skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did you create three shell companies in different states, some with no reporting requirements, in order to carry out this purchase?

Your point is a good one. But it's hard for the nonspecialist to avoid associating this kind of tax avoidance with the behavior of Enron sometime back.
If you listen to his audio commentaries (most of his pieces in http://www.banksyny.com/ have a commentary on the page), he pokes fun at himself and at pretentious commentaries that often accompany art pieces.
> For example the guy after Obama could win by a 90% landslide, then immediately launch an all-out war against Iran, Syria and say Jordan

Or, to turn that around the other way, something happens just after the election which causes 80-90% of the electorate to support an attack on Iran, Syria, and Jordan. The president after Obama, after some consideration and discussion with people in her/his cabinet decides to not attack.

With the threat of death over his/her head, might the president decide to make a decision, not based on deliberation and careful consideration, but just as a way to pander to the public lest s/he get killed. Is that a desirable outcome?
The "slick and simple user interface" stops with their marketing site in my opinion. I used it for about 3-4 months but had to switch to Quickbooks Online and I can't stand Intuit. I actually find QBO to be better designed & easier to use.
In this case, not sad at all. As abat says above, these pieces look flat and boring. Usually Banksy's work melds with the environment it's in, often in clever ways. Taken out of that environment, it's just stencil art. The special essence has left, and it does become boring.
I'm a Java developer, do music recording and plays the synthesizer. Unless there's a Linux laptop in the market that can let me do all these without hours of configuration, I'll stick to my Macbook Pro.

I know that Garageband isn't meant to be a professional recording software, but it gives me what I need, and so far, Linux can't meet any of those requirements yet.
Not just AP, but nuking people you don't like, too: https://twitter.com/pro2rat/status/389410900832038912
It's interesting to compare this to the Joshua Bell (live) 'performance' cited in @mjn's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6544810) considering that Banksy generally makes stencil art. I suppose the performance here was not about the art products at all.
Flipping the hackathon model on its head (big brands/startups)
The singular meaning of what a hackathon is has changed drastically over the past year now that corporations see the massive potential of gathering together top-notch engineers to work on specific industry problems...

And rather than these hacks bringing out weekend warrior devs, they are increasingly attracting early stage startups who have teams hungry to build solutions to real world business problems with a chance to win big customers.

These new kind of hackathons provide an incredible opportunity to help more and more startups succeed by building products and services businesses will actually adopt. And yes…

Help us understand what we can do to create the most robust and mutually beneficial platform for young companies to thrive in what's becoming a powerful new way to engage with customers.

Note:

We are also holding a Novatis business hackathon on Oct 25-27 in SF to build mHealth apps for people with chronic illnesses ($40K pot). Join us.

http://novartis-mhealth-challenge-sf.eventbrite.com/?discount=hn
New toy: Building a meditation feedback loop
I like Banksy, but there's no way my mom knows who he is, which is the important thing. There are more "my moms" in the U.S. than there are "your friends", in other words.
Aren't those "two steps" and the analysis sort of after-the-fact relative to the 4th Amendment itself? I mean, those "There are X steps to a blahblah" things are Supreme Court Rulings from the recent past. Those analyses are the stuff of lawyering, and seem to me to divorce the plain meaning of the US constitution from how it's currently interpreted. The whole 3rd Party Records doctrine stems from such a divorce, and seems to defy the plain wording of the 4th Amendment. It also seems like a petty dodge on the part of law enforcement, frankly. "Oh, not a search, 'cause you let the phone company in on the deal." Sure, but The Phone Company doesn't care what I say in the call, and doesn't have the capacity to record every damn thing I say. Also, there's something of a professional relationship there.

I realize that nothing I wrote would withstand some kind of "N-Prong Test for Violation of Privacy", but that's the point. Those "N-Prong tests" are a way of talking around a violation of privacy.
The intent usually seems to be to get one's chidren surrounded by primarily middle-or-better class children, not to keep their schooling racially and culturally pure.
D-Link Router backdoor vulnerability discovered
Ubuntu Gnome and sometimes Debian. Mostly because apt and ubuntu are so widely used everything just seems to work.

Unity is nice when it works but gnome seems to work more often so that is what I prefer.
And how do you propose that government finds money to pay for roads, bridges, dams, police, firefighters, national security, national parks, environmental protection, regulatory standards etc?
If your contribution can be traced. Such a system would not be viable without at least, deniability if not outright anonymity.
Annual/biannual performance review.

Its sounded at first you were looking for feedback from employees which is equally if not more important.
Try not to let this article turn you off Weingarten's work — I think this story was meant to be a bit "fun".

