time, getting more of a take from the successful firms that can afford it.
That's actually a bit of a myth; companies don't have any explicit legal obligation to maximize shareholder value. In addition, courts tend to defer to their judgment on things such as intangibles; if a company says they're doing X because it's good for the company's image even though it loses money in the short term, a court will generally not second-guess that decision, especially since the shareholders have alternate means to reverse it if they disagree, such as voting out the board. To the extent the shareholders keep the board in place, they're presumed to agree with their decisions on where to take the company. The material that makes for a successful shareholder lawsuit tends to be more about things like favoring one class of shareholders over another, or executives making decisions for their personal gain.

Earlier HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227980
International commerce is not new, and the common law principle that the taxpayer is not obliged to maximise their tax bill is exactly the same and has been upheld consistently for centuries.

Countries who want to make money via a territorial nexus usually use VAT or GST ... which the UK already does.
I think this one is more appropriate: http://nikic.github.com/2012/06/15/The-true-power-of-regular...
> What's possible next fall, is possible this fall.

If that were the case, I'd be writing this on a hover board. Alas, I'm not. Market conditions change.
We already have a thing that's capable of real-time graphics and real-time user input, it's called a web browser. This is simply leveraging that to run a different set of input.
theres just less bots visiting stores than websites.. ;)
"But Freeman Dyson has shown that, despite this, life could adapt to the ever-decreasing supply of ordered energy, and therefore could, in principle, continue forever".

Does anyone knows what he's talking about ?
Dyson's sphere ? Surely there's some energy loss involved in the process ?
But if it's true I'm happy to learn that an intelligent lifeform can theoretically live forever.
They are. I don't think this is good though.

Companies are made up of people, and these people are the ones taking the actions.
Scratch is one of the visual tools he spoke about.

I'm not sure how he can bash such a tool. When you're such a beginner that you don't know what a semi-colon is then scratch is the EXACT tool you want to teach with.

It allows people to get to the logic and interesting problem solving mechanics of programming instead of worrying about including header files or curly braces.

All you do is drag/connect constructs together and you can instantly see the results.
My little SanDisk doesn't have a keychain loop, it has a hole built in to the body, same idea as the slot/hole built into your car key or house key.
They have a custom version of the Tesla Roadster. It's under the 'specialcars' link.
The Vestey brothers pioneered using offshore trusts for tax evasion in the 1920s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Vestey,_1st_Baron_Veste...
> Countries who want to make money via a territorial nexus usually use VAT or GST

Exactly, they have run into fundamental problems with income tax which is simply a bad tax scheme. From being counterproductive to easy to game (at a certain scale).
I haven't personally driven one, but in my opinion things like that are only as distracting as you, the individual, make them. It's analogous to texting while driving. Is the fact that I have a phone I can do an amazing variety of things on a distraction while driving? Yes! But, do I do those things while driving? No! I don't see this as anything different. Just don't touch the shiny thing when you're busy driving an automobile that can kill someone or yourself.

That being said, it is a gigantic target for negative media coverage because of it, and as soon as someone is dumb enough to get in an accident because of it, people are going to be calling for Elon's head. (maybe not, but it's certainly within the realm of possibility)
A few guys from minimsft suggested that Ballmer picked someone else for CEO and that's why Sinfosky left.
Tax avoidance. It was legal.
Virtualization With KVM On Ubuntu 12.10
Silk Interactive Generative Art
The three things that stood out for me were:

1 Starbucks lumped National Insurance into their tax bill

2 They pay "branding rights" to the parent corporation

3 They make almost no profit in the UK

The first point is that NI is pretty much unavoidable anyway, so including it doesn't really make you look great. Only really low-level tax evaders try to get out of NI and PAYE.

The branding rights is an obvious avoidance measure. They don't have to pay this, since Starbucks UK is wholly-owned by their US headquarters (and if they're not, they may as well be).

The final point actually follows from the second: they don't report high profit because it's all syphoned off via branding rights. Do they seriously expect people to believe they operate in the UK purely out of the goodness of their hearts?
GSTs and VATs do "leak" for customers who personally import goods or services. So for example, Amazon collects no GST for the Australian Tax Office when I import books from them.

On the other hand, I receive no ability to offset my own GST collections against GST expenditures.

