skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no real government backing Bitcoin.

There is no real economy backing Bitcoin.

At some point you need to convert BTC to real money for taxing and what not and this conversion is the perfect place to ban it if so desired.

Nice experiment currently backed up by blogging.
> Apple performed a complete, ground-up redesign of their entire iOS UI layer from drawing board to shipping product in less than a year.

Well, but that's mostly redrawing the existing widgets, it looks different, but works like how it used to work. (They added some stuff like the control center on the bottom, but they haven't really _changed_ how things work.) Also, I don't consider it to be a successful restyling (it's less straigthforward to figure out whether an icon is a button or not, and so on), but that might also be a matter of taste. What I'm trying to say is adding a digitizer to iOS does not mean that you only need to write drivers and design the hardware -- you need to change some UI paradigms. And that's hard. Windows classic desktop is now touch and digitizer-enabled in the case of Surface Pro, but the whole thing is not too useful.

Apple is in a difficult position exactly because iPad Mini is so successful at the moment. Eventually large phones will devour that market as one mobile device (large phone) is usually better than two mobile devices (phone+tablet), or at least that's my prediction. They must target the same use case what Surface is trying to target: a super-lightweight laptop replacement what can sometimes be used as a tablet but renders your old, clunky laptop mostly irrelevant.
Oh my! Now I feel old. Thanks!
I thought he was criticizing the icon view, fair enough.
is anyone having trouble getting the video? mine simply's not generated at all. i just find a bunch of pics, no movie, no share button.

anyone?
bullshit title
Best of vim tips
Personally, I'm in favour of taxing Internet companies

Why?

EDIT: I was just curious to hear more.
I have often wondered why a country like USA still continues to have lots of freedom compared to many other democracies, couple that with the fact that USA is probably one of the oldest and largest democracy with extreme diversity.

No doubt that USA seems to become more and more of a police state but this process is very different from a country like India. In case of a country like India, there is a huge mistrust between individuals/private parties which leads to more demands for government intervention and policing despite the fact that government is known to be corrupt. [1]

In case of US I think it is more of a top down. I still see that fair amount of trust between private individuals in US which keeps the "small government" voices loud enough despite all the attempts from government. This is something that Americans must protect. This trust will get destroyed as the government adopts more and more "steal from peter and give it to paul" approach.

[1] http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/politics-in...
SOOMLA – Complex Single Page Application
#2brave4me
By eliminating taxation (governments can simply print the tax money they need according to a fixed formula against the national GDP), and then using computers, allow citizens to directly apportion their equal portion of the taxes to the causes they think are worthy, updated on a regular basis (I suggest daily so that the populace can respond quickly to things like natural disasters).

A simple approach would be to let each person subdivide their tax "share" (which is equal among all voters) by 1% increments. In addition, private individuals could establish "tax baskets" that could be used to fund a number of smaller entities with a single appropriation, so that your 1% could be apportioned among hundreds of entities without you having to type them all in.

This approach completely eliminates money from politics: politicians no longer have the power to tax specific individuals (or grant special exemptions), and they also no longer have the power to give money to people within (or outside) government.

It does not eliminate the ability of government to meddle with regulations, but the populace can trivially respond by docking their budget immediately in retaliation. It's amazing how much better behaved government institutions are when they are directly answerable to the people.

This approach is completely reasonable in the information age and with monetary systems, like the US, where fiat money is used. We already calculate GDP numbers, and the number for taxation would simply be fixed as an amendment to the constitution (while simultaneously invalidating all other tax powers from the government).

For extra fun, double the amount of tax dollars created and give everyone in the country a basic income out of it. I suggest that half of all taxes go towards a basic income (social money for individuals), and that the other half go to the community in the form of government, law enforcement, schools, police, etc. and whatever other social programs individuals want to apportion their social tax dollars to (social money for the community).
It still escapes me why this recent trend of naming companies with the names of products "for brand recognition" (the other obvious example is 10gen to become MongoDB Inc.)

It would be interesting to see other companies do that in the past:

- "Microsoft is going to become Windows Inc"

- "Apple Computers will be known from now on as iPod Ltd"

- "The new name of the company will be Air Jordan & Co. Nike no more!"
Why bother with a trial at all, right? If most people at the government agency that investigated the case figure he's guilty, just throw him straight in prison.
I had to kind of laugh at the seeming distress expressed in the article the Google merely passed on the taxes to the consumer, as in who do politicians and journalist think pay all taxes? Business taxes are merely an indirect means of taxation on the populace, it is done to fool the general population into believing someone else carries the load.
I guess my point is that it wouldn't surprise me, given the way science tends to downgrade humans from being at the center of the universe, if we were in fact not alone but instead are one of many intelligent species throughout the galaxy and universe today (while on the lower end of the intelligence scale as our relative lack of time in existence would suggest.)

