skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your "fair share" of tax is what is detailed in the tax code. It is not a number picked out at random to punish companies for doing well or something. Granted the tax code is unwieldy and complex, but the intent is pretty clearly spelt out. I speak from 3 years experience working and training fulltime in the UK towards accreditation as an accountant.

If you munchkin a string of infinite wishes don't act all surprised when your DM just says no (or if they're a particularly good DM, "yes, but").
Ask HN: Why anyone use Gravatar to sync user infos?
I think that would be great to be able to sync your user profile informations just like our avatar by fetching info from our email via Gravatar.

Take a look at all what available: https://en.gravatar.com/site/implement/profiles/
Design-dependent media queries in LESS
Wow, it sounds like you were outright exploited, while the OP merely has incompetent but non-malicious co-founders. Did you not have a lawyer?
Isn't this a huge burden on the economy as a whole? The vast majority of businesses which follow this strategy will go out of business without ever creating more value than they consumed. A significant percentage of those will over leverage and file bankruptcy, pushing their losses off onto those who helped finance them while driving up interest rates.

How does it pan out long-term for a VC to advocate for this strategy and this strategy alone?

Edit: My gut instinct is that this is an example of a VC valuing short-term gain at the expense of literally everything else. They don't want your business to succeed, they want their business to succeed. They don't want the economy to boom, they want to outpace the economy any way they can. Maybe I just lack experience in this realm (I have nearly zero experience dealing with VCs), and/or this is overly cynical, but this just pisses me off.
You seriously lack reading comprehension.
Uhh, no.

Regulation is what requires corporations to dispose of pollutants properly instead of just dumping them in rivers.

Regulation is what requires corporations to give workers proper safety warnings, equipment and training rather than just putting them in harm's way.

Regulation is what requires corporations to disclose their accounting to investors instead of telling them whatever they want.

Regulation is what requires corporations to pay full time workers overtime, give breaks and sick time, and just generally treat them like human beings.

Regulation is for corporations what criminal law is for individuals.

It's what prevents the worst of us from behaving as badly as they would otherwise.

Not all regulation is automatically good, just like not all criminal laws are automatically good. But there is a reason it exists, and it has an important role to play.
If I headed a big corporation, I would optimize taxes too and at the same time, wish that the laws wouldn't allow me to do that. Why should I be the only stupid one and give my competitors advantge?

I absolutely agree with Warren Buffet on this: he uses the legal loopholes while arguing against them. I think it's the most ethical position. At first, it may seem as hypocrisy, but in fact, it's absolutely understandable and logical.
I genuinely thought this was bot spam.
I agree. I think they should switch to at least Debian testing, if not Sid. There's really nothing to be gained by staying, especially since Mint is currently at the top of Distrowatch.

I use Arch, and I find rolling to be amazing. I love it when I run updates and I get an upgrade to my DE without having to go through a 30-minute or longer upgrade process.
Quite. I have used gvim on Windows from around '99. It works decently and you can even share most of your plugins and configuration across platforms.
Nice job mate :)
Last time I used Rackspace for a VPS (over a year ago now), they required me to file a support ticket to create a cname/txt, for my domain linked to my VPS. Is that still the case? It was one of the reasons I left Rackspace for myself and all my clients. I just got tired of having to ask for something that other VPS providers let (and trust) developers to do themselves.
An app for living healthier, really this time
YES, SURELY.
When someone drives a car they're polluting, and therefore reducing the quality of life for at least some of the population. Does that mean driving cars is immoral?

Surely something more is needed to make it immoral.
> assuming you're doing so legally.

Avoiding taxes is fine, but the extent that Google (and Amazon, and Starbucks) do it is unacceptable to the British public.

There's a possibility that it's not legal. These companies have huge budgets and staff, and they can hire very expensive accountants (who also have very many staff) and they come up with complex schemes. Some of these are legal, some are borderline. UK tax authorities don't have many staff so forensic investigations of complex probably legal gets less attention than the people who are evading tax.

The outrage isn't that these companies have avoided some tax. Everyone expects it, and they'd be doing it too if they could. The outrage is when Starbucks charges a couple of quid for a coffee and then claim that they make no profit in the UK.

You're right that in the UK there's a weird attitude around very rich companies. It's changing, slowly.

[1] avoiding = legal methods to reduce tax bill; evading = illegal methods to avoid paying tax.
I'm writing a clone/rewrite of virtualenvwrapper in pure python, I'll announce it on the fish mailing list, since the main reason I created it is that I felt this pain as a fish user myself
So fix the laws to prevent this type of tax avoidance, else all companies will use these tax avoidance schemes, like they are doing right now.

Which begs the question why these 'loopholes' exist in the first place, and why they aren't quickly plugged.

