skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So no heat death, but every computation implies an energy loss, right ?
Even with the help of gravity, how do you prevent energy from escaping in EM form ? Even a black hole evaporate if I recall correctly.
So I can imagine we could live a loooong time, but indefinitely ? That sounds too good to be true to me, but I don't know much about the physic involved.
Do you pay the minimum amount of tax allowed by law? And is that immoral? I guess you're right ... it's not immoral after all.
The FBI agent who initiated the investigation leaked it to Congressional Republicans, which probably led to it making its way to the press.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal_government/ho...

> That agent’s role in the case consisted simply of passing along information from Kelley to the FBI agents who conducted the investigation, but that agent was subsequently told by his superiors to steer clear of the case because they grew concerned that the agent had become obsessed with the investigation, the official said. The agent was a friend of Kelley and long before the case involving Petraeus got under way, the agent had sent Kelley shirtless photos of himself, according to this official.
Maybe it's something specific to the US history.
Hawking received his phd in 1966. Are you seriously saying that he can't can't claim ownership of the products of his intelect, 46 years later?
In the UK, PAYE and NI are deducted from your headline wage, but then the employer has to pay an additional NI contribution on top of that, which is what Starbucks are presumably referring to. Employers aren't allowed to deduct this from staff wages, so instead they simply pay staff a lower wage to start with.
Functional programming makes multithreading easier. This is one of the primary reason people are taking interest in this way of programming.
Businesses act to maximize profits. There is nothing immoral about this.

I really disagree with this worldview.

When business dump toxic byproducts into water supplies, in places where nobody has yet legislated against that, is it not immoral?

I agree it's up to the lawmakers to change things, by the way, but I don't agree that it's always the right thing to do for companies to walk as close to the line of illegal behaviour as it's possible to get, just to maximise profit.
> Boomerang is fully compatible with all versions of iPad (except iPad1&iPad Mini).

Just wanted to point this out for anyone interested, since it is pretty buried in the description.
> Security through obscurity never worked.

It works all the time for people having affairs. You're typically hiding from your spouse, not the CIA/FBI.
StartupTagWall: raise funds with a tag wall
Come on, roads have been paid back hundred of times since they were built, just like phone poles and most of the infrastructure. Now the governments in Europe are going after taxes because they are deeply indebted as welfare providers. Most of your taxes have nothing, nothing to do with the infrastructure or the maintenance of it.
I don't live in the UK, and when I'm there I generally avoid both Costa and Starbucks. Yet, from what I have read, it seems Costa has dropped the whole "fair trade" thing, while Starbucks continues to promote it. Does anyone have any idea if this difference incurs much in the way of cost?

I know that Starbucks is convenient and consistent, but there are reasons other than their ethics to drink elsewhere. In London, at least, there's no shortage of UK coffee shops that make a product superior to both Costa and Starbucks. Prufrock Coffee and Department of Coffee are notable examples.
Why you should participate in Stack Overflow
The Curiously Different Inflation Perspectives of Men and Women [pdf]
Streaming helps, but "consumption content" was never a big issue for me, even when I had to store it locally. Menwhile, "production content"---audio samples for music production, high res textures, effect plugins etc. have always taken up an order of magnitude more, and I can never have enough with me.
I agree ... And my original post states the laws should be changed. But why not change them in a way that maximizes the tax income and makes the country more favorable to corporations?
I get iCloud for free. Why would I pay you for this?
I've been wondering the same thing. Where would a question appear? I've read a few threads saying that they have just been scanning New and Ask. One person mentioned that the top menu bar may change color too to indicate you have something to review. Yall have any thoughts?
I'm really curious. Did anybody here read that and think that it in anyway painted Starbucks in a better light, even if taken with a pinch of salt?

A lot of press-releases are often aimed at investors or the business markets etc., which is why they sometimes appear strange to the general public. But even (perhaps especially) those types of audience are even more able to see through this kind of BS and understand how the "system" works, so I'm really not sure why they released it at all. Any thoughts?
MongoDB vs. MySQL disk space requirements
quick point 1: Murphy is a crazy left winger, seriously, try following him on twitter and not exploding.

quick point 2: Seriously, income & profit generated from a country should be subject to the tax of that country. I don't know why this isn't obvious to everyone, especially HMRC/the Treasury when they write the rules.

