skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The tax code isn't just overly complicated, it's poorly equipped for dealing with a global economy and effectively encourages you to shirk as many taxes as you can legally get away with. This is especially noticeable in the business world where you're forced to file more frequently and actively put yourself at a disadvantage if you don't exploit the loopholes to the level your competitors do.

There's a certain irony in wealthy corps/individuals being able to pay less effective taxes than the less fortunate purely because they can afford to work the system to their advantage. The only reason most of these gimmicks are possible is because the government is so damn determined to influence behavior through taxes.
Better Bulking for MongoDB 2.6 and Beyond
Wait, you say it's wholly untrue but the immediately say that it's somewhat true.

Can't disagree with the rest.
This is what an US iPhone charger looks like with an EU adapter: http://imgur.com/fM8iP0n

I usually leave it at home. The adapter isn't large, but you have to take it off for transport which makes it awkward to use.
Major Redesign and Features added to Bonobo Git Server for Windows
I don't understand. The data was leaked from March 27, 2013 to March 10, 2014, but LaCie didn't know that was happening. They found out on March 19, 2014 when the FBI told them about it. I don't see how you infer from this miss-ordered priorities for fixing the site.
TL;DR:

Founder makes mistake after mistake, blames other people, then finds a famous & rich engineer, suddenly stops making mistakes.
Flexible Selenium tests via Page Objects
You are assuming that you'd recognize innovation as innovation as innovation, if you saw it. Would you?

Because self-driving cars are a huge deal. It would eliminate the range issue of electrics, because you could send your car to a charging station and get in another. Plus, reduce overall transportation costs. Parking costs in a large city can be $300/month. Self-driving cars plus car sharing will make that obsolete.
Is this an add for daatomic or is that really that highly used by clojurians?
"I’ve also discovered that nothing is more motivating than a high profile, non-negotiable deadline." Sweet jesus no. If you don't understand what is required do NOT sign your team up for that. That's what causes death marches. Now if you had the team already analyze the opportunity and prototype "the hard parts" then by all means go for it :)
Because it is a lot easier to attract new customers and do a free PR campaign this way. It doesn't prevent them from selling the technology later on.
LGTM: https://filippo.io/Heartbleed/#mint.com
You're just saying that because you don't understand it.

Once you understand it, you'll come to admire the brilliance of the whole thing.

At that point, explain it to the rest of us.
App Annie Index – Market Q1 2014: Revenue Soars in the United States and China
Firm names?

Thanks a lot!
Student musicians often cover professional music without paying royalties. I think there is a lot of "creativity" in trying to mimic other people's work even if there is no profit motive.
In Australia gov (state & Federal) is now "Cloud First".
This reminds me of an interview with one of the LittleBigPlanet devs. He was asked if he was worried that the most popular user-generated levels were just clones of other games. He said, it's natural to learn by copying the great masters, and it won't be long before the mod community gets the hang of the medium and starts being more creative. And he was right! While some of the more popular levels are "inspired" by other properties, most aren't, and there are hardly any straight clones.
> And browsers have js enabled by default

Not all of them. It's just disturbing that people move so far away from the basics for such simple tasks as static HTML. What about those with disabilities and use screen readers or braille displays? I guess the author doesn't care about the blind or those who choose not to execute arbitrary code on their computers.
Cloning game for monetization is bad, but is there any real ways to prevent that if you're single person developing that game with no money?

I think too cloning is good way to learn, but must agree most clones we see are plain ripoffs made with motive to scam players and game designers. It hurts worst the newcomers. But then I don't approve the tetris clone litigators, who are just big jackasses.
Exactly, how many people didn't really care about unencrypted requests over public WiFi networks until everyone and their grandson could install Firesheep? Tools to make that attack had been available forever, but only after Firesheep did many people finally accept that basically any authenticated request should be done over a secure channel.

For a huge majority of folks, some unfortunately in the position of making decisions and policy surrounding security, the attack just isn't real until there's a nicely usable and widely available tool.
because subliminal liberal mind control, duh!
I remember seeing a talk by an antarctic scientist researching anti-freeze oils in fish, for use in the food sciences. Down there with his crew and expensive equipment, boring a hole through the ice to catch fish... and the most fundamental bit of equipment they used in the process was the fishing rod. They couldn't find a short rod easily (Australian, no culture of ice fishing) so they ended up using a toy Snoopy-branded rod, all of about 30 cm long...
If a student in an art museum copies one of the old masters (as happens every day), no money changes hands either. The problem is, for many of the game clones, there is a profit motive.
Isn't this always the case? A company that has at its top someone not familiar with the field of the company is almost always doomed.
Regarding "Mint's old cert": as many people have pointed out elsewhere, new server certificates can be backdated, so an old date is not in and of itself indicative of a problem.
My Air came with a 45W power brick which is even smaller than the 65W.
> Yes, the tax preparation industry has made token donations to efforts to preserve the current tax code.