What would be rather surprising but yet poetic to me is if we find out that ultimately humans are special: we are special in our solitude, entering the cosmos in a period of declining intelligent life due to the expansion. It would be a strange twist: we get some satisfaction in knowing we are unique in being an unremarkable, irrelevant, isolated civilization.
I found PowerShell incredibly crunchy.

I will admit I was paid to drive hyperv from ruby remotely. What happened is that WinRM wasn't usable and that PowerShell was the lowest barrier mechanism to drive the functionality. It was nasty but thanks to WMI and some 3rd party PowerShell REPL that job was over. I wouldn't willingly give up Ruby much less Perl or Bash for PS. It seems like another "thumb their nose" CLR, C#, closed-source NIH proprietary lock-in tactic.

Years ago I wrote tons of jscript to silently deploy lots of software remotely, and it wasn't as slow to become "productive" at as PS.
So he expected a government agency to track its efficiency and see if the money spent is really warranted compared to the effects produced? That's crazy talk. That would be running the government like a good business. Nobody does that. And yet less folks like CIA or NSA. They protect us from evil, so people should shut up, pay up and be quiet and trust them, they're the good guys after all.
What's basecamp?
There's the option of working remotely from Belgium.

It may be easier with a European company (same timezone, can take the train once in a while to meet people) but you can also find a remote job with a US company. There are plenty of cool companies in Paris, London, Berlin, some in Amsterdam...
Tranquility: Peace and quiet for your eyes while coding.
Why you saying Why should Internet companies be taxed? Or Why should taxes exist at all?
Great, photos of all my ex-boyfriends, in sequence, set to sentimental music. Just what I've always wanted.
If I can piggyback on the original question... Am I the only one who have never heard about basecamp before?
But it wouldnt be as much fun :)
> I believe tackling such a complex issue affecting many countries on a national level is a mistake.

This sounds like the main problem here, to me:

EU law makes it easy for a company to do business anywhere in EU and only pay taxes in its headquarters, on the assumption that it doesn't matter a lot where the company pays its taxes as long as it's inside the EU. But at the same time, EU law doesn't regulate corporate tax, so some countries can easily take advantage of that by lowering them (or completely removing them) so companies will be attracted there.

They are basically living as parasites to the other countries, and the only solution to that seems to be harmonizing taxes accross the EU.

Edit: could you explain the downvote a bit? I'm curious to hear what you don't like in what I said.
Why shouldn't they pay their fair share? Normal companies who make profits get taxed. Giant companies funnel their profits through Holland and Ireland, and pay a paltry amount.

Back in the days, the nobility had also exempted itself from taxes. I see no reason for this state of affairs to continue.
For me its the form factor + the power to use a full blown OS when travelling. I don't have to lug around my laptop anymore. On my way I can get some work done; when feeling tired I can switch to the Metro, play games for sometime and get back to work again. I find it to be really productive. I have also set it up so when I am back home it automatically syncs the changes to my laptop (using BitTorrent Sync).
Well, yes, that would be a problem.

There is a problem with risk assessment in general.

BBC had a few useful programmes. One was about young peoe visiting developing nations to see how luxuries are produced. They visited the Accra toxic electronic equipment dump. People take wiring and burn the insulation off to get the copper. These cable bonfires release huge clouds of toxic smoke. Now one has any kind of mask. The programme showed a boy smashing capacitors off a PCB with a rock to sell them. I think, but do not know, that if je'd had a pair of snips (for the compnent leads) and some way to get the copper / gold off the PCB that he'd have had a more valuable resource to sell. It was a profoundly depressing, distressing, view.

There was another programme called Welcome To India. This showed poor people reclaiming gold. They visited the jewelery district and swept the roads. They used acids and mercury and heat to turn this dust and grit into tiny gold grains. Part of the process was taking aciding grit in the palm of their hand and stirring it with their fingers. Again, no glasses or masks or gloves.

Indian bloggers - are there any good blogs showing everyday life in India? Not just the poverty, but the life of a broad cross section of the population?
What is survival without a biological body? If you transfer a brain to a computer, is it still surviving, is it still "living"? or is part of the magic of life in it's uniqueness? Once we can instantly replicate any part of ourselves, what will that mean, are we still living at that point? or just useless machines?
Am confused, would this anyway bolster my geographically challenged HERE Maps?
I don't understand the hate here. I meant threatening in a good way, to financial/state power.
So Oliver had 86 karma before posting this. Assuming this marks the start of his intent to post all his 2014 articles, I shall enjoy observing how rapidly this number blossoms...
The rumor is not replete with how the proposed tax would work either; however, previous indications of similarly proposed taxes would suggest a tiered tax level based on different types of User data (more sensitive vs less sensitive) are stored in different tiers (France/National, Europe/Federal, and outside of Europe), with wavering amounts of taxes on a, I imagine, per user level.
TL;DR: because ExtJS sucks.

