skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fundamentally Uber is competing against a government mandated and enforced cartel, when you go up against such a monster it's difficult to maintain a competitive advantage while not engaging in unsavoury practices.

Ideally getting a taxi cab license would be much like getting a driver's license where anyone who wanted one could get one with a minimum of hassle while still enforcing a regulatory framework.

The situation between uber, its drivers, and victims of traffic accidents is definitely subpar, I think there's a lot of blame to go around between uber, the taxi cartels, its regulators, and its legislators.
3 Resources I Needed to Survive my First Year in Business
I always found that a strange rant from Zed, equal parts bluster, spot on observation (consultancy firms) and bullying and bitching about personal little squabbles he's had with various people (that seems to happen to Zed a lot). It's not particularly relevant nowadays about deployment of rails apps - that's pretty straightforward now. It is amusing in retrospect that he is talking up other frameworks like merb - merb is what became Rails 3, which is what you're complaining about migrating to, and the creator now works on Rails as part of the evil™ core team:

The best part about the whole thing is there’s potentially 10 new web frameworks that can take on Rails. Hell, Mongrel spawned or helped 5 of those. My favorite of those frameworks is Merb which is literally “Mongrel plus Erb”

Also, I'm not sure that the best test case for the ease of rails upgrades is embarking on a major migration of an app you don't know well, written in a previous version of a framework you don't know well. I've been put off frameworks by bad apps before too so I know the feeling - is it possible that your experience is related partly to this app, not just to Rails? Many others have not experienced anything like this level of pain with Rails upgrades. I updated a terrible drupal site once - let's just say that I'll never touch drupal again, but that is not necc. justified, it runs a lot of sites without drama and can probably be used to make good apps in the right hands.

Certainly if you are familiar with the app and gems used minor upgrades are exactly as described above - upgrade, test, deploy, sometimes with no changes. That's not to say there are no problems, but I think you're extending your horrible experience unjustifiably to encompass all possible uses of Rails. I find it not bad as frameworks go, better than many others I've seen internally, particularly > v3, and plenty of other people other than Rails developers use and enjoy Rails, without any resulting disasters, why the hyperbole?
Attitudinal topics are just some of the cross-cutting concerns, like customer service and security, that often become Tragedy of the Commons if not taken seriously. In large organizations, there does need to be a "Chief _____ Officer" for relevant concerns that has support, authority and wisdom to teach their domain and helps other departments. Not just a title, paperwork, busy work or a mandatory meeting.
As it gets easier & easier for smaller companies & individuals to setup international businesses, I think this is going to happen on a major scale outside of mega-corporations.
Bitcoin was extensively pre-mined.
This site does the same thing and has been around atleast a few years: http://www.globegenie.com/
> When TDD isn't a good idea (say, when ... you don't yet know how you want to structure the system)

(Apologies in advance as I can't figure out how not to sound snarky here.)

Isn't that called "the design? And is there any meaningful way in which, if "test-driven design" fails if you don't already have the design, it's worth anything at all?
This is good advice, I will try to be proactive in my commentating on places like HN where I would traditionally lurk. Unfortunately this is a bit of a moonshot!

Perhaps I should attempt to seek out places where my skills can be applied to problems and discussions. I'm surprised there hasn't been a prominent website or platform for intellectual / Socratic argument since the waning of discussion groups.
Of course. Tax competition is obviously the answer, not companies paying fair taxes in the countries where profits are generated. How silly of me...
Fastest routes revealed by mimicking electrical flow
If we're to be proper, fedora clad neckbeards, it would be "m'lady pages."
He could have been trialed in absentia, get death penalty and then get killed by a drone. I don't know if this scenario was even possible, let alone probable.
Truly Interactive Matplotlib In Your Browser (with D3.js)
When drivers accept a call, furthermore, they need to
interface with the app. The suit goes on to note that
under California law, it is illegal to use a “wireless
telephone” while driving unless it is specifically
configured to be hands-free — which the app is not. In
essence, the suit argues that Uber was negligent in the
“development, implementation and use of the app” so as
to cause the driver to be distracted and inattentive.
I never understood this. They're trying to pay less tax - they're doing it legally & as far as we know not "evading" anything.

