newjersey

Yes and simplifying it involves in pissing off a lot of people. Closing loopholes makes people made. People who have money. People who will spend money to keep things the way they are. And (sometimes) we are those people.

I don't know how we can ever actually simplify the tax code.

> I didn't understand that our tax brackets in the US are marginal (i.e. we don't pay 35% of our entire income if we are in that bracket), until a quarter way into my PhD program.

Is this common? How do we educate people about this? How can we have a serious conversation on tax reform when people don't know what system we have now? Personally, I want an end to most deductions and credits (but honestly because there are so many that I'm not using and never will use). However, if wager that the only people who know about them are the people who use them.

For example, the Masters exemption for Airbnb hosts makes no sense.

Isn't this true of gnu/Linux as well though? A lot of patches are drivers and fixes? For example, one could argue trim for solid state storage is a driver issue?

Why isn't it enough to do the tracking/audit log in the server side? I can't imagine even the JP Morgan Chase CEO lives under surveillance of JP Morgan Chase Bank 24/7. Just require them to use centralized services and keep audit log of that? Sounds simple enough. I don't get the need to monitor all traffic. Surely the sensitive servers have audit log independent of network?

So in my mind there are two parts to publicly funded projects. One is whether the spending of funds is worth it and another is whether the people have a choice.

We think that by definition that when private companies have programs, they're not spending public money but I'd argue (somewhat controversial I agree) that any tax break is public money. Also the second part of whether participation is mandatory. I'd say if an ISP has a de facto Monopoly in a market, then we could say participation is mandatory. I hope this part is less controversial.

What makes it difficult and what can we do to make things easier in the future? Is this something the @angular/cli should consider making default so as to surface pain points in as many scenarios as possible?

Wouldn't the next logical conclusion be to get rid of cash altogether?

Did I fall for a slippery slope fallacy?

While we are on this topic, let's not forget the real culprits: cfaa and widespread abuse of discretionary power by prosecution.

We must repeal (and not replace) the cfaa. Of course, we should name and shame MIT at every junction (shame on you, MIT!) However, we shouldn't lose sight of the bigger picture. CFAA is evil.

> Cloud is still competing with on premises solutions, right? One year is nothing, try ten or twenty.

Not an expert by any means but I would put more weight to Google's ONE year promise over (to give an example) HPE's twenty years promise. I know it is a cheap shot because I am pretty sure HPE will be bought and sold at least once in the next twenty years.

The quote for those who didn't read the email. Linus Torvalds says:

> Do we want to migrate to another hash? Yes.

> Again, I'm not saying there are no freak deaths in India. It is common in every corner of the world where there is more than one man. But, death by an individual in a public setting is not common and that too by a gun is almost impossible in India. That was my whole point.

Absolutely understandable observation. Factual even. I don't own a gun and have no financial interest in companies that manufacture or sell ammunition. However, I'm afraid the perception among readers might be that this is a problem we can solve by reducing or eliminating access to guns.

I'm not aware of the full details of what happened but I think we need to address the underlying issues as well.

There's clearly a lot of cognitive dissonance and leaps of faith even in this discussion because apparently the Klan's activities amount to terrorism but actions of a deranged lone wolf do not.

As much as we talk about us being civilized, conversations like this remind us that we are all fundamentally animals with a very limited capacity to care about issues that we don't see as directly affecting us.

I think the question I care about is how do we prevent these things from happening repeatedly? I'll be blunt. I have no interest in "justice" for the victim's family for the sake of "justice".

By the way, I wouldn't call what happens in India as "freak deaths".

http://m.hindustantimes.com/india/it-is-beef-says-lab-about-...

> Police maintained that the report was of no use in the investigation into the murder and assault.

Not trying to single out India. There are people who benefit from this bountiful harvest of fear and hatred everywhere. I'm just saying the issue is more than gun control.

Can anyone comment on how Apple works with retailers? Do retailers "buy" from Apple (and pay within thirty days of delivery)? Can retailers return iPhones they can't sell without paying a premium?

Sorry I don't know anything about the market. I don't even know if best buy's margin would be public information or if we'd need to make an educated guess.

