skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for taking the time to answer questions here. Reading all the information you have posted so far makes me glad to be apart of this thing we call the internet.

Now my question:

- Me and a friend started a company in the US two years ago (both US citizens), and we run a consumer web app and in the near future will also provide SaaS. We just started to generate revenue 2 months ago and I was wondering how difficult it would be to incorporate again but in a more friendly place tax wise - What are our options to that?
My experience with this is yes that you need to be in the USA to open the bank account for the US corporation.

It MAY be possible to work something out if you deal with one of the multinational banks like Citi or HSBC but don't count on it.

To keep this sleeping corporation alive:

1. File the paperwork in Delaware every year and pay the fees there.

2. File a Form 1120 (the corporate income tax return) with zero income and zero expense. Technically a corporation has to file a return even if it has zero profit. Don't forget Form 5472 (foreign shareholder of US corp) if it applies to you.

Solution from this mess? Find a US partner who can co-own this thing with you. Then you have a US-based human as an officer/director who can do the footwork to open the bank account.

Meta solution to this mess: someone can start one of these things as a service for 10,000 people like you. This carries thermonuclear risk of course, which is probably why no one has done it.
How the Best CEOs Get the Most Out of Every Day
It's a great productivity extension. Thanks
I didn't say they were off-topic, they're ok content wise, but they're very thick on the 'buy my thing, buy my thing, buy my thing, buy my thing'.

They're blog-verts.
We have used other webinar type sw in the past. For every user of webinar sw you can quickly find a story when a meeting was started late or users (connections) dropped out. Internally (read internal network) it works great but as soon as you have others included or someone who doesn't have the plugin installed issues arise.

PitchIt started out as an internal app to help us show our slides remotely while trying to sell a different app. After consecutive calls where clients only asked about what presentation software we were using and if it was for sale, PitchIt was born.

Our focus is on simplicity and the ability to respond to adhoc meetings and opportunities to "Pitch" your products. Your attendees must only click a link and they are in. No plugins to install and it doesn't require high bandwidth.
I think the better message is to think about what would happen if you or your spouse died or couldn't work. There isn't a one-size-fits-all plan. Someone with a $500,000 mortgage, $50,000 in other loans, and no real nest egg needs more than your recommendation. Someone with a spouse that makes a good income, has very little debt, and having a substantial nest egg may not need any life or disability insurance. The key is to be realistic with your situation.
I've witnessed exactly that kind of informal public transport system in cities in Africa. Interesting that it's taken hold in New York.

Doubtless it occurs in numerous other cities, though i'd always assumed it was a developing countries phenomenon (cue joke about Queens).
Note the Per Capita Income vs Corruption scatter plots in a different post. Chiles actually one of the least corrupt for its income level. In fact, its generally not that corrupt. Approx = to the US (whether that's good or bad). In general I'd agree, although I'd think these stats would be thrown off by Santiago.
On rape accusations: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and-so...

TLDR: About 20% (with a wide margin of error) of rape accusations are false.

> "1 in 4 women is raped" was a fabrication by Mary Koss.

Not entirely. According to a CDC report (http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a...), 1 in 3 women have experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner. That said, some have criticized this report for taking too broad a definition, e.g. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/cdc-study-on-sexual-v...).
I was wonder about this. Does employer life insurance do anything to terminal illness? I pay extra to supplement my term life. But if I get too sick to work and lost my job, what good is the employer life insurance?
I don't know why, but I've always enjoyed looking at things like this. Companies that have really cool workspaces always fascinated me. Great site! Keep up the good work!
The idea of a "modern" Excel/Access is intriguing, but it's not without it's pitfalls. Basically, who uses Excel/Access a lot? Big Corporate America. Can they put their data up anywhere and access it over the web? In some cases, yes, in most cases I've seen, no. So any solution, to really make a dent, has to be usable as a self-hosted app. No quant at a trading desk is going to willy-nilly upload their proprietary models to a startup running on EC2.

We encountered this push back with our software so we had to write an Excel add-in (code-signed, of course) for our corporate customers so they could use our software locally on their data sets without having to leave the comfy confines of their corporate firewall.

With all that said, I'm sure there is some segment of the population who don't mind their data up in the cloud if the UI on top comes close to Access. You just gotta find that segment.
Yup. More about the tech stack here http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-trello-tech-stack/
It has a pretty similar score to the US, I haven't personally observed police corruption here, have you?

