skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tough shit. Our tax laws are a disgrace and need to be totally rewritten. This goes for personal taxes too (or even especially).

Good for Apple for making this into a public issue.

See, governments try to fool people into thinking they're paying less than they are. By creating such a pathetically convoluted tax code and taking loads of money here while giving you a "deduction" there, they think that you're too befuddled to be pissed at any particular rip-off.

If the government gets statements from my employer and banks and brokerage, why the hell am I filling out forms? And if we have to fill out forms, why are we not entering data into them on a government Web site and filing that way?

The whole thing is a sham, and Apple has simply paid someone enough to figure out how to avoid as much of it as possible. GOOD.
Very reactive. Name and domain changed to TeeLaunch.

Now you're on good tracks. The idea is great as well as the potential. What's the best way to advertize to KickStarter users though?
I don't believe I took the quote out of context, as I wrote what Friedman said, almost verbatim without commentary.

"Out of context" means you omitted other text that changes the meaning of the text you did quote. See rayiner's comment about this (the very next paragraph...)

The monetary base is the stuff consumers touch

No, it is not. See the wikipedia link and Rayiner's comment, which explicitly refutes this (The monetary base must not be confused with the money supply which consists of currency circulating in the public)

It is hard to take your arguments on good-faith if you make such blatantly false statements.
Its amazing to see such steady growth almost immediately after Marissa Mayer was announced CEO. Marissa, FTW!

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...
> s4 is the most popular mobile handset with android on board

That's exactly why I think it is a bad idea :) Why drive the Android device market towards a monopoly? It ties both Google's business and Android's success to a single player.
What I got out of your comment was monetize at every possibility (maybe I misconstrued it).

No, that's not what I meant. Monetizing and profits are two different things.
Some prepaid cards support direct deposit these days, which means they'd have an ACH account number. For example:

http://usa.visa.com/personal/cards/prepaid/prepaid-card-expl...
They just sent me this in an email:

"As a Pro Member, your subscription remains the same. You'll enjoy unlimited space for your photos and videos, detailed stats and an ad-free experience. However, you can switch to a Free account before August 20, 2013."

I can't understand what this is supposed to mean. But it sounds like the pro account, which provided unlimited storage for $25/yr, is going away. I wonder what they do about pro members who already have more than 1 or 2 TB of usage now?
That actually makes me more wary of reddit than tumblr. For others, the llinked-to reddit seems to be mostly about laughing at and sometimes harassing people on tumblr that have pride in alternative lifestyles or viewpoints.
But those "technicalities" are the law, as it was written. The rules say "if you meet these conditions, then use this algorithm to calculate your tax bill". The inevitable result is that every company with a halfway competent accounting department pores over the tax code to find the algorithm that results in the lowest tax bill, then figures out how to meet the necessary requirements to use it.

Please note that in no way do I think this is a good thing to do, or that I'm remotely in favor of the current situation. It sucks and I'm not. But Congress made that game, and they completely lack the moral authority to complain about others playing it.

Put this in coding terms, where each tax code requirement is a conditional branch in a `calculateTax()` function. If you write a function with 50,000 conditionals, you simply can't be surprised that someone figures out a way to call the function with arguments that give the best possible output for them. Even worse, you can't close those loopholes by adding more conditionals. By definition, you're only creating more optimization paths for them to choose from.
I'm a friend and former colleague of the author, and having read the book from cover to cover I don't think it's true that it has lots of typos. I think you might be confusing it with another title.
right. let's not start pointing fingers.

Google, Microsoft, GE, etc.

"General Electric Paid No Federal Taxes in 2010"

http://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=13224558

"GE's CEO, Jeff Immelt Heads Obama's Council On Jobs And Competitiveness"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2011/01/21/jeffrey-i...

