skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If items being referred to as loopholes are legal, then they are not loopholes but part of the tax code.

I've never liked the term "loophole" when it comes to the law. Either it is legal or it is not. The best I can do in terms of that is referring to the act of a politician inserting an exception to benefit a few as "inserting a loophole". But once that has been placed, voted on, and signed into law it is at that point the law.
Its concerning how the Pro-Russian narrative has been formed over the shooting down of that plane. We don't call the shooting down of planes during the Cold War accidents, but somehow we do for this?

The world is coddling Putin for fear of losing his economic ties into countries that control the editorial content of much of the Western press. So we say 'accident' and we say 'supposed' ties to Russia, and we say blatant lies like 'Nazi party has taken over the Ukraine' in Western papers.

Sadly, Putin's money is held above morals and truth in Europe. Especially in Germany and France.
Minor nit, which is that all the top CS (and engineering, for that matter) schools are not Ivy League schools: MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CMU. And I've never heard of top tech companies being referred to as Ivy League tech companies. But your point is still valid when you talk about "top schools."
Steve appeared on Ghostalk (a podcast which I co-host): http://talk.ghost.io/17/
Toby's a brilliant guy. Check out some of this other work here, some of which has been seen previously on HN. http://tobyschachman.com/
I do find myself in many of the same communities as Steve, and in much the same starting position whereas I tend to get bored and leave things he puts in the effort to do something for the community.

I jointed Rust to write an ML project and contribute, I gave a talk on the philosophy of programming, I think I was speaking one conference behind him at one point too. And yesterday he opens metaphysics.io and I programmingphilosophically.com ...

It's interesting to see what could be with a little effort. And yet I still dilly dally and potter around.
AWS in fight of its life as customers ponder hybrid clouds and Google pricing
In order for us to use this in production we ordered all our programmers keyboards with lambda keys. jk but for real this is a really useful lib
Would be great to know the exact data set size (not size in the database). I can't get an order of magnitude sense of what I am looking at without that.

I know I can divine it from the parameters to stress, but I have no idea if the row keys generated by different clients overlap and I don't know the default number of columns nor their size.

I think it's also important in this kind of benchmark to describe the distribution of access especially for a read intensive benchmark. Without that you really don't know what your are looking at. I am a fan of scrambled Zipfian.
so I'd take that as you're anti-anti-vaxer, but pro illegal aliens?

And nice job putting words into my mouth, I didn't say you HAD to be against Y, I said you SHOULD. And it wasn't denying immigration I was talking about, it was illegal aliens. Different words mean different things.
>I do not believe it unreasonable to demand evidence to the extend and nature of sexism in tech (as I have seen no formal study on it at all).

I'm trying to not be rude here, but my inclination is to tell you to just go look for such studies or run such a study yourself. Nobody owes you a spoon-fed version of reality on your terms when they make their own decisions.

What is unreasonable is saying that normal business decision practices are not adequate to make this particular decision, and instead a formal, "unbiased" study must be conducted.

The numbers are so extreme that they speak for themselves. Several years of 0% women founders, and now 10%.

There's a double standard for evidence when it comes to sexism (and other cultural issues). Maybe it's because some people take it as a personal affront, as if they're accepting responsibility for the actions of others, and it switches into "prove beyond a reasonable doubt" mode rather than "what's the most likely reality here."

Recently there was a string of articles on Language Log about gender disparities in meetings between men interrupting women and women interrupting men during discussion. A surprisingly large number of comments consisted of men denying the evidence. This type of response is endemic wherever science touches cultural issues. An unbiased scientific study of gender disparity may be useful as a tool for finding where to make corrective steps, but it will convince nearly no one. On issues like this, people stick to their cultural inclinations more than the evidence.

HN has decided to move the conversation forward, and I give them kudos for that.
Not related to the article, but the source:

Having my email address on my blog is a vulnerability. Another vulnerability is named 'Rudimentary Scan', meaning 'we looked, and your site has no client-side vulnerabilities'. These issues mean my blog is 'borderline unsafe'. Wut.

Neither of these are vulnerabilities; to call them such does a disservice to your customer's understanding of technical language.
No, you literally have to scroll down to the "below-the-fold" Samples section, read the terse description, and click in and out of several links to see samples.

Point is: the very first thing anyone going to that page to see that font is going to want to see is that font. Most are going to expect the text of the page in that font, or at least a suitable sample first. As is, the text seen is in some non-standard (AFAIK) font which piques interest as the reader studies its subtleties, wondering how code would look in it ... then after a nontrivial time reading, discovered the links to samples, and is startled to see something completely different (and, IMHO, kinda "squashed").