You do the same thing on your tax returns to pay as little tax as possible (or get as big a refund as possible). Why is it worse when a corporation does it?
I agree with you in general, but this is not the smoking gun you are suggesting.

Once someone is a target, investigating them in general is legitimate, assuming that there is justification for regarding them as such.
Which is where you should have stopped; but you said OTOH, and I'm saying no, no OTOH, that's not a valid reason.
No. A valid analogy to a cab responding to a call is an uber driver responding to a call. Which is almost certainly liable.

An uber driver with no call has no reason to be moving as far as I know.
Emergency $8.7 Million Contract Awarded to Fix Healthcare.gov Performance
Which access controls do they have and how do you know? And how is that consistent with Snowden leaking all those documents?
As of a few years ago, the USA is the only G20 nation that taxes corporations on their overseas earnings. (Japan was the last other holdout).
I have no knowledge as to what you think of triple canapés, but I do get a strong feeling of entitlement from you. You also seem to disregard a whole bunch of people(like me for example) that didn't experience as much pain as you. As well as the people that have dedicated their time to write deprecation warnings and documentation, recording videos etc..

Worst case, your app is exceptionally hard to upgrade and I feel for your effort.
Easily reverse the query sort order for app engine NDB
The people who are harmed by making this information public is not the U.S. government. Think it through. Who wins by knowing how the US government conducts targeted counterintelligence operations? That will be primarily terrorists, organized crime, and oppressive governments. So then who loses? That will naturally be victims of terrorism, organized crime, and oppressive governments. That is why I don't think it's responsible to go around publicizing every little detail about NSA/GCHQ CI techniques and technology.
It is not, because trials in absentia, particularly criminal trials, and specifically capital trials, are unconstitutional in the US.
Use/VAT taxes are considered regressive and therefore hurtful, bad, and evil with respect towards lower classes. The great irony is that by avoiding such taxes it hurts the poor and enriches the rich. Tragic.
"fair share" is a bogus term from folk morality.
I guess it depends on how you're defining the term "fundamentalist". I'm from the US, and generally when people use that word here, they are either talking about religious fundamentalists, or they are making an unflattering comparison between religious fundamentalism and a person's beliefs about something else which isn't religion.

I associate that term with people who adopt a specific point of view on faith, rather than from a long process of observation and reasoning. They don't change that point of view, and at no point engage in any ongoing observation and reasoning to revise their view, once it's been adopted. They also tend to have very simplistic, binary views on the subject matter ("x is evil, y is good, and there are no gray areas between them"), and their views are as much or more about making people feel good about themselves than anything else (they get a rush out of feeling like they know the truth, and we could all be living in a utopia if only everyone would listen to them).

So, based on that definition, yeah, fundamentalists are bad, even when they happen to be fighting for something you might agree with. It's like a broken clock being right twice a day- just because they're right about something at this moment doesn't mean people should emulate them or buy into all of their other beliefs. In fact, doing so would make the world a worse place, not a better one. By all means, fight alongside them if they happen to be doing the right thing, but be wary of them in all other respects, and don't take anything they say at face value. Don't dismiss it out of hand either, just maintain a reasonable amount of skepticism about such people. I include RMS and the FSF in that group.

