skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some random ideas currently floating in my head:

* Ultra-portable Linux computer. This is interesting in both building the HW, and figuring out the SW stack. To get most out of the device some custom(ized) SW is probably needed. Main inspiration: 200LX

* New kind of word processor. Squarely aimed for writing essays and other relatively straight-forward articles. Attempt to take semantically correct HTML to the extreme.

* Tag based file system/management. Ultimately this is something that should be integrated fairly deeply to the OS, so probably the most difficult of these projects. Basically make the filesystem more like document database.

* Something that merges the greatness of Excel and IPython. Not sure if this is really achievable, but it is something I'd love to explore.

* Object shell. I think the basic idea of PowerShell (ie piping objects) is very cool. But the syntax did not impress me, and Windows console window is not a nice editing environment. The output wouldn't need to necessarily be pure plain text, instead you could have at least some simple tables etc.

* Discussion platform. This is bit nebulous in my head, but something that would merge best bits of Wave, G+, Reddit, XMPP, and blogging maybe. This is one area where innovations certainly are possible, especially ones that do not have a walled garden in the center.

* Better XMPP-IRC gateway. Kinda precursor/first-step for the previous, something that would allow progressive transition from IRC to XMPP. Main inspiration: Isode/M-Link/FMUC.

* MP-TCP based VPN gateway+client. This is pretty self-explanatory; most services (afaik) do not support MP-TCP, but for end-user it would be massively beneficial. But luckily most of those benefits can be gotten by using MP-TCP (or something similar) to make a VPN, over which regular TCP connections are made.

Many of these ideas might work quite nicely together to make even greater whole.
Thanks for trying out the service and giving us your careful feedback. I agree that we have lots to learn here. Some of this still feels clumsy. We are constantly iterating on things and hope to get the right balance sooner rather than later. I also agree that it can be so much more. It sounds like you have some real insights here. If you are open, then please shoot me an email (info@7cupsoftea.com) so I can better understand your thinking.
Ha! it is me! I'm in Cambridge! Let's catch up!!!
My 9 month old son has 45min sleep cycles during the day so that doesn't leave much time to code after washing and sterilising his bottles and grabbing a quick bite myself! He doesn't always sleep into the next cycle by himself so I have to be by his crib to pat him and thats where my new workstation is lol!

But honestly I think being a self employed developer is the best option if you want to really help out with the upbringing of your kids and avoid getting a nanny.
I like your thinking, but there's a sliding scale (15%-35%), just like personal income tax, so that smaller businesses don't get hosed.

Theoretically it would also be easy to game payroll and income taxes this way. You could essentially file articles of organization for a corporation with you as the sole shareholder, and have your employer pay your corporation your wages, instead of you directly.

When it comes time to take money out, you pay a fat dividend with 15% dividend tax rate, instead of 35% income tax rate. There are of course some exceptions to this and it isn't possible in some states, but it would be possible.
IBM has stopped targeting excellence and started targeting EPS. You cannot operate a business without looking up from your spreadsheets once in a while, no matter how big that business is.

Earnings per share should be a natural byproduct of excelling in your market.
Bunch O Balloons: 100 Water Balloons in Less Than 1 Minute
Sounds good, but they damned well better apply the same rules to individuals who use offshore tax shelters too. How unpatriotic is that? Deserters!
If anyone from Digital Ocean is reading this, please help if you can! A lot of developers really want to check out CoreOS, and having it supported on DO would help so much. Let us give you money!
Yes, the concept of a Benefit Corporation [1] does exist, and we should encourage more of them, and more business to write their charters to act like them. Maximizing investor profit is only one metric of a business.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
I've been slowly designing an open source drum lesson book. If I had more time, I'd put more effort into it.

Currently, there are a few drum books that every drumset player works out of (Syncopation, Stick Control, etc). Most people don't play what's in the books note for note. Instead, they modify the lesson to fit whatever they want to learn. If they were available under a free license, it would be easier for teachers and other drummers to publish their own modified lessons.

I have no delusions that a free drum book could replace the classics. I'll consider it a success if it just helps my students. And who knows, it might catch on.
How is following the law to a "T" morally or ethically wrong?

Isn't the greater moral or ethical wrong here is how terribly convoluted the tax code is?
How do you expect bills to get passed if the President doesn't talk about them?
This is a false premise. OP said absolutely nothing about changing / eliminating existing laws. Even if OP said something about tax laws your argument would be a slippery slope fallacy.
So, I create a corporate entity that provides my housing, transportation, other major needs. All my income is paid to this entity, which pays no taxes. I, as a biological person, get some basic stipend to cover daily costs, and live comfortably with all my necessities being paid by the corporate entity. How does the state collect any taxes at that point?

