skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Charge them with tax avoidance for not paying those taxes, then throw them in jail.

Tax avoidance isn't a crime (or even illegal.)

Tax evasion is a crime, but consists of concealing or misrepresenting material facts to avoid an assessment of liability, which isn't what your scenario presents.

Willful failure to pay taxes is also a crime, but mere inability isn't willfulness.

Your argument that retrospective taxes (which aren't retroactive unless the tax becomes due in the past) being a license for arbitrary imprisonment rests on a misrepresentation of criminal laws associated with taxes (and would require them to be applied in a manner not only inconsistent with existing law, but in a manner which I'm fairly certain has been held unconstitutional as a violation of due process rights even outside the context of retrospective taxation.)
Nearly all of /r/bitcoin, some people here and most of the "true believers".
Hey guys, thanks for the response! This was just meant to be a starting point for anyone working on getting bootstrap 3 to work. It's not an end-all be-all, use it as-is theme. I just realized after a bunch of hours of fighting through and figuring out stuff, that this might help some others.

You have great points about the (horrible lack of) code structure. Sue me. Fix it yourself! :) Kidding aside, literally I have about six hours into this, and thought it might be helpful to others.

I really stuck it on github more so that my buddies could use it, than for general consumption... it was just a whim to stick in on here.

I'll pop up a demo site in the next day or two... client work takes a priority. If I had expected to get as much traffic as I am, I would have put it up already... sorry about that!

As for the licensing... I'm not up on it, and shame on me for that... I guess I'll have to do some reading about GPL vs MIT... I just know that I tend to use MIT in the past. Thank you for pointing that out... stay tuned.
Your iPhone maps and logs where you are and when you're there
Hackathons - Get more than just Prizes
There's a lot of open source that glues the internet together (e.g. most of the DNS infrastructure, essentially the largest distributed database in the world, is run on open source software).

When it comes to the actual shuffeling of packets, it's mostly done by proprietary hardware though - but there's no lack of open source there either, there's plenty of routers and routing protocols available (and cools stuff like openvswitch).

One step up from there, there's quite a lot of work done on distributed databases, load balancers, distributed virtualization, service provisioning (e.g. platforms such as opendaylight, cassandra/hadoop, puppet)
I think The Incredibles is at least partially responsible for the return of mid-century modern furnishings.
http://hnrankings.info/6712226/
It's still pretty trivial to mess up memory management and segfault and die. Speaking as a full-time iOS person, I don't think I want to write a backend in Obj-C.

When I flub a strong/weak reference on a phone, my app crashes. The user is mildly inconvenienced as they launch the app again.

When I flub a strong/weak reference on a server, my app crashes. That server is now down and my ops guy (probably me) will have some unkind words for me, particularly if it's in the middle of the night.

It's tempting to say at this point "well, don't flub references, n00b", which is much easier said than done. Bear in mind that we did use to write webapps in C - we moved to higher-level, more resilient languages for a reason.

I don't mind Obj-C/Cocoa. I'm a graphics guy at heart, so the closer-to-the-metal implementation makes me happy and lets me spin all kinds of neato magic with custom UIs... none of this is necessary serving data off a server.
Is this deliberate or accidental sanctimonious groupthink topic derailing?
I've ridden through bits of Central and Northern Italy, Rome to Florence to Venice all on regular 'old trains. And little tiny bits of France as well. I've also ridden trains in the U.S. from D.C. to Miami.

Italy was an absolute pleasure. An easy walk to the stations, even with luggage. In Rome the rail network is an easy connection off of the subway system and in Florence lets you off and on so near the old parts of the city (which are fantastically walkable) that you don't even need a cab to get there. Seats were comfortable for the 2 or 3 hours the trip took, had a table to setup a laptop, read a book whatever. I sat in group of four seats that faced each other and had a lovely chat with an elderly couple from Scotland on holiday.

Florence to Venice was similar, except my destination was outside of Venice and took a little more to get to from the station. No big deal and it beat having to deal with a rental car for a few weeks.

Importantly, the ride was unbelievable smooth compared to other rail trips I've taken.

Amtrak was my first long distance rail trip and was very bleh, seats were okay, but nothing to do on the 20+ hour ride from D.C. to Miami. This was back before laptops were common, but even with a pack full of gadgets I would have run out battery long before I ran out of boredom. Impossible to sleep on the train as it's noisy and jostles all over the place since we were on old freight rails for the entire trip. People also get so bored they start pacing the length of the train and with numerous stops were cars are split of and rejoined to other trains, and waits of a couple hours each time this happens, you feel like you make no progress at all. Trains were old, but in decent shape and generally well maintained. I've heard sleeper cars provide for a moderately better experience, but there's still the hours of boredom. I also didn't see any scenery of note, either mile after mile of overgrown weeds or industrial sections or really bad parts of towns we passed through. The worst, stations are hard to get to/from at the end points without prearranged transport and they aren't really all that nice. I regret the trip as flying would have only been $100 more and much faster. Every once in a while I think about taking the train North towards the better run North-East corridor parts of the system, but that one experience kind of waived me off the whole thing and with the stations so hard to get to and flying to my destinations faster (even with security hassles included) and about the same cost it just isn't worth it to me.

