skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes sorry VAT (i called it sales tax for US readers to relate)

We have a lowish corporation tax of 12.5% yes paid on company profits, but everything else is very high!

For example out of a ~€39000 salary last year after all taxes i was left with €25000, things get rapidly worse from there if you want to move money from your company to yourself, people can check http://www.deloitte.ie/tc/ for ideas of what income taxes people pay here

As a director one could take a company loan (illegal above certain % but dont think anyone checks) but this would be liable to witholding tax of about 20%

Capital gains is 33% here.

And of course VAT of 23%..

tl.dr: the taxation structure here works great for large corporations who can hire expensive accountants to launder literally billions thru' Ireland to warmer climes
BUT for anyone running a normal small business, expect to hand over 20-40% of your earnings

and anything left after you pay income taxes for example, is heavily taxed with loads of stealth taxes (tv license, house tax, soon water tax etc etc) and of course 23% on anything you buy (essentials like food aside, some of these have lower VAT tax rate)
The settings page to opt out of Amazon Prime is disabled.
Speak for yourself, prime for me is still about fast shipping. I pretty much won't buy anything that doesn't have prime shipping
How To Train My Puppy Fast System-bestcbstore.com
We have a similar support load, but have been able to avoid that problem. I attribute this to two things:
- We have a highly skilled support team that can handle pretty much everything except actually writing bug fixes
- Every iteration we pull the whole team back to swarm on feature development together. They may get pulled into different historical features for support, but new development is always done as a team.

Support is still very costly for us, because the distraction of working on old features slows down new development. To combat that we're putting a lot of effort into fixing the root causes of our support issues and training our support team to handle more and more technical problems.
- Total government expenditures are nearly the size of China's GDP

Total government expenditure of USA 2013: 3.45 trillion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budg...)
GDP of China in 2013: 8.3 trillion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin...)

If I am not mistaken, the federal spending budget includes military spending as well.
The #1 reason I limited myself to 2 kids was so that I did not have to drive a mini-van. The #2 reason was my concern I could not adequately provide for them.
"Founders School" by Kauffman Institute
A new self-paced learning program for startup founders. What do you think?
I wouldn't be so sure. There's this woman[1] who ran 366 marathons in a year -- that is one per day and two durnig the last day of the year since she started. (And despite the interview was done after she had ran 100 marathons, she finished her project last July with 366 marathons as intended.) Yes, it's not ultramarathons, but I guess she still stretches the boundaries what some of us would consider humans being capable of.

That's almost 15450 kilometers in a year(~9550 miles).

1: http://blog.endomondo.com/2012/11/07/annette-fredskov-366-ma...
Show HN: Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet
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I believe few of the points he made were remarkable: the intonation/accent is definitely true. Walk like an egyptian, is really true, full immersion too. I also believe 3 months are a reasonable time for a B2 when those points are granted.

Then I admire, and envy, that he has time enough to go around the world and learn new languages for the sake of it.
The issue is not really having a manager that is technical or not: I have met great managers that were not technical, and terrible ones that were technical.

Success comes from trusting your people, having a clear goal the team believes in, and a team of the right size to accomplish said goal. Every successful team I've been a part of had all three. When even one is missing, there is much dysfunction.

The agile rituals are there to try to make those things easier, but they are just a way in: If you meet the important principles, you do not need them. Just look at the Valve method: No management, no ritual, but a hiring process that attempts to just get the kind of people that focus on those principles like a laser.
>Is it just those of us who are toiling away in the code mines of megacorps?

Code miner here, can confirm we operate Java EE servers but I have never known anyone to use Glassfish, its always that bundled server I download yet never use. We use mostly weblogic and tomcat, there may be a few JBoss app servers somewhere too.
While I would always wish to pay less for something, this is fine with me. Prime is still such an amazing value for me, and Amazon has created so much good will with me by being so awesome for so long that my reaction to this was basically to shrug and say "what took so long?"
Data Science Weekly Newsletter – Issue 16
linkydink.io is pretty good for link sharing, in my view, partic for the daily digest
Is it? I'd rather they split this into 2 plans and let me have just the fast shipping for $79 (or less) and people who want streaming can pay $99.

Netflix still has the better offering IMO. Not only content, but the video interface is better too. Initially Amazon's video player worked on Linux out of the box, but now it's just as hacky to get running as Netflix.

Due to this price increase, I'm going to reevaluate how important fast shipping is to me.
That's what I'm thinking too. The fact that it's old and running MS-DOS doesn't seem like much of a big deal to me considering it's not networked and only has one job to do that it's already capable of doing. They should probably just go get a cheep IDE HDD, copy the floppy onto it and boot from there. But other then that, I don't see tons of issues.