The millions Intuit alone spends annually lobbying to that end are considerably more than anything that could reasonably called a "token".
There's certain opinions that my parents hold that I do not. As one (fairly non-controversial) example, I don't believe in the death penalty, but my dad does.

We were having a debate about it one time, and I asked my dad how it was that we disagreed on these topics. He replied that he raised my sister and I to have what he felt were more ethical viewpoints on various issues than what his own perspectives were.

I was astounded when he told me this. He doesn't hide what his real thoughts are, but he recognizes that some of them aren't the most kind or moral and has actually raised me to have different views than himself.
The IRS doesn't have a system to track down FB posts or Instagram photos. It doesn't even have the resources to maintain its own systems.

Audits are randomly chosen out of several pools (i.e., corporations, very wealthy individuals, the self-employed, business-owners, every else, etc.) with heavy emphasis on high-fraud pools such as the self-employed. These pools are generated based on self-reported information (the much vaunted/feared comparative reporting analysis system is years from implementation). Due to high fraud levels, some pools (i.e., the self-employed pool) have higher likelihoods of audits but from the standpoint of the taxpayer, the increased risk is isn't meaningfully worse.
A large cause is all the government handouts we hide in the tax code as deductions. Simplifying the tax code removes a favorite way for politicians to payoff donors.
According to LinkedIn the CTO left the company
I found that bit suspect as well, but I think this guy is more flexible, e.g. look at her discussions on features vs. making things sold.

The one deadline she mentioned was implicitly a decision, "we will launch at X event". That eliminates the first general problem with these, they're usually artificial (vs. what I like to refer to as the "pesky" customer challenge). It also allows for the right sort of deadline bargaining, what shall we present then? Vs. the "I think I can do this in 4 weeks" which the worst managers take as a starting negotiating position.
"I hope you're not referring to the perfect competition supply/demand curve, because that's irrelevant here."

No kidding. That's exactly what I said: homes aren't commodities, the market isn't anywhere near "perfectly competitive", the demand is inelastic, and the supply is primarily constrained by the availability of land. Thus "building skyscrapers" is not an axiomatic solution to any of this: it costs more to build upward, which exacerbates the non-commodity nature of the good; landowners have even more competitive power in the market; availability is still constrained by an extremely limited natural resource (land).

What happens is that prices go up, landowners build upward until prices stagnate, then landowners stop building. When prices go up again, landowners build upward again. All building happens in response to rising prices, so it's never a force for downward pressure on prices unless demand declines unexpectedly.
Maker of Android flashlight app avoids fine after selling location data
It's always funny to see somebody so eager to post a smarmy, obnoxious response to an article that they don't bother to actually read the article.
I see it as more of the 'if your problem is that you don't like surveillance, it shouldn't matter who is doing it' as Nike is being stated as a preferable body to have surveillance them than the IRS in a hypothetical worst case scenario for both which appears to involve them being a tax cheat.

It is not difficult after all to imagine a situation where the worst case scenario of Nike monitoring you is much worse than the worst case scenario of the IRS monitoring you.
I don't think I had a problem with "heartleech" until I read this comment. What exactly does Snort's TLS decoding have to do with extracting private keys from servers? That's not the bug. The bug is OpenSSL leaking memory when it receives a malformed TLS heartbeat. You could have demonstrated that without publishing "find_private_key()".

I think you published this because it was fun to write. "Auto pwn", as you call it, has nothing to do with convincing Snort to do anything.

I don't believe you agree with Daniel Weber's argument at all. Don't dodge it by making things up. Engage with it directly. I wouldn't think it would be that difficult for you to knock down.
200$ for "Global Dart for MacBook", that's a lot for a charger
Generating electricity by moving a droplet of ionic liquid along graphene
> All of those questions have a massive amount of upvotes, i.e., the community thought they were interesting, well written, and, mots importantly, useful. All closed as "off-topic" or "not constructive." Give me a break. This is the crap I'm talking about. A bunch of self-important people with nothing better to do than enforce the rules in as strict a manner as possible regardless of whether or not what they are doing is actually making the site a better place.

Don't have time to look through all of your examples, but I took a look at the first one. It's an open-ended question that doesn't have a single, definitive answer. It will generate discussion forever. That's the reason that it was closed (emphasis mine):

> As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit...polling, or extended discussion.

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood have a very strict and specific philosophy/opinion regarding what kind of questions and answers make for a "good" Questions & Answers site. There are numerous blog and Meta StackOverflow posts talking about this philosophy. The idea behind suppressing extended discussion is that it makes it harder to find practical answers to actual, real-world problems when they're buried underneath a sea of un-focused discussion.