(Obviously it goes on, I'm talking about first-hand perception)
Speaking of which, how do y'all get most of your hires? Referrals? I've emailed your careers email address for matasano, but I've not gotten a response. I'm not sure if it's because I'm not qualified or I got filtered somehow.
I was always wondering if FileMaker could find some sort of role like this (if it's even still alive)?
Michigan SB636 Passed, allowing termination of landline phone service. Now what?
The trouble is, trains require a certain density to be economic and to run a frequent enough service to be convenient. The ideal city density for an efficient metro service is roughly equivalent to streets of 4 or 5 storey apartment blocks. If you've ever been to Barcelona then you'll have an idea of the ideal density. Very few urbanised areas of the US meet this requirement and most of the areas that do fit the bill date back to before the 1920's and already have mass transit. Buses can operate in cities of lower density, but still require a certain critical mass. I don't have the figures to hand but there has to be a certain number of households within 5 minutes walk of a bus stop to make it viable and many suburbs aren't dense enough for this.
See the book 'Cities for a small planet'. Also the Reith lectures on this topic: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gxns8
Interesting!

I did end up using annotations as you mention. However I chose to manage the db structure myself because early on I encountered problems when I changed data types and indexes, hibernate incombination with JavaDB dropped then recreated the structure, which is fine, but then if you want to push your changes to the live version, I had to write the SQL to port the live data into the newly created table which was a PITA given javadb can't insert into "GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY" columns, so that in turn meant more SQL to preserve referential relationship between data. I was always left feeling I did something totally wrong in that respect, so I blame myself.

A part of this also stems from the way I approach building an application, I'll always spec & then create out the DB as a way of helping me visualise the model before I start doing any "real" coding.

I still respect Java enormously, but I'm not at all sold on JEE application servers for anything below enterprise scale applications. And for any case where you need a quick prototype, Java definitely will not be my choice in the future.
Do the Forms from Google Docs come anywhere close? (Serious question having not really used either product much.)
Hopefully this will soon be added to django core - it's one of the goals as part of Marc Tamlyn's kickstarter to improve postgres support in django.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mjtamlyn/improved-postg...
That is 100% the case, same way movies prefer to have it in theaters and then release onto Blu-ray/dvd later to get people in theaters THEN get them to buy it. Controlling buying habits through windowing is annoying but not surprising method of improving revenue among other things.

Another fiction example, to ensure the last book of the Wheel of Time would hit #1 on the NYT hardcover list the original author's widow talked the publisher into not releasing the eBook right away to make sure people who bought the book week 1 got the hardback ensuring it would hit the top spot.
I am sure a lot of people will not agree with me here. But I feel Sweden is more corrupt than it appears.
http://sloseriombudsmannen.se
Poll: How much money do you have in your bank account?
Under $3,000
$3,000 - $10,000
$50,000 - $100,000
Over $150,000
A lot of the reason why a phone number isn't used is because of the unpredictable and immediate nature that comes with that channel of communication. Not every company has enough people or time to be constantly distracted by phone calls. That plus society has taught us that a ringing phone must be answered if you're around or it is considered rude, whereas an email can be left for a while, digested, and replied to at a later point in time without being rude. More simply, I can answer many more emails, more accurately than the time it takes to handle an unknown, untriaged phone call that will likely require another call or email to followup the initial conversation anyway.

That being said. For those that need a phone number, this is a nice-looking service! :)
Ballad of a WiFi Hero
Tiling window manager users: What do you do when you see "drop a file here"? I usually just move on but I wanted to try this. I am staring at awesome right now trying to think-of/find a graphical file manager that does not have a thousand dependencies.
> Four years ago no one could believe that a whole OS could be built on top of a web engine.

I think most people do remember WebOS.
"Show HN" is already kind of meta, so this definitely strikes me as meta-meta. I think the main problem here is the post title: "We did a SHOW HN and it landed on the front page of Hacker News". Good for you. Really. That's an accomplishment, or exciting to say the least. But by definition there are hundreds of front-page links a day -- we don't need a briefing on all of them. What would be next, "We did a post about our front-page experience that landed on the front page."?

The best part of this article was seeing what they did wrong, how they listened to the feedback and made changes.

Maybe a bit wordy, but I would have gone with something like, "What we learned we were doing wrong when our Show HN landed on the front page."
It is easy to form a new company in a friendlier tax jurisdiction. Singapore. Hong Kong. Etc.

You--because you are a US citizen--will have a metric shit-ton of paperwork to file every year. E.g., if you don't file Form 5471, it is an automatic $10,000 penalty, then you shovel snow uphill in Hell in the summertime to see of you can get the penalty removed.

The second--and bigger--problem is that when you transfer ownership of IP from your US corporation to the new foreign corporation, that is treated as a sale and you pay tax on it.