"Former Google Exec Turns Whistleblower On Company’s Tax Avoidance Machinations In The UK"

http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/19/former-google-exec-turns-wh....
Using "you" in that context doesn't mean I'm "speaking for you". It's a didactic device used to convey a hypothetical situation.
How Microsoft dodged the Yahoo bullet
The thing is, most people who use a finance data website regularly actually choose Yahoo Finance over Google Finance.

Also, the Google Finance Android app couldn't bring up the US listing of Hitachi, which is pretty bad.
New version of CMME out
The reason is because on Google Finance, I can link to a specific time frame. I don't think I can do that on Yahoo.
But seriously, "blogging"? In 2013?

It's incredible that Tumblr is even a going concern, let alone a billion-dollar "company."
Check out this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

There is a lot more going on that simply avoiding double tax. I'm not saying I blame them for taking advantage of the prevailing laws to pay as little tax as possible, but for them to claim it's simply avoiding double tax is very disingenuous.
One-Time Pad reinvented to make electronic copying impossible
Yes but if you buy them with stock they get some of that power (since the power in the end belongs to all the shareholders)
Multiple personas, and multiple interest graphs
It isn't Ford and GM fighting this, it is the dealers. I actually doubt that GM and Ford care much about protecting the dealers. My guess is, or should I say hope, that GM and Ford executives are looking at Tesla and thinking about how they might make more money with that business model in the future.
Site Ai Provides A Cliffs Notes Version Of Your Web Analytics
Does the angle of the crossing change as the distance between the two points gets larger? I'm curious because this seems to mimic the way most of us cross if we're not at a crosswalk (i.e. slightly toward the destination, but mostly perpendicular to the road), but that doesn't really change if the destination is a lot longer down the road. All things equal, you still won't want to spend that long in the road.
“Performant” is not a word
We think this trend is here to stay, what do you think? thanks.
It's not supported by Safari according to the article, though, which may have dissuaded them from using it.

I, being the roundly-abused Opera user that I am, would obviously prefer that they still served the "modern browsers" out there, while the others are catching up. :)
Completely agree. This is similar to shared host that offer unlimited space. For those using a lot of share/cpu, they'll get a friendly reminder to upgrade, then a notice that they can't continue supporting them as a client with their current plan.

The Flickr Pro account 24.95/yr for "unlimited storage" was an easy purchase. When you login with your Pro account you are suggested to downgrade to the new 1TB (ad) account.

For 49.99/yr I have to ask myself, do I really need this ? what are my other options.
Stripe is only available in North America, and probably lacks the headcount to handle thousands or more new merchants in a short time. Braintree's more than twice as old, more than twice as big, and operates in US/UK/AU/CA/EU. Recommending Stripe would mean sending many of Google Checkout's merchants somewhere that can't help them. Google Checkout, like many third-party processors, is heavily used by merchants outside the US where a traditional merchant account is much more difficult to acquire and integrate.
The path to that end has many solutions, and the methods to obtain that value are overdetermined. Long term or short term outlooks and nuances between. Cost-benefit analysis paired with changing technology and political landscapes, along with different definitions of what value is and how to go about creating it.
I'm a bit uninformed about the capabilities of Google Wallet and Checkout. Anyone care to elucidate the differences? Do they perform the same functions?
Technically, the bigger threat is download bots who can drive rankings up. I really don't think ratings count for much anymore.
and, what if they DIDN'T put a fireproof box around the batteries that had caught on fire multiple times in the past, when given the opportunity as the whole fleet was grounded?

is that smart, or stupid?
The services Apple kills are usually rubbish. Ping, Mobile Me, those iPod speakers. Google is killing things that are actually good. I think that is where the Reader backlash came from. Reader was good even if the relative popularity was low.

Hardware is kind of a different thing. The iPod was pretty nice. But now I want a shinier iPod with more features. Production of the Classic just has to match demand from those with niche uses for it. So a slow death makes sense?