Archived at https://archive.fo/DhAB8

Screenshot without comments: https://i.imgur.com/LbqmLV4.jpg

Hope this helps.

> The cost of that would be roughly 1/1000 of Google's annual income.

I don't own Google stock but 0.1% of revenue would be a huge number that you just can't blink away. Especially when it is not a one-off whim I mean spectacular moonshot but rather an ongoing business obligation.

I hate that the service sucks but I'd rather they don't waste money like this.

> How does that help in the situation of a homeowner not being able to afford their tax bill because their property increased in value?

If you cant afford the tax, you should move out and sell/rent out. This whole premise is absurd.

Sorry down voter. But this is a fact. We have property tax to discourage under utilization of scarce resources. If you can't afford the tax rate, you should you should find some way to increase your income. This is a prime example of why we don't need the 0.001% to screw over the rest of us. We the 99% are perfectly capable of screwing over ourselves!

The "community" doesn't owe long time residents or new residents anything just because they decided to buy instead of renting. Let's be rational here.

I have a question. Do you think this Amazon culture is the cause or the result of service-oriented architecture at Amazon? Or maybe am I completely off the mark here.

I found this quote from SEC filings. Jeff Bezos says:

> Service-oriented architecture -- or SOA -- is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies.

This was in 2010. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312511...

It sounds like they have been committed to it at least since 2005? https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws001/trailhead/MigratingAmazonCom... I'd imagine internally it'd have to be a lot sooner than that because I think they were ready to release AWS by 2006.

Sorry, I don't mean to start a holy war. I just wonder if there's any connection... What do you think?

I am not complaining. I don't trust myself with the responsibility anyway but I have 500+ and I cannot down vote stories.

I used to avoid voting on comments on my phone for a while because I was afraid I'd end up downing with my fat fingers but they've fixed it with an undown link when I down vote. Maybe they've relieved me from the responsibility of down voting stories?

I don't know how I feel about down voting because there is always a desire to down vote dissenting opinion.

tl;dr that's for comments afaik

I'll go further: never* rewrite public history

*In most cases, I think we should consider invalidating secret keys instead of trying to delete it and hope nobody saw it.

Are there secret keys in your app that you can't invalidate without a lot of pain? Maybe it is time to change some things in your app.

Maybe if someone accidentally commits secret-evil-plan.txt you might want to rewrite history? I can't think of any other scenarios... I mean even if someone commits a secret key, you're probably better off revoking it and leaving the secret key there. Or should you delete that file anyway to prevent people trying to brute force your old revoked private key?

> Yeah, those are the laws that shouldn't exist.

I absolutely agree. I'm no fan of Uber or Airbnb but I still side with them on a lot of issues (except Uber or airbnb requiring you to accept any and every customer in the name of anti discrimination).

I reject the idea that traditional taxis are safer than Uber. I reject the idea that Airbnb makes our communities less secure. My understanding of Airbnb is bringing someone to share my house where they have their own room but I'm still in the building. YMMV when it comes to most Airbnb use cases where the host is in a different state and uses Airbnb full time.

The reason I support these companies even though I don't like them is that I feel helpless against the regulatory capture. Taxi service doesn't exist to promote employment of taxi drivers. I think the medallion holders should ask TLC for their money back they paid for their medallions. Screw this whole charade about employment. If the only way to fight against regulatory capture is big companies breaking laws, I fully support big companies breaking those stupid laws. If I were in a jury about any such case, I'd likely vote to acquit.

> Look at their github page, where they even say they want more to amass more data and to "annoy the hell out of users" to make them update - shove updates down their throat a la Microsoft style.

I imagine this is by design. What do I do if there is a vulnerability that a patch fixed but the person I'm taking to refuses to update?

I am not saying I like the idea of bricking an app if there's no update for three months but if you agree that the fight is against dragnet not targeted surveillance then this is a reasonable compromise.

Hm... Is it a crime to write an email, not under oath, to a journalist accepting responsibility for a crime that one didn't commit (and had no idea was taking place)? I'd like to answer no but I'm sure a judge would use the "fire!" In a crowded movie theater analogy to answer in the affirmative.

