skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I disagree with people who think corporate taxes are "double taxation" or anything like that.

Australia has dividend imputation because of this argument. When you receive dividends from shares you own, the tax paid by the company is offset from your own personal income with "franking credits".

So along with a different capital gains framework, the net upshot is that Australian shareholders are quite happy to take dividends, thankyou. Which means companies can focus more on running things at a profit and less on trying to pump up the stock price any way, any how.

The downside is that Australia has a higher headline corporate tax rate than a lot of countries. An argument is sometimes made that we could significantly lower it (as in by double digits) without imputation.

(This is of course not financial advice and I am not an accountant, lawyer, planner or even a dog on the internet).
Layoffs are fairly regular occurrences, and don't necessarily represent the end of a company. In fact, even if it wasn't just 5% of their workforce, and not mostly Nokia staff, it wouldn't be a concern — its just business as usual.

Companies often experience a raise in share-price after a layoff.
The problem is that if the culture is already bad, it's very easy to shed the false positives, i.e. the good people, and keep the false negatives.
To quote, perhaps inaccurately, Louis CK: "Divorce is always good news. It would be terrible if there was a couple who as happy and in love, and they had this perfect life, and then they got divorced? Oh that would be horrible! But that has happened exactly zero times."
USA Today ran with a prediction of 5-10% of Nokia staff, around 12,000 to 25,000 employees.
Microsoft employee here. My main concern is the fact that I'm the US on an H-1B visa. I really, really, really don't want to go back to my country, but that will be the case if I'm laid off and unable to find another H-1B sponsor in a very short time. :(
And these positions will be soon filled by Indians.
On zdNet they say that 1/5 of ex-Nokia workers in Finland could be axed [ http://www.zdnet.com/one-in-five-ex-nokia-workers-in-finland... ]

Personally I think it will be even more
I thing what people bugs most about Glass is the fear to be taped all the time without consent and without even noticing it.
Glass should be clearly signaling when its filming/streaming via a hardwired LED or something, so that it is obvious when someone is filming and when not.
Layoffs are a sign that a company has been struggling, or has been slowing, or has grown disproportionately in personell, but that someone is doing something that probably needs to be done. It is not always the solution, but it is also not a sign of ultimate doom.
Good 1st estimation. you also need to add in the impact of severance packages.
Sometimes, as was the case with Zynga for example, I get the sense that layoffs are an indicator of imminent demise.

For some reason, under Nadella, I get the feeling that these MSFT layoffs are an indicator of an imminent rise. Maybe it's just a story I'm looking for after watching Mayer at the helm of an increasingly relevant Yahoo.

Similarly, I really get the sense that MSFT under Nadella is going to be an exciting company to watch.
Have you actually used and looked into AWS? There are dozens of services that do a lot more than just what people generally think of as "the cloud".
It's certainly not good news for someone who might lose their job. It's also not good because it can scare off good people too--if you're watching the company you work for go through a massive round of layoffs and make the cut, won't you start wondering if maybe it's time to look elsewhere before things get worse?
Anand was the lead designer at Quizlet (arguably the most successful ed-tech startup)
I've been working on this app for about a year on and off now. Everything was designed/built by me personally.

It's still very much beta and still needs a lot of work but I'd love to hear any comments you guys have.

There is a free trial if you'd like to try it out =)
Cool! What's the state of the art in greenhouse climate control (preferably passive)? Is there a PassivHous equivalent standard for greenhouses? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house)
I never understood the double taxation argument either. Even if I concede its double taxation, who cares? Its not a natural right to only be taxed once.
"Compilers are pretty bad at optimizing virtual machine interpreters, and this is unlikely to change. Here we go, straight from the horse's (or, uh, Mike Pall's) mouth"

This could possibly fall into my "strictly necessary" bucket. I'm not sure what the timing differences actually amount to, either - I've got a threaded interpreter in a fast path in some of my code, and it hasn't proved a bottleneck (less than 1% of time during a low-latency event is spent running the programs) so I've not looked closely at register allocation through it.