Not sure what the situation is with the MacPro...
Watch this brand new video of the world’s biggest ship being built
I think OP missed one important point. Tumblr acquisition is like a Cinderella story: young high-school drop-out builds a billion dollar company. It is so American Dream! That's something average person would rather hear instead of "one bigco is merging with another bigco". Actavis news are for CNBC, not for general population.
The new UI is certainly prettier, but yet another example of Android done wrong. Weird action bar, forcing portrait on tablets, etc.

This was already mentioned with Facebook Home, but it'd be great if UI designers and developers would actually spend some time on their target platforms to learn the UI conventions instead of copying iOS as-is.
You can say anything when you're anonymous and don't have any repercussions to deal with. (like this tumblr is)
> Actually, the ability to make drugs or biologicals is quickly dropping in complexity. Right now, one can design drugs and biologicals on one's workstation.

Uh, no you cannot. I have worked on these exact sorts of problems, and we are nowhere near being able to "design drugs and biologicals on one's workstation."
I was expecting this post to be about Glencore merging with Xtrata [1]. Although in news for over a year, the merger was completed earlier this month.

It is important for the fact that this merger creates the largest commodities trading entity and the fourth largest mining company on the planet.

[1] wsj: http://goo.gl/UOaN2

[2] wiki: http://goo.gl/faWrJ
As someone who used to recruit for Google, and watched the team recruit THOUSANDS of developers only to discontinue product after product, wtf are these guys all doing?
About leaving the service...

A while back I was getting nervous about what Yahoo was going to do with Flickr, so I signed up for a $60/ year SmugMug account.

On the technical side of things, transferring the data out of Flickr wasn't a problem at all. If I remember correctly, importing ~9000 (~42 Gb) of photos from Flickr took less than an hour, and preserved almost all of the meta-data I had in Flickr (sets, collections, tags, etc.). It was so fast I almost didn't believe it. Of course 1 Tb would take a while even at that speed.

The bigger problem is getting people to use the new site. My Mom, for example, still goes to my Flickr page.
First it looks good, but only because the old one. When you try out the new look, it is immediate that it lacks any consistency in its design or style whatsoever... (maybe because it is not rolled out fully yet. I guess riding the tumblr hype is more important now.)

On the ux side bringing the pictures to the front is pretty reasonable. Unfortunately it stops with a masonry (which is questionable in itself) and a profile header. Everywhere else it is just too noisy, smells like marketing and distractions that stop you every minute from enjoying the pictures. Just look at the home page with the "sign up" popup.

Yahoo needs designers and style as badly as acquiring the next thing every year...
Ah OK, makes sense.
I was more interested in the graphs. Surprisingly I commit more on fridays.
Fix to Blank (Empty) pages in Google Analytics
John McAfee's Belize home burns to the ground
Ask HN: Does anyone here have a connection to Marissa Mayer?
Hello. I need to get in touch with Marissa Mayer to show her my pitch deck.

To show you I am serious and not wasting Marissa's time, you can access it here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/142683536/Notestagram-Pitch-Deck

Please have her email me at acquisitions@fountain.la
> The problem is the overwhelming majority of 17 year olds don't know enough to make useful pharma research.

There's more to it than that. The reason why the overwhelming majority of 17 year olds don't know enough to make useful pharma research is because it's not so easy to learn those skills and gain that knowledge.

Any 17 year old can teach himself to code and get valuable, real-world programming experience (and an actual job, for that matter) with nothing more than a laptop and an internet connection - everything else is free. He can then start a company, all from his parents' home.

You cannot say the same about pharma. The capital investment needed is much higher, the regulations are much stricter, and blind trial-and-error isn't an option unless you want to put your own life at risk. To put it simply, you're quite literally in the (human) meatspace.
This would be awesome for making diet management applications that didn't require manual user entry.

