skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These are official tax rates, not effective tax rates, which makes the whole thing disingenuous. AFAIK, the effective tax rate for the US puts it near the very bottom, just above tax havens.
http://www.businesspundit.com/10-most-notorious-money-launde...

over half are not about drugs.

The US also puts a lot of effort into freezing assets of people violating human rights.
Define speech ;)

As it is, people have been circumventing fundamental rights by calling them other names. E.G. "Disclosure" or "Leak" or "Disturbance". I understand the need to prevent certain pieces of information falling into the wrong hands, however a blanket sweep of all activities with the implicit understanding that it's potentially unconstitutional, is a bit much.
About 10K of my income is from resold web hosting - the numbers actually pan out for me to open a business in Ireland and keep it open for about $1500 per year + $1000 in IE taxes to duck about $3500 in US taxes. If I only spend the profits outside of the US (in the form of vacations), it would work.
Corporations hold onto huge amounts of money, and transfer huge amounts among themselves. If that value, income, and spending were never taxed, it would effectively hide all that money from the tax system.
Why does the level of discourse around this subject need to be so disingenuous?

There is definitely a time penalty at stops. Meals are the only one of those things that takes longer than 10 minutes. You do that maybe a couple times a day.

With the model s you are stopping about every 2.5-3 hours for 30 minutes. Exactly one or two of those stops might involve a half hour meal, where it doesn't make a difference. The rest of the time, it does. To characterize this as not "affecting you all that much" vs. a traditional gas trip is just not accurate.

But you know what? That's ok. I don't get why some enthusiasts feel the need to pretend there are no compromises. It's ok for the model s to have some drawbacks at this stage. It's early. That's how the technology cycle works. Like I said elsewhere, the model s is like the first macintosh. It's the future and it's already pretty cool. No need to pretend it does more than it can. That just polarizes people.
I don't think you're being very clear. The victims of terrorism generally don't have access to the information that these counterintelligence operations obtain. In other words, the victims are in the same place they were before they knew what the NSA was capable of. What I think you're saying is doublespeak. To paraphrase your argument, "Snowden is doing damage to our counterintelligence capabilities by releasing this information. Also, Snowden isn't doing any damage to the government." These statements contradict one another.
I don't evade taxes by setting up shell persons in various companies. I would look down on someone who did.

Actually I do know someone who maintains a fake residence for tax purposes, and I do look down on her (a wealthy heiress who didn't want to pay inheritance taxes).
The space station orbit is inclined at 51 degrees so the ground track goes as far north as London and almost all the way to the southern tip of South-America. The earth also rotates roughly 23 degrees per orbit, so eventually it passes within 10-15 degrees of most places between 60 and -60 degrees latitude.
Is that driver in the specific? I thought it was the general case.

Okay with a more thorough search I found an actual claim of the specific driver being distracted on page 9 of the suit, not sure why I didn't find it before.
This is not an attack on Bitcoin per se, but an attack on blatant money laundering:

US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, who filed the charges: "truly innovative business models don’t need to resort to old-fashioned lawbreaking, and when Bitcoins, like any traditional currency, are laundered and used to fuel criminal activity, law enforcement has no choice but to act" [1].

This is different from HSBC's case because while HSBC was negligent in implementing proper anti-money laundering procedures Shrem was actively aiding his clients in their money laundering. That has not been proven in the case of any of HSBC's U.S. executives, at least so far.

[1] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a994436a-8770-11e3-9c5c-00144...
Utah has an 80 MPG speed limit north-south. It's really quite fun rolling along at 80-85. I would hate to come across someone rolling at 60, it starts to become a hazard at that kind of delta between vehicles.
You can currently do it in Android with standard tcpdump
The battery is replaceable under AppleCare or for a $109.77 +tax after warranty/AppleCare+ expires:

http://www.apple.com/ca/batteries/replacements.html
The overwhelming bulk of a Unity game on Android runs in purely native code (the Unity shared library). Of course the game orchestration and such runs in a managed runtime (mono), but the garbage created by simple orchestration/management running in a GC is minuscule compared to the garbage created by an entire game engine running in a GC.
What country are you in? Do you have a reference other than the KPMG link mentioned earlier in the thread? [1]

Also, it's worth mentioning this is referring to where corporations are set up - not people.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7133781
Denmark (it's in my profile). Our overall taxes are pretty high, though our corporate taxes aren't particularly high. Partly depends on what you count as corporate taxes, since there is a large VAT, large energy taxes, large taxes on corporate vehicle registration, etc. But a good portion is via personal income tax.
Umm, did you read the OP?