So. You wrote some software all by yourself. Now you're up and operating and generating revenue. What's the software worth? (Well, who the F knows, right?) Hire an appraiser to get a random person's opinion, just to keep the IRS mollified. That person's random opinion is that your software is worth $2,000,000. Guess what? You "bought" that IP at $0 and just "sold" it at $2,000,000 and have to pay tax on that profit.

Internal Revenue Code Section 367(a).

That's why in these circumstances it is better (for tax purposes) to start an IP-heavy company outside the US and license the right to use the IP in the USA to a US corporation. Don't do a startup in the USA then expand outwards.
Which I do not see how it was critical of feminism as a whole, it was directed at Jezebel in particular, and perhaps more broadly it could be extrapolated to postmodern feminism, which I disagree with, indeed.
Thanks for the support and advice! Most of the big financial firms are at least 2 years away from adopting cloud software, so if we are to target these as our customer, then it would appear as though the add-in would be the sensible route.
Parcelify – create css bundles from npm packages using browserify
Why would you ever want to do this? Surely at this point you are better with a table with id, name, description, price, currency, in_stock and an extra data field for anything else - given you require the other fields.
London's Burning: How a Skyscraper Melts Cars
I hate that I just saw the comments for that article.
Isn't this basically SuperShuttle?
Another terminal-based log file viewer with a large feature set is lnav:

http://lnav.org/

One of the nice things about lnav is that it indexes the log messages by time and shows a combined view of all the files that are loaded. Other features include: automatic handling of compressed files, querying logs using SQL, a histogram view of messages over time, and more...
On the Trello Android team we have a similar workflow to the web client and server developers. We merge in to a shared development branch when we have a complete feature or bugfix. With git's --no-ff this allows us to see when a new feature was implemented, and when bugs pop up we have a clear list of intersections where they could have been introduced. Our workflow is roughly based on an excellent post by Vincent Driessen, http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/.
One advantage of an in-browser tool is that the hosting can be anywhere, from the cloud to your local computer.

I set up a simple nodejs server (using the module `j` http://npm.im/j) that exposes all of the XLSB files in a directory on a computer and generates Numbers-compatible CSV output so I can read the data on iPhone when I need to. The data is hosted locally, and unlike with saving CSVs the output is always up to date
the form builder. Takes about 30 mins to get a form front end built that ordinary users can use by double clicking. You can customize quite like crazy with VB script.

My experience was 8 years ago, its just so easy to hack something on a whim to solve some office task that's annoying (for internal use only, the security was a joke).

The graphical database designer tool was perhaps useful for non-techies too. And the forms could be extensively customized with VB script if it didn't do what you wanted out the tin (change this color when X happens etc).
Oh cool, that's very interesting! Thanks for sharing.
I live in Helsinki and have tried this service a couple of times. Every time I have had the whole van for myself, except once there was a journalist doing a story on the fancy new service. It's not really fair to compare the price to a single bus ride: if you live in Helsinki and don't own a car, you already have a monthly ticket and the incremental cost of getting on a bus is zero. This is in effect a cheap taxi that's a little less convenient.

What I think they're really doing is getting around Finland's taxi permit system (there's a limited number of taxi permits so there is no real competition) by building a taxi-like service that can only pick you up and drop you off at bus stops, which apparently avoids getting the vans classified as taxis.
The product I'm working on, Silk [1], is trying to do basically reinvent Access/FileMaker for the web age.

I'm not sure if it would do what you'd want since we're not trying to replicate many of the power features of Access, but would love to hear your feedback.

[1] http://www.silk.co/
That would be part of the autopilot. It will probably use a combination of GPS, maps, and radar to avoid this. And it would fly in circles waiting for people to wake up.
I (never living in either) feel like US is way more corrupt than Germany, France, ...
You can do all of that with TCP/IP or any other network stack, no need for HTTP.
Do not transfer IP to the US mother ship before you have thought it out.

You can transfer IP into the USA but once you have done that all of the profit generated from that IP worldwide will be subject to US tax.

And if you ever want to transfer the IP out of the USA it will be treated as a sale.

The worst I ever saw was one of those online poker sites. To move out of the USA they had to move their IP to a new foreign corporation.

The appraised value of the domain name was $6,000,000. That's a $6,000,000 income item. Pay tax on that at 34%, baby.