Long answer:

1. The learning curve is really steep. I mean, really really steep. There's a critical shortage of (good) books, video, and tutorials on the web. I guess ExtJS' learning resources should be 0.1% of jQuery's. The examples on Sencha site were still using the 3 version last time I checked;

2. If you need to customize ExtJS, or need something slightly more sophisticated than CRUD screen, then you are pretty much on your own. You'll spend a large amount of time trying to "fight" the framework and your chances you succeeding are very low;

3. It's expensive and its open source license has restrictions;

4. Sencha seems to hide and obscure the access to the learning resources so that you are pushed towards their paid support.

5. It's slow;

6. The error messages (when they show up!) are cryptic.

7. ExtJS was re-designed for version 4, but some things like the Model objects are cumbersome and suffer many usage limitations;

8. It will never be adopted as a general purpose solution on Internet facing webapps for the reasons exposed above;
A slicker templating workflow – Kickoff Statix
> How many people working on web search ranking would ask for a special pricing exception from their bandwidth provider and get it? The answer is, apparently, one.

Anyone who knows how peering and bandwidth pricing works.

Basically, bandwidth prices amongst ISPs is a game of chicken and relative strength and perceived benefits; it's one of those areas where being good at talking and having sufficient traffic can make the difference between you paying consumer rates and the other party paying you to get you to host hardware with them in some circumstances.

(E.g. consider if you run a CDN - for smaller ISPs that pay high rates for bandwidth, it may save them a lot of money to get a pop in their datacentres to reduce their bandwidth usage; and in some circumstances it may even pay for them to pay to get a big bandwidth hog to serve traffic destined for certain other ISPs on their network, to "tip the scales" in peering negotiations)
Maybe this kind of taxation could be a way of coping with NSA surveillance of European citizens? (That's just a provocative sentence, so please keep on reading.) Currently, Europe is at data disadvantage comparing with USA, and this disadvantage is used by USA not only for security reasons, but also to protect interests of USA. (That's what Snowden claims himself.) In such case, shouldn't Europe also protect its interests? I think the only two ways out are:

1. Imposing taxation on foreign Internet giants in Europe. Needless to say, that would lead to divisions of the Internet, which we all want to avoid.

2. There should be an international act signed between Europe and USA providing Internet companies certain degree of independence from national-level surveillance, which would protect privacy of citizens of each country involved in the act to the same extent.
Did Microsoft profit from browsers? Or was it a threat to existing platform profits that it temporarily pushed back via antitrust-inducing bundling tactics in order to scorch the earth for others trying to make inroads? And looking back, how did that go for them, they may have stalled human progress for a while, but what did they do with the time it bought them?
You have to wonder, do the GCHQ agents involved really think Anonymous is worth their time?

In terms of a threat to the United Kingdom, or in terms of a threat to GCHQ's budget?
Maybe now it is but back in 1998?
It's not about internet companies, it's about a set of multinational companies (amazon, starbuck, McDonald & many others including non-US) using a set of legal fiscal tricks to pay a ridicule amount of taxes compared to the national based ones & individuals. It's hurting competition and feeding the increasingly wide gap between wages & company income.
I get what you mean but selling 1000 units is hardly a game changer :p
SONY had a lot of fashion, but some technical qualities too. Soon we'll be left with neither fashion or utility.
Internet Exploder, stalling human progress since '95.
I don't really want to have to go into process security from scratch, but I have previously commented on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6811368

"Sandboxing" and "process separation" are not magic smoke.
> "Apple Computers will be known from now on as iPod Ltd"

Or "Newton Handheld".
This is an excellent set of reads for shedding light on why things at Microsoft are the way they are, thanks for digging them up and sharing!
This smells like they are going to try to pull a Atlassian.

And they will also go take VC money ... Going to be fun to watch :)
We shouldn't fool ourselves. Even with technologies like AngularJS, webGL, or D3.js ; desktop applications will always be there. You will always have software that need the maximum of power and will be native. Even if you think that because in 5 years computers will be much more faster, it won't change the fact that some applications will need to have every ressources available.

The only place where I can see we would avoid to do native apps is for mobile apps. Because in the future mobiles will be faster but they stay limited by their small screen. So you will use higher level tools to do your "simple" app that doesn't require thousands buttons and stay more productive.
All of those things that Microsof were hated for in the 90s are just mainstream tech business practice in 2014. For better or worse, they were trailblazers that big tech companies since have copied, not just a one-off bad guy. Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook are all doing exactly the same stuff, where they can and where they calculate they can get away with it.
This will open a big philosophical debate.