Now, I can totally see how someone might say that what I wrote above is a fundamentalist criticism of fundamentalism. I get it. It's sort of like people who complain about other people being intolerant of intolerance. It's kind of a tautology, but that's how I feel (for the record, I am also intolerant of intolerance, so guilty as charged).
I assume the "My" stuff is a useless relic from the pre-NT days. "My music"? Of course it is mine, who's else's could it possibly be?
Apple's cash pile is 1/3 of their market cap. That means that is they'd use it to buy their own shares at the current price (they can't, they need to pay taxes on most of it first) their P/E ratio would drop to about 9.
There is a lawyer in Scottsdale, AZ that takes bitcoins...
Apple: Update on National Security and Law Enforcement Orders
The tax rate could be 5% or 15% and they would do the same thing. (Edit: If the US lowered there tax rate to 5% ireland would lower theirs to below that to keep the extra income flowing.) The advantage is they can gain compound interest and or cover overseas losses with money that would otherwise be taxed so there is no reason no to do it.

Add to that the occasional tax holiday and companies would be stupid to bring money to the US they don't have to because keeping money overseas is one of the easiest tax loopholes to exploit.
Quick scan shows that the US is 2nd only to UAE in tax rates. Did I miss something?
There are many other companies besides tesla who offer public charging, like Blink & Chargepoint. Tesla owners can still recharge their vehicles at these stations even though the charge rate is probably slower.
How about a Reddit <-> NNTP bridge?
Why Do Windows Journalists Have To Trash Linux?
And that just means you aren't actually that confident about your prediction, just like the rest of the market.
To be contrasted with Android, where they only need to wait a couple of weeks for their brand new phone to be "old". Apple buyers really have a raw deal, getting to enjoy having the latest phone for a whole year.
I think it's also the only other country in the world besides Eritrea that still forces citizens to pay tax based on citizenship rather than residence.
C++ and Objective-C both began as preprocessors for C.
It is a roadmap to oppression, and revealing it is harmful to NATO. Can you connect your own dots?
Also, put a lock screen on your phone and never let anyone use/borrow it even temporarily because if someone installs an accessibility service, it is game over for your privacy in most apps regardless of whether the network traffic is encrypted.
Of the sixteen companies in the table, four have moved to the UK, and three to UK overseas territories. Doesn't say much for our tax regime, does it?
More like blog comment spamming strategy.
Book review: Mining the Social Web by Matthew A. Russell
Because Koch brothers!
I'm sure a Maven mirror can give you enough JARs to do your own survey. I don't believe a poll like this, unless really publicized, will be accurate. Also, Unsafe (and maybe another one or two of the unpublic APIs) should have an opt-in shim/polyfill that you can put in newer versions of the JDK/JRE after these APIs are taken out.
If you hate your children and want them to die in a dystopian post-Oil-Age future then yes, shuttling them around the exurbs in a car makes perfect sense.
That is the wrong question, the correct question is "Given the state of the world, how can I minimize tax payments?"

You see that question only works if the costs salaries of the accountants, the cost of a 'presence' in some foreign country, and other rules is more than offset by the savings in tax rate. It is easy to budget since its an annual thing, plan A we pay $X, plan B we pay $Y, select plan in (A, B) where the tax is lowest.

What it means, in the absence of some pretty crazy laws, is that there is a ceiling on taxes.
On your first point: The world is not as black and white as you tend to see it. jahewson probably does not think that government should control everything related to money. However, society has a legitimate interest to keep a check on large flows of money [0]. Government law enforcement is a part of that. (edited to emphasize quantifiers)

On your second point: Money laundering laws and bitcoin are compatible. You just have to make sure you comply with the laws when you run a business using bitcoin. Bitcoin is already only pseudonymous at best, and it practice it will be quite easy to eliminate anonymity; and distributed control features are not necessary to prosecute those who use bitcoin for money laundering, as the article under discussion clearly shows.