Also, programming is like drug and alcohol abuse? What?
I'm unaware of any U.S.-sponsored assassinations of non-uniformed American citizens outside the theater of war during WW2. I'd be interested to know what you're referring to.

Look, I understand you're trying to support your argument by drawing comparisons to another better-defined war, but your particular choice of wars is baffling. Most often, comparisons are made to the American civil war; Lincoln's explorations of executive power in the face of an existential threat to the republic are profoundly relevant to this debate. WW2... I'm at a loss.

The 2001 AUMF, for example, is as far removed from the US declaration of war against the axis as you can get. It's everything that a typical formal declaration of war isn't, with the vaguest possible definitions of who the enemy is and where the battle can be fought. It has no real limits of any kind, and has henceforth been used as a license for indefinite military action.

>"Nobody in al Qaeda wears a uniform; they deliberately avoid them, to maximize the probability that their opponents will kill innocent civilians."

I may be a bit slow, but honestly I already knew this :) Yes this conflict is very different from the canonical 20th century wars which naturally shape our views of what war "ought" to be. Our laws and treaties are inadequate, and leave us in troubling gray areas, and I'm not convinced there are any good ways out.

BUT...

I'm also pretty sure a good solution is NOT to simply give the president the license to do whatever he wants to whomever he labels a "terrorist", regardless of location or citizenship. This is precisely the license assumed by the Bush administration during John Yoo's tenure. It appears to be the basis of your own assertions as well; please tell me I'm wrong.
People are not fleeing the U.S. either. There is some small amount of emigration, but I doubt there is a net emigration of wealth.
> This is what happens when you raise taxes to absurd levels

Wouldn't any amount above 0% be reason for a company to seek tax havens? With revenues in the billions, it seems like even a 1% tax rate would be more expensive than the cost of relocating that money.
The Decline of Corporate Income Tax Revenues (2003)

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1311
Even in math "infinity" often means "unbounded". For example, in real analysis if we have a sequence x_n, we write lim x_n = ∞ to mean "given any real number alpha, we can find a natural number K, such that x_n >= alpha for all n > K".
Are we looking at the same financial results? Year-after-year, Apple has had double-digit % growth in both revenue and income (often 50%+).

This latest quarter, revenue has grown 5.7% and income per diluted share 5.0%. This could actually be the end of limitless growth.
40% US official vs 24% effective worldwide.
I've realized lately that http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/ is always the place to go for latest haskell news.
I'm Selling my Geeksphone Keon on Ebay.
So I bought this last year because of all the hype, didn't use it much. I thought I might post it on here to see if anyone wants it. Sorry if this is viewed as spam.
It is a lot easier once you've figured out what a particular variable stands for to do a global search and replace for "vublu" than "a".
Not necessarily true:

http://www.europeanfinancialreview.com/?p=6482
Doing something at the correct time to defeat a competitor doesn't make you a follower. It means you understand the market better.
"Evading" taxes is disingenuous as these are completely legal methods. You're implying they're doing something illegal.

Would you rather not have the ability to incorporate your business wherever you like and only be locked down to one country with no other choices?
And that's exactly it. The commenter doesn't understand the wildly different processes or effects of going those two different routes.

For one thing, a put (or call) option doesn't even trade on the same markets (usually), has a lot less liquidity (usually), and depends on the supply of people willing to write contracts against positions they already hold. (non-naked) Options also have the effect of limiting any possible loss to the price paid for the option.

When you short a stock, your loss is potentially UNLIMITED. In practice, your broker will buy the stock for you with whatever cash you have on hand if the price moves against you.

That doesn't happen with options but you also don't get the huge sums of money to play with by borrowing against a stock that you don't own but are positive will dive into the dirt.

edit: explanation.
I *love* computers. Just wanted to share my thoughts.
Go + QML + OpenGL now working
>The Justice Department had endorsed the new rules months ago but intelligence officials argued they still revealed too much information. The breakthrough came in recent weeks with a rule requiring new companies to wait two years before publishing data.

> That provision means nobody will know whether the government is eavesdropping on a new email platform or chat service. And itpersuaded intelligence officials to endorse the rules, a U.S. official familiar with the discussions said. The Justice Department proposed the changes to the companies late last week and, by the end of the weekend, they agreed to drop their case before the FISA court.

Does this imply that the two year waiting period (as opposed to 1-year, six month delay) is a new restriction specifically added in for new companies in order to get Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook to drop their case?

I don't expect that too many new companies would be eager to report that data, but I'm curious if this is ultimately a win for intelligence officials.
Shawn Blanc’s Grandpa’s iPad
Programming isn't necessarily isolated. This article is all about finding the tech community to be more welcoming than "normal" communities.

