skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's more complicated than that. He was using a so-called "Registered Tax-Avoidance Scheme" (TAS for short). TAS's are basically entire schemes built around a loophole in the tax law.

Each time the government announces a new Budget, they include a raft of measures to try and plug these holes, but there are companies that specialise in finding these loopholes and helping their clients exploit them (for a fairly sizeable fee). They pay some top lawyers to provide a quote that "yes, damnit, the loophole exists", and then they go on their merry dance to acquire clients to make use of those loopholes.

As my accountant explained it to me at the time (before I decided to stay the hell away from those things), the difference between regular tax avoidance and registered tax avoidance schemes is that in the first case, you and your accountant think you're paying a fair amount (and HMRC may disagree), whilst in the second case, you, your accountant, and HMRC all know you're playing dirty.

Example: one of the more popular TAS's was to set up an employee benefits trust, with you (the business owner) as the beneficiary. Payments to the trust could be seen as staffing costs, thereby attracting no Corporation Tax on profit. The trust would then loan you the money at zero interest and with no expectation of it ever being repaid, thereby avoiding income tax. Bingo - zero tax! But obviously exploiting a hole in the rules.

This has been progressively clamped down on - first by requiring people using TAS's to declare that they are using them (which allows HMRC to target them more effectively), and in the latest Budget, by requiring users of TAS's to pay the tax first as if they weren't using the TAS and then argue with HMRC over whether the TAS is valid.

I think overall the TAS thing is on the way out... but it's really worth drawing the line between regular tax avoidance (i.e. reducing your tax using very legit mechanisms like capital allowances, R&D tax credits, dividends/salary splits, etc) vs registered tax avoidance schemes, which are just dirty business.

As far as I know, Jimmy Carr was using a registered tax avoidance scheme.
pc's hair is fierce fluffy these days
lain implement https encryption
google can go wrek itself

im srs
America is slowly turning into its own worst enemy. Is this what war on terror has lead to? "No one can terrorize our people, we terrorize our own people by slowly taking away all their rights and liberties" good job America.
The problem isn't the certificate infrastructure; it's the protocol.

Online revocation checking could be made to work. We know the shape the solution will take. It will look like a redesigned version of OCSP stapling (where instead of connecting out to an OCSP server, the TLS server itself relays the revocation assertion over the TLS connection), but for chained certificates, and with an HSTS-like persistence mechanism so that attackers can't skip revocation checks by simply not sending the Certificate Status extension.

This is a lot of work to get certificate revocation, which is a rarely-used feature. But dynamic certificate pins are useful all the time, and solve some of the same problems as revocation. They also happen to be a persistent, cached attestation that accompanies a TLS connection.

So, perhaps the right thing to do is (wait for it) push for TACK:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7562185
Chromes ability to save settings silently fails with disturbing regularity (in my experience). A lot of people seem to have seen the issue (e.g. [1], and google will reveal many more) but consistent steps to reproduce seem hard to come by. It's one of the main annoyances that made me switch back to firefox.

[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/npSTSO...
How long has coveralls been down?
Related: http://mdocml.bsd.lv/
Present on topics you know nothing about
I was primarily thinking against the CAs (or network paths to them), but yeah...
Tiny Docker images using musl libc and no package manager
alright, no need to be a smart arse, I wasn't aware of those tools.
I pick up Lazarus ever so often because I loved Delphi (it was my competitive edge; everyone was doing VC++ and I ate their lunches. And dinners.) back in the day. Lazarus as being FPC + libraries is great, but the IDE is still really bad in my opinion. It is unstable to say the least. I wish it was more solid or that Embarcadero would just get smart and open source the whole thing so it actually would have a chance. I'll keep checking though...
Alternatively, if you want to search for a more specific image, this is pretty convenient: http://nuggety.com/u/nuggety/top-image-search-engines
Backward. The dos would be possible for many to whom the mitm is impossible.
Yeah, hard to say without a live demo. Also, downloading an entire Ruby interpreter in JS seems a little on the heavy side. If you were going to go that route, might as well use texlive.js and get a full-blown LaTeX system. :-)