[0] In case it isn't obvious: money leads to power, and society needs to keep power in check. Therefore, society needs to keep (large flows of) money in check.
Ark allows you to charge your phone wirelessly
> You can't create Retina images out of base64 strings

Why not? There's no such thing as a 'retina image', they're just a larger resolution. There's nothing stopping you from requesting a @2x set of thumbnails
Because devices are tools and we use tools to do something.
They do this to increase adoption, but it would probably still reduce the life of the battery. I doubt people would use their supercharger every day unless they happened to live next door to one. Their purpose of the supercharger network is to reduce the whole "distance-fear" that EVs have.
The most serious issue with electric cars isn't road trips, it's the fact that if you don't own your own home, or live in a dense city with no off street parking, you likely don't have reliable access to a daily recharge overnight. That's probably half the driving population of America. 30 minutes of quick charging is fine every so often, but not every day or even every week.

This is why fuel cells continue to be pushed as a viable alternative--quick, carbonless refueling. The closest equivalent that the EV world can offer is a battery swap station, but that has a host of issues.
Yeah but a different power plant isn't that much of a historical breakthrough. For the planet, sure. But for the consumer? There's no payoff.
Oh right, my mistake.

s/pretend a bool is a string or vice versa/not know whether an object even has a certain method because it isn't added until runtime/

I'll grant you that this type of thing is more difficult in static languages. But in my experience, the need for this kind of dynamic behavior is quite rare in terms of lines of code. So I'll trade it away any day of the week for the ability to reason about my code with more guarantees. At their core, all bugs are situations where the programmer's expectations didn't match reality. In my experience programmers who are good at debugging are good at being able to question as much of what could be going wrong as possible. Strong static types are about reducing the amount of things we have to question.
If it was more profitable to keep the money here rather than moving it overseas, they would keep it here.

They're using legal means to reduce their tax liability. I get that they're big "evil" corporations so we should hate them, but how is this any different than what everyone does on their tax returns except on a larger scale?
If a company is publicly traded, management is legally obligated to act in the best interest of stock holders and do whatever they can to maximize profits/ minimize tax obligations.
Wow, investors aren't liking these numbers.

The reason I recently purchased Apple stock is that I foresee a large number of users coming on board once Apple launches a larger screen size for their iPhone line up. That's the main reason I can't use an iPhone.
The court will just order them to turn it over unencrypted. And if you won't they can use that as evidence against you.
Solved like with http://www.apple.com/batteries/replacements.html or http://www.apple.com/de/batteries/replacements.html (Germany) or http://www.apple.com/au/batteries/replacements.html (Australia)?
Would it? Unless I missed it, the article doesn't say where Apple's tax haven(s) is/are, but if it's a place like Cayman where the rate is zero, well...you can't compete with zero.
It's funny. Every year, since 2007 I've heard this argument, that the market isn't big enough and every year: record growth and profits. No but seriously. This year is the year that Apple's iPhone success catches up to them.

"Apple's iPhone business is finally going to fail this year" is the new "this is the year of the Linux desktop"
The variable names remind me of the names in an early RPG video game.
Our taxes are twice the USA's [1], and people aren't fleeing. Maybe America is doing something else wrong?

[1] Overall tax rates, taking total tax revenue as percentage of GDP. Some specific tax rates are lower or higher, though overall they trend higher.
If we're going to do that, we had better drop the corporate personhood bullshit at the same time.
Are women actually being driven out of the tech community or are all these articles I read about discrimination against women in tech just a vocal minority?

I also don't get the feminist push for more female programmers, scientists, etc. You mean you WANT your kind to sit in isolation for long periods of time, day in and day out, for years at a time? To me, it's something you fall into like drug and alcohol abuse, but more positive.