EDIT: thinking a bit more, I guess sales taxes could still be collected. Could a government function almost entirely off sales taxes?
"It is the job of a business to make money, the most money possible, at all costs. That is its single purpose existing."

This is a popular meme, but I've also read People On The Internet claiming there is no legal basis for this belief.

Do you have any sources to persuade me otherwise?
There's a big difference between the government asking you what deductions you qualify for - those are intended under the law - and a corporation making convoluted corporate structures to avoid paying the intended amount of tax. Generally, double irish sandwiches and the like don't pass the smell test.
Kudos. We all managed to fit in one big bed, and it's been one of the most rewarding experiences of our lives. In the UK the NHS fight pretty hard to discourage people from co-sleeping, and people very regularly do dangerous things like go to bed drunk with horrific consequences. But if you're sensible, it really does make your life easier, and I think our little guy's happier for it too.
Presumably by taxing dividends (and possibly capital gains, depending on who you ask) as normal income, and eliminating other quirks of the tax code that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy.
Interesting to see Google Trends chart about Ruby on Rails:
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=ruby%20on%20rails&cmp...

Sad to see it fading away. But to be honest ... I am not using it anymore.
I don't have a question, but I wanted to say that you're very right to guard your time with your family. For at least the first year of my son's life, I can't count how many times I'd come home from work and I could see a difference in him compared to the day before. Maybe not even something I could quite put my finger on, but I could just tell there was something different about him. They change and learn so quickly that you could miss a lot in only a few days, let alone weeks or months.
Of course! I'd love to help. I've sent you an email with the subject: How can I help?
I'll say this, also, as someone who runs the tech side of a startup and now has an 8-month old:

Those first few months are brutal. Not only was I in a terrible mood, but work stacked up like nuts. Productivity nosedived and I started earnestly looking into pharmaceuticals that could reduce my need for sleep (more "obtaining modafanil" searches in my history than I'd care to admit). And as much as I hate to admit it, there was a period wherein I felt like the two are completely incompatible (being a parent and working at a startup).

The last month or so has been a massive reprieve - granted, I'm at a spot now I'd not have envied a year ago, but compared to operating on 4 hours of sleep a day for months, I'll take it.

The obvious truth here is it's still about balancing your time. If you want to be a parent and be able to work feverishly, that means abandoning something else.
Big Data for Social Innovation
"Minimizes their costs" can also be read as "minimizes their contributions back to the society they're benefiting greatly from", hence the ethical concerns.
Detecting Trial Date Ranges in Ruby
>IBM didn't use low interest rates to invest therefore "the companies that were expected to spend us back to better economic health didn’t do so" therefore low interest rates didn't make the recession less severe than it otherwise would have been?

Investing in your own shares doesn't lead to growth like capital investment does, it's just more money at rest. Low interest rates improved the recession through improving the stock market - through 'trickle-down'. That's why the stock market can be raging while the larger economy is in the crapper.

So low interest rates can simultaneously make the recession less severe than it otherwise would have been, yet make the growth potential of the economy worse.
I wonder if color-blind users can play this...? Any first-hand experience?
Here's another view point: I recruited for Mainframe Developers a year ago. It's an increasingly rare skillset to find because developers:

- move on to cloud technology or other newer technologies to stay relavent

- don't want to move back to mainframe since they see less jobs for them

- there are almost no junior level candidates for mainframe roles. Most candidates will have 10-20+ years of experience. It's extremely rare to find anyone less than 5.

It is true that legacy systems aren't going anywhere anytime soon. But as time goes on there's a high cost in finding people that can maintain those systems.
Because to my eyes aren't trained, I really can't tell any font better than any other. I am mostly used to visual studio's default but I adopt to others equally efficiently without any real hindrance to my work.

So, anyone care to explain why a font is better than another or is it just a "feel" you get that you like one over the others?
Not much, but there have been a few changes:

- We added on ElasticSearch (for the search bar).

- We have almost phased out Socket.IO (we were only using the WebSocket transport, so it wasn't doing much for us).

- We're working on dropping Redis PubSub in favor of RabbitMQ (we're keeping Redis for transient data, though).
Why assume paying higher taxes than necessary to a government is moral? It is not as if governments are widely considered to be admirable ethical organizations. Just the alternative, really.
If I find a loophole in the law that allows me to murder someone without punishment, surely that's not moral or ethical, despite being legal?
It is not the job of a business to make "the most money possible." That tired bullshit meme needs to die.