EDIT:

I think the generalization of community moderators on StackOverflow as "self-important" isn't entirely correct, nor am I convinced that it's even relevant either. Are there self-important people moderating StackOverflow? Probably, but that doesn't address the fact that people are following strict guidelines for usage of the site that were agreed upon over time by the site's founders, together with the most active participants of the site (or at least, those who most actively chose to participate in Meta).

These guidelines were put in place to "make the site better", at least in the opinion of the founders and the aforementioned participants of Meta. They weren't made up so that a bunch of "self-important" people could feel "self-important".
MakeGamesWithUs Summer Academy Deadline Today
It's not a trick. Be a good person, and treat your children like people.
Was this recent? From the path she described I'd expect an event like this sometime earlier.
Lessig and others have pointed out the US needs a constitutional amendment to fix the problems with campaign finance that are the root cause of the problem.

This isn't hacker news unless you mention someone like Lessig in relation to this.
I think we need another derivative on that, can I invest in people who invest in angel investors?
That's totally a legitimate concern.

No, it's not. If it were, you'd reveal your identities, just like in any business transaction.
Because Kickstarter is used to get the resource to accelerate the business which they may well eventually sell to Apple or Samsung for far more than they raise from kickstarter. (See, e.g., Oculus Rift.)
The problem is they can't dump that deduction without causing a massive discontinuity. If you get rid of it, house prices will drop instantly and incumbent owners are holding the bag in the form of their existing mortgage. So the only sane way to get rid of it is start now and phase it out over decades.
A hilarious backfiring of positive discrimination...
This may be a simple oversight and I hope I don't sound too pedantic but you may need to broaden your definition of developer a bit. Developers who work on OS, games, embarked systems or professional applications (think CAD) are not very likely to need these anytime soon. More knowledge is always good so I'll check some out anyway!
I don't see how the US Federal Tax Code could get more complicated without just inserting pure gibberish into it.

The thing is, most of the tax code doesn't apply to everyday citizen. The really complicated stuff only applies to a certain number and I'm sure they have well paid people doing their best to avoid those sections.

The easy way to get people riled up about taxes? Remove withholding from paychecks and force people to write that big check every April. Then you'll get an uproar since most people have no idea how much in taxes they pay. But that's likely not the point you're trying to make.
In this case, a 'run-time failure' would be completely unacceptable, as the 'run-time' environment is your $X000 hardware manufacturing run. Hardware development isn't in the same league as software. It's not even the same sport. Like comparing football to rugby. Both played on a gridiron, but entirely differently.
What I learned as a liberal talking head on Fox News
A flat tax is highly regressive and is basically a giveaway to the rich. A flat tax system that attempts to be fair ends up being a progressive rate system by another name. Either way, a flat tax system isn't any better than the current system because the progressive marginal rate structure isn't where the complexity of the tax code lies.
I imagine this story to be off the HN front page any minute now.
Strong words. I assume you feel the same way about the field of mathematics then -- that it's all "bullshit chicken-hawking?"

http://legendofpi.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/do-mathematicians...

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/25/science/la-sci-sn-nu...

http://www.massey.ac.nz/~rmclachl/overthehill.html

https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~rdc26/zoop2.pdf
There are different levels of audit. The "standard" audit they apply to everyone is basically a cross-check of your 1099's and W-2's, as well as a form check to look for computational errors (or didn't-follow-instructions errors).

When people say "I am being audited", they mean the higher levels of audit where they must produce extra records for the IRS to prove deductions & such.
no, i just used streaming api to gather the data. you can crawl surprisingly more data with streaming api as opposed to regular api.
In all fairness, she also learned a lot of important things, some before that point. Including the very important lesson that if you don't understand the web site your contractors have developed, your potential customers probably won't either.

Getting the UI stuff right is just as important as implementing it solidly.
Being afraid they might get things wrong is like being afraid your car might lose its wheel on the highway.

Could it happen? Yes. Is it a risk one must take in order to partake in the luxuries of the lifestyle one leads? Yes.
Maybe i am naive, but i think this screams for a system which enforces reproducing of bugs.

1. Bug is filed

2. System checks if bug is reproducible

3. As long as the bug is not reproducible it is hidden in the issue tracker and flagged as "needs reproducibility" and emails are sent to the creator. After a given time the bug is closed automatically.

4. When the testcase to reproduce the bug is provided, the build system checks against the current supported versions. If it passes, the bug is fixed as "needs reproducibility" again, if it fails, the bug is finally pushed to the main issue tracker.

I can see how brutal this approach is, but this way, the number of bugs is kept to a minimum. Bug filers, who actually take the time will therefore have a high probability of immediate fixing. Motivated people can always play gardener additionally, but without the email spam, they can simply help in one step of the process.
I grew up in New York, spent about a decade in Manhattan itself, and have never once seen anyone capitalize either as "The City".