For something more serious, check out Weingarten's thought-provoking feature piece about dead children — "Fatal Distraction", http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2009-03-08/news/36840402_... . His story does a good job of (1) telling stories about tragic accidents where children were forgotten in the back of cars and died; (2) showing that the key factor in whether or not the parents were prosecuted was not the facts of the situation but instead which prosecutor's district the deaths occurred in; (3) finding a surprising explanation for the increase in these accidents — rear-facing car seats. Given the subject matter, it's neither smug nor glib, and so you might prefer it to his subway violin story.
In the context of a street performance, the difference between a bad musician and a good musician is much greater than that between a good and a world-class one, particularly if you're only briefly exposed to it. For the most part, you're just not focusing on the music - it's not like sitting in a hall intending to be entertained.

Should people at a metro station even be able to tell the difference between a violin worth $3.5k and one worth $3.5M anyway?
The connotation of that is flipped by its corollary: the less masters you serve, the less pleasures you have.
River geomorphology: Divided by five
Ya'll, what amount of time do you find is enough for your streak? I am on day 11 of 1 hour/day working on a startup concept.
What you are blaming them for is not prohibiting tax avoidance, but for not anticipating that loopholes would be found in existing regulation. It's very likely that if these loopholes were eliminated, some other loophole would be found. At some point, maybe the discussion should be about the spirit of the law, not the letter of it (which can probably be worked around if you can pay for an army of lawyers and accountants in multiple countries)
T-Mobile has to do this because their network is the worst. For a lot of people, that's more important than device availability, customer service, data limits, international roaming and contract terms. I say this as a T-Mo customer.
The closest touchstone might be to think about Andy Warhol.
When somebody gets busted for computer hacking, the common line on here is that an activity's difficulty has very little to do with its legality. A for loop and curl are really simple, but just as illegal under the right circumstances.

You're doing the same thing: suggesting that the ethicality of a practice depends on its legal complexity.
It is interesting, although I am unsure of the value of this information.

Something I have started to do is to look at the finger prints on people's touch devices. My wife's has an interesting pattern and it reflects her obsession with Candy Crush.
Sad but true :-/
>For example you might see $50mm worth of bounties on a lot of higher-ups at the NSA for letting this spying-on-innocent-as-well-as-guilty Americans business go on for so long. Those programs might then get shut down, or at the very least those people might retire to very private places immediately.

Or you'll get bounties put out on postal workers because the Post Office is secretly reading everyone's mail.

I would submit that out of the pool of people willing to participate in an assassination-for-hire marketplace, few are likely to be reasonable in what they would consider a killing offense.
In a just world do you lose rights when you violate another's?

Most people would accept that it's moral for someone who's threatened with a gun by another to kill that other person, thus preserving their own life.

Many would still accept as moral the same situation, but where the assailant has a knife.

Many would again accept as moral everything the same, except instead of someone intent to kill with a knife, an assailant who only intended to rob.

Robbery is taking a thing against the wishes/desires/rights of another.

Some might argue that the government collecting taxes is robbery by that definition and thus they have the moral right to defend their property with deadly force. The government certainly will use force to ensure that it gets it's taxes. They won't shoot you but they will take away your freedom and the only way they can do that is with force or the threat of force.

At what point do you disagree with that line of thinking? Why? I'm not trolling you, genuinely curious.
>The biggest bottleneck was consistently the communication with MongoDB, something I had very little control over.

Interesting you say that, because one of Mongo's few redeeming features is that it's supposed to be pretty fast for both reading and writing. Exactly which part was the bottleneck? Was your app more read-heavy or write-heavy?
Agreed. Fortran 20 years ago? I like Fortran and was using it 20 years ago. That said, that was only because I was working for an astronomer.

It did take me a moment to catch the sarcasm.
I probably wouldn't have bought anything, and instead assumed that the guy was selling ripoffs.
I suggest you just get one of his books and look at the art for a while. He's been doing his thing for a long time and has built up a following. I've been a fan for years.
has anyone revealed who he is yet?
That's true, and like I said, none of this is a quantitative assessment.

I think phrasing is that way is misleading, though, there are more "my friends" than "my mom" even though they each have a "my mom."

I would wager that the sum total of all twenty and thirty somethings that know of banksy is pretty substantial. That said, it's definitely not a household name. I'm just wondering if 98% is a great guestimate.