This was rhetorical question, the politicians keep these loopholes in the system at the behest of these massive corporations and rich individuals who bri... lobby them to do so, and then they put on these shows to make it seem as if they are actually trying to prevent it.
I'm with you up until the corporations ask for a repatriation tax holiday for the cash in the havens.
Just look at the results. That seems not to be the case.
You didn't, I was giving you examples of actual corporatists (particularly Obama as he's actually appointed lobbyists to positions of power in the federal government).

corporatist: "A supporter of corporatism."
corporatism: "The control of a state or organization by large interest groups."

Using the definition of the word, how exactly are either of the Pauls corporatists?
It's being rolled out to Gmail since day 1. You can't launch something like this to several 100 millions of users in an hour.
I disagree and the experience of many others in prominent positions have experience that runs counter to that. From the outside, it's easy to dismiss it as a "game" (which is a bit odd, given the popularity of games in software...).

I'm using "game" as a synonym for "gamble", not "engaging, interactive experience".

When you let your boss assign you crap work to support his career goals while you don't learn anything, you're essentially gambling. The idea is that if you let him use your career in the way that a teenager uses a Kleenex, for about 3 years, his sense of indebtedness will inspire him to start giving you real work and this sudden turn to political favor compensate for your wasted time.

What actually happens is that the real work always goes to people with higher-quality work experience than what you got. You're not eligible for the good stuff, because you wasted years of your life on the garbage out of a misguided sense of loyalty (or perhaps financial desperation).

From the inside, find a better way to separate those who can make an actual contribution to those who just do what they're told and need to be told what they should do?

People who try to work directly for the company by solving important problems they weren't told to solve get fired for breaking the #1 Rule of Corporate Survival: Never Outshine Your Master: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMy8Tf-zCag. (Ok, that's actually one of the 48 "laws of power" and I don't agree with the whole body of work, but that one is 100% true.)
Of course you don't have to agree with me, you can choose to be wrong if you want to.

But my point was that it's not just "contrarian bullshit", and I'm right about that.
Thank you for posting this. I think this highlights really well how complicated Bitcoin security issues are.

I will come right out and admit that there is an intrinsic risk to leaving your Bitcoin wallet on a 24/7 server that an attacker can potentially break into. I think that running your own (vs a centralized hosted wallet service) potentially mitigates some of this risk, but of course, if there was a security issue with Coinpunk, an attacker could theoretically write a script to spider for servers. I do believe that it does help to reduce the "single point of failure" problem though.

I do think that the added convenience of 24/7 bitcoin transactions is worth the risk. I think that there is a threshold of acceptable risk that people will take for convenience. After all, even if you're running Bitcoin-qt on a desktop, what's to stop a trojan horse from infecting that machine and stealing its wallet file?

There are a few things I want to implement eventually to improve the security of Coinpunk. One thing I want to do is allow accounts to remove and backup their private address keys. This would in effect turn the account into a "savings account" that is locked from changes. You could move a large portion of your funds to that account, and then keep the rest available for quick transactions.

Another thing I want to do is enable the wallet encryption feature. It's not a huge security gain because the attacker probably has access to that password, but I don't think it hurts. This could perhaps be combined with a chroot jail that doesn't have access to the config file after loading, requiring the user to figure out how to pry the password out of memory on a running program (which isn't impossible, but it's definitely more work).

I wanted to get the basic system running, and then explore these security improvements in a systematic way with help from the community. So these features will eventually go in, I just want to go slow and make sure we get things right.
great video about the whole corporate tax game http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4o13isDdfY

also showing parts of the discussion with Google, Amazon and Starbucks in Parliament.
They advocate this strategy if you (plan to) take VC money. They are probably not claiming every startup should follow this strategy.
Tableau IPO (Ticker: DATA)
The problem I have, is that common workers pay taxes, but these very profitable companies don't.

I hate taxes, I really do. You can offer free healthcare and education and proper infrastructure without the fucked up taxes some countries take. But it's the unfairness here. The richer you are, the easier it is for you to dodge taxes, while workers are forced to because they don't know all the cool tricks or can afford a lawyer.
> What makes you think Google is better?

Statements from friends who work there plus knowledge from seminars they sometimes organize with Warsaw University. Example (Polish language warning :-) ): http://students.mimuw.edu.pl/SR/rok12-13/Google.html

Short translation of the above link: cluster management, availability management, load balancing. OS-level things, definitely not maintenance of a legacy ticketing system for "real" devs in California.
yeah that is really good after only 9 months - what business?
Bush appointed lots of lobbyists too. It's unfortunately how our government works in an age of unfettered corporate donations. If you hate it as much as I do then you should be for publicly financed campaigns to remove corporate interest from elections.