My experience in France was on much shorter, hour or two trips, and they were "ok" if a bit run down. Graffiti on the trains, that sort of thing. Felt more like extended commuter trains (which they probably were) then proper passenger rail. It was somewhere between Italy and Amtrak in terms of comfort, but more towards the Amtrak side in terms of desirability.
It's really outdated now, but "A Walk Across America" by Peter Jenkins. Reading that inspired me to spend 13+ months living on a bicycle in my twenties.

So much of who I am is a direct result of the experiences I had living on the road for several years. (I spent several summers, and one full year living on a bike.)
With some exceptions, especially at the top, the "downtime between campaigns" is called unemployment.
> C# keeps sucking badly

I wonder why, the Fortune 500 sites we have built are handling the load quite well.
And the old sexy. Back in the day, UNIX was a piece of garbage and the future was LISP machines, if you asked a lot of people. Nowadays, to similar people, C/Go/Java are garbage and the future is, I dunno, Haskell or something.

I like the idea of LISP, I not only aced the SICP class back in college but tutored it, too. I get it. And I wouldn't use a LISP for the majority of the work I do these days, it's just harder to work with than imperative code for a lot of normal, boring business use cases. You can write imperative code in a functional style when you have to, it's a lot harder to get the imperative advantages from a purely functional language.
Startup.com (2001) - IMDb
I Just Built a New Columnar File Format for Big Data Genomics
At Drexel Law School, a donor's name comes down
I thought that asm.js would be a compile target for any language, not just C/C++. E.g. you could have dart2asm instead of dart2js.
I think gift taxes are bullshit.

Simply a mechanism to prevent people from calling salary (or estate tax avoidance) 'gifts'. The exemption level is $14,000/year/person, I think that's more than fair.

If I earned and paid taxes on income/capital gains,
I should be able to give the balance to whom ever I wish.

Follow me on a little thought experiment if you would;

1. It's spring 1997, life is good, you just got a huge bonus and decided to buy shares in a flailing tech company called Apple Computer.

2. With your $250,000 bonus, you buy 62,500 shares at $4/share.

3. You and your wife live a happy life and in 2013, you pass away, content with your impact on humanity. Fortunately your wife will be taken care of since you hadn't touched any of those Apple shares.

That stock is now worth $550/share, and your wife's 62,500 shares are worth $35 million. A gain of $34,750,000.

So your wife should get that $34mm without strings? Even though no tax was ever paid on it?

Double taxation is bullshit.

It's a meaningless phrase. Are property taxes bullshit? You paid taxes on your income before you paid on the property... Sales tax? Same story. Money circulates through the economy, it's taxed at various places, every dollar is taxed a litany of times.

The number of times you're taxed should be irrelevant as long as it's fair and equitable.
This is a great article, and I really appreciate this paragraph:

> But in between the important cases, I found myself spending most of my time prosecuting people of color for things we white kids did with impunity growing up in the suburbs.

However, I think he ignores a really salient distinction: a lot of these "crimes" like the laws against graffiti, exist not because the acts themselves are particularly heinous, but because they're proxies for things that are dangerous, namely gang activity.

In not going after the author, the police simply did the analysis they are required to do: is this guy a threat within the spirit of the law?

Now, obviously there are shortcomings in the heuristics the police are using here. It's not okay to conclude that someone is a threat because they're a black teenager in a hoodie and aren't a threat because they're a white professional in a suit. But I don't think we really want a mechanical justice system that follows the mere letter of the law instead of the spirit. We don't want police to ignore the distinction between someone tagging a public building to make a point, and gang members tagging a private building to "make a point."
the better question is: what will be the next platform? there will be high momentum for change when the underlying platform changes, with todays platform it's just too convenient to compile to C or compile to javascript.

how will platforms evolve?

I'd say it will be a language that is parallel to the core and only sequential in edge cases, because thats what the underlying platform (processor, graphics card) is evolving to. parallel first, sequential second.
> genuine human connection (instead of superficial self-promotion).