Yes, businesses need to make money. I'm not saying otherwise. But even the fiduciary duty that publicly traded corporations have to their shareholders isn't "maximize profit above all other considerations." The kind of short-term, next-quarterly-results-are-all-that-matters thinking behind that notion is possibly one of the most destructive ideas in the history of markets.
That's to take advantage of Delaware's well fleshed out corporate law, not to avoid paying any taxes. I pay more in taxes to do that, in fact.
yet, downloading software and music for free, without compensating the author/creator, is seen around here as 'moral'. So is using Adblock on websites, depriving that company of revenue.

I see this as leveling the playing field.
I don't understand why Mark Cuban is morally obligated to invest in corporations doing things he doesn't like.
Even now as far as the IRS is concerned you will personally pay tax on all of those services that were given to you. The IRS doesn't just tax cash transfers.
The corporate tax is an absolute mess. Compliance costs are insane. Closing one loophole opens up another. It creates incentives for "paying" executives with look-the-other-way corporate jets and luxury hotels and conferences in the Bahamas.

It is also indeterminate in how regressive it is[1]...some companies and industries can offload almost all of the tax burden (incidence) onto their workers, while others offload it onto their shareholders. Even in the case where shareholders shoulder the majority of the burden, ownership distribution can still heavily affect how progressive it is in reality.

The worst part is that it just isn't that great of a form of revenue. Doubling our effective corporate tax rate would be impossible politically. Superficially, rates can be raised, but tax lawyers will exploit the shit out of it anyway. A coalition might be able to raise it by an effective 25% max before every corporation in the US teams up to vote them six feet under. Seems like a lot of political capital to waste just to get a measly $80B/year. [2].

IMO, the perfect solution would be to eliminate the corporate tax altogether, and tax capital gains and dividends as income instead. At least then you can be assured that it is progressive, and you have more direct control over how progressive it is.

[1] http://www.urban.org/uploadedpdf/1001349_corporate_tax_incid...
[1] http://www.kc.frb.org/Publicat/RegionalRWP/RRWP07-01.pdf
[2] http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...
I believe that the housing, transportation, and other major needs would be taxed just like the income they replace. (Or should be, in any case.)

This IRS page says that benefits are taxed like income: http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employ...

My mother is self-employed, and there are strict rules about deducting business expenses (like home office square footage) but not personal expenses (like the rest of the house's square footage).
The point is that a lot of companies keep their funds in offshore tax shelters but have their de facto bases of operations in the US. They benefit from the advantages that the US government provides (stability, well-educated workforce, infrastructure, etc.) without paying their fair share of the cost (i. e. corporate taxes), and it's not like they can't afford it.
A significant chunk of investment in the American stock market and real estate is done by foreign investors and funds and hedgefunds etc. These decisions are made primarily based on the spreadsheets ; as a backend software guy in the capital markets and banking sector, I see first hand how automated this decision making has become. I have had score of meeting with Investment and Financial advisors ( for s/w development/testing , not financial advise )and I see first had how hard data oriented these folks are in their decision making.
Clojure in the cloud. Part 1: Google App Engine
Ah, very interesting. Thanks for the info!
Or companies that aren't repatriating their profits to avoid paying US tax?
What's your business model for Known? The reason I ask is explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8086694
Because you're shifting that burden onto somebody else.

If you're a company that primarily does business in the US, you're benefiting from access to all of those customers and a friendly business legal infrastructure. You should be paying tax for that privilege. If you want to move out of the US and lose all of that, I don't have a problem of that, but what Mark Cuban is talking about is different.

Multi-billion dollar product and finance companies move to the Cayman Islands or Ireland or elsewhere and do virtually no business there. It's purely to shed tax liability.

It's not much different than banks and lenders who choose to incorporate in places like South Dakota or on Native American reservations where there are lax/no usury laws so they can charge absurd interest rates (the latter of which 50-100% are common) that have been voted illegal in the places where they actually have their customers.

It's immoral as it gets. I used to work in Finance and those companies justify it as ethical because "everyone else is doing it". It's bullshit, they just don't want to be the nail that sticks out...
It's not all of them, but it's a lot of them. In a way, having a professional job gives you a lot of flexibility. You show up 5 minutes late to your retail a few times, and you're fired.
What you just described is illegal. A corporation must act as an independent entity, not just be a shell around a single individual.
Hi! This is the Market Economics Fairy! Just a quick reminder that if virtuous people selling a stock would predictably lead its profits to be temporarily priced lower relative to the rest of the stock market, even a small group of profit maximizers can just swoop in and buy that stock! So this is a completely ineffective strategy for virtuous people to drive a stock price lower! And if Cuban sells the stock after the news of their move breaks, he's already locked in all of the company's expected profit from that move, because the stock will already be priced higher! Sincerely, the Market Economics Fairy!
Children die from feeding accidents. Automation would need to be excellent quality to avoid dead children.