Every tax has problems. That's why every major economy has a bunch of different taxes that collect money in different ways for different kinds of economic events -- purchases, income, sale of capital/equity and so on.
I was under the impression it was generally accepted; from a brief look e.g. Friedman's NAIRU concept. Are you arguing that it's practical to have full employment under capitalism?
It is. Some people do.

I think more people have a lot of pirated content. I'm not saying thumb drives should be banned, just mentioning the elephant.
I've shared numbers openly my whole life, never had an issue. I understand why company policies exist though in our own company, we never implemented any such rule. As with the rest of the world, I've never not told. If anything, it irked me a bit that others weren't open about it, especially if they were asking me those same questions.

I can't say my experience speaks for everyone else, but I can't imagine why it'd ever be an issue disclosing these things openly.
> The fact they are paying almost zero tax while being here I find abhorrent.

Almost zero for one tax, but they certainly pay lots of other taxes. Mom and pop coffee shops aren't known to be large tax payers either, they probably weren't paying much more than Starbucks is now.
"Streaming services like Spotify and Netflix"

Thanks for the advertisement, salary man!
How To Start A Hackerspace: Part 2 – A Place To Hack All The Things
I saw a good analogy of the tax system to computer code. The inland revenue express their intent of the tax system in code (or at least legalese). It's the job of accountants to exploit bugs in the tax system.

To misuse a famous quote:

"There are two ways of constructing a tax system. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
What a pleasure to see!
Here's my MVP:
Minimum Viable Poem
That may be one of the slickest presentations I've seen on Kickstarter
"The chromebook model is to provide the bare minimum a user needs to get into the Google ecosystem, so that the hardware is attainable for low-income users, and becomes a complete commodity for businesses" Could you point me where you get this if it is not your idea? In contrary, I always thought ChromeOS is the model where web is the app; and all you need is a web browser to do anything you want; which includes "development". As a developer, using Firefox/Firebug, Chrome Dev tools, Online editors/Ace to do everyday job, I am myself developing on a cloud IDE to do anything I want online.

The question is, why can't I only use a browser,(then why not Chromebook) to do development? And what is facetious here?
I know URL file extensions aren't necessarily related to the technologies being used, by why is it that the URLs end in .php on taobao.com? Did they migrate from PHP to the new stack and then want to keep the existing URLs for some reason?
While they do now have a good compiler (clang), there was an (in my opinion) unforgivable period of 4 years or so where we were stuck with a buggy g++ 4.2.
I disagree, functional programming is the right way to go without multithreading.
I agree. A wise manager once said: "I don't want Rock Stars. I want a team that Rocks". So yes, we have a team of very mixed skills.

But I agree most with this idea that you want to hire "the best", or "highly talented". The thing is, no one started out as a great employee, with bags of talent. The rare few that got very good, very fast, were snapped up by the worlds of finance, corporations, or are already Director of Engineering in a start up. (Hint: you can't afford them unless you offer them a painful amount of equity).

Everyone else, early in their career, needs training, mentoring, coaching, regular feedback cycles, a manager that is willing to have the open and frank conversations about what they should and shouldn't focus on to achieve more results. You have to grow talent.

So "good people that get stuff done"... it's a classic Joel on Software type statement. How do you find them? I meet a lot of people who never "get stuff done"... but why is that? Is it because they are lazy? Bored? Incompetant? OK, you don't want these guys. But what about: they are perfectionists and nothing is ever quite right to be called finished? Or do they always find themselves stuck trying to micro-optimize? Or are they always "late" because they got into the design, and realised the use case was wrong, so they fixed the use-case first? This second class have a lot of potential, with little "extra" effort.
I was particularly talking about the display and battery hardware of the current iPad mini.
seems decent.. can't wait for the stable version to come out!
No law is perfect

The more rules and regulations there are the more easy it is to game the system

The simplest tax is the most effective, but of course bureaucratic behemoths are too stupid to realize that.
You should count the people which look at your store, too. The conversion rate will be much less than 95%.
> Amazon has done a large amount of damage to the UK high street

Contentious - damage, or consumer choice and therefore progress?

> However I feel both are taking the piss when it comes to taxes

While I have zero doubt these companies and others will be taking 101% advantage of the situation, don't forget that the situation has been created by our own governments and an unwillingness to modernise in the face of a globalised world.