I don't have any credibility or knowledge to talk about the exact current issue at hand but don't we at hn pine over the beautiful past where email was distributed instead of going between Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Google? A private email server isn't bad by definition, is it? Perhaps we should try to help the "ordinary" person keep their servers secure?

Apparently, they're is a time article about it

http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,0...

They talk about information density:

With this raw data in hand, the investigators crunched the numbers together to arrive at two critical values for each language: the average information density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken per second in ordinary speech. Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information-dense) given an arbitrary value of 1.

For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable was, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and thus the slower the speech. English, with a high information density of .91, was spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, ripped along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edged past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.

Further googling got me this PDF http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegri...

> "Don't break the web" is a hard constraint. Any solution you propose that violates this constraint is unacceptable.

What would you rather happen with mangled input like opening tags with no ending tag? Should the browser always try a best effort and never die with errors? Perhaps we can afford to break some things even though we can't afford a clean break?

I think you'd agree that the perfect is the enemy of the good. I'd argue that perfect backward compatibility is the enemy of good backward compatibility as well. Thoughts?

I'm unwilling to accept this is a hard constraint. It can't be that a later version should accept all inputs accepted by an earlier version. We should carve out exceptions based on what's actively used and inform the developer that what they're using is bad code. Eventually, some day if it becomes rare, we can discontinue support.

I don't understand the distinction. Does that mean any DRM encumbered store would also automatically be in violation of GPL? I'm thinking steam, origin, or any store that doesn't like you sharing binaries with others.

> The FSF argue that the App Store's ToS restricts app redistribution and therefore is incompatible with Section 6 of GPLv2: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."

I anal but why would it restrict recipient's exercise of the rights? I believe as of iOS 10, you can compile your own apps on your iPhone without paying an Apple tax and I imagine the apps have source code publicly available in summer git repository probably on GitHub anyway?

I don't think the argument is that you as a developer are prohibited from using GPL code on apple app store. The argument (rightly) is that you should not participate in that ecosystem because it is a serfdom but then emacs exists on Windows which despite all the overture of "Microsoft loves open source" didn't come even close to saying in practice "Microsoft loves free software". Such is life. You can't win them all, Charlie Brown.

tl;dr I anal but I don't think the GPL prohibits you from putting your app on the app store. Just make sure you somehow give the source code to everyone who installed the app.

Wix is still in the wrong though. Saying your vendor is in violation of their license doesn't give you any right to violate their license.

I anal but I don't think this nullifies WordPress' GPL.

I'd be very alarmed. How is the retention?

> So democracy is only OK so long as you get the "right" result? And UK should be forced to remain in a union despite their will?

I want to agree with you but I can't because I want a new referendum for Scotland well as for alternate voting. Opponents will use the (fiercely neck and neck) results to show that the discussion on this topic is over and I vehemently disagree. If you see it as my rejecting people's will, so be it. Nothing: not will of the majority, not rule of law, nothing is absolute. Everything is up for negotiation.

> But more importantly, Apple could run Twitter at a loss as a data platform around their product.

This is something I don't understand. Pardon me if this sounds pie in the sky but how much does it cost to RUN Twitter without any expectations of profit? It seems like the people here in the conversation have knowledge that I lack about Twitter's expenses. It probably is public information but I can't find anything satisfying from a cursory Google search. Anyone want to help me out?

If Twitter were to tighten it's belt today, how would it's operating expenses look like?

I remember talking to Justin TV (precursors to twitch) folks and they said operating a live streaming site wasn't expensive and that one ad every couple of hours was enough to keep the lights on. I imagine running Twitter should be cheaper except for maybe dealing with SMS providers but Twitter is big enough that it could ask for special treatment from telecom providers to get a favorable rate if not to not have to pay anything entirely.

I understand that I'm asking two different questions here. One is how much it costs to operate Twitter at a profit versus what it costs to run Twitter at all (and I'm thinking like a highly upscaled https://mastodon.social than anything Twitter is today, none of this augmented reality play). I do understand that to make a profit, Twitter must be spending heavily to pour over analytics day and night to find s breakthrough but if you remove the need to make a profit, things should be less hectic, right?