skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Without a serious discussion on the actual figures its hard to take political discussions seriously.

Tax people instead of corporations to make it easier. On principle it might sound good, but what % does it need to go up and for what % of the population? On principle - only tax software companies, lawyers, and accountants fight a simplified tax code.
South East side of Chicago / Northwest Indiana resident, recently MIT graduated software developer wanting to put some of my skills to work on something like this. Microcontroller Project Laboratory at the 'tute left me with a Cypress PSOC and crazy ideas. The extent of my gardening knowledge ends with basil, thyme and peppermint, but I had the freshest teas and tastiest pizzas in my frat. :)

Let's make drones that recognize the heat patterns of weeds and pull them for us, or laser weed spores right out of the sky...

Let's tap into the local food movement. People want to know where their food comes from. Let's make them hyperaware - live video feeds of the way the seed was planted, they watch their food grow before their eyes.
There seems to be very little evidence backing up your marathon reduces life statements.
Thanks for the feedback, benchmarks are notoriously difficult to get accurate (and fair), which is exactly why we published the benchmark code. We will incorporate your feedback to improve them.
I'm going to look on the bright side of things, and say that the XBOX team might use to to avoid a layoff. Hmm?
One-sixth of Americans don’t have enough food to eat
Less people than you think (people that matter, not people who blog). The A-10 is running into the same problem that the A-1 ran into before it: it's a world beater when it comes to CAS for a period in time, so good you can't imagine not having it. But the guys on the receiving end aren't standing still, and there will come a time when the A-10, just like the A-1, is no longer survivable on the modern battlefield. The people who are killing the A-10 see that day coming, and you don't want to figure out when that is the hard way.

Not that they've got a decent replacement...
I guess this means between 7000-9000 layoffs based on the crude calculation 600M/(60,000 ~ 75,000)~ approximately
Unfortunately, I don't think eliminating corporate taxes will eliminate tax code complexity. It will add to the complexity of personal taxes as the well off rush to hide assets and income in un-taxed corporations. The only solution to that, for the tax man, are ever more complicated rules for determining what can be counted as personal income.
It's worth looking at the levels of taxation around the world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates

The US has a high theoretical company tax rate but a low practical one because of the myriad of deductions.

Reducing the corporate tax rate rather than abolishing it may make more sense and make less attractive to play tax games and waste effort on that rather than creating value.
Homeschooling Parents Are Being Targeted
While this tells a somewhat similar story, comparing web frameworks to the languages themselves is apples to oranges.
I wonder how much of Nokia is going to get rejected. A friend of mine is a former Nokia employee who was really psyched to be working on the Surface team now — that would be pretty rough if that team got laid off just after getting settled into the company.
Despite the title, the real thrust of the piece is that regulations – taxes, here – are inputs into a complex system. The more complex, the less predictable and the more likely to have unintended consequences. Or, perhaps, “intended” consequences which benefit certain participants over others.

We think that of regulations as rules of the road, or adding fairness, or enhancing transparency. And they might! But those assumptions are, often, insufficient models and at worst, dangerously incorrect.
Australian Government Repeals It's Carbon Tax Scheme
The Australian government has repealed the carbon tax scheme punishing polluters in favour of a "direct action" program of providing financial incentives to reduce pollution.
This is an excellent article. The key takeaway starts here:

> I know what you’re thinking. You want a simple tax code that raises a bunch of money by closing the loopholes. Many people think this because they think that taxing income is simple, so “loopholes” must be illicit backdoors placed in the tax code at the behest of greedy corporations.

> And to be sure, the tax code contains plenty of senseless giveaways to corporations. But these are small beer. Most of the “loopholes” that we argue about are not a result of congressional pandering, or even sharp lawyers who bend sensible rules. They’re an artifact of the fact that calculating corporate income is really hard.

I realized this when I was taking an introductory course in federal income tax, and trying to figure out the effect of different depreciation schedules. There's a neat logic to the income tax, including complex concepts like depreciation.[1] Yet, things that are simple to state as an equation are quite complex to implement in practice. For example, things like loss carry-forwards arise from trying to tax a continuous parameter (changes in wealth over time), in discrete, annual time-steps.

I disagree with people who think corporate taxes are "double taxation" or anything like that. Taxing corporations falls naturally out of treating them as distinct legal persons. A corporation's income is treated, and taxed, distinctly from shareholders' income for the same reason a corporations legal liabilities are treated distinctly from shareholders' liabilities. It's just the flip side of the coin.

That said, while corporate make sense within the logic of the tax code, in practice they are probably more trouble than they are worth, and create bad incentives for companies to relocate their operations out of the U.S.