final point: I'm not sure companies should be taxed at all. Just make it law that anything accounted for as "profit" must be paid as dividends, and charge people income tax on the dividends. Do this at source, like PAYE, for all dividend payments leaving UK-active companies, even the ones headed to foreign citizens. (this would mean companies could re-invest in growth for free, but that that growth would have to take place in the UK.) Subject all "brand value" payments, and indeed all other transfers abroad, to scrutiny / valuation (should be easy for big companies, as there's only one brand.) This would work anywhere, not just in the UK.
Dictionary app auto-posts piracy accusations on users’ Twitter accounts
And? That's proper grammar.
For me it's not surprised for me that you guys don't know Taobao. I would like to say you can buy everything on Taobao, it's true. For many people in China, once they come up with something want to buy, they search on Taobao first. And according to my own experience, you can get what you want in 99% of the time. You can even explor many creative goods on Taobao. Actually Taobao has done this sort of big sales many times but not big as this time. Also, there's some small villages in China that most people in the village are selling their goods on Taobao and the village has more than 5 carriers carry all the stuff every day for these sellers.
The context doesn't change the principle. At all. That case was about a party who didn't exploit the fully legal options.

Every single day judgements are written where a principle is outlined and then, when the principle has been breached, the judge says so.

Does that change the principle? No. Because it is the principle.

Certain obiter dicta are taken as "persuasive" by other courts because they form such a concise statement of a legal principle that they can't really be improved on.

The two quotes I gave above are widely used in tax law in multiple countries because they elegantly state the general principle that a taxpayer has no legal obligation to help the tax man raise more money.
If a person did it, we'd call it immoral

Would we? It's pretty rare that I hear of someone being accused of immorality for taking every tax deduction allowed by law. If people want to complain about tax deductions, they usually say that the law is bad, not the people who follow it as written.
Support chrome/firefox/whatever on Linux and I will be impressed. Open source is great, in this case though, being cross platform is better.
Thank you, looks interesting, I'll have a look, I hope it's not too complicated for a layman like me.
Being creative is not enough
I get it, necessary evil, all that jazz.

But the question is not:

Should taxes be levied?

It is:

Is it immoral to pay only what the law requires?
Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize
Partially as increasing the taxation rate on employees vs taxing corporate profits could start to slow down economic growth as employees reduce their spending inline with the increases in tax they pay. That's one outcome I've seen bandied about at the very least anyway.
I wish there was a market for the opposite: not very fast (say, as fast as 7200 rpm hdds), but cheap and biiiig (2 TB) for a laptop. I'd buy that even if it was five times more expensive than a 2 TB HDD (just so I don't have to worry about moving parts).
Military families should plan ahead to manage finances
Managing money from afar can be difficult, but being proactive can make things run a bit more smoothly, according to U.S. World News and Report. Financial experts suggest using companies that are familiar with the unique financial situation of troops and their families.
Hawking mentions values of physical constants that support life as being often given as an evidence that the Universe was designed. I was wondering once if the values of constants are not enforced by the structure of the Universe, and are not magic numbers that could theoretically be changed. Maybe we don't really understand the underlying mechanism that gives a physical constant a given value, and if we did, it could turn out, that the constant can not possibly have any other value.

Take PI as an example. People very well understand what a PI is and how it can be delivered. Because of this, we do not argue what would happen if PI had a value of 3.15... not 3.14... In a Universe with different PI circles wouldn't be circles, atoms or planets would maybe collapse, but such deliberations do not make any sense because what PI represents enforces the only value that it can have. Maybe the same is true for the electric charge and other constants Hawking mentions?
but it is also part of the gawker family, so fuck them.
The fact is not that Amazon, Starbucks etc are paying so little, it's that small businesses are taxed so much in comparison.

AFAIK none of these tax avoidance methods are available to small, single country companies. HMRC are happy to sue small companies, whilst cutting sweetheart deals with multinationals with deep pockets for lawyers.

//edit//It seems like Laffer Curve applies to companies as much as it does people.
Google Nexus 4 Review
Well, at least Mercedes holds a stake of about 5% of Tesla.

But I'm quite puzzled that even Porsche hasn't produced more than some shiny prototypes. An electric sports car, where range isn't that much of an issue, just seems like a no-brainer after the Tesla Roadster.
I don't see what difference does it make if we're 7blns on this planet and alone in the Universe, or if there are other planets populated with bacteria or intelligent life.

Actually, I think, it makes no difference. Look at Star Trek, a large series of civilizations which are pretty much variations on the same human theme.

Claustrophobia starts when acknowledging that there's nothing else but the Universe. And nothing beyond our limited life.
That's the scary thought.
Android Police say 9am PST:

http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/11/13/psa-us-customers-you...
It's wrong thinking.

Google is ought to pay taxes like everyone else. Without the UK infrastructure, there would be no businesses to advertise through their service.

Taxes fund healthcare and security. Without healthcare, people would die and Google would have less customers. With no police and justice system someone could just go and bomb Google's UK datacenters.

Trying to rationalize why one company should not pay taxes while others do is bad.