A newspaper doesn't put the #1 headline on a page referenced below-the-fold.
That's because we're the master race. I'm kidding. It's because we're immigrants from a populous country that overwhelmingly work in a few occupations in America.
Actually, if you have multiple owners you really want to have your company appraised on a regular basis (every 6 months if you're beyond a little startup). Reason being, if you should happen to encounter an event that triggers a buyout right of one of your members/shareholders/partners, you want a contractually accepted valuation to control the cost of the buyout. Well planned valuation procedures can really help avoid costly litigation over the value of an ownership interest.

Appraisers can value your company above a billion dollars without you ever taking on an outside investor. If someone does go to invest, they're going to hire their own appraiser (or entire firm of economists) to determine how much your company is worth prior to investing.

Appraisals aren't free, but they have significant long term benefits. Their estimate of your company value tends to be as accurate as any potential investor's estimate (competing biases on other sides of the ideal valuation).
This looks fantastic. Truly a great app here if it works as well as it looks.

If anything, I think you might be targeting too small of an audience with this. While I realize there's no incentive for you to make this change, I could easily see someone forking this and using it for any large-ish group of people united under any purpose, such as a PTA or soccer league.
Absolutely in agreement. The Tax code in the US is insane.

Instead of criticizing companies that do the math and determine it's a smart [business] decision to relocate or whatever just to reduce tax liability, why not instead focus on what is making these companies so inclined to make said decision?
Ask HN: How can I estimate hosting costs for an app?
I have a Ruby on Rails app hosted on Heroku. The project is fairly far along, to the point where we are in talks with investors. We have all our numbers down except when it comes to hosting costs. How can I estimate what my hosting costs will be as my user base grows?
Could be a typo, or a freudian slip.
Crows and magpies are the smartest birds on earth. European magpies pass the mirror test, something very rare animals and only children over 18 months do: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14552-mirror-test-show...
Nope. Companies can put a small portion of themselves in a foreign country, then say that that small portion is the most important part. I cannot cut off my big toe, mail it to the Cayman Islands, then say that I should be taxed under their laws instead as a result.

That analogous thing would be for a company to stop all business within a country, which is not being done.
Make some progress on a bipedal robot strong enough to carry me around.

"Some progress" means maybe I could get one leg to stand upright :-)
I wish all new accounts made such thoughtful posts. Welcome to HN!
I totally thought this was going to try and make a broader analogy. But no, just a golf article. Hm.
> When I create an API, web or otherwise, it is rarely of the type popularised by Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET MVC and most other MVC frameworks. These tend to think of an API as simple resources with HTTP methods – two GETs, a POST, a PUT and a DELETE. That’s not an API. That’s just a basic Data Access Layer over HTTP. Sure, I’ve written code where that is a valid pattern for certain resources, but it’s not an API. An API provides high-level commands and operations, such as “activate this user” or “complete this order”.

I disagree. A resource-centric "restful" http interface is most certianaly an API. These high level commands can be easily expressed with a PUT request on the user to activate, or a PUT on the order resource to complete it.

In theory, we could always go back to the days of JSON RPC where every request is a POST to /api.json with { action: 'getUser', userId: 123 }. IMO, the rails-esque API conventions are a significant improvement.

Is there an alternative routing technique which you prefer? I wouldn't know, but maybe the .NET ecosystem has a library for creating APIs with proper conventions for classes, objects, and methods.
http://golang.org/doc/code.html#Workspaces
A beautiful poem, one that many a legal immigrant saw upon entering the US as they began inprocessing through the Ellis Island immigration station. One that the illegal aliens will not see as they illicitly cross our border, seeking to evade what agents we have stationed there.
Could you explain what a corporation's actual fiduciary duty is?
You seem to be describing tax evasion. Tax avoidance is paying your share of tax!
It can start by not brushing it under the rug. By using "diversity" as a catch all for feel goodiness, is a little bit self serving and even selfish in the grand scheme of things. If we are going to do the work then do it, don't do a bunch of marketing. If we want to look at CS and look at the harshest affected group it specifically black males (which no one is doing in all of these reports they are releasing) - it irks me because it seems that the world has moved on from black males needing help and it is more en vogue in 2014 to focus efforts on women and LGBT entirely and exclusively. A more well rounded approach is needed and that can't begin until we are comfortable with admitting that the job isn't done in regards to young black males, and yet the sentiment seems to be "we've done enough for that underrepresented group"

Solutions? tech companies and incubators need to be targeting young black males for immersion and mentoring programs as early as 5th grade. The myth that silicon valley is closed to non CS types needs to be exposed for exactly that, a myth, so that we can start to recruit talented non SC students into silicon valley in areas of marketing, sales, general management and finance. Areas where they are currently.

waiting ten years until the CS rates increase is not an option, because the ship will have already sailed by then on this generation of wealth being created

the whole debate around diversity in silicon valley right now is pretty much marketing and seems pretty cynical and disingenuous from my POV
If the convoluted corporate structures are legal then they are paying the intended amount of tax because they are following the law. It may not pass the smell test but they are legal. The complaint needs to be placed upon the laws and those write them, not the companies who abide by the law.
The average American man and the average American woman have the same IQ, were raised in fairly similar cultural environments, and received fairly similar educations.