[1] I recommend http://www.amazon.com/Chirelsteins-Federal-Income-Taxation-S... for a very approachable introduction to the topic. Don't be scared off by the page-count: it's big type on paperback pages.
Oh hey I referenced your guide on Jekyll when I was setting up my own blog last year. ( thanks :) )

I'm kind of surprised that both of you are living in a roommate situation. How did you guys know each other?
Having substantial experience running a startup on Scala (Not OCaml, but many of the same aspects apply) I'm going to throw my 2c in.

> There is not a strong community behind OCaml. You can't take advantage of the numerous libraries and references created by the community like you can with Ruby, Python, Javascript, Java, or any of the other mainstream languages.

You'd be surprised how good the community is around FP languages.

> OCaml is hard (and so are most functional programming languages)

I'm going to strongly disagree on this one. FP is different to what you're used to. Once you've learned it I actually think FP is substantially easier, especially when maintaining large codebases. The amount of cognitive effort required to write code in an FP style is substantially lower.

> You will always need exceptionally talented developers to work on your code base and that will get expensive

I work with Scala, not OCaml personally, but I've been able to train Junior Java devs up on Scala (In a pure-fp style) with minimal effort. In addition, I find there's a very large talent pool of excellent developers wanting to work with FP in a commercial environment, and are willing to work for less for the opportunity.

Hiring has actually been substantially easier since I switched to Scala, and I'm getting better developers for less.

> OCaml is a risk. If you're starting a consumer-oriented service, you need to prove there is a market for it. Will OCaml help you get to market faster? I don't know. Will Ruby-on-Rails? Yes. I'd pick RoR any day just to eliminate the risk of getting to market late.

I'm sure people were saying the same thing about PHP vs RoR back on the day.

Any new technology is a risk if you're new to it.

For those that have taken the 'risk' of using an FP language, the payoff has been worth it. From my experience with FP Scala, the go to market time has been substantially quicker than with any other platform I'd used previously. The defect rate has been 90%(!) lower, productivity is higher, the codebase is easier to work on, an it's easier to find top-tier developers.

Mind you I can understand not wanting to bet the farm on it from day one - this is why Scala was an easier choice for us, because we could fall back to Java if we have problems (We didn't).
My bad, got to get with the times ;) That looks like a happy user!
True, but you should probably take a take a look at the above comment...
I use my local library for a quiet co working space, but never borrow books because their inventory is horribly outdated. In my town many of the libraries are also where the homeless go to hangout, since air conditioning is key here in the south. I rarely see any other tech people at the library, but do see tons at the coffee shop a block away.
It doesn't have to be, it's a mascot, which in my experience means it will be an officehold word. Also, since it has a name, I'd say the smart money would be to look for it to play a role in future marketing and advertising collateral.
.stores a { text-decoration: none; /* keep spaces from appearing as part of the link */ }
Very interesting. Thinking about what you said, one could compare the software industry to the marketing industry:

- no accountability - marketing campaign with no effect, same as a bug, a unforeseen flaw

- lots of bullshitting

- scientific methods on deciding what practice is best still at infancy
Where is more information about Microsoft having been made flatter?
These comparisons are hard to make sense of because of the different services provided by these governments. For example, health care is a government benefit in most European countries, paid for by their "higher" tax rates.
A fellow NWI resident, mobile app designer and dev in Valpo. I would love to brainstorm/help. If you're interested, let me know!
I currently have about a thousand servers that do Blekko's web crawl in a colo facility, they are pretty modernish (westmere vs Ivy bridge but similar configuration), the operation economics for running those is a couple million a year fully loaded. My particular application is a 'bad fit' for services like AWS due to its large storage foot print and the fact that it constantly churns through petabytes of data but were we to host web servers w/ Docker or the equivalent we could probably provide something like a 100K web hosts. Doing that $5 'droplet' style with Digital ocean would be say a half a million a month so pretty good margins (caveat all the things like racks and drive replacement and floor space) but when those margins got squeezed something like an equivalently sized Z10 could shave operational costs from both a operator perspective and a power/cooling perspective. (total watts per delivered core-gigabyte-megabit of compute delivered to the Internet)

At web scale, costs shift in interesting ways, operator time is much more valuable than say the cost of hardware power, and cooling overwhelm floorspace costs etc. Luiz Barrosa is an engineer who gave a talk titled Data Center sized computers which alluded to some of those shifts, Urs and Luiz updated it a couple of times.

As I've gone from NetApp to Google and now to Blekko it has been interesting to me to watch how the multi-core, large memory, SSD changes have pushed around system design like this. And I was thinking that back in the day the "big problem" with blade computing was that using 20 blade chassis an install with 20 blades was cost effective but one with 21 blades was not. The virtualization wave made that moot since you only install full racks/chassis as demand calls for it, and current container wave adds to that single OS type installs for even better cost savings. Fun times.
Are they just going to make teams leaner (with less features in the next release) or are they going to be cutting projects/products?