I reiterate that this comes at severe cost to ease of extension and refactoring, however, and shouldn't be undertaken lightly.
Dude!! Where is your Narrative clip? http://getnarrative.com/
If the goal is 600MM / year in savings, your denominator is off by quite a bit. Fully loaded cost of an employee is significantly higher than 60-75K. Try 3-4x that amount.
So instead of carbon costs being passed onto consumers, their taxes will be used to provide green subsidies instead? Seems like some perverse economic incentives there.
Rewritable Space
Regional pickle shortages probably aren't going to have the same effect on the economy as a nationwide trucking strike. :)
This is a story about what can happen when a governmental agency has: A) too little oversight, B) way too much (taxpayer) money, and C) way, way too little transparency.

What can you do about it? A) join the ACLU and donate a little every month, B) actively support open government ordinances and proposals at every level of government, C) support investigative journalism and avoid agenda-driven media outlets and D) vote against surveillance-state supporting politicians (esp Feinstein and Boxer in CA) at every opportunity.
I don't think taxes are the problem. I think the complexity ends up benefiting those who have more resources at their disposal and actually acts as a moat to discourage smaller businesses growth or people from starting businesses.

The ability to afford lawyers and accountants to play the system for every write off is a big advantage and so if anything the incentives to large companies is to increase complexity of laws and regulation, which I think is why for all the money and lobbying, laws are getting MORE complex, not less.

A simple system with minimal regulations, sensible rates, and no "loopholes" would be much preferable to what we have now. Maybe take it a step further and make it a small transaction tax whenever money changes hands instead of an income tax.

Make the transaction tax on every financial transaction, from purchasing equipment to buying a sandwich, and keep the rates the same for pretty much everything. Don't have stupid exclusions like large purchases of houses, equipment, buildings, or expensive services.

All of a sudden write offs and loop holes pretty much go away, you already have the infrastructure to collect transaction taxes via sales taxes and if you levied it on ALL financial transactions it would probably be < 1%.

I'm pretty sure it would be too much change to ever make it through government without being ruined, but it'd probably be better than what we have now.
I don't work there, but I would venture a guess that employees at Basecamp (37signals) are proud of https://signalvnoise.com/
not op, but Anand was previously the head of design at Quizlet (a top ed-tech startup).
That's all well and good, but I bet there's tons of dead weight in the engineering ranks as well. Not just areas/jobs indirectly linked to core business functions as you cited.
This is absolutely practical. I'm happy to do this. The land was previously used as a tree farm, so there is no irrigation system. But there is some marshland on the property.

My contact info is in my profile. Very much looking forward to this.
The site is broken for China, since the prettify js code is hosted on Google Code.
This concept is useless because it relies on an honor system. It should be painfully obvious by now, that honor systems cannot be trusted to preserve privacy.

Google Glass is the Crystal Pepsi of the internet. It's only interesting in that it represents a definite violation of ordinary, common, everyday privacy, but stands out as one boundary that certain interested parties are determined to invade.
gmail: syed.f.karim
The US corporate income tax rate is the highest in the world - literally. If it was something more in-line with other developed nations, call it 20%, I don't think you'd see the current wave of inversions and no one would make a big deal about it. But here we are, 35% and people have finally had enough. I wouldn't eliminate the corporate tax, but I also think that 35% is idiotic and now we're finally seeing corporations vote with their feet.
Microsoft has a lot of cash and a huge mass of captive customers who will stay captive customers if they clean up their act just a little bit. I wouldn't call demise just yet. They will be around for a long time to come and may just surprise everyone.