This does however seem like a fairly obvious use-case for an embedded solution. No floppies, no moving parts, etc.. It would last much longer then this computer will. It's not like the computer was doing much anyway (I mean, besides signaling motors, I'm not really sure what the computer was even doing).
Articles about Java don't usually do well on HN, and something about Glassfish (which never had any significant adoption whatsoever) getting any votes surprises me. I've run a JUG fir 14 years, and most of my membership these days is from larger companies. The startup crowd is a small minority now, but years ago was at least 50% of my membership.
We've just launched the alpha, you can try online or download as an Excel add-in. We'd love feedback.
That is the reason why there are Nexus phones.
Yeah, no. Just not how we work. Sorry! :)
Agreed. And, they haven't raised the prices in years.
It depends on what kind of business, and what languages are understood by the people involved.
Wow - was just about to ask the same.

I'm based out of India and hate the Taxation system here (it's worse than what you read for the US) - software attracts Service Tax and VAT (Sales Tax) both - you pay reverse service tax for services you take from abroad and you even pay TDS (Withholding Tax) from your pocket for entities not incorporated in India. I could just go on and go on here.... it's just stupid.

I'm planning to incorporate my startup soon and want to do it in a country where I can:
1) Use a PG like Stripe.
2) No Service/Sales Tax just flat out corporate tax on profits.
3) Easy, Simple and Affordable Registration and maintenance process.
It is mandatory in Italy. If you die the debt is automatically payed.
I may have bagged this game for being way too simple a few weeks ago. But after Flappy Bird, the genre seems to live on. It's annoyingly great. Keep up the good work!
The key innovation is an accurate, reliable method for rotating faces so they're 'looking straight at the camera' before feeding them to a deep neural network. They call this 3D photo rotation process "frontalization." Figure 1 on page 2 of the paper shows at a very high level how this is being done. Very nice!
> A 19th century person couldn't have anticipated nuclear weapons

This one seems a little strange. They're like weaker bombs, only not as weak. What's not to anticipate?
I've read parts of his book. He had already been living in China as a student for a few years when he decided to start his trip, if I remember correctly.
it's true that some people learn faster then others and that some people can understand notions and ideas that no one else can (at last not as quickly) but there is no way in hell.....i repeat NO WAY IN HELL that one can have a conversation in polish after studying the language for 1 hour (regardless of how bad their pronunciation or choice of vocabulary is). take it from a polish native who is also a polyglot. i guess some people like to believe scams like these and would be quite happy to also accept the fact that you can become a millionaire in 3 months if you only follow my technique etc. or you can learn how to advance your stock market analysis skills if you only try hard enough/have a knack for it/follow me blindly etc. put it that way......if it's so easy, how come nearly every school in the world offers some sort of foreign language curriculum yet after years of studying the given language 99.9% of students will not remember anything past counting to 10 and 'how r u'-type phrases? seeing is believing but not in this case. good luck learning.....i suggest starting with polish :)
Prime could cost $199 and I still wouldn't have to think before subscribing.
That did cross my mind when I posted it.

I should point out that I don't know what is true. It just seems to be a contradiction that every passenger can take on board and use whatever they want in-flight, yet transponders specially engineered to be safe on a plane must be able to be disabled.

I suspect the answer is that the transponder doesn't need to be under the control of anyone on the plane.
I'm sorry but I just can't get past the name. Who names any product squirt?
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Check out Genymotion.
Jeff Van Bueren's Postal Experiments
Interesting. In DE those services were just unlocked (and the price increased for renewals accordingly). So far it was JUST for fast shipping.

I subscribed for faster/cheaper shipping and canceled now, after a couple years. The streaming services are of no use to me. Most content in Germany is .. German (dubbed). I don't see a streaming client on Android or a way to stream from my XBMC. Inaccessible + expensive -> No prime for me anymore.
You can get Shoprunner and shipping will be free on Newegg and lot of other companies (i've used it last week on newegg and brooks brothers).

If you have an SPG Amex card, the membership is at no cost to you.
This can already be done by someone who truly wants to keep an eye on you, only it takes more manpower (well, detective power).

This is simply the same trend as ATMs replacing (some) bank tellers many years ago.

Will it be easier to perform and abuse mass surveillance? Sure. Will people with something important to hide still wear disguises? I'd bet yes.

My stance is that we can't fight progress, but we can start fighting the people bent on abusing the powers that progress bring. Identifying them is another issue (perhaps some form of facial recognition? :)
The best place to incorporate is wherever creates the least impedance with potential investors. If the pool of potential investors has not been identified, then incorporation as a C-corporation may create an unproductive tax burden.