For example, it surprises most people to learn that this 'brand value' Starbucks charges itself for (or the fact that these companies charge themselves between entities in the first place) is in many ways a requirement of the corporation to abide by transfer pricing rules.
Never was there a more perfect candidate for the text-to-speech function in Safari.
Ghanaian Tech Startup Garners Grand Prize in Global Startup Open Competition
The film industry does something similar to what Starbucks is doing (and I am guessing many major brands). 'They pay "branding rights" to the parent corporation' This increases their overhead and is a major reason why most films are not "Profitable", but they are if you take out this brand licensing fee. Because many taxes and bonuses are based on profit companies can save huge amounts of money.

Also, does anyone know if the company that owns the Starbucks brand is located in the USA? My guess is that it is not due to tax reasons.
As I read the article, I kept wanting to write "citation" in the margins for nearly every assertion that the author made. He is clearly passionate about the subject. I applaud the attempt to hold multi-national companies responsible for their actions. However, this read more like opinion and gut feeling than a well researched article. I want to know what the law says. Exactly what laws are being broken? What is the wording? Justify the statement that "each of the companies made such a mess of this event" with quotes and counter quotes. Don't just tell me your opinion.
You know you're Scottish When...
First, I wonder if you would quote the same sources if Amazon, Google,Starbucks would move the money from the USA to Europe and not the other way around.

Second, everyone knows that this "sorry, we have to pay royalties" thing is most likely legal, but a very grey area. It certainly is against the spirit of the law. A company whose main product is "we make you feel good" should not use such tactics in their own interest.
they dont take commisstions, thost retailers pay the rent of online store,there are difference between stores, some stores they are is rent free which doesnt have adavanced functions,some of them need to pay rent ,and still cheap
Its his choice how he wants his works to be distributed. You can still link to it. And if you want to translate it just ask him.
Stop this. It's really dumb that there is a group of bicyclist insisting helmets don't protect your head. There is a similar group of motorcycle enthusiasts and every day there are a few less of them. Hit your head on the cement with and then without a helmet on and you will see. They work without question.
But how many 4KB IOPS can it do?

Answer: According to http://www.squidoo.com/best-usb-3-0-flash-drive , 128GB version has 255 KBytes/s writes, 7 MBytes/s reads.
OK, I will give a little introduce to you foreign guys:
Taobao is a B2C/C2C E-commerce site.
11/11 is called Single's Day(all number is '1', you see?), as some song sings, "single boy single boy.single all the way!".

Taobao is one of the three biggest IT company in China. It is composed of taobao(C2C), tianmao(B2C), alibaba(B2B), yahoo China and etao(shopping search).

Moreover, you must know that on October 30, 2012, China's largest online book retailer, oldest B2C electronic business, the first landing Nasdaq China's e-commerce company, Dangdang, declared to join Tianmao.

Finally, I should say as Ma-yun said : I am very cruel, more brutal tomorrow, the day after tomorrow is very beautiful, but most of the dead tomorrow night, only those who are the real heroes to see the sun on the day after tomorrow.
> I am angry with Amazon and Starbucks. I feel both of these have a large presence in the UK. They employ thousands of people.

> As for Google I feel it is less of a problem... They don't have a big presence in the UK.

So let me get this straight, you are OK with Google not paying taxes because... they don't provide jobs to the UK? My apologies if I honestly misunderstood your post, but it seems really strange that you let Google "off the hook" since they ONLY remove money from your economy and don't even create jobs there. The way your post is worded its as if you are offended that Amazon and Starbucks provide thousands of jobs.

If Amazon and Starbucks figured out a way to provide the exact same services they do today, minus all those pesky UK employees, would you feel less angry with them?
They aren't the same legal entity - it is entirely possible that the US parent company is profitable and the UK subsidiary loss making (or indeed vice-versa).
I have the same problem. You might be interested in this:
http://theniftyminidrive.com/

It's a MicroSD adapter designed specifically for the MacBook Air, so it sits flush within the SD card slot. I just put 64GB card in mine and store my libraries there.
I think this may be referring to the insight that there won't be a heath death of the universe, due to gravity. Best I could find is here (a book review written by Dyson):

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/how-we-...

"Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past."
Exactly. Via a tax on fuel for example. This is much easier to enforce, and sets better incentives than taxing income.