The Pauls are corporatists because they would eliminate basically all regulation and so many government services that corporations would be the government.
For what it's worth, we've been using UberConference ( http://www.uberconference.com ) to do conference calls and it's been quite good. No video, though.
Woman creates 3D-printed portraits of strangers using their DNA
Reclaiming your Google referral data
But if you're avoiding it legally, like pvnick said, what you pay is by your definition the fair share.
There is the android wallet app already. I wonder why would one want to keep his wallet on a server?
> I'd be much more likely to give geocities $15 for a premium account than I would be to ever click on an ad.

I really wish this was a more common attitude.

You could make it happen for less than $15. At a value of $1/CPM to a website owner displaying one ad. $5 would cover one user for ~5,000 page views. ~10,000 page views taking into account the 50% of users using adblock today, value equal to double.

Imagine you pay $5 for every 10,000 page views on previously adverted sites and the money was distributed among those websites you visited.
Governments needs to be honest with their citizens and detail how the taxes on the corporation are merely embedded taxes that they, the people, are the true payers.

So all that is being done here is taxes collected by Google on behalf the government are not being paid to the government through one tax rule or another.

Do no evil, sorry but the people claiming they are doing evil in regards to taxes need to look in the mirror. The dishonesty in taxation starts at government, everyone else just has different abilities to play the game.
I am trying to think of the others like GeoCities. all I can think of is Tripod, Angelfire, and members.aol.com pages. there were a bunch of others back in the day.
The argument against testing seems to be "the Spike", when you're learning a language/concept/framework or are testing out ideas. But startups (at least the two I've worked for the last two years) seem way more heavily invested in the spike than in the carefully-tested production environment. Personally speaking, it's even more exciting to work on.

It took me a good year and half to properly appreciate well-optimized, well-tested code in production, and enjoy the challenges associated there (which aren't trivial-- the neatest, ugliest NumPy script can be entirely useless at scale, or in a timeframe useful to users).

But I still personally feel flat when the knowledge gains associated with a Spike aren't as frequent. How have other developers and math-types dealt with that disappointing feeling of a plateau? Besides just changing jobs entirely, I mean.
thanks for the actual rankings numbers - that would have saved me some time..

and i agree that thread got pretty unpleasant and i think it highlights another side of the same problem as it shows how people who may not like the particular issue furiously attack those who do (and likewise in reverse).

i really believe if one made-up a similar post and reversed the roles between the two companies the reaction would have been substantially different - both in terms of the thread commentary and flagging. its one thing to disagree with something and argue against it, its another thing to try to burry something which only serves to depress any good exchange of thoughts that came come-out of it.
Some of the schemes are pretty complicated. Routing the goods and money and paperwork needs to be done carefully to ensure you're still legal.

Hiring KPMG, Deloitte, Earnst & Young, or PWC isn't cheap.

And we have a really weird system here. These big four firms sent some of their accountants to help the government create tax laws. They then exploited the loopholes in the tax laws they had created.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/apr/26/accountancy-f...)

EDIT: Here's some discussion of the PAC report that's more balanced: (http://www.ion.icaew.com/TaxFaculty/26745)
They contribute to the confusion by showing a photo of a young woman in a field.
Off-Topic: but the site looks awesome and so does the video :)
Well, it is hard for department stores to claim they do not sell goods where their cashiers are, despite their address being perhaps in a tax haven.

However, Amazon have this unfair advantage as well as google. IIRC.

Or for small service companies to claim they do not do 'sales' in a country when their business is done there.

It is not just a business address.
Exactly. You don't see that mentioned very often in the papers, though...

If Google and Amazon are evil, then so are half the "British" banking and insurance companies. It's common practice to channel profits and off to countries like Bermuda to avoid both tax and regulation.
Michael Feathers has a good talk where he discusses this a bit:

http://vimeo.com/43659006
Ask HN: Can reading SICP and doing its exercises get you hired?
I'm reading SICP and want to complete most of its exercises. Seeing never got a chance to be in a functional programming type of course, I feel like it would be beneficial for to learn more about the paradigm along with compilers and interpreters -- the last two exercises in the book particularly have my interest in the long run. I worry that it could be a waste of time, and that I should be focusing on more practical projects before looking for a first job.

Every review I've read on the book has talked about how wonderful it is in really giving the reader a rigorous general foundation, and having a good foundation in a variety of topics is what makes a great programmer, right? I feel that most prospective employers don't really care about that, though.

So my question to you is if one doesn't have many OSS projects, but rather one or two on github along with having finished SICP's exercises and a blog for explanations to complement those, do you think said candidate would be a decent first job prospect? In otherwords, is SICP worthy of a CV bullet point?
It was available just now in brew for me.
Building Good Tools
Actually yes, regulation also gives favored status to corporations. For example, the "Big Three" credit rating agencies who were given the federal gov't's blessed "NRSRO" status, who controlled 95% of the market share on credit ratings and who ended up being a a major cause of the 2008 bank failure due to their malfeasance in rating debt.