For day-to-day business operations you will have the normal level of business brain damage. Complexity is a mathematical constant.
I'd love to hear—maybe I missed another blog post—why they went with the single release manager, where only one person can merge and deploy. What happens if Doug is sick or on vacation? Or even just in a meeting? What is a typical amount of time for a change to sit in "ready for merge" or merged but not deployed?
The minimum possible. If you recognize that banks are part of the problem, you don't want to finance them... Unfortunately, they've had laws passed to make having a bank account mandatory for some important operations, so you cannot avoid them entirely, but that's not a reason to give them all your money.
>2-day shipping is rarely shipped via a 2-day shipping service;

One thing I find interesting is that UPS Ground can be a guaranteed 2-day service. They call it "day-definite delivery", and it depends on the distance.
DockerCon 2014 – Call For Papers
your premise that its main goal was to reduce the physical number of pages for federal programs is incorrect

That isn't my premise. I mean 'paperwork' in the 'burden' sense, not as in physical pieces of paper. However, the extra layer of bureaucracy added paperwork in the 'burden' sense.
It's still very much alive. IIRC, a lot of universities / K-12 schools and non profits use FileMaker in some manner. I've supported a high number of users in the past and non-technical people surprisingly adapted well managing to be productive with it. The iPhone + iPad apps were decently usable upon launch and hopefully they've gotten better over the last couple of years. I prefer FM over Access and even Excel as far as small tasks like data matching / cleanup / etc. are concerned where a development effort isn't warranted.
No, you should get a response and, if you're interested, a phone call from us, no matter what. Our process is pretty much resume-blind. So if you didn't get a response, you fell through the cracks somehow (actual humans read all those mails, we get a lot of them, and we have spam filters).

Send directly to me? thomas at mycompany.
On the subject of supply constrained taxi permits, here's an interesting NPR story on NYC's taxi medallions:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/11/29/142866785/the-tues...
What TDD Is and Is Not
It does mean that the particular causal link in question is marginally more likely than if the correlation had not been observed. Not enough to base action on, though.

It certainly implies (how strongly depends on the actual data) that there is some causal link (A -> B, B -> A, or A <- C -> B), because something is reducing the entropy between the two systems. That again, though, doesn't really tell us enough to be useful.
Excel, and Access specifically were unique in that they helped groups validate their need for software. By the time they had given in and tried to build something themselves, be it in excel, or Access, it allowed the logical extension of 'here's the data we need' to 'here's how we need the data to connect and interact'.

I think anyone who inherited an access system saw the progression from taking an excel like interpretation, to putting forms on front of it, to trying to connect the forms, to ultimately print some form of report. It was CRUD within one app, that didn't require learning 37 different technologies to make one screen work.

At most, you might have to pick up VBA if you wanted to do something fancier.

As much as Access makes me cringe, seeing the apps that were reasonably well architected and talked to MSSQL backends didn't look too out of place.
We have made a lot of changes so drawing conclusions is difficult. Removing the name/email on the instant demo instantly increased activity there. Moving forward we also introduced a 30 day free trial which will now be our target metric. We are iterating a lot of things and hopefully can limit are changes and get more targeted data.
Ask HN: Is it illegal or unethical to build apps based on previous paid work?
Is it illegal -- or simply unethical -- to work on a competing product in your free time to one that you developed at a previous job?

I was previously employed in a field other than programming. My official title was about as far away from engineering as one could get. However, being that it was a very small company that I worked for (less than 5 employees), when it got out that I could code, I started working on little projects here and there.

One of the projects ended up being rather useful. However, since programming was not my official role, getting time approved to actually work on it was very tricky to do. In short, the software was built to a point where it works, and they use it on a daily basis for their business, but due to time constraints, it never reached the point of what I thought it <i>could</i> be.

I've now switched jobs, but that little app still floats in the back of my mind. I want to built it into the useful tool that I know it could be. Obviously no code would be reused from the previous job. Do I risk any kind of legal trouble for doing so?
A paper posted on arxiv a few days ago by Fan et al. claims to have a similar level of accuracy (97.3% on LFW): http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.2802.pdf

Both methods use deep neural networks, but have a lot of differences, e.g., the Fan et al. paper doesn't use a 3D face model.
While you are here: you've funded a few startups in the space, including skysheet (http://www.skysheet.com/) and fivetran (http://fivetran.com/). Are they targeting this "hybrid" or are you thinking of something completely different?
Odd, they go away for me after a second or so. (Firefox 27.0.1, OS X 10.9.2).
Google smartwatch specs leak, show hardware comparable to Galaxy Gear 2
Yes, mbesto is right.

Acquiring a second citizenship will not relieve you from the full boat of U.S. tax laws. No matter where you live, no matter how many other passports you carry, if you have the magic blue passport with the eagle on it, you are a U.S. taxpayer.