tdubhro1

OK, let me give you a simpler example. BMW is domiciled in Germany. It builds cars there. When it exports a car to the US, it has a US subsidiary company that employs people and helps to sell the car in the US. BMW doesn't sell the car to its subsidiary, it sells it to a dealer (a separate company domiciled in the US, think "Jacks awesome BMWs, Toledo"). The profits that the dealer makes when it sells the car are taxed in the US, because it is a US domiciled company. BMW will probably pay something like sales tax and in some countries there will be import tariffs to pay. But the profit that BMW makes on the sale of the exported car, the difference between the price the US dealer pays them and the cost of all the raw materials, labour, marketing etc, is realised in Germany, and that's where they pay corporation tax. Because, where the hell else could it happen??

US companies holding cash offshore is a separate issue. Not the same. Different. The top 50 companies now hold about $1.5 trillion offshore. This is a US tax loophole that the US govt can decide what it wants to do about it. It does not mean that every country in the world can suddenly decide that they should be able to levy corporation tax on multinationals. I mean, apart from anything else, how they hell would they even do that, given that they don't have the full set of accounts covering all the company's operations, to even know whether the company was profitable or not. You can be profitable in a lot of countries and loss-making in a lot of others - so in the new fantasy land, do we need to pay corporation tax in