Not that I care. I don't use Microsoft products and given the choice never will. And I don't care for their general behavior as a company. I never thought it was a good idea to have ubiquitous monolithic providers of essential software. But I'm a minority among computer users and I wouldn't count them out.
when you're recording something the light is turned on and it's very noticeable.
My local library (Burnaby Public Library) lets me access Safari Books Online using my library ID and I agree: it's awesome!
The military is especially prone to this problem. I’d hesitate to refer to people as dead weight, but the retirement structure encourages mid-level management to hang-on for twenty. Even if people are burnt out after 10 years, which the military is very capable of doing, many stay even when they and the Service would be better off if they moved on.
Well for one thing, it does not control for the differences in income of the stockholders. Each shareholder is taxed at the same rate per share held. Since it penalizes income coming from corporations (by taxing both the corporation and the dividend), it creates perverse incentives that cause some pretty unproductive behavior - like the hording of cash by all the tech giants.
If the OP doesn't get fired, it might be tough for him (her?) to prove that he suffered any damages, a sine qua non of that kind of claim. [1]

[1] E.g., http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/intentional_interference_with...
You'll typically get severance for one or two months. As long as you are on the payroll, you can apply for a H1-B transfer. I went through this situation 7 years back. For a company of Microsoft's size, a severance of one or two months shouldn't be a problem.
Ginkgo Bioworks (YC S14) is Hiring
Ginkgo Bioworks is the first YC biotech startup. A young company out of MIT with the mission of making biology easier to engineer, Ginkgo Bioworks designs and builds microbial organisms to address fundamental challenges the world faces today. Ginkgo bioengineers make use of an in-house pipeline of synthetic biology technologies to build new organisms for making natural products, pharmaceuticals, biofuels, and more.

Ginkgo is looking for motivated software engineers to create and improve computer aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) tools for building and testing new organisms. You will be working closely with our bioengineers, so your tools go from conception to deployment in hours or days. You will be responsible for improving our Ruby/Rails based lab automation platform, writing new algorithms in Python or R for our data analysis platform, or creating easy to use UI in Javascript to help our bioengineers navigate our knowledge base. You don't need previous biology experience; Ginkgo is a great environment for amazing programmers to learn to hack biology.

To learn more, visit www.ginkgobioworks.com. Apply for a position online at www.ginkgobioworks.com/careers/
It will be interesting to see what gets funded. Actually getting a drug to market is a far different beast than get a tech product to market.

However, there are a ton of non-drug biotech plays that one could pursue. Lower risk and lower capital requirements. I wonder if that is what YC is looking to fund.
I've always considered double taxation "paying for limited liability."

To be honest, it's worth paying for.
I always find these kinds of projects interesting ... then inevitably I'm reminded that having a server is a playground and can be fun. NGINX is easy (for 80 of 80/20 part anyway). SFTP/SSH too.
You have to pay a subscription just to get your photos out of the clip!? I like the idea of the clip, but what a huge dealbreaker
I think Safari Books Online is mostly tech books. Yes, I know it has other stuff, but Harry Potter? Lord of the Rings? No.
It's a win-win...and AirBNB will surely be able to negotiate the bill of its design consultants steeply downward for their lack of due diligence.
If people look beyond desktop, specifically to enterprise software and cloud computing it should be pretty clear that Microsoft is not in decline. If anything they are more in control and cohesive than ever..
It's disappointing that more biotech isn't ultimately funded by YC. I'm sure it's just due to the cost of starting and running a pre-revenue biotech is much higher than a company starting a pure software product.

That said, YC funding science is fantastic. Even if it is just 1 company, thus far. Biotech should be a nice hedge in the portfolio.
Agreed -- I grabbed Castro thinking it was gorgeous, but using it was super unwieldy. I went back to Downcast after about a day because it's much more useable, despite being far less easy on the eyes.
Iosnoop For Linux
"No taxation without representation". You get taxed twice, but only represented once. (If that.)