Automated data entry and feedback on weight loss and management would be great.
I've always thought very carefully about my paths' efficiency (despite not being a mathematician). I walk in a similar way except I'm okay with spending more time in the street.
I doubt a corp card limit has anything to do with it, this isn't a business product.
What a sad state we find ourselves in. The past decades were by no means free from such poisonous personalities (see: Tyco), but we seem to have reached a whole new level. I guess humility doesn't pay the bills anymore.
Just slapping a web interface over IRC channels would be 80% there. "Oh, I'm here to talk about hockey while I watch the Flyers game."

But Facebook might be hurting themselves in this regard by forcing real names, one account, etc. And the expectation that anything you do will spam all your friends newsfeeds. I mean, if my friends, coworkers and family all wanted to talk about hockey I wouldn't need to chat with strangers.
Venture capital investing is not the only method by which to mitigate the risks inherent to innovation. The university system, via tenure and grants, does a good job of facilitating innovation by mitigating the risks that individual researchers take--even when big capital expenditures are required.

Other systems can be envisioned: for instance, a basic income or a negative income tax would remove much of the risk that individual programmers, inventors and tinkerers face when trying to pursue their visions.
If you haven't already, it would be worth your time to read Player Piano by Vonnegut - the setting is very similar to what you describe above, and it's a pretty interesting take on those themes.
Does it support Ruby?
I really like how the code + images enhance the post, but I think this model is a little simplistic for how analytical minds actually cross roads. The post assumes that my discomfort level is a constant, but in reality I become more comfortable the further across the road I've walked (as I become more confident that I'm not going to be flattened by a car). This leads to a smoothed curve on the latter half of the street.

Does Fermat's principle allow for variable refractions?
Me too (4,000 photos). I had recently let my Pro account expire in favor of just posting to G+, but now I'll probably start uploading again. (Of course, G+ also just changed their photo support last week.)
Improve it, maintain it, kill it or sell it?
It's my site. I didn't realize it was even posted here (I did post it at reddit).

To address some points:

The title of the site is kind of vague, agreed. I'm going to write an abstract for the index page to describe the gist of the design methodologies.

It's not part of an NVIDIA sales pitch, at all. I work in NVIDIA Research and have a lot of autonomy. I like doing programming patterns and algorithms research. At some point I had amassed a lot of stuff and thought it would be nice to share everything with the community.. no coordination with the marketing folks. My employer was nice enough to let me release it, but this is my project, not an official company one. This flexibility is one advantage of working in research.

I don't want to get dragged into a vendor or API debate. The MGPU project is about programming concepts. It wouldn't be hard for a developer to translate all the functions into another API--"hackability" is a goal that I talk about in the introduction. I chose CUDA because it's succinct (important for code readability) and its what I use on a daily basis.
Eccentrism is by no means the sole privilege of the rich. Emperor Norton was a famously broke, yet grandiose fellow who was beloved throughout the city of San Francisco in the late 1800s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton
Is the left mushroom a 1-up mushroom while the right one a power-up mushroom? I must know! :P
You know how long I had to haggle at a shady Toyota dealership to get my brother his Yaris? 4 hours. 4 HOURS. Haggling does not take 10 minutes at a car dealership once you get to a certain point in the process.

I make enough money that I can throw it away on not haggling for a car. Carmax can keep whatever I left on the table by not dealing with a douchebag car dealership.
I feel like no one actually read the submission. Google Checkout and Google Wallet overlapped too much, and Wallet won out. If your website uses Checkout, just replace it with Wallet, and move on with your life.
Bringing another billion dollars into the company? Loading up on ammunition.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732476700457848...
I do remember my high school physics teacher mentioning this during optics... he used an example of the most optimal path for a lifeguard.
It only works on certain browsers, so you need a fallback. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/824349/modify-the-url-wit...
Rich people spend thousands of dollars on private planes just so they don't have to deal with the BS flying commercial. Dealing with a car sales person is no more fun than going through airport security, i happily pay a premium to not deal with those people.
Recruit this
Sure, but that's hardly some sort of government conspiracy to turn police into mini dictators.
"Does Fermat's principle allow for variable refractions?"