But compare the average black man and the average white man. The average black man has a lower IQ (Google it, many citations), somewhat different culture (more likely to have grown up in poverty, more likely to speak in AAVE, more likely to have come from a broken home, etc), and worse education (likely went to worse schools as a kid, less likely to have gone to college, etc).

Maybe I am racist for writing that, but I think it would be more racist to ignore those facts, because that would lead to ignoring the problems and not trying to help disadvantaged groups.
The Administration will probably just Executive Order their way into a "solution".
For what it's worth at this late date, that post set off the voting ring detector. No users flagged it and no moderator moderated it.
Wow, cool idea. Though $3,499/month is WAY above what a small company like mine can afford. We're considering paying a one-time cost of ~$10,000 for a consultation to get us there and won't have to do another one for (hopefully) quite a while.

What size/type of company is the target market?
Any type of insurance in healthcare is a double edged sword. Not stating how much they have isn't going to necessarily lower the number of lawsuits they may get. My family ran assisted living facilities in Florida years ago, every customer (family member of a resident) was a potential lawsuit waiting to happen. It's just the nature of being in healthcare. So, Aptibly is addressing how they're going to protect their customer. In doing so, they really do need to state how much they can protect them.
Umm...yes, it does matter.

Closures? Can't be optimized. Polymorphic method? Can't be optimized (even if every implementation is tail recursive).

This is more than an implementation detail, it actively influences the way you write your code.

And Scala -doesn't- optimize A calls B calls A etc cases. It requires the developer to explicitly make use of scala.util.control.TailCalls. See http://www.scala-lang.org/api/2.11.2/index.html#scala.util.c... and associated white paper.

What Scala gives you is that if A calls A (calls A calls A), and is tail recursive, and A can not be overridden, it will optimize it.
"The free-software ethos and the founders of the open-source movement are mega-racist libertarian people, and so it’s always really weird to me that a bunch of Leftists are so into open source; it explicitly manifests capitalist social relations."

Mega-racist? What? Lost me a bit there.

It's weird to me that he speaks about the free software movement as if it were dead...as if the only motivator to write open source software is to get a job with an artificially low salary.
I had a few ad and affiliate sites that made a fair amount of money at their peak, and then died after Google algorithm changes. TechSpyer.com was just a WordPress site that took an XML feed from Commission Junction and Linkshare and created posts with affiliate links for consumer electronics products. It took about an hour to make (it used a free WordPress theme and a custom XML to post plugin that I wrote). It made about $150 per month back in 2007 before I sold it for $1500 on Flippa. I later made a similar site for general products called DealSpyer.com that made about $100/month before traffic dried up. I had a travel site called RewardFreak.com that had pages for all the travel loyalty programs, and affiliate links to travel portals to book flights, hotels, cars, sign up for a rewards credit card, etc. There were thousands of pages of content, but 99% of the traffic came from 5 pages (for lesser known frequent flyer programs, I ranked higher than the actual websites). Just 1 or 2 affiliate sale per month was enough for $200+ revenue.

In total, I averaged about $500 a month during 2007-2010 with costs under $20/month, but 2011 the traffic on these sites disappeared overnight with the Panda update, so I just let the domains expire.
Let's remember that Mark Cuban didn't receive his fortune by making smart investments. He received it by winning the dotcom lottery. When listening to investment advice, perhaps we should listen to people that made their fortunes through smart investing. Public companies have a responsibility to their (rational) shareholders to minimize expenses that have no possible ROI. Taxes are chief among those.
The dividend tax rate is mainly there so as to avoid double taxation, so it would make sense to remove it.
I'm confused. If I cut off my big toe and mail it to a different state, can I claim that I should only pay taxes in that state? Why, then, can a company move a small and inconsequential part of itself to a different jurisdiction, then be taxed under that other jurisdiction?

Companies moving out entirely would be analogous to people moving. Companies moving out on paper while continuing to do business in the same location is analogous to tax evasion.
I think what he means is you don't necessarily need to have experience with the particular stack before hand (and they probably don't expect interns to). You can pick it up on the job
There's like 70 different commands that can move the cursor in Vim. And that's before you add any plugins or mappings.
What would be the business or distribution model, assuming it's not a book?
Thanks! The authorization stuff expects that method to be there, so just return true! :-)
I've read your other comments on this thread and I've got to tell you that I love your attitude and find you very inspirational! Thanks for showing off this app, it looks great...
9 times out of 10 when I see some "controversial" (for HN) economic/political post that I totally agree with, it was posted by user steveklabnik. That aside, I have to admit I still prefer Go over Rust.