Cool nonetheless.
Angular is a framework, knockout and react are data binding libraries. You can get dependency injection and testing with both, its just something you have to set up yourself.
What a sensationalist title. The real title is "Chrome users oblivious to Heartbleed revocation tsunami" which makes much more sense.
The thing about creative inspiration is that you never know where it might come from. Having a little random piece of beauty fall into your lap when you aren't expecting it could be just the thing to make an unusual connection in your brain.
Try earning $25,000/year working two jobs in a top 5 most expensive city in the world.

Working in tech may be unjustifiably glamorized, but you have to be incredibly out of touch with reality not to realize that earning six-figures plus benefits working 8-10 hours a day in air-conditioned buildings for employers, many of whom will feed and transport you, is something that millions of Americans would give everything for the opportunity to do.
> Notice how "public domain" is in the less harmful category? And all the licenses in that category as more free than the GPL?

That's a very odd definition of "free". Can you explain to me how my computing freedom is enhanced by using a binary that's licensed under the Free BSD licence without the source being released? Compared to a GPL binary where I must be supplied the code as an end user and can vet it to make sure the vendor has not put tracking software/other malicious code inside?

I assume the silent downvotes mean "No".
Jtsummers gave some links, but in the interest of having something here:

data Surface = Surface -- presumably provided by drawing backend
data Shape = Shape
{ shapeGetCenter :: (Int, Int)
, shapeSetCenter :: Int -> Int -> Shape
, shapeDraw :: Surface -> IO ()
, shapeScale :: Double -> Shape
, shapeGetAABB :: (Int, Int, Int, Int)
, shapeShow :: String
}

instance Show Shape where
show = shapeShow

circle r x y = Shape
{ shapeGetCenter = (x, y)
, shapeSetCenter = circle r
, shapeDraw = undefined -- draw shape to surface
, shapeScale = \ f -> circle (f * r) x y
, shapeGetAABB =
( floor $ fromIntegral x - r/2
, floor $ fromIntegral y - r/2
, ceiling $ fromIntegral x + r/2
, ceiling $ fromIntegral y + r/2
)
, shapeShow = unwords [ "circle", show r, show x, show y ]
}

box w h theta x y = Shape
{ shapeGetCenter = (x, y)
, shapeSetCenter = box w h theta
, shapeDraw = undefined -- draw shape to surface
, shapeScale = \ f -> box (w * f) (h * f) theta x y
, shapeGetAABB =
let w' = h * abs (sin theta)
+ w * abs (cos theta)
h' = w * abs (sin theta)
+ h * abs (cos theta)
in ( floor $ fromIntegral x - w'/2
, floor $ fromIntegral y - h'/2
, ceiling $ fromIntegral x + w'/2
, ceiling $ fromIntegral y + h'/2
)
, shapeShow = unwords [ "box", show w, show theta, show x, show y ]
}
SoundCloud Instant – 3 days later
If you don't count the days, how do you make sure that people are taking/compensated for the statutory minimum - or do you mean "we count the days, but we don't say no just because your count is above a specific number"?
How do you manage your finances?

An interesting, and probably useful, comparison. I would not expect to even try to set up my finances to persist indefinitely beyond my lifetime; I would hand that responsibility over to my children. If the banks I had used went out of business, they would need to take action to move the money to different banks.

I can do my best to maintain photo backups, either film or digital, but there's no plausible way to set up backups that last forever without eventually turning stewardship of those backups over to someone else. So rather than setting out to depend on Amazon or Flickr or whatever, understand what makes a backup service reliable in the short term, and pass that understanding on.
First, this is (was) an editorialized title, and of the worst sort: written to pre-seed a partisan angle into the thread.

Second, it's especially amusing to see people try to find reasons to dig into Google over Heartbleed, given that Google found and rapidly published Heartbleed; other providers talked about speculative countermeasures for Heartbleed as potential "competitive advantages".