Google extracts profits from UK economy and doesn't pay anything in taxes. It's bad for every UK resident.

If there was no Google, people would use directories/yelps/UK-based search engines which would pay taxes. In this case, from the economic point of view, Google is simply a parasite.
Finding out about this kind of thing is exactly why I come to Hacker News. Thank You, eminent kefs.
> Contentious - damage, or consumer choice and therefore progress?

It's a matter of whether there is a level playing field. I was shocked to hear the representative from Amazon admit yesterday that they only pay 3% tax on ebook sales through an agreement with Luxembourg.

That's absurd.
>>So no heat death

Unfortunately even if that is true, there is something called as entropy at play here.

Also I would advice you to read Isaac Asimov's "The last question" once. One thing discussed in that book is how quickly human kind or an intelligent being can grow in population and energy consumption.

So even before we reach the point of heat death, if we survive and move out to do the heavens. Then over time, we are likely to run out of resources and space eventually- may be even long before the heat death of the universe itself.
This isn't /g/
Complete lack of details there.

Does it support Thunderbird?

Does it support CardDav?

Will it sync with my existing Google contacts?
I have a buddy who has an international Galaxy Note II, and for what it's worth, I think the screen looks magnificent compared to the screen of the Nexus 7, which isn't half bad (my phone is a Nexus S 4G, so the comparison is moot).
I am angry with my Government and the Parliament. I feel both of these have a large presence in my country. They employ thousands of people, well actually millions of people. The Government has done of huge amount of damage to the High Street through increasing taxes and regulations. It has pushed a number of independent companies out of business. The fact that they are have no responsibility to tax payers, while being here, I find Abhorrent.

Maybe you should consider what is really hurting the Economy. The fact that your government is borrowing 5 billions every two weeks on the markets to keep functioning because its damn broke and cannot handle a budget, or the fact that Google did not pay (while absolutely legal) a few hundred millions in last year. If you apply the 80/20 rule, I think your attention is well misguided.
I'm actually Australian.
It's actually really easy to take the JIT-compilation engine from LuaJit and use it for the compiler of your own programming language. The LuaJIT code is surprisingly modular, and you can pretty much take what you need.

For scanner/parser generation Lemon and Ragel are terrific. That takes care of building the AST for you. LuaJIT does the heavy lifting and takes care of the architecture specific edge cases. That just leaves the fun part in the middle where you decide on the semantics and syntax of your language.
Hi sneak,
A couple of reasons - by paying for the service you are a customer and your desires align with ours rather than us wanting to use your data to make money - we will never sell it. You fully own your data - no big companies with complicated privacy policies. And we are transparent about backups and security - http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-hona... - our versioned backups don't allow things like the above to happen and result in the complete loss of data.

Hope that helps, please let me know if you have any questions either on here or at hello@columns.co.
These companies are based upon the proposition that the people who own them are not accountable for what the company does. Furthermore, to a large extent the people who operate the company are largely absolved for their actions.

Corporations, like Nicheian supermen, are not subject to ordinary rules. If you were dodging taxes, your ass would be in court, not before parliament.
If I live in the US and own shares of Starbucks, it is much more strongly aligned with my interests for Starbucks to pay me a dividend than to pay that same amount in UK taxes.

Even in a jurisdiction where I might see some benefit from the taxes, I'd probably see more benefit from that same amount of money in my pocket. It's perfectly rational to want to minimize one's tax obligation, especially to foreign governments.
Math and Physics are two very different realms. There's no a apriori reason for anything in the real world to obey a law or regularity. The fact that it does is amazing. The fact that we are able to think it's amazing is mind blowing. :)
Discover the best Electronic Dance Mixes you probably have never heard of
Because roads don't need regular maintenance?

But that's beside the point, if you want to take a different view on it, a healthy population is a resource on which these companies draw. In the US model, companies also pay for this, direct to their employees private health insurers. But pay it they (mostly) do.
While I agree with what you have to say, it's hard to support you're point of view when you're saying like that.

Be civil.

It seems (to me, at least) that you're saying it so aggressively and childishly, your comments are likely to be discarded and ignored rather than considered.
This is Dyson's "eternal intelligence" scenario. A summary can be found at [1], but the details are in "Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe" [2]. wcoenen very helpfully linked to a text version of this paper [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson%27s_eternal_intelligence

[2] "Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe", Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 51, Issue 3 (July 1979), pp. 447-460

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4777857
I don't buy this argument.

If comes down to the two definitions of fair - is it fair that you pay for what you use, or pay that you pay what you can afford?

A tax system tends to walk the line between the two of these but it's very rare than any tax or tax system makes it a simple matter of charging for resource usage. There are elements of that, sure (and Amazon and Starbucks will pay additional road tax, fuel tax, property charges, NI on employees and so on so they are paying more than Google in that way) but part of it is you pay what you can afford.