It seems completely reasonable for either individuals or companies that are large enough and mobile enough to relocate to shop around for a better value for the cost.
Interesting how this will impact the job market on the West Coast. You'd think that 5-10k people in IT would quickly fill a lot of the currently open positions.
I heard Marc Andreessan make a very similar point in an interview. His theory is that the large regulatory burden of being a public company is causing a dearth of IPOs as companies wait to grow large enough to pay for dedicated compliance departments.
On the one hand, the loathing reminds me of the early cellphone days... But it also reminds me of the Segway.
Hey Mr. Founder, You're Not That Great (Respect the Competition)
Internet Explorer doesn't have Web Audio yet, but Chrome and Safari (and Opera) should work. If anyone reading this is a dev from those browsers familiar with audio, JSMESS could really use some help here.
The problem with the military is how benefits are set up. There is a big jump in benefits at twenty years. If you put in 10-12 years your benefits aren't significantly better than someone who just did minimal time. If there was a small jump around the ten year point they'd probably see people willing to stop there instead of holding out 8-10 more years.
the people in that picture look like they eat plenty
But is that short or long term?

That is, is their fiddling and tweaking just code masturbation, or is it actually leading to a better product? Do they produce less in a given amount of time, but that product is more solid, robust, extensible and maintainable than their peers? That may be a worthwhile tradeoff to many businesses.
I have an acre in South-East New Mexico and am hoping to get the proximate 10 acres within a year or so. If you need another soil sensor deployment I'd also install and send you photos and soil samples.

I'm an agronomist by training if it matters.

It's arid and the soil has a fair amount of gypsum. It is on a hillside around my home and has never been cultivated (except a small patch for my garden). I'll shoot you an email you can respond if interested.
It appears to be the second highest[0], second only to the UAE's 55%! The global average appears to be about 23.57%.

KPMG state that the US corporate income tax is approximately 40% with the following reasoning:

"The marginal federal corporate income tax rate on the highest income bracket of corporations (currently above USD 18,333,333) is 35%. State and local governments may also impose income taxes ranging from 0% to 12%, the top marginal rates averaging approximately 7.5%. A corporation may deduct its state and local income tax expense when computing its federal taxable income, generally resulting in a net effective rate of approximately 40%. The effective rate may vary significantly depending on the locality in which a corporation conducts business. The United States also has a parallel alternative minimum tax (AMT) system, which is generally characterized by a lower tax rate (20%) but a broader tax base."

[0] http://www.kpmg.com/global/en/services/tax/tax-tools-and-res...
hmm, as far as I know you just pay the $10 a year if you want to have your photos stored on the cloud, but if you are willing to store all them yourself you can do that. But i'll double check that!
Noting a physiological difference is not the same as passing a value judgement. Vive la différence.
...uh no? If the camera is physically not pointed at you, it can't record you. It's clear and concise.

EDIT: My exact thought on this subject has been that the camera needs a mechanical shutter. But I'd say thinking of Glass like sunglasses is probably also the way to go - a way to "take it off" without having to take them off (i.e. like when you put your sunglasses on your heard to talk to someone indoors).
Yes, this is true and I excluded it for a reason. UAE has no personal income tax, property tax, or capital gains taxes. My guess is that it all evens out and then some.
Sorry, I forgot that people still live in the US.
Hi, the few lines of code on this extension are open-source (Apache v2 license), and you can download it all from here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ffnnzlbaspp94p/open_first_result_...
Diamond crushed to Saturn's extremes
I'm curious about this, I've got a bunch of books I don't want to throw away, but I'm tired of the space they occupy. Seems like scanning them would be a huge hassle though. Any special techniques that you use to do this? How long does a single book take to process?
The rest of that response is:

"What we decided to do instead was have a living laboratory for a very public experiment. Is it messy? Sure. And are there are things that you couldn't predict? Absolutely. But there is all of this feedback that you get from these Explorers and these use cases. We cannot only bake the feedback into the product, but bake it into our policies."