Finally, the post is wrong. It correctly explains that Chrome uses CRLsets for high-profile sites instead of full CRL checks or OCSP, but incorrectly attributes the reasoning to performance. That, as it turns out, is not the reason for Chrome handling revocation the way it does. The real issue is that revocation doesn't really work: browsers (at best) "soft-fail" revocation (when Google's Adam Langley built a revocation-stripping proxy, he found for instance that IE reacted to it merely by removing the EV indicator from the URL bar), because hard-failures cause serious reliability problems.

The Netcraft article certainly is written to convey the notion that Chrome is cavalier about TLS security. But people who follow TLS know that to be a ludicrous narrative, in the truest sense; worthy of ridicule. The reality is that the Chromium team has apparently thought more carefully about revocation than almost anyone else, came to an important and counterintuitive conclusion about it, and made the design decision that maximized user safety given the constraints.
I don't think it's the synchronizing that's an issue; it's the fact that power is now flowing from your house into the grid, instead of the other way around. Since there is no storage in the grid, power in has to balance power out at every point in the grid, which means the grid has to be able to manage its own power generation, in real time, to adjust it according to how much is being put back in by homeowners. The grid as it currently exists is not really designed to do that.
The article talks about "grand jury subpoenas" so this is different than NSLs.
> Part of what drives altcoin innovation is the chance for profit (I guess this drives a lot of innovation). Since Bitcoin sidechains are pegged 1-1, there is no chance for a lot of profit on each sidechain. So if you are starting a new altcoin, what are you more likely to do, create a sidechain where you can't make any money or create a separate currency with all kinds of potential?

I see this as a good thing. There are just too many people launching non-innovative altcoins with the only goal of getting rich quick or just for the sake of it. As someone who is mainly interested in the technical side of cryptocurrencies, this will allow me to quickly dismiss any altcoin which is not pegged to Bitcoin as a get rich quick scheme (unless they provide a pretty good technical reason).

Also, there are tons of incentives (apart from speculation) for creating altcoins, I wouldn't worry too much about about sidechains stifling innovation. On the contrary, it will allow people to use new altcoins without the risk of falling into pump and dump schemes.

> But why should Bitcoin be the currency, other than it was there first?

There's no other good reason in my opinion. In an ideal world, Bitcoin itself would have been pegged to an existing currency (e.g. USD) to allow for a more fair initial distribution but this was not possible due to the inherent limitations of fiat currencies. I like the concept of PoS/lower block intervals but as far as I know, those are still open problems (and Bitcoin's protocol could be changed over time to incorporate eventual solutions).

> But thankfully, we don't have to put all our eggs in one basket. The current system where multiple exchanges exist where you can go from one coin to another very quickly seems to work pretty well. Does everything need to be pegged to a single currency?

It works well but it's not a decentralised process which is what sidechains would effectively enable. Of course, some altcoins whose claimed innovation is directly tied to the mining mechanism would still continue to exist independently but this is not the case for most altcoins.

PS: People who believe having a theoretical single Currency would be bad thing usually base their argument on assumptions which do not hold in the cryptocurrency world. In the fiat world, the fact that there are multiple currencies is seen as a good thing because governments can manipulate currencies, restrict or impose their use, etc. Those considerations do not apply to cryptocurrencies. I personally believe that having a single cryptocurrency would be a good thing (I know, taboo!). I'm not sure if Bitcoin will be it though.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think the term "fired" is improper in cases like this? I think the more appropriate term for when a company is changing direction, leaving a market, etc. is "laid-off". To me, "fired" denotes wrongdoing on the part of the employee. Of course, when you're trying to get page-views, Fired is likely to get more readers at the expense of the terminated employees.
Hardly any consumers know about the Nexus line. I'd say that's the last thing an Android OEM should be worried about. The biggest problem is consumer awareness (the same problem the Nexus line faces), especially when the carriers are in control, like in the US.'