Yes, and that's where is gets interesting! Light will take a curved path through a tank of salt water, because the salinity, and through that the index of refraction, will not be constant but will be a continuous function of the depth.
I don't haggle. At all. I've sold a startup before for 7 figures. You know how I closed deals with Fortune 500 companies when we were selling our product? "Here's the price. Please feel free to shop elsewhere if you're not interested." Same with selling the shop. "Here's the price (based on our fundamentals). If you don't want to buy it, cool, someone else will. Or it can keep printing us cash."

Haggling is overrated.
>The truth is that the VCs have created absolutely none, zero of the wealth in Silicon Valley. All of the wealth was created by the workers who built these companies.

You sound too emotionally invested [1] in a world view and that is clouding your judgement and understanding of the situation.

Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, Paul Graham, and countless other VC's were once "workers" who produced a great deal of the wealth of SV, and are now reinvesting it into the ecosystem's next generation.

Logically speaking, no amount of confirming examples can prove your assertion true, but one single refuting example can completely disprove it. I believe I just did that.

You can't tar everyone with the same brush, and doing so only takes you, and all of us, further from the reality and truth of the situation, not closer.

[1]: http://www.metafilter.com/125555/The-Psychology-of-Human-Mis...
Fab Raising at Least $250 Million
So far fun, but connect it with stackoverflow, linkedin and public google search and you have pretty scary tool :)
I think the next thing Google will kill is its search engine... :)
Yeah, I figured it was on me when you actually started talking about business. I thought you were trying troll and say it's all about money and greed :)
Reminds me of the adage that a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into.
Hey.. they's my family. This is what HN sinks to?
> Even worse, you can't close those loopholes by adding more conditionals. By definition, you're only creating more optimization paths for them to choose from.

One thing they try are schemes like alternative minimum taxes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_minimum_tax

Computationally, they solve this problem. But, as far as tax terms, who knows.
I use Dropbox every day. It just works. I don't need anything new from them, I'm perfectly fine with product that just works. Contrary to popular opinion, most people aren't 5-year-olds with short attention span, that constantly need something new to not get bored. They are busy people with little time to spare, and once they found something that works for them, they'd rather it keep working than search for something "new" that may or may not be useful for them.
Thank you for the explanation. And kudos for eating almost 1kg of chicken breast per sitting ;)
It was understood that it's not GM and Ford fighting on this issue. The point was, in reply to the OP, Tesla will be able to play the underdog card for a very very long time.
And here I was expecting a serious pitch... but then I should have realised that "a serious pitch" and "I want to contact Yahoo" may not be compatible.
This is a very interesting way of solving the key distribution problem. It forces attackers to capture both the digital part of the key and the physical.
Not only mathematicians, but ants:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
Could've been 8... ;-)
君子报仇十年不晚

Also this:

10 minutes on stage is 10 years practice behind stage.
Everyone. They just won't use GMail anymore.
Would like to add that the senior management in charge of running the company are expected to perform their fiduciary duties i.e. optimize for minimizing taxes for the benefit of the company.
Refunds and credits are two different things entirely. They are considered two different things by the credit card companies. If you've done this, then you've done it with a system that hides the specifics of what you are actually doing.
The Top 3 Things I Learned at the Bitcoin Conference
Headline trolled me good, I was all ready to post my screed about how it is, in fact, a perfectly cromulent word because people use it all the time and everyone else knows what they mean and English isn't a dead language defined only by what you'd find in dead-tree dictionaries.

Of course, the post basically goes on to say you should just keep using the word, so no ranting required.
This is a warrant. They're legally compelled to give emails to the DoJ. This went through a judge, as well it should...

What is the problem here?
I want to know who he is calling a "mick"?
How? Have you used the service?
It's a constant upper bound for lg N, which is shown in the editorial for the maximum subword length. It's easy to remember 2^20 > 1e6 > 1e5, which helps simplify the thought process behind the implementation.