Edit: Discrimination in tech seems to be done by a minority, but those few run into a lot of women at conferences etc. Much more discrimination is done outside the tech community, by people who don't tell girls that they can pursue tech.
Another lesson is that I seem to have picked up at least some narcissistic tendencies.
Makes perfect sense!

I mean, thank god. I was really worried that they weren't disclosing nearly enough of my ostensibly confidential information.

God bless America.
...an uber driver responding to a call.

...which, per TFA, Mr. Muzaffar was.
And it follows that if you build internet technology, you are also building surveillance infrastructure.
I don't see why selling BTC in SilkRoad is illegal. How so? by association with other things that happen there? By that standard working for the government would make you a criminal.
No, I'm not implying they're doing something illegal, merely slimy. I would rather people didn't try to avoid paying their fair share to the society they live in. And I won't give such people my business, if I know about it and can help it. They can play the game, and suffering opprobrium for their actions is a valid rule of the game. If you're talking about only what's legal, it's legal for me to blacklist them, blacklist their employees socially, and to encourage others to blacklist them too.
The main difference is that you share an actual, physical space with your wife and kids. So it makes sense that you have partitioned places for your stuff. I doubt you share actual, physical devices with your wife and kids, so it makes less sense. If it's your device, the interface can be specialized to you, and not have to present a generalized Your Family interface like your house does.

(You may see a deleted comment of mine; I re-read your top comment and the analogy clicked.)
Intel developing its own Siri
short a low beta stock, hedge that position, short the higher beta stock, and hedge that position.

That just sounds like gibberish TBH...
Sure, but if the end result is "lots of little objects/methods/functions" maybe there's a simpler way of getting there, e.g. prescriptive design rules. After all, that's what every design method, including stuff from the waterfall era attempted.

I'd like TDD to be more than just another way to relearn those old rules, especially if we arrive at the same conclusions on a circuitous path. Perhaps the old design rules, object patterns, etc. have to each be integrated with a testing strategy, e.g. if you're using an observer you have to test it like this and if you refactor it like that you change your tests like so.

The general rules are easy to understand and your post makes perfect sense but once you formulate your new design approach you'll have to find a way to teach it precisely enough to avoid whatever antipattern is certain to evolve among the half-educated user community, which usually includes myself and about 95% of everyone else.
U.S., tech companies reach deal on spying data
> I've recently been fighting my way through an upgrade of a Rails 2.3 app to run under Rails 3.2; it's a difficult enough task to begin with, and is massively complicated by the fact that no real documentation exists on how to perform such an upgrade.

In what way was McAnally's book insufficient?

http://www.railsupgradehandbook.com/

> I've led upgrades from PHP 4 to PHP 5 which were both less painful and more quickly completed than the task of upgrading a single, rather small, site, from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.2 has been.

PHP is a language and Rails is a framework. Compare upgrading PHP to upgrading Ruby. The latter is painless.

It seems like you should stick with PHP.
"If you abolish corporate income taxes, then I could have my company loan you the $1000 and receive the interest; it would then compound at 5% per year, and I would only pay income tax when the money is paid out to me as a dividend. In effect, you would be turning corporations into tax shelters."

Can you explain what the problem is? I mean you use the term "tax-shelter" and we associate that with something bad. But what's wrong with only taxing when you actually get access to the money you made?

You can't even sell the company without having to pay taxes. The money seems 100% unusable till you pay taxes on it. I guess you can reinvest it into something else without cashing out, but that hardly seems like a bad thing
A lot of people who might live in these markets, also probably don't own cars. In NYC, for example 55% of people DONT own cars[1]

They are right to focus on high rates of adoption with people who live in suburbs than those that live in metropolitan areas.

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_h...
Seems like a great use of Discourse.
In answer to his question about the equivalent problem in French:
http://people.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/zagier/files/exp-math-2/fullt...
An often repeated thought. Yet at some point (usually when children or rape is involved) people tend to suddenly forget about tolerance or sympathy and throw around death sentences, castration or torture. There are certain mistakes one can not do even once in most societies. And in some cases, or rather in some countries you won't have a life to return to (or you're dead in the first place).
One way to reform the tax code quickly is to convince enough people to stop paying taxes until the enough of the special interests are eliminated.
Self serving drivel. No function is contained within a single department.
My point was that revealing CI techniques empowers terrorists, which tends to be a bad thing for (potential) victims of terrorism.
Non-CS people doing CS will give a worse experience in a single specific case, but will improve the overall customer experience in the long run.