Unfortunately, using Samsung's approach of overwhelming the public conscious with advertising isn't feasible for a lot of smaller OEMs, who don't have the sort of capital necessary to do that. However, signs of hope are developing, if you take an ultra-lean approach to producing and selling the phone[0].

0: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/01/moto-g-boo...
I remember when it was sexy - in the days of Windows 95-98 - that was the best RAD tool out there.
Does anyone... Turbo Vision!!! Oh, the memories! and "Uses BGI"
I imagine the iWatch will primarily be a Fitbit/Fuelband competitor, with some extra features. Like a pulse sensor.

If anyone can make what is essentially a pedometer sexy and mass-market, it's Apple. I'll be very surprised if they come out with anything that resembles a "smart watch", save for perhaps Pebble-style notifications.
The Obama administration is the most open and transparent administration in history. Not.
I think that's how the second sentence is meant to function. It should be taxed like any other business because it is substantially like a normal business transaction.
One nice thing about such a system is that would give the holders of non-trivial patents a direct interest in demanding a high bar for patentability, because other people's trivial or obvious patents would be directly taking a slice out of their revenues.
Taking The Bumpy Road
Radare Summer Of Code
The insanely high prices aren't helping either though. Yes yes, they are not 'high' if you are a fortune 1000, however, they are high compared to what everyone is used to now. They didn't step on the train of making for instance a version free if you are an open source dev. Or doing low monthly payments. Or do anything 'cool', like turn up and give a demo on how to implement reactive manifesto complaint software client/server with a few clicks / lines of code. That kind of thing would be relevant and interesting to devs now; if you can do a dashboard in Mac OS X, Windows, iOS, Android with all the backend & frontend stuff smoothly working together, smoothly tested and smoothly deployed, showing off those 6000 datapoints per second coming into the server and the client and still have a responsive interface companies would listen. But they don't; they just don't 'do' anything people want now besides turning up to the mobile parties way too late.

I kind of wonder how many devs still are working on Delphi and if they are not only just bugfixing...
Well, I'm not sure I have as strong of a position on this as I should. The way literature is talked about in university isn't really the way I would ever prefer to talk about literature really, but it was enlightening in the same way that doing anything strenuous outside of your comfort zone can be enlightening. The essays themselves, if you had a demanding prof, could be an excellent chance to practice analytical thinking and learn to compose your thoughts on paper.

In general, I don't think there's a compelling reason why Writing Composition has to be tied so closely to Literature. And really of the two most demanding essay-writing profs I had, only one taught literature. (The other taught symbolic logic and a Frege/Russell/Wittgenstein seminar I took.)

You're right that most the essays are derivative and bad, but I think that's general to all writing--fiction, non-fiction, academic writing, whatever. It's all usually derivative and bad because it's really hard to make something that isn't. And while there is a taste for those name-dropping "look what I've read" essays, I never had a prof that didn't also appreciate a tight, close reading. I always stuck to close reading anyway, as I suspect most people on this forum would. (It feels less bullshitty to look at one or two small things extremely closely, than to fling around loose references to god knows what theories and famous names.)

It's interesting that your friend said that. I'm not sure I understand completely what is meant by that, but here's my personal take on it: I think literary criticism should be subject to the same scrutiny that the original literary texts are. And if a work doesn't partake of creative exuberance* like an excellent novel or poem might, then I can't really be bothered to care about it. I think literature should respond in kind. Some criticism does this, and is breathtaking in the same way reading Whitman, e.g., can be breathtaking. Bloom's little book Anxiety of Influence, for example, is something I found beautiful and strange in a way I had never before encountered.

I don't think academic literary critics really see what they do as an artform necessarily, so my view is probably a very marginal one, and one they might scoff at. I don't even know of a sub-discipline that promotes criticism-as-artform, so maybe I'm just weird. Probably weird.