In any case, very interesting interview.

I'd love to see more like this even if the subject was someone on the opposite end of the political/economic spectrum from me, I found it much more interesting than the typical padded puff-pieces "What Hacker XYZ uses to hack with" (spoiler: probably a MacBook, you bunch of Apple-sellouts!).
Would expanding the geographic sourcing of startups help with diversity? Cities like Miami, which is 75% hispanic, our startups are as diverse as our city. However I only recall a couple ever getting into YC (note, I have no idea of the merits of any others who applied).

So could sourcing from more diverse cities help YC ?
Google to Yahoo Search search for mRSS goes to yahoo page
Glad to hear you're thinking about this. Understanding the complexity provides power, but the tradeoff in this instance doesn't feel quite right.

For example, etcd is a powerful primitive, and then more complex/sophisticated systems can be built on top of it.

I wonder if an 80/20 solution that is simpler than fleet/systemd for pushing work into a CoreOS cluster would be a win, and then more complex systems (e.g. Kubernetes-esque orchestraction) could live on top of that.
That's why I said it was nearly as important as the ability to code.

By that I meant that if interviewing a candidate you should be able to say w/ reasonable accuracy if they can a) actually write code (personally I don't usually care if it involves the tech stack I'm using) and b) have a strong breadth of knowledge on different paradigms, tools, languages, etc so that their decision making will be well informed going forward. Note that my lack of caring about tech stacks/languages/etc is because I've found people who are strong at b) are able to pick those things up rapidly, assuming that they actually can code in the general sense.
Can I ask what you expect to occur that will produce the upside or dividend on your investment and what kind of time frame you're operating on?
"Starting today, you can begin running CoreOS in production" - nice!
Ah.. what's the purpose of this? I don't get it.
> What companies are doing is nothing more than citizens within the US can and choose to do, they move to places where their tax burden is less.

Wherever you, as an individual, move in the world, you are still supposed to pay US taxes. The US is one of the very few countries in the world to do this. The number of people renouncing their US citizenship to get away from this is on the rise.
I dunno about you, but in a forum where most of the discussion typically centers around fad-driven, closed source products that pivot every fifteen seconds, I find it kind of refreshing to see us talking about a product that 1) someone's been working on for seven years, 2) is clearly aimed at an established, recognizable audience other than "Bay Area techies", and 3) is open source.
You're right, there's some ambiguous wording on my part. I'll be sure to make that section more precise right now. Looking back on that section, I should also be talking about work factors and such.
In the US, we encourage everyone to "go out and live the American dream". Open a business. Be successful!

But as soon as you become successful, we will punish you via a huge tax burden among other things.

We explicitly advocate success, yet implicitly advocate punishment of success.

It's not hard to imageine why so many companies often see relocation as a way to relieve their tax burden. It's nothing a normal citizen doesn't do.

Instead of focusing on punishing companies (who will eventually just up and leave altogether), we need to fix the core problem that is encouraging the behavior -- ie. the tax code.
http://www.leagle.com/decision/19471007159F2d848_1759

He quoted from the dissent in Commissioner v. Newman. He found a single judge who wrote an opinion at one point in American history that fit his mindset. An opinion to which that judge's peers disagreed. Selective quoting if I've ever seen it. I didn't think I needed a quote considering the decision itself is entirely written in opposition of the dissent.

Your inability to differentiate between legal and moral has been sufficiently addressed by other posts.

Have an example of a company acting legally, yet immorally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9_boycott
Google were innovating new product with the money they didn't spend on hardware. And, AFAIK, the didn't so much reduce existing cost as reduced the future cost of new investment i.e. increased bang for buck.

That's not the same as doing removing every other light bulb in the building (which is what Lucent did at Bell-Labs!)
Sure, and it's a little sad that there isn't any good resource to explain them... But I also am not going to try to do it in the space of a comment.
There are systemic and cultural biases against women in math and in technical fields. Women are driven out of these fields by people in them.

If you had a magic wand, women wouldn't be driven out, so there would be more women in professions that have biases against women.
Where the Tab key is now is where the Escape key was on the system Bill Joy developed Vi.
>It seems like you're equating "nationalism" with "government", which is most certainly too broad.

No, this is precisely what you are doing. I mentioned that we should not make arguments based on nationalism, and you responded.

>...he says while sipping a glass of nationally funded water, on his computer which arrived via nationally funded sea ports, which sends data over nationally funded computer networks, using a protocol developed with national funding.

which, as you just mentioned, has to do with government, not nationalism.
Of Advertising and Scaling Up
Have you looked at http://hypothes.is or the W3C annotation work?