If the purpose is solely to limit liability, then other limited liability forms of organization might make more financial sense and organizing locally might make sense.
Sqrrl Adds new members to big-data and security team
What is a postage-stamp nation then?
Yesterday a dream. Today a global business success.
I did, that's why I wrote "there are better alternatives like Genymotion"; I do use it.

It's not a coindidence that it is recommended by very talented developers such as C. Mottier: http://cyrilmottier.com/2013/06/27/a-productive-android-deve...
In Italy Prime costs just 9,99€.
That's just a little more than a single shipment.
http://www.amazon.it/gp/prime
Did you find it difficult to get Incorporated as well? or is was that fast, just everything afterwards tedious and slow? Did you found in Ireland?
The new trackpads. The one of the reasons I've liked Thinkpads is the two solid mechanical buttons, plus the 3rd button in the middle. The latest model replaced those with the integrated trackpad.

The old X1 Carbon apart from the display is nearly the perfect Linux Laptop. All they had to do was upgrade the display to HiDPI and it would have been perfect.
If I may, it sounds like the hurdles encountered were:

- Paperwork and fees/taxes in each state an employee works in.
- Securing a work visa to enter and work in the US.

But, it sounds like, if we were to swap places and Nitai lived in the US, trying to start a business in Europe, he'd be faced with

- Paperwork and fees/taxes paid to each country his employees worked.
- Securing a work visa to enter and work in the EU.

Depending on the country American Nitai wanted to live/work in, the visa may be easier/harder than the US visa, I'd imagine. But I'm not sure that the kinds of difficulties would be much different.

You're putting up a lot of strawmen here.

Example: "He will pay his taxes in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland or wherever he freely chooses to live. In Europe, you can live in whichever country you like. Most countries here seem happy to receive taxes."

In the US, you can freely live in whichever state you want. It's rhetorically dishonest to compare the United States to a single country in the EU.

--

I'm sorry that your experience was a poor one. Indeed, US laws are different, and if you went into the experience expecting it not to be different, that would certainly have been a shock. I make no claim our system is better than Denmark's (you shouldn't imply all of the EU is the same as Denmark, by the way). But it's a disingenuous platform to decry the US because you received inadequate counsel on setting up a US business or failed in your due diligence...

I'm sure, however, the pro-European camp of your readership will feel quite satisfied with the tone and subject matter of your post.
Amazon's streaming video is useless to me. It doesn't work on any of my devices (android, linux, or chromecast), while Netflix does.

I made 2 online movie rentals within the past few weeks, and both times I checked amazon, but then remembered that it doesn't work on my devices, and ended up getting it from Google Play. They're missing out on purchases, and getting people used to using other services - not a great way to set yourself up for the future...
Norman Borlaug is the father of the Green Revolution. Green revolution agriculture techniques require a massive amount of oil and gas as inputs. Eventually we're going to run out of those. When oil prices start to spike, people will starve. Also it has decreased diversity to only a few high yielding varies of crops making our food supply more susceptible to pathogens because of lack of biodiversity.

As well as a whole host of other problems, such as people switching to profitable crops to export rather than to feed the local population.
I'm surprised they did not change the cost to $97 so that the cost would still be a prime number.
Ditto. Sure, price increases suck, but a quick perusal of how many Prime-eligible items I've ordered in the last year would still put me way ahead even at $99/yr.
Yes, being able to use Stripe would be a great advantage.

There are a number of online services offering mostly a hassle free incorporation process, but none explains (or compares) the entrepreneur's side of the experience for an online business.
The giveforward site is now really active. I hope it is load friendly because it is being hugged very hard right now..
Yeah, but getting everything to place nicely while inside tmux is a bit of a challenge, especially if you want to have proper clipboard support.
Bah. Headline is misleading. There aren't "photos", it's a 5:18 video.
The original Compaq Portable that my family had growing up ran Compaq DOS, IIRC.
I don't know your definition of "very hard" but there are certainly harder languages for a native English speaker to learn:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Di...

Pronunciation specifically can be hard to learn without actually focusing on it, such as recording your own voice or having a tutor specifically teach you how to make each sound. A normal class setting is very bad for learning pronunciation while a one on one conversation with a teacher focusing on pronunciation will bring much better results.
30 Days Before Sunrise: The Secret Wisdom in Waking Early
I second this. My team is about 18 months into our transition to agile, and it is a tough road. This book has been an excellent resource.

The one gap is that it mostly focuses on greenfield projects. It does a good job of highlighting the parts where legacy systems will make agile more difficult, and I understand that spending more time on that would have made the book harder to understand. But we've had to do a lot of learning on our own to try to fill in those gaps for ourselves. With that said, this book does the best job of addressing legacy projects of any that I've read.