In the end I try to take a soft stance on this because I want to leave room for the idea that other people may enjoy things that I don't. I would never talk about literature the way they do outside of the pressures of "academic success," but perhaps they find it to be genuinely thrilling. If so, I'm only happy for them, and wish them the best. Many of them had an obvious passion for literature, including one prof who was completely looney-tunes for Shakespeare. :-) And that's nothing but delightful.

* - which isn't to imply there need be an exuberant style.
U.S. Views of Technology and the Future
I would do a simplified minimal french system: five week paid, and if you want more, it's unpaid. The boss approves the vacation, but in a collective code ownership, that helps the bus size.
Knockout too pollutes the HTML with it's own "language" in the "data-bind" attribute (for example: data-bind='value: itemToAdd, valueUpdate: "afterkeydown"')

True separation would be if there will be the HTML file and then there will be a separate definition for the data bindings using selectors, because then you don't have to touch the HTML when you change bindings.

React cannot do that but the other useful feature i was looking for is that it can render the views on the server-side (node.js) too.
"Ethnic people around whiteboard, discussing important business things" -- artist unknown
Argument preview (ABC vs Aereo): Free TV, at a bargain price?
I've done this before in dojo framework + dgrid. Our system is based off of a dynamic metamodel where users define classes (e.g. Task) and attributes under those classes (e.g. State, owner, project reference) from a set of predefined types (e.g. Enum, user, reference). The defined metamodel ends up as a class hierarchy and is presented as a tree for the query builder. After defining a class, you can then instantiate that class and set attribute values on it.

For building queries, you drag classes and attributes from the metamodel tree into either the filter tree or the report fields section. The filter tree is a tree of AND's and OR's constructed as you drag attributes into it. Selecting an item in the filter tree then brings up a value editor based on the attribute type that allows you to filter your query based on values that make sense for that type. So if you define your tasks state as enum(unassigned, assigned, started, completed) you get a combo box with those values and options to select in, not in, null, etc.

The report fields section is a list of attributes you want to see in the result set. Basically just a select on that attributes value for the query system. Imagine a todo list created instantly by filtering on tasks with owner == current user and state not in completed, but also wanting to see and sort on the priority, and not showing the owner since you know it's you. The report fields area allows setting of sort order, and ascending or descending.

As you drag attributes into the filter or fields sections, a results pane underneath automatically gets new columns added (for fields added of removed) or new results based on a modified filter tree. After saving a query, users can then register for updates of items that match the query. If any data is changed that affects query results, the updated item or removal is pushed via websocket and that item is updated or removed from the results grid. With this, users never have to refresh the query since all the data is live.

Screenshots are slightly edited and a little out of date, but you get the idea.

Query builder: http://i.imgur.com/AV071JV.png

Dashboard (powered by query/report building): http://i.imgur.com/BvBW7L3.png
I also meant easter eggs like changing the Y logo to something else once you have enough karma.
Here is what I don't understand: actions like this takes more than one person. It takes hundreds of people, complicit in actions that are the opposite of what anyone would consider 'American'. It's plainly fucking unamerican. So who the hell are these people? Why are they getting away with it? Sure covert things have always been going on to protect the public...but this is so in-your-face against what we should stand for that I cannot fathom how it is allowed to continue. I am so very angry that things like this are happening. The worst part? we can't seem to do anything about it so we just end up whining on the internet.
Errorbars are usually 68% (1-sigma), unless stated otherwise. In physics, confidence intervals are usually 95% (2-sigma), though 90% is becoming increasingly common.
It is relatively easy to change a cylinder on a horizontally opposed air-cooled VW motor (think '60s beetle) or the Lycoming/Continental engines popular in light aircraft.
The key engineering problem that they solved is related to fuel and weight. They need more fuel for the landing, but more fuel adds more weight, which requires more fuel for lift off.
Please don't use things like ELI5, TLDR, and so on, on Hacker News. We strive to write comments in good English.

(Not directed at any comment in particular—there has been a spate of these lately.)