I'd like to see a narrower focus from Microsoft towards things that have nice growth trends. But I guess for strategic reasons Microsoft has to continue to fund its Mobile OS division, even if it doesn't gain much ground on Android, iOS.

PS. http://bgr.com/2014/07/01/windows-phone-market-share-3/ Windows Phone market share is dismal and shrinking.
Star Trek? A stylized male genitalia?
The JSMESS Sound Emergency
While I do some work for the bank, I have no idea how to even try to find out the answer to this question.

There are two options I would use in a similar situation.

1. Ask for a case number, and the return phone number to call back.
Check the number belongs to the bank, and call back quoting the case number. Could be painful to do this depending on how the call gets routed.

2. Get the caller to verify themselves using information that only they would know, and that doesn't expose any PII of yours. Things like 3rd,4th,6th digits of your account, metadata about a recent transaction on the account, etc. Even better, get them to send you an email from their work account, and make sure they can reply to you from that account as well.
I knew Microsoft was on the way out but I didn't know the situation was so bad. Hopefully those who lost their jobs will find a place at Google or Apple.
Modifying the user agent to mimic a normal browser might solve the problem.
Show HN: A Twitter management app I've been working on over the last year
You can actually track him hour to hour... kinda crazy that he's providing that, the site design is a little different than described I found myself clicking on things that weren't links and being sent places I didn't want to go because I'd click something that looked clickable but turned out not to be and clicking on unclickable things sends you back one step.
The piece starts with the companies on equal footing and ends with the logo belonging to AirBNB. To me that implies AirBNB is buying them off.
Hey objectReason, my side project is AutoMicroFarm (http://automicrofarm.com). I'd love to chat with you about aquaponics. Would you drop me an email (andrew at automicrofarm) or provide a way to contact you?
Not bad, but its WAY too over designed. The actual functional part on the front page is like a black bar that is 10% of the page. The start your adventure part is nice, but serves little functionality to me. Yes its cool to see all these awesome places, but I don't think I'll be going to Berlin anytime soon. The search page looks good still, just not a fan of the front page.

Compared to Kayak which makes it super obvious where to start, and the "Start Your Adventure" equivalent is top cities people travel to. That section should be a supplement not a main feature.
http://www.luimbe.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/photo.edit_...

? :/
Greek was spoken in Egypt for 1000 years. I imagine it's not that common today.
For anyone still reading - I fixed the save/preview feature, its really cool.

Example: http://shoelace.io/#2aed04bc819c4c7da28a
I think corporate tax should be simpler but not eliminated.

I have started and run multiple companies in three states.

In the early/small days its annoying to pay the CPA more than the total tax burden due to "red tape" requirements.

Taxes (in theory) fund education and social services which is a solid foundation to build my businesses on I'm OK paying just, make it less terrible.
Show HN: Open First Google Result – Chrome Extension
It's more that with the purchase of Nokia, MSFT got 25k new employees which is kind of a lot.
Is the portable LibreSSL library being written by the OpenBSD folks or someone maintaining a fork? My impression of their plans was that they would focus on OpenBSD first and foremost and once they were happy with it, then would be the right time to start porting it to other platforms (or any platform which provides the same guarantees as OpenBSD's API could already use it).
>One of the unique things we are doing with Glass ... is that we are having this discussion very publicly. We, as a company, could very easily have taken this technology into a conference room, wrapped the conference room in tin foil and developed this over the course of two to three years and released it en masse and basically said, "You know what? Deal with it. The technology is ready, and here it is."

Wow. Just wow. The arrogance displayed here is staggering, to the point that it erodes my confidence that Glass will see much success. (I didn't have much confidence in it to begin with.) You can tell the possibility that Glass might just simply not catch on, hasn't so much as drifted into his conscious awareness. The idea that Google is doing everyone a favor with the Explorers program, so that everyone can get used to it, as opposed to doing this for the usual reason of not releasing a shitty product, appears to be something this guy actually believes.

I've heard that Google selects for arrogance to some degree in their hiring practices. Perhaps it's time to rethink that.
Never good news to hear about layoffs, but for those that are affected I can say there is life beyond Microsoft. (it might even be better!)
With all due respect, I suggest you take a minute and read what I said instead of what you're filtering.

I assume that you're deeming "Girls sweat the details" as a dismissive statement. It is not. Middle school girls demand perfection among peers. I remember vividly the hell my sister went through when she did something with her eyebrows that didn't pass muster. One circle of people she was essentially forced to spend time with basically ostracized her.