If you have the money to afford automatic feeding you probably have the money to afford an Au Pair or similar to help in the short term.
House sends cellphone unlocking bill to Obama's desk
After spending time with friends and family, I think I'll still have a good deal of time left for myself.

With that time, I'll build my body. Not just for aesthetics, but really spend time building it as well as I can. Needless to say that it'll make me feel pretty good about myself and all the good things start when one feels good about one's self.
It's our own setup, similar in its external-facing product, but implemented a bit differently on the backend than other PaaSes like Heroku, Flynn or Deis. Specifically, we support many isolated-tenancy stacks behind a common central platform interface.

Other than Docker and AWS, there are a bunch of pieces that make the whole thing work, but most of them are custom.
> The obvious truth here is it's still about balancing your time. If you want to be a parent and be able to work feverishly, that means abandoning something else.

I'll agree with this. Parenting, work, hobbies: pick 2.
Well, my parents saw enough of me, I don't feel that I missed anything. There are evenings, there are vacations, all the things. It's just I didn't had a solid schedule of them helicoptering me daily.
Thanks for having a bug bounty program, far too infrequent in healthIT.

Can you expand more on "generate all of the documentation, audit logs, and explanatory materials you need to demonstrate compliance with every aspect of HIPAA."?

Also, with QSM requirements for the vast majority of other healthcare regulations, you need to explicitly address them in documentation to be compliant. Does Aptible address this, or only HIPAA?
How can you achieve vote secrecy with this system? Not being able to prove you voted for X, even if you wanted to, is one of the most important parts of electoral democracies.
There's a difference between immoral and irrational.

It is rational for a company to maximize their returns for shareholders and to skip taxes wherever legally possible.

Morality is relative, but if you went simply by utilitarian ethics, then a company would be acting irrational by maximizing the amount of good it provides.

There is crossover between rationality and ethical behavior for companies (especially B-Corps). A good case would be plastic water bottles. It's good that they are using thinner plastic lids now, and is rational because it cuts costs, but non-biodegradable water bottles are a huge filler for landfills, and probably are not maximizing the good.
Will all the misogynist trolls still come out to play on this one given that it's a YC post?
"Wow, that's a boring attitude."

My response to your quote had also already been written, isn't this a convenient day?
Seems a fair amount more expensive than TrueVault. Any reason for this?
I worked in reinsurance, and there was the (apocryphal) story one year of how the government of South Africa had promised a million dollars to every player if their team won the world cup. On the flip side, the government looked for a reinsurer to insure them for that risk. My company said no because so basically it distilled down to sports betting and we did not have any experience in that market.
That may be some, but a good chunk of companies save a lot of tax dollars by doing this (according to http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/business/how-delaware-thri... among others).
I have never seen an interesting discussion on that subject where I came away being smarter or having learned something new.

On the other hand I have had such discussions suck many hours away. I understand that this is a topic very dear to many peoples hearts, but it seems like one of those things that are just not a good fit for HN.
Do you think that, because rural communities tend to be more homogeneous, then there is less "politics" or special interest intervention?
So not only are corporations super humans that have limited liability and now religious views, you don't want those extremely wealthy "people" to pay taxes, either?

I'm open to a "first world tax rate" for corporations, but dropping it to zero would do more harm than good.
Delaware, Nevada, etc. let you skip STATE tax but your corporation would still be based in the United States and Federal taxes would still be due.

If Mark Cuban resides in Texas then the net effect of lower tax revenue in the state of Delaware should be almost zero to him personally.
There is no god, bro, fyi. I suppose automating delusional groupthink is your thing, though, so have fun with it.
Would a collaborative filtering engine that was able to discern inputs/feedback that were reliable versus not be useful to your endeavor? That's a key piece of what I'm working on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8086694
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Cut spending. Does anyone really think that 10% of what the federal government does can't be eliminated entirely?
My impression is you can be a perfectly healthy person wandering in the bush in Australia and be dead in under a day.
Because the very same business try to play themselves as being society-minded, if it helps them.
Do you indemnify users of the platform in the event of breaches, data loss, bugs, etc.?
i'm sure you know this, but when you invest in a company, you are actually just buying shares off of some other investor - the money doesn't go 'to' to company (except in IPOs and secondary offerings). of course the stock price can affect a company in some pretty important ways.
Let's put it a different way. Let's assume for a second that the taxes are more or less "fixed" and need to be paid. SO - you can have companies participate to a lesser or fuller extent. The rest falls on us as INDIVIDUALS.

The moral angle here is that companies shouldn't avoid the taxes of the very environment that enabled them to succeed in the first place.

So I think what he's basically getting at is that paying your (corporate) taxes is basically like "giving back" to that system/environment.

That's the way I think about it, anyways.