In the same way prices aren't set based on what something costs, they're primarily based on what something is worth (go look at the cost of a Starbucks Latte and then we can talk if you disagree), that's how many taxes are set. Corporation tax is (or should be) Google paying for access to the market they wish to operate in - that's what the UK government is offering them and that's what they should be paying for. If that's a good deal for them (and even paying full corporation tax it is) then great, if not they can go somewhere else.

It's the equivalent of the argument that taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society. Taxes are the price you should pay for operating in an attractive market.
or he could join the catholic church where they dont worry about that sort of thing
I don't think it's a bad idea in isolation, I'm just not sure it's a solution to the current problem. The race to the bottom that struck me is competing on being the place where the magic profit fairy makes her appearance.

I think both solutions would probably be great - fix the glaring problem that multinationals can avoid corporation tax though legislation (where local and national firms can't), AND then try to maximise take (and employment and all those other good things) by adjusting tax levels.

Sound good?

--edit-- if his is broadly in line with what you were saying from the word go then sorry for being an argumentative arse. Need more sleep...
Employers pay contributions to the employee's NI. I don't know the exact ratios, but it's non-trivial.

I threw PAYE in there, since NI and PAYE tend to go hand-in-hand. Looking at it again, I probably muddied my explanation somewhat.

Starbucks aren't preaching to their employees, but they are trying to claim moral credit for paying a tax that's not worth their time to get out of paying.
I don't think things have necessarily gotten worse, but instead people are just done believing that things will get better.
Absolutely. It just annoys me that in the same way as the UK Police target the mostly-law abiding (motorists, for instance) as they're easier to prosecute. HMRC is scared to tackle large companies but is ruthless when it comes to small ones.
The Big IDEA Stirring up Entrepreneurship at Northeastern
Evernote is building one in Clearly. I've seen a demo last week and it's working well.
You're right, the Note II in store was pretty good, but with its size the density was slightly less pleasant. I think that'll be more of a personal preference thing.
Hi Andrew,

Apologies for the lack of details - this is just our landing page and of course will be built out further.

In answer to your questions: yep, it supports Thunderbird. Yep, it supports CardDAV. In terms of syncing with your Google Contacts, I'm not 100% sure what you mean but you can import all of your Google Contacts and keep them synced up through Columns (if that's not what you meant please let me know!)

Hope that helps and thank you for your time.
I'm going to lean on the side of Jeff Atwood simply being genuinely enthusiastic about the technology and sharing. I've followed his blog for a while and have ever thought that he was a shill. I'd hope that he made enough while at Stack Overflow to not need to be one.
"Trust" is a big offer. There are 2 main trust issues when I give my contact information to another company: 1) Will they keep as private as I would? and 2) Will they still be around in 5 years?

Your model means that I can somewhat believe 1), but 2) means that I personally would not use such a service.
PAYE is paid by the employees
VAT is paid by the customers

Both are just gathered by the company on behalf of the exchequer and as such are not taxes the company pays.
Where on the homepage? If there's a non-Facebook way to create an account, it's now well hidden.
I think this sub-thread may be missing the point that on a production server you may not have installed the whole toolchain required to re-compile your webserver so dynamic module support is actually kind of a bigger deal than you might think.
I'm not sure there is demand for this given that most people value convenience over security

But these kinds of business models appeal to me personally though. Lately I've been wondering if "It's like X, minus the evil part" is a valid startup strategy. Reason is the whole Hacker News Cologne fiasco with Meetup.com.

Some examples:

Stripe is a less evil PayPal. (edit: I mixed up Parse & Stripe)
App.net is a less evil Twitter.
XYZ is a less evil Meetup
I don't quite see the point of this article.

So, someone had an affair and used GMail drafts for sexting / communicating with his lover?

How on earth can you insert the word 'terrorist' into that already borderline 'And the prince of ... has an new girlfriend' level article? [1] Really, what's the connection? Terrorists might use that as well? They eat bread as well, I guess. And maybe ride a bike from time to time.

1: I agree that it might be (?) interesting if the head of the CIA is potentially making himself vulnerable to blackmail, or if he's sharing secret stuff with his lover-at-that-time. But the article is low on anything of value?
I don't see it that way. To me, it raised my awareness of USB 3.0 storage speeds. I won't necessarily click any links or buy that specific device without further investigation. And if I did buy through an affiliate link, I would be happy that Jeff earned some money for his post.
Also, the annual Road Fund license (that all UK car owners have to pay, approx £100-£200 depening on engine size) is supposed to cover the cost of road maintenance. In reality it does this and more and is used as just another tax.