Online, no one knows you're a dog.
Much of Apple's cash is stashed in Ireland, where the corporate income tax rate is 12.5%. If it were 5% in the US, no doubt that money would return quickly.

http://underdisclosed.com/apple-offshore-cash-horde-u-s-taxe...
We really shouldn't. I am a liberal in most ways, but corporate income taxes are a bad idea (in my opinion). Taxes really serve two purposes; to raise revenue and to encourage/discourage behavior. Corporate income taxes really do a bad job of the latter; if we only taxed the money when it is taken out as profit, we would do a better job of encouraging behavior we want.
It still does not justify the redundant comments. Keep an eye on that signal-to-noise ratio.
Rumored Audi Q8 E-Tron to Get 435 Miles of Electric Range?
Definitely! Let me know
Of course not, but it's trivial to create a synthetic short position with an almost zero cash balance. Not EXACTLY zero, but close enough.

e.g. short a low beta stock, hedge that position, short the higher beta stock, and hedge that position.
I'm pretty sure you just described an S Corp, which isn't subject to corporate taxes (they "pass through" to the owners personal returns). Many small businesses already do this.

But as with anything, there are pros and cons to S Corp vs C Corp vs LLC.

Here's the first hit on google: http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2012/05/03/c-or-s-cor...
I agree with Gruber that the "missed expectations" expression is misleading.

Analysts' expectations were not in line with reality. The iPhone numbers are what they are, irrespective of incompetent analysis.

A fairer way to state this would be that analysts, as usual, were over-optimistic and this optimism caused a lot of investors to be overly optimistic too, which caused an over-inflated share price, now corrected.
I think mobile software has a long way to go, and hardware performance will drive quite a bit of upgrading for years to come. Two areas off the top of my head: moving more voice recognition and "smarts" onto the client to speed things up, and better and better gaming.

Non-replaceable naturally create refresh points for mobile devices, in a way they don't even with laptops. I have a Macbook Pro from 2009 with a totally dead battery, but it doesn't matter since I most use it at home, where it's easy to keep it plugged in. That doesn't work with a phone or tablet.
why we have corporate taxes in the first place

Someone asked this question last week on a similar thread; the answer I gave there is still relevant so I'm just going to copy and paste it here:

Compounding investment returns. If I loan you $1000 at 5% interest, I have to report $50/year of interest income on my tax return. Since I pay approximately 40% income tax (federal + provincial), I have an after-tax return of 3% compounding annually. 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.

Now, this isn't absolutely insurmountable; in fact, Canada already has different tax rates for "active business income" vs. investment income, and theoretically you could have a 0% rate on "active business income" and a 40% corporate tax rate on investment income (which would then create non-taxable dividends when finally paid out to individuals). But you'd still have the complication that "retain profits" produces a different taxation result than "pay out profits as dividends, then raise more funding a few years later".
"I wasn't speaking in absolutes, so one counter anecdote hardly defeats the point."

You were talking out your ass, is what you were doing. An anecdote about THREE. INDIVIDUALS. doing X pretty solidly "defeats the point" that X is reserved to "large corporations" - we're not even a mid-sized corporation! None of the three of us currently paying for bespoke development is particularly wealthy (one is a part-time music teacher), if we'd gone overseas (or even out of state) we could lower development cost further, and the scope of our project is much larger than the minimum meaningful chunk of work.

"Bespoke development is cle[a]rly out of reach of most end-users."

Bespoke development is not out of reach of most end users, at least in terms of resources required. I would put forward that basically any user desiring a particular feature or small functionality change - outside of extreme examples - could financially manage it if 1) they cared enough and 2) they found sufficient friends interested in the same, and that for most users and simple tasks, "sufficient friends" is not a hugely high number. Organizationally, most users would presently have a hard time picking an appropriate developer and working with them, but that's a separate problem that numerous groups are working on solving.

With proprietary software, on the other hand, bespoke development is far further out of reach, because there is dramatically less competition - only the original authors can bid to modify a piece of proprietary software so no two groups are bidding on the same job.
That I am not aware of some expectations I have of others until after they have been broken.
Because it runs OS X, and you can't run OS X on a rack mountable unit.
Version 2.0 released of Err, a Python XMPP/IRC bot
So I get to pay you $30/m to work for you on projects and I get to talk to the other developers you have locked up in your forum and to listen to you do a screencast of unverifiable quality. Sounds amazing, sign me up!