Another example is Bell Systems("Ma Bell")'s stifling of innovation as they held a government-sanctioned monopoly over telephone service via the Communications Act of 1934. Ma Bell would have had no reason to build you an iPhone as they had the market cornered.
The most useful thing I find is just to contact friends. If I need to chat to someone then I know that if I send them a facebook message they'll most likely read it and reply within the day.
That question was asked 2 years ago.

From the current docs:

A universal variable is a variable whose value is shared across all instances of fish, now and in the future - even after a reboot. You can make a variable universal with set -U:

> set -U EDITOR vim

Now in another shell:

> echo $EDITOR
vim
I disagree about having no choice---there is ALWAYS choice for a "Do No Evil" corporation. I do agree that it must be solved by international law, though, as it is kind of silly to expect a corporation to behave any better than how you force it to behave.
An integration with Jawbone's Up / Fitbit's One would help a lot.
It's not knowing about them, it's being able to defend them. A gray area loophole is much safer to exploit if you have a large legal team to back up your interpretation.
Indeed I did. Thanks.
Kind of hoping that the linked story was a continuation of Ovid's thoughts on (not unit-)testing:

http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2013/04/how-to-be-agile-wit...
http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2013/04/when-must-you-test-...
http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2013/04/code-evolution-vers...
Yup. It's my Twitter and my Website, and it makes it easier for someone to contact me.
Yes, doing at least a million in profit a year for the past 2 years.
If they get away from utility pricing and go flat like Linode then that might be interesting. It's the same reason I don't use AWS, nickel and diming practices.
If you liked The Office, I think the Gervais Principle is an even better explanation of this:
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
Spring Config File Best Practices
Yep. It all comes down to companies promising to donate tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to public representatives the next year in exchange for votes which harms the United States. It's certainly corruption and almost treason, but congress has probably passed many laws preventing themselves from ever going to jail for bribery, treason, information leaking, insider trading, or any other crime which normal citizens would be prosecuted for.
http://www.google.com/patents/US7535468

Given how long ago that was, I'm guessing it still doesn't quite work, it doesn't fit into a feasible footprint, or it interferes with some other more-valued part of the current backlight/display/glass arrangement.
Static init/de-init order were huge issues at my last job, working on embedded devices. When I say huge, I really mean issues that would seem to come and go randomly with builds, and in some cases brick devices until someone could JTAG it and get it up on a debugger to load a new boot block or determine the root cause. As the guy that got to do this, let me tell you that stepping through the ARM assembly of the runtime library made me feel like an uber hacker, but it wasn't exactly fun.

The nifty counter pattern[0] ended up being the most helpful for generating a static initialization and de-initialization order without conflicts. The tradeoffs are that it increases codesize and that it looks like magic to a lot of people. I don't remember the exact reason that wrapping everything in functions returning references didn't work - I think it was more to do with the de-init side of things, since the function wrappers guarantee the init order but not the de-init order.

[0] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/More_C%2B%2B_Idioms/Nifty_Count...
I love Console2. Be advised that it doesn't play nice with some things (or maybe the other way around?). I downloaded less for windows [1] yesterday and it completely hosed the terminal (changed all the colors and made the window ~10px wide and taller than my resolution).

Thinking back on it I'm not terribly surprised this happened given what Console2 is.

[1] http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/less.htm
I don't think you need to do that any more. I too remember having to do that and it was a complete PITA.
That's a pretty good idea. We still have to validate if people want to do something like this. So far, our beta testing has come back really positive.
I'll address just one of your lefty talking points.
"Right to choose : They are against a woman's right to choose."
Why don't you finish the sentence, pal? Right to choose what exactly? Many people recognize that women do not have the right to murder their unborn child. One good thing from the Gosnell case is that the reality of your agendas are becoming more exposed by the day.
There are actually a lot of refugees/immigrants in the Norway/Sweden/Denmark/Netherlands from Islamic countries, now. And, those communities tend to commit a disproportionate number of crimes, although this could be for a variety of reasons -- poverty before moving, poverty after moving, culture, age, ... (Biology seems like the least likely, especially given how bloodthirsty the vikings were only 50 generations ago)
>Does that mean driving cars is immoral?

Yes.
From the tutorial: "fish has excellent help and man pages. Run help to open help in a web browser, and man to open it in a man page."

I haven't installed it yet, but it sounds like the same information is in both places. Given its dependency on doxygen, I think it's very likely.
Yahoo reportedly eyeing Tumblr for possible $1 billion acquisition
Because its easier.

I only have about $20 in bitcoin. I would much rather use a server, because the thought of losing $20 in case of security breach doesn't really keep me up at night.