People whose limbs have been amputated, generally report of phantom limbs. They even experience sweating, itch etc on the phantom limb. Now how come the brain detects all that on a limb that isn't even present? It seems sense originates in the brain and the body parts are just acting mere like sensors and output peripherals.

If that is true you should not worry much about this biological body thing at all. After all we have organ transplants already. Like the argument about Ship of Theseus, you have to ask if a person who underwent organ transplants for more than one organ is actually the original person. If you were to wake that person post surgery, how much less of his original self he is since a good deal of body parts are replaced I am sure to bet he will say nothing changed at all.

Transferring brain to a computer is just brain transplant. If you accept organ transplant you should hardly have any problem with this at all.
Bloomberg was once called "Innovative Market Systems". The customers called BBG terminal as Bloomberg from the start. Hence the renaming. (source: wikipedia).
People, please watch these few videos to genuinely understand what 37Signal guys (David and Jason) stand for before having a say.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XD2kNopsUs&list=PLuBTPnEIr6J...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzERXJgi5vQ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPrvnlvnu-k

and yea, don't forget https://twitter.com/shitmydadsays/status/10390379840929792
"perhaps due to an advanced civilization with more aesthetics than sanity" :)
That really doesn't surprise me. I was given a brand new Sony Vaio VPC-J1 all in one. Had a niceish 20" 1920x1080 screen and an i5 so decided to try and use it for dev work.

Came stuffed with crapware and Sony-isms from the start. Did a rebuild with clean windows. Couldn't find any drivers for any of the Sony proprietary crap (Sony firmware extension parser, Magic Gate, WTF etc) so left them off as it worked fine.

After about 2 months the external PSU blew up. Sony couldn't provide a replacement under warranty for over 6 weeks so I got a dodgy Chinese PSU from Ali Express (took 2 days to arrive!). About 2 months later it started overheating and turning off randomly. Took it to bits to try and clean it and noticed that half the screws on the stand were no longer screwed in - all the threads were stripped. The stand collapsed shortly after resulting it being crudely propped on a pile of books. Turns out there was no dirt in the cooling ducts at all. Took the HSF off the CPU and there was only thermal paste on half of it. Sorted it with some arctic silver. About a month later the disk blew up. Turns out it was from a known bad batch of WD disks. Stuck a new disk in it. A month later it completely failed.

Total piece of junk. It lives in my cupboard as a reminder never to buy anything Sony and as a source of a mouse and keyboard for my daughter's Raspberry Pi. Even the keyboard and mouse suck.

ThinkPad user before and afterwards. ZERO problems ever.
In Windows 8 they moved this functionality to new Task manager, and it's window is resizable.
Google does a lot of business in the UK. I can buy, with real English money products from Google employees in an Enish Google office. For them to include a token step at the end of that process (invisible to the user) of having a Google employee in the Irish Google office just so they can avoid paying the English corporation tax is shady.

Google quasi-legally avoids a huge amount of tax. Everyone accepts that reducing your tax burden is legitimate, but there comes a point when it is taking the piss.

Paying tax is part of being a member of society. People and corporations not wanting to pay any tax should not be able to claim the benefits tha result from that tax burden. Google benefits from UK education. Google should fucking pay for it.

The scary thing is that Google isn't that bad compared to other companies. The scale is huge but the techniques are run of the mill. See some of the water companies who have baffling corporate structures and who use international intra-business loans in order to avoid corporation tax, all while paying massive bonuses to staff, increasing costs to consumers, under funding maintainance, etc. it's infuriating.
So the solution is for .nl and .ie to close their loopholes, not create new taxes, no?

They recently passed a similar tax in Italy, and the whole thing was about how the big bad American companies are making money and not investing in Italy. This, at the same time Fiat is decamping from Italy because the business climate is so shitty. So what's their creative answer to improve things? Another tax!
They didn't when I worked there, Vaio's all round. That was 3 years ago though, at SCE (Playstation).
Well I'm stockpiling T-series ThinkPads :)
I agree, I actually don't use any 37signals products.

Basecamp doesn't work for how I organise projects, and Campfire is a poor competitor to HipChat.

But I frequently point to them as an example of how to run a company. And they know their customers really well.

I guess I'm just not one of their customers.
The internal Syngenta documents the article talks about can be found at http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Portal:Atrazine_Exposed
Exhibit 19 is a scan of Sherry Ford's notes on Syngenta's FUD strategy.
What is missing in this article is any mention of Amazon and AWS. Surely that is the biggest roadblock in the way of Microsoft in the cloud?
IBM existed before Microsoft.