You can move the goal posts with that definition all you want, because it is incredibly difficult to define "genuine human connection" I personally know friends and family that found long lost childhood friends through it, and connected. I myself have made valued, genuine connections while on using it. That's just silly.
I would love to learn about clockwork - even if only using CAD (although actually getting to make something would be even better) - however have been unable to find any resources for learning about it. Does anyone know of any good guides for introducing horology/clockwork manufacturing to beginners and explaining how to get started?
Because Google will remove it from their index when they revisit the page organically. If Google provides a way to programmatically send removal requests, I'd be happy to hear about it and I will pass it along to the team that deals with account deletions so we can make it part of our flow.

Right now, I am only aware of the Google webmaster tools where you have to input each individual link you want removed, and even that request is queued and takes time, with no guarantee that they will reindex the content.
Yes, it is common in my experience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_an... quotes it as 26 megatons of surface energy, and 9,600 gigatons (or 550 million Hiroshima bomb) of total energy.

Hiroshima was about 15 kT, so your number gives 345 megatons. Tsar Bomba was about 50 Mt, which is more than the energy of the tsunami.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent , "The total global nuclear arsenal is about 30,000 nuclear warheads with a destructive capacity of 5,000 megatons or 5 gigatons".
as bhauer pointed out, 500's are counted in those latency figures. If you look at the error count column, rails does miserably in everything but the "single query" test, which is not a common use case.
It's included, alongside Go frameworks, for the same reason PHP/Ruby/ASP.NET are included -- so that you can see how much overhead the frameworks are adding compared to a minimal implementation in the language they're built on. The code behind every benchmark is available under the source code tab up top. The Go benchmark is using some JSON library, not just printing a string.
>An experiment by a handful of high school students in Denmark

Enough said.

This was in Natural News, which means it's definitely bogus. Come on HN, you're better than this pseudoscience clickbait.
Google Chromecast: Too Much Hassle For the Money
Because customers only request JavaScript and I don't want to debug code generated from tools.
I should have learned to write tests a long time ago.

I'm not necessarily a fan of full-on TDD, but I would have been better off on some previous projects if I had written tests that provided at least partial coverage.
> Do we really need to punish people with prison for non violent crimes?

No, and when it comes to white people in the suburbs we largely don't do that (except serious financial crimes).

When it comes to the inner city and gang activity, that's not so clear cut. What are you going to do, issue monetary fines?
Why not fix circumvented corporate and income taxes so that everyone does pay a fair share, instead of taxing elsewhere where it would affect both those who did and did not previous pay their fair share?
IBM Looks At Innovations that Will Change our Lives in the Next Five Years
Not if you find the right job for you first.
I can't help but remember Aaron Schwartz when someone mentions "making an example". What can I do to try to discourage this practice of "making an example"?

Has anything changed since Aaron's death?
> In not going after the author, the police simply did the analysis they are required to do: is this guy a threat within the spirit of the law?

I don't think we know that. Maybe it's true, but I can't rule out other possibilities.
Severance takes all legal threat off the table.
Nobody said anything about "IT guy", he said "IT". A field, not a person.
Skip Study Abroad
Why? Sales pitches and fantasy fill seats and sell tickets. They're interesting, understandable, and inspiring. They do what TED, TEDx, and all infotainment are supposed to do, right?

"Real science that is easy to understand" tends to be shallow and hard to distinguish from sales pitches, fantasy, and lies.
> The authors pay Elsevier to coordinate peer review and publish using their brand names.

Traditional academic journals do not require payment from the author. While author-pays journals are becoming more common, AFAIK all journals published by Elsevier still work the old way. Elsevier makes money off its journals through subscription fees.
asm.js amuses me.. so many useless layers, NACL is much more sensible. But oh well Brendan Eich wants to keep his bragging rights.
How We Raised 1.1 Million from Cold Emailing
I take written notes in staff meetings when I see the same shit being discussed over and over again.

When the subject comes up again I say, "We've been through this before. Does anyone have anything new to add?"

Then we either pick up where we left off, or move on to more important issues.
Nice presentation. Any idea when it will be ready?
Chances are good that there will be a PHP 6 release in the near future (~3 years?) that contains a non-trivial amount of BC breakage. At least the idea has gained some momentum recently. But no branch / timeline yet ;)
> ...formal agreement (== threat).

Sorry, it just ain't so. Like the grandparent said, the employee's probably not an idiot, and threat is present from the very beginning, even if unintentionally.
I wrote a longer explanation elsewhere on this page, but the "getting screwed" in the current system falls on the drivers forced to offer their services at a sub-market rate.
As I recall, it confused Hiroko as well. Apparently it was translated as an artistic statement against the confines of rigid structure, or something like that.

It's been a while since I read the series. Once it got to the political debates, including on how the future school system might be set up, I started skimming.
I don't disagree with your initial point. However, it carries the rhetorical premise that simply because we find something offensive we should question our sensibilities rather than note when we feel other folks are being sexist.