I'm not arguing that companies should get rid of departments, just that they should take CS seriously. I think having all members of the team talk to customers is the best way to give the whole company an orientation toward customer service. 37signals, Stripe, and others do this too, not just Amazon.
Yes, please see slide 34 of the attached presentation and also section 5 of the paper linked to at the end.
That is exactly where the problem is. Ever tried to find human customer service at Skype.com?
Uber to be hit with wrongful-death suit
+1, and anything the DEA does should be presumed bullshit until proven otherwise.
Surprised he doesn't have a Wikipedia article. Anyone experienced in Wikipedia's little ways want to write one?
Lots of time is spent understanding what the product needs to do and building a suitable solution to it that is intuitive for users. The resulting JS code does not always represent a large portion of the investment into delivering the end-to-end product. In my subjective experience, the JS is written more quickly, requiring overall time to get something working. An idea might change course in significant ways a few times in the span of time it would have taken to write it in C/C++ once.

In our setup, apps leverage key lower level libraries that are maintained by a small team and represent a much smaller, more manageable native codebase. A very complex app can be written in 10k LoC. Yes, there are a lot of "apps".

> Also, there's a huge difference between maintaining 3000 apps with 10k LoC and maintaining even one app with >1m LoC.

I said exactly this at the end of my post, but I don't feel it is always black and white. I said "apps" in quotes above because many times they act more like modules than standalone apps. Many of them interact in non-trivial ways, making the comparison more muddled. It's definitely a lot of code either way and in our situation JS has definitely made evolving the product much easier from an end-user perspective.

edit: ^once
Thanks, this lead me to the following links:

http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001....

http://cointext.com/fincen-issues-bitcoin-friendly-ruling-fo...
I'm sorry you've chosen to stop being civil. It doesn't support your argument.

Bespoke development clearly is out of reach of most end users. There are billions of end users of computers now. You may exist in a rarefied stratum of the economy that gives you this freedom, but to claim that this is the case for most users is bizarre.

I am astonished that you think that choosing a good developer is the biggest challenge for end users who want custom software.

Your comment about proprietary software is invalidated by the examples of the web, Google Play, and the iOS app stores, which are brimming with highly specialized solutions which are developed because there is a business model to support the developers.
What point are you even trying to make? You trust the app for the same reasons you trust a web site you put your credit card number into, or the card reader that the cashier uses at the local business down the street.
The thing about computers is that yeah, they're awesome at communication, but they do a lot of other stuff too that has nothing to do with person to person transmission of information. IMHO task-oriented UI makes the most sense because I use my computer as a general-purpose tool to get stuff done. In all use cases I find myself performing a type of task. Only in a subset of cases do I find myself communicating with a person.

I guess I'd call myself more of a power user, but when I look at what I've got going on my computer at night it typically looks like this:

- playing a video game

- talking to arbitrary group of friends on skype over headset

- streaming video to twitch (to whomever is watching)

- programming my side project on my laptop during downtime (waiting for people to connect in-game, etc.)

- browsing the web (looking up game items, watching funny videos, researching some kind of programming thing I'm figuring out)

- monitoring my inbox

- monitoring my twitter feed

Talking to my friends on Skype is definitely direct person to person communication. But even then, I think more along the lines of "1. I want to have a group conversation with Friend A, B, and X, 2. I'd like to communicate with them through the medium of Skype, 3. open Skype 4. add the specific friends I want to talk to to my conversation, 5. go ham". There's no one friend in particular I would "open" first, and subsequently open other friends into. That seems backwards. It's more about what I want to do, not necessarily who I want to talk to.
Collecting the information of the various ways that Alice can talk to Bob is a righteous bitch ATM. However, if we make it easy for people, we also make it easy for machines, and that leads to massive privacy issues.

I like that my profiles are available to people I want to communicate with. I don't like that they are also potentially available to siding salesmen (I live in an apartment).
In the context of U.S. taxes, 'evasion' and related words have a loaded meaning, where evasion is the word for illegal activities and avoidance is the word for legal activities.
Where does this 1000 estimate come from, and how is it calculated? Having all the calls from the District of Columbia recorded - is that 1 illegal access?

I have an article here that claims 2700+ incidents from 2011 to 2012. One of which affected 3,000 Americans:
"The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders. "[0]
This is only an internal audit - the only cases I have read about are where this information is volunteered by the perpetrators or investigated after a suspicious victim, that knows about potential NSA involvement has come forward.

[0]http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-br...

If the NSA were authorised in another case or acquire the data unintentionally and happen upon incriminating evidence, they feel they are authorised to tip off the FBI - this is where parallel construction comes in.

Here's evidence that the IRS has received database information through SOD and the NSA, they have a manual for it:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/07/us-dea-irs-idUSBRE...
Not to the button but to create a dummy form. Simple csrf. Relogin leads to identity fixation