If anyone has any recommendations for resources on using agile in legacy systems, I'd love to hear them.
Shopping for a Masterpiece for $5,000
The Iceman of Wall Street
It is a racket. One of the Mitford sisters pointed it out a while back:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/525561.The_American_Way_o...
In the UK, Amazon have just raised the cost of Prime from £49 to £79, and bundled in their (failing?) LoveFilm movie streaming service to excuse it.

A lot of people I know (including me) are cancelling as a result - not due to the cost, but more the brazenness of it.
Yep and that's how you alienate your existing user-base who signed up when it was all about the shipping.

If they wanted to run a streaming/media service they should have done just that. They have definitely lost me as a customer by switching me from one service to another without even asking for confirmation (I found out in hackernews). Even if I was interested in the media streaming service which I'm absolutely not, I would still be upset about the way they have dealt with it.
I agree about the idea of being forced to speak it.

I think a cool idea would be some kind of RPG or MMORGP where you are forced to speak the language you are learning to accomplish tasks in the game.
Amazon Prime fee jumps to $99 a year
If you live in a rich western country and want to take time off to wander then it's going to be less expensive to do so in a country like China.

It's also probably much more interesting to go to a poorer country where people are more likely to be farming out in the countryside or walking/biking around than just walking by some highway in a western country.
If you acknowledge that "welfare state" is not a bad word, then why not just say "a poorly run state is bad"? Adding the word welfare serves only to confuse and misdirect the reader.
Live interactive map of world shipping
Content being dubbed is the most annoying thing. Here's a relevant discussion (a mixture of English and German replies): http://www.amazon.de/forum/high-definition?cdThread=Tx3PQMDU...

Apparently, there is some content which isn't dubbed but it's not enough to make it attractive.
SXSW is a popular tech-oriented conference, thus might qualify as news for nerds.

Besides, my first fear upon reading was that it would be a Uber car. I'm glad that's not the case, but saddened that such a tragedy happened in the first place.

Let's mix two polarizing subjects in the same comment:

Just as shortly after the invention of guns, a safety release was added to prevent accidental discharge, self-driving cars might be a drunk driver's safety catch. I have to agree with some of the above posters.
I think you are missing a couple, somewhat related failure modes.

First, if the software project is part of a larger integrated hardware/software project, people above the project manager may be making promises of deliverables without consulting the program manager at all, thus creating externally-imposed deadlines that cannot be changed without rippling through to other teams, who may or may not be in your own company. Of course, the same upper management that pulled deadlines out of their asses is reassuring the customer and other teams that they are Agile, so this won't be a problem.

Second, you have a stubborn customer who wants deliverable deadlines, holds you to them, and views your Agile-based explanations as "excuses". The US federal government is notorious for this.
That doesn't explain what he meant by 'nice,' that's just another statement.
I don't think that should be the incorporation motive, unless you already have a prospect of having investors. When you're starting a business/service, all you want is to be able to have income and to have such a legal protection that incorporation offers. Once you get to the point that you're profitable and that investors might come, I don't think it's a problem to re-incorporate...

I'm all for local incorporation, but only when it's possible/feasable. In my own case, local incorporation would render me unable to process online payments unless I have a yearly profit of at least 50K EUR, which I cannot have at all unless I'm able to process online payments :)
The depth of ignorance on display here is staggering. Why not read The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital instead of making a fool of yourself?
Additionally, the US is one of the few countries that punish their citizens with US tax even when they don't live in the US anymore...
I was kinda hoping we'd get away from these kind of woes with the transition from BIOS to (U)EFI. Apparently that is not the case.
I've never even seen any claims that there is a significant difference in language learning ability between teenagers and adults. There is strong evidence that very young children (younger than three years) can pick up the phonetic aspects of languages in a way that adults simply can't and people often simplify that to "young children are better at languages".

Given that this guy's key message seems to be about the importance of actually using the language (over taking classes or reading textbooks) I'm not sure that you actually disagree with him.
How big is a "small group", in your opinion?
> I have always wondered why don't Government have regulations in place that forces a borrower to purchase a life insurance. Or at least make the borrower opt into insurance by default with the option of opting out.

Because that's literally an unfair subsidy for insurance companies off the backs of homeowners. Insurance isn't a scam, but it is trading some reward to decrease risks. Probabilistically, you're better off saving the insurance money. I'm not saying that's the best choice for everyone, but it should be a choice.

Personally, as a single adult I'd never consider life insurance——nobody would be financially ruined if I died, so I'm much better off rolling all excess money into the stock market.
I have to admit I was very surprised it worked so well. I was very skeptical and hopeful when trying it but I'm very glad it does. Thanks for the great work!