Anecdotal? Yes. But that isn't an atypical story.
It's typically not one driving the other. Reducing costs by laying off employees can happen with or without reorganizing in a major way. If you want to get to a more effective organizational structure (arranged around company priorities and strategy, clear authority and responsibility, aligned goals, less hierarchy and unnecessary dependence, etc.), you can do that with or without significant layoffs.

So theoretically what happens in this case is the company's senior leadership decides on strategic priorities and a proposed level of investment. Once that's approved by the board, they look at the organization and specific resource allocation. It's not really that linear, though: changing market conditions and surprising opportunities or threats can lead to changes in how much they'll invest overall, which can have a big impact on the size of the layoffs. Of course the reality is typically a lot messier -- no idea what actually happened in this case.
While layoffs suck, I see this as positive for the company.
I also wonder if the account is legally set up so that employer customers get FDIC pass-through insurance.
The same could also be said of just about every grocery store. Even small mom-and-pop stores (or perhaps especially them) are concerned with shareholder welfare, more so than "What will happen if Ted runs out of pickles this week?".
They had a vague announcement about organizational changes a few months ago to a "flatter" hierarchy. It was the first hint of the layoffs that have now come to fruition.
This is not the first time I've heard such claims. This article says nothing of results. These problems exist because they are hard to solve. So, while this sounds very promising, it does not say a lot about the progress that has been made. If that looks good then you've really got something...
Do you have pictures or a website set up by any chance? I'd love to take a look at your tinkerings.
They are on the way out in the same sense as the sun is. Someday, but no time soon. They profit many billions every quarter, and it seems far fetched to guess that this move will do anything other than strengthen the firm.
Any company that has been around for as long as Microsoft, has a huge amount of dead weight in its mid-level management. I mean people whose main skill is mastery of the internal political process.

Lest people think I'm singling out Microsoft specifically, this same problem is present at Google as well, but is less of a problem because Google has not been around long enough to pick up the same amount of dead weight personnel.

The first generation of people at a company were fighting for market, and they rose due to their ability to deliver value to colleagues and customers. But when a company becomes successful, the resources available to teams within the company becomes somewhat decoupled from company revenue. Soon, political skill becomes as important or more important than impacting the company's bottom line.

Microsoft and Intel alumni in the late 90s used to tell me that they knew managers whose main goal was to grow the headcount under them, in order to grow their own prestige.

Today at Google you can see some of this same behavior in its nascency. Most of the deadweight is outside Engineering teams because its hard to bullshit when you have to deliver a product. Still, there are peripheral functions like business development, marketing, intellectual property, privacy, policy, etc., where you can always find a few deadbeats that talk slick, but don't seem to have much to show for their time except hiring more people and making a few high impact appearances at meetings. You can go a long way if you can talk the talk, look the part, and kiss the right asses.

Microsoft has been picking up useless deadbeats for nigh on 25 years now. They really need to shed these people.

One company you have to admire is Facebook. I don't know if its true, but I'm told you basically get fired at Facebook in the first year if you don't know how to deliver something of tangible value within that time. That is hardcore.

If that metric was applied at Microsoft and Intel, you'd see the companies shedding 25% of their workforce immediately.

I suspect even Google would shed 10-15% of its people.
I think you're missing a zero or so.
Amazing, the blog's owner is a designer? Full of modern sense. It's a good idea, combine many health apps and LBS apps data, display to user. It's done automatically?
Must we bikeshed every issue there is, in such highly public fashion?

Not only is this entirely uninteresting, but this is not the way to do software development. Take it to the respective mailing list, issue tracker, IRC channel, etc. That's what they are there for. I'm sure it's less distracting to the developers as well.
Why can't it be good news? And good news to whom? To me, who cares about this company, this is good news because I think that MS needs to get much more nimble. I'm saying this as someone who can receive very bad news tomorrow.
Imagine if we could get access to the O'Reilly library of technical books, that would be extremely valuable.
Can't say I find this very surprising. For those who would like more details on the flow of funds, 990finder.com will let you browse though nonprofit organizations' historical tax filings, with only minor redactions (like the personal contact details of signatories, which could otherwise be used for nefarious purposes). You can learn all kinds of interesting things there.
Great idea and gesture to the community.

Does any of your land receive irrigation?

I'd like to send you several surface and subsoil sensors to deploy that will communicate back to me via GPRS. Just a couple of minutes is needed to deploy each sensor.

And it would be very helpful if you could send back a soil sample at my expense.

Does this sound practical?
This is particularly true for non-European languages – ligatures are a minor feature for most of the languages using latin-1 but there are quite a few which depend on complex, multi-letter combinations which are required for text to be comprehensible:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_text_layout
Ceramic Paper Crane Modern Lamps
I live in Chicago and grow my own food in my yard. I'm highly interested in this.

How can we talk further?