In fact, I've never seen anyone refer to any city that way except a minority of people in and around SF.

This is why South Park characterized residents of the city as "in love with the smell of their own farts."
How does it compare to OCaml's time-travelling debugger? Is the feature set and the debugging experience basically the same?
Isn't equal protection, without regard to a superficial category like length-of-residency (which is itself highly entangled with age & race), a constitutional right?
Ask HN: How to communicate basic security protocols to parents, non-techs
I've been writing an email to my family (mostly 65+ parents, retired, etc.) about how to protect themselves from email scams, etc., especially in light of the heartbleed fiasco.

There's often no distinction between a systemic bug (e.g. heartbleed) and an actual corporate security breach (e.g. Target). Everything is a "hack" to them. I'm not looking for "general" advice, e.g. make sure you're using https, etc. And I'm afraid this will devolve into "any non-technical user", no matter what the age. If so, that's fine.

Here's what I'm asking...How do you communicate this stuff to your non-tech people, whether parents, grand-parents, colleagues, etc.? Without being overcome with technical descriptions. How do we help them stay safe? Everything from social engineering (a la Kevin Mitnick) to clicking on emails from their "bank."

Is there a protocol, or set of "rules" you place on your loved-ones? The last thing you want is for them to call you at 2am asking for help because they've been "hacked." What strategies are you using to prevent the "2am call because they've been hacked?"
Thank you sir! I think it does look nice but I don't think I want that functionality.
Nice example of racism and sexism, at its finest
I know of three people who have been severely injured from a project I walked off last year. The Fortune 20 company's guidelines(and national safety codes) were ignored in their entirety. The project manager who was going to save $4.5 million at the risk of others' welfare is now shopping for bids to "do it by the book". Apparently his plausible deniability has sprung a leak or one or more of the injured have lawyered up. Vindication is bitter-sweet.
You are missing the incentive structure that results from over-complicating the tax code.

Getting angry about an over-complicated and taking productive action to change it takes effort. Lots of it, sustained over time in an organized and intelligent way. But people generally aren't passionate about taxes. They're passionate about hobbies, their families, friends, major life goals, and so on. Taxes are just an obstacle to move past.

When you overcomplicate the tax code, you create a huge market for companies willing to take on that burden for you, at a price. Because they operate at scale, they achieve efficiencies that no individual or small group can hope to achieve. Doing peoples' taxes is much more palatable when you're getting paid to do so. Meanwhile, John and Jane Smith can go back to what they're really passionate about.

For a price.

As a litmus test for a country's tax code, I propose: if a typical high school graduate with access to all necessary information cannot do his or her federal/national taxes in an afternoon, your country's tax code is too complicated.
The followup text:

"Our team performed brilliantly in the month leading up to our launch at the South by Southwest festival; they worked day and night. Now I look for major events that we can all work toward every three months. It’s a great way to keep everyone pointing in the same direction and working fast."

Ugh, I'm really not sure this founder learned the right lesson here either. I'm hoping there's an unspoken here that deadlines are being set in a less-arbitrary method grounded with a technical reality check.
The IRS doesn't use your online profile to decide if you're a tax evader. It's simply fearmongering from anti-tax advocates.

The IRS doesn't even have the budget to carry out basic audits in which the bulk of the investigational burden is placed on the taxpayer (by means of responding to auto-generated documentation requests). It certainly doesn't have the budget to invest in a high-tech system that could track multiple social media platforms and somehow connect that to financial spending or tax reporting.
Asset Pipeline with Gulp JS for any WebApp
What's stopping you from open sourcing it now?
This would make underwater mortgage holders (at least lower-income ones) to stop paying taxes completely. After all, they've already lost their money, and have no hope of getting anything out of the sale, and there's no way anybody gets anything more out of them, it's bank's loss now. Moreover, it is in their interest to postpone the sale - since until sold, bank's incentive in eviction is much lower, and incentive in just discharging the part of the mortgage is higher, due to additional buyer costs. So if you shift the tax burden essentially to the buyer of the house, the consequences may be not that good.
There's considerable empirical evidence from cross-country studies of democracy that limited input and poorly representative government are a product of electoral structures that support duopoly, like the ones that US has had since its founding.

The domination by elites is a result of an electoral process that prevents effective choices (and thus, meaningful input) from coming through the electoral process and drives most meaningful political input through processes other than the formal electoral process.

Constitutional changes focussed on campaign financing rather than fundamental government and elctoral structure are unlikely to seriously change that, though they may redirect the form through which elite influences are directed outside of the electoral process.
4/23 talk on how to get more engaged users by Flurry marketing guru