To an extent, I agree with that as well, though it's possible you're not intending that premise within your statement.

But ultimately, we have sensibilities, and while we should question them it's not universally the case that our sensibilities are wrongheaded, and personally, I think the padded bra comment is a good example of that kind of thing which, even upon reflection, I have little trouble saying that folks who write like that are employing a sexist trope.
You could see it this way, or you could also claim that those "creating entirely new paradigms" themselves don't have "the wisdom and maturity required to use it responsibly". (See: nuclear weapons, nuclear power facility meltdowns, climate change, overfishing, the list goes on and on.) Perhaps a desire to live in a state of less technological advancement is in most cases just fine. Not at all defending stoning here, but you should realize that technologically advanced societies have a great deal of problems, in most cases to a larger scale than tiny undeveloped countries.
> Bittorrent does not work great, to my mind, compared to a centralized service. It's absolutely abysmal on network traffic, is inherently slow, and depending on the communication, practically unusable outside affinity groups. Toward that last end it's useful, but i'd hardly consider it great in general.

I don't know what BitTorrent you're using, but most everything i torrent downloads way faster than it would from a centralized server (iTunes, MegaUpload, etc.)
Good point. Why would they offer such a steep discount if it were not worth that much?

But $100Bn would be if every American were a paying customer. So maybe they are expecting the people most likely to accept this offer are households with many users. And maybe those younger users are the ones most valuable?
Well, until recently, the proposed transition was to a non-standard language controlled by one company. We'll see if the attempt to standardize Dart has a positive effect.
Thanks! For a moment there I was like "what the hell is this." But then I found the article fascinating and then I remembered, this is what HN is all about.
Lots of people have spent more than 100 hours on their job search, spread across hundreds of companies. The idea is - what if you focused on the ones you really want, and put more effort into those?
Just fire on the spot with no severance.

Bad play, risk-wise. Severance requires them to sign a non-litigation agreement and usually non-disparagement as well. PIP provides a paper trail and insures you somewhat against lawsuit (but not disparagement)-- they could argue for a "wrongful PIP", but you have paper. I don't recommend going that way, but it is better (risk-wise) than just cold-firing.

If you cold-fire, you're taking a major risk. With no severance and no warning, he will be pissed off-- and it's not hard to damage a company's reputation.

It's also not as hard as you think to build a termination case, although I'm not getting into the details here. Let's just say that some people (esp. termination lawyers) are as good at playing that game as we are at programming. Even if you win, he can make it a pyrrhic victory.

I've never known anyone to go on a PIP and remain at a company. They are either fired "eventually" or they find another job.

Agree. I covered that. You're 100% right.
The other possible issue there is that Magic the Gathering Online Exchange tends to behave weirdly differently to all other exchanges.
This is a great resource. It's a shame it didn't make it on to the front page.
I feel somewhat relieved to see this amount of investigative journalism collected on the topic. The public response in Sweden has been much too weak so far.
Uber provides transportation. Transportation is much closer to the dialysis side of the spectrum than the beanie baby side.
Right, Go is a language. It does have a decent (built in) HTTP library, and is actually pretty fast as a webserver in itself. On the more conventionally robust framework end of things, I suppose Revel/Falcore would be a more appropriate comparison. (both of which have impressive performance of their own).
Delivering a package for a random stranger has all sorts of risks. If the package contains a kilo of heroin and you get pulled over by the cops, it will be rather hard to explain to them that you knew nothing about it. That's a risk that a UPS or Fedex driver doesn't have, since they're not the ones who accepted the package.
Eh, yes, that was my point?
This isn't a no manager company. This is a "few manager" company. They still have managers -- the cofounders.

Reading through this series it looks like they basically just consolidated all of the management decisions to themselves. I'd love to know how a truly no management company functions, if such a thing exists for companies more than 5 or 6 people.
I should point out, the original post I meade that spawned this rather large thread, had no bearing on the decision - it was my opinion purely.

Something else I should point out - there were mobile (pre-cellular) phones in the 1970's and some geolocation data could be implied from their use - because in most cases they couldn't roam beyond their home area. For what its worth, some of this data could have been gathered as early as 1979 - when the first AMPS systems were being turned up.

Beyond that - I guess what I'm looking to say is, landline equivalence, I don't think you should be able to collect more information about a mobile phone user than a landline one, even if the information is there - at least not without a warrant.

My discussion here has really been about what is acceptable without probable cause and a warrant, and not just for the NSA - but for all Law Enforcement Agencies. I think Call Detail Records and Call Associated Geolocation Data is acceptable, but really, nothing else, not without probable cause and a warrant, I even think that using big data techniques on CDR's is novel and worthwhile - but it should be as a clue to find more information thru old fashioned police work, not as the end evidence.