It's all wild speculation, though and kind of immaterial
If your are all interested in Banksy I'd urge you to watch a film that he accidentally was forced to make about Street Art and himself, well let's say because the original Director...well you will see. It's called Exit Through The Gift Shop, I watched on Netflix.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0b90YppquE

I've always been a fan of Banksy's work. Especially the work he did at the dividing wall on both sides in the West Bank and Israel.

http://www.stencilrevolution.com/banksy-art-prints/flying-ba...
Its called positional good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_good
I think my qualm has to do with the impression that the legal complexity is being used to subvert the manifest intent of the tax law. This in my mind is neither black nor white -- it's in the gray area of the law. But I'm not a lawyer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6540842
Social network bias. Ask you're MOM's friends, not your friends.
> roads, bridges, dams, police, firefighters, national security, national parks, environmental protection, regulatory standards

Congratulations, you've enumerated most of the uncontroversial activities of government, which take up a few percent of the budget, and several of which are paid for in whole or in part by use fees.
my roomate's sister makes $69/hour on the internet. She has been out of work for 6 months but last month her pay was $16756 just working on the internet for a few hours. go to website==============================
http://www.works23.com
Well, "data" might not have been the best choice of words. I was thinking back to the times I've seen, interacted with, or heard second-hand of drug addicts (or read studies) -- and I couldn't think of any cases where the statement hold true. The only context I could see it as true, was as an (unfounded) prejudice.

So, I was really just wondering if you've ever had any first or second-hand indication that your assertion isn't just bullshit.
>Logic should always happen in the server domain, handle the client as merely a presentation unit.

Angular/Ember users would disagree with you.

There is a fair bit of logic that can be done on the clientside, sometimes even raw computational logic. It really just depends on the kind of application, and also what the developer thinks is best.
Have you tried VoiceOver? On iOS, turn it on by triple-clicking the Home button, then two-fingered swipe downward to start speaking continuously until the end of the book.
This reminds me: did the White House ever respond to the petition regarding Snowden? I know it reached the required number of signatures.
Issue more treasuries and sell them to the Federal Reserve (since no one else will buy them) in another kick the can down the road way… oh wait…
There seem to be a lot of discussions going on inside each of these projects. There should be some central hub for research and exchange ;)

Disconnected knowledge-islands with people not knowing about already existing solutions to problems they are trying to solve seems to be one downside of scattered communities.

Decentralization is needed for private communication, but there are downsides - creating x parallel nets will not help in finding each others - the knowledge evolution of the internet is driven by the desire of the human brain to connect all available information.

Imagine the NSA decided to create an open and freely available API to the centralized information they have collected - good-minded people certainly will extract useful knowledge from that data, possibly world-changing new ways of thinking about everything could be the results.

The human brain wants this central intelligence (the real one, not the agency) to solve the evolutionary problems we are confronted with today - it must be seen as an ironical evidence of this need that the first biggest data collections that might be useful for all humans on this planet are collected exclusively by paranoid psychopaths to have better tools for control and oppression.

But even if misused, it does happen - the human brain wants to connect. It will not be happy with decentralized knowledge - it is the reason, why the internet exists and it will not want to go back.

This does not mean that decentralized networks are a bad thing in itself (as I said before, needed for private talk urgently!), but it means that we need some information harvesting entity that makes it easy to connect.

It is not only marketing what makes google and facebook so successful - it is the biological meta-programming of our brains that make us want to use these possibilities to connect to the global information pool.

The global brain is the destination - of course it should be untouchable by insane sadist that want to control our life. This evolutionary force will lead to social changes - it does already.

Re-Decentralizing the internet, from this point of view, only postpones the real challenge: build technical and social systems, that can not be misused or at least make it easier to detect and eliminate misuse - we have already concepts for this, we need to apply. Real-life IDS will warn you if you consume fake information or are following the wrong leaders (or if you are following at all). Real-life social SIEM will prevent a group of people misusing the system just for their own profits.
Most probably "profit" will be an ancient word that will be remembered only with shame, like being confronted with the primitive life of our ancestors, that were living in caves.

Decentralization will not rescue us from our duty to expand participation.
Madison, AL huh? I think I know a few people from that area. I'm from Enterprise if you know where that is.

As for your site, I like it. Shows everything I'd care to see.
Netflix in talks with US cable providers -- report
>The bottom 50% pay nothing at all (they do pay about 12% to state/local/sales taxes).

Bullshit. Not just bullshit, but pernicious bullshit.

Payroll taxes account for the same amount of receipts as income taxes. Payroll taxes are extremely regressive. That's some mighty creative accounting where you ignore half of all tax receipts when talking about tax revenue.

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/numb...

The other side of this coin is that tax dollars at the federal level are a returned IOU, they do nothing to fund the government.
Touch ID Likely on iPad 5 Even Though Performance is Erratic
You might as well blame them for creating free trade, and the european union. If legislators had the power to change the tax code, they would. Realistically they can't without doing something awful like currency controls or trade restrictions or something that will get shot down by the WTO.