I just can't square that with your interpretation. It's very clear he thinks that Google is running the Explorer program for the feedback they're getting, so they can use it to improve their product. Moreover, making a point of incorporating that feedback into their policies rather than just their product demonstrates that Google's position isn't anywhere near telling people to "get used to it". Which shouldn't be surprising - telling people to "Deal with it" was part of his description of the path they didn't follow.
That's an impressive degree of spin. I don't think anything about the article requires this simplification: the same concept is expressed in fewer words in the pull quote accompanying the picture at the start of the article, and this aspect of the story was immediately understandable to me.

It seems you would prefer people did not read about the finances of the Tor foundation, and dismiss the CIA connection as irrelevant. It's quite true that the CIA is a large organization with many fronts. But the article is not premised on 'Tor foundation tainted by CIA blood money' or the like; rather it examines the dichotomy resulting from founding members' statements to different audiences about the uses of Tor. Some of the stances celebrated in the hacker community seem rather disingenuous in the light of the project's financial and organization history, claims which are backed up by links to things like tax filings and so on which are a matter of record.

I don't think it's a massive scandal, but nor do I think it's a case of 'move along, nothing to see here,' as you appear to suggest.
In the last layoffs, many of the people who were let go were back working for Microsoft again in a year or so (often as full-time employees, more often as contractors).

I believe that Microsoft has more contractors than it does employees. That is just crazy.

Also, it's nearly impossible to fire even the most grossly incompetent people. One person I worked with was a utter flatline and doing negative work (very bad Q/A, argumentative, and the most useless person I have ever had as a coworker. It took six months to fire the guy, and it was no secret to the third and fourth layer management that the guy was a huge mistake.

MS needs to get rid of the right people.
I don't know whether you were implying this, but paying for "unlimited" services when you wouldn't otherwise spend the monthly (or annually, etc.) fee on that product isn't necessarily irrational. It may be that a person isn't willing to spend $5 a book on 2 books because a book is only worth, say, $1 to them. But given that returns diminish at a low rate, that person could be willing to buy, say, 20 books at $1 a piece. In that case, paying for an unlimited service that effectively lets them do so makes sense.
and who selects the ones to fire? The ass-kissers of course.
Very similar to CloudCannon (http://cloudcannon.com/)
It is quite new compared to what others posted: https://github.com/rgrinberg/opium
God said single voice.

That means one freq at a time but with different waveforms.

I don't think waveforms help much.
How did this not become a hot topic on HN?
The other five-sixths of us have too much.
I'd be willing to be that Craigslist shut you down because they're building their own "watch" feature. The same thing happened with Padmapper - they sent them a cease and desist letter, and then came out with their own map feature (http://newyork.craigslist.org/aap/#map).
That would be the town of Greece, in upstate New York (population 96,095)[1], not the country of Greece.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece,_NY
> Microsoft has been picking up useless deadbeats for nigh on 25 years now. They really need to shed these people.

Isn't the key reason for these layoffs the recent acquisition of Nokia operations ? If that is, the layoff is just about eliminating redundancy post acquisition, and not addressing the deadweight problem.
Well the personnel problems with the military go far beyond the timing of benefits alone, unfortunately.

As it stands the military actually has great difficulty retaining people past 10 years. Many military communities are chronically undermanned at the senior enlisted and officer leadership levels.

So while it's fair to say that the military has held onto lower-skilled workers, it's not exactly the case that it's leading to a glut of excess deadweight just hanging on. Rather, we use the "idiots" to fill the desks that would simply be left empty were it not for these guys biding their time to 20 years.

Whether that's a net positive or not depends on the given billet being filled, but we'd have to do away with billet-based manpower and fine-tuned "year group" tracking entirely in order to truly see benefit from dropping deadweight in the 10-18 YOS ranks. But the way it stands now, many billets require a certain rank or grade to fill them, no matter what the skill level might be of excess junior (or senior) personnel.
Even enough support to use flexbox on a daily basis would be great
How's that different from someone who's holding a cellphone not taking photos of you?