I am not a huge fan of corporate taxation because it is so indirect, but I do think we need some new global rules around IP transfer pricing.
>Legislators are beholden to rich benefactors.

I think that is ucha's subpoint, if not the main point. We cannot effectively police this kind of stuff.
I got "invited" to federal court over this (I ran the mailing list archive at MIT which USG used as evidence). I was outside the US at the time, working on anon ecash in the Caribbean, so it was a request, not a demand. I met Jennifer Granick as a result, and learned the "if you can possibly avoid it, never ever set foot inside federal court" rule, which has subsequently served me quite well.

Jim Bell probably tops weev as an unsympathetic defendant.
I've always been curious about the pressure of shareholders in situations like this. Google is a publicly shared company, right? So if they don't maximize the shareholder's value, don't they open themselves up to lawsuits by shareholders?

So even if they wanted to "do the right thing" and pay some taxes on this money, they couldn't, else their board would get voted out by large shareholders who are only in it for the money.
No doubt he was a brilliant inventor. But designing gadgets is not science, and if that's all he did he wasn't a "scientist".
>If legislators had the power to change the tax code, they would.

Huh? They absolutely have the power to change tax code. Who do you think does? The IRS just executes the tax doctrine (with varying levels of compliance, of course).
This is funny but I expect will ultimately prove fruitless. Advertising companies like Facebook and Google are not going to back away from monetizing the information they have been collecting from their willing users. In the end, you have the option not to use their services if you don't care for the terms.
I believe the overwhelming majority of the buyers at the top end of the London market are foreign. So it does have something to do with wealth distribution, but not the distribution in Britain.
I don't think replacing Word documents with HTML/CSS is viable, since they specify content for two different formats. HTML is suited to flowing content like a river, whereas Word is for documents meant to fit on a printed page, like on a stone tablet.

You'd have to create quite complicated style templates to get HTML formatted to fit onto pages.
Not everyone. It would help those who don't have the disposable income to find and use these loopholes, which is mostly everyone. Unfortunately the vast majority of the people that it WOULD help have little to no power to effect that kind of change.
>roads, bridges, dams, police, firefighters, national security, national parks, environmental protection, regulatory standards

Take a guess on the percentage of federal budget these services consume on a yearly basis.
It's a cool experiment but not altogether surprising right? The provenance of a piece of artwork, and other rare goods, is arguably more important than the art itself. Especially in the case of artwork which is easily reproducible and copied.

If you think that's idiotic then ask yourself if you were given the opportunity to buy the first original Apple 1 or an exact replica, how much more would you be willing to pay over the replica? If the amount is greater than zero, then you're admitting that you're really buying an experience and set of emotional states in addition to a physical good.
As all gamers know: the best way to fix a badly-broken rule is to exploit it relentlessly.
>few percent of the budget

>national security

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY...
Software is a very broad field and you are painting with a very broad brush. It is true that for many branches of software you do not need much in the way of advanced mathematics. But EVERY graphics programmer I have ever met has told me he wishes he had paid more attention in higher level math courses. The same holds true for folks doing signal and image processing, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and on and on...
My experience is that T-Mobile's 4G is the best. It beats Time Warner's cable modem. I'm able to stream HD Youtube without stalling on my phone but not at home.

But the coverage is truly more limited.
In this case, there is no overt threat - the government employee is not holding a gun to your head, so you have no right to kill him.

Most people are not very even handed when they feel that their rights have been violated, so it tends to lead to escalation, and tribal/gang style violence, tit-for-tat.

It's much better IMO for a society to deal with disputes by legal means, not by stalking, harassing and killing each other, eg. if I shoot you in self defence, then that's 1 person's worth of productivity lost to the world, similarly if I harass you and threaten you at your home address (0.5 x PP?).

And yes, if you consistently violate other people's rights, or act with poor judgement, then you should lose rights. For example, if you're in the US and threaten people with a gun, you should lose the right to carry a gun, or the right to not be searched.
Anyone else take a look at that sort of price tag and ponder whether they're in the wrong business? :P
that is the user experience.
It's basically a Threadless t-shirt design in concrete or canvas rather than fabric.
> it's also unlikely that the few folks who can judge your work are in any position to fire you

But in the other hand, it means those who can judge your work are not in the same position to hire you, and it is not ruled out that people in position to fire you has to understand your work in order to do so.
Aren't most of those paid for by property and energy (gasoline) taxes?
I think most people would be able to deduce that those people who were living there before moved somewhere else. If you can't use money to buy things that lots of people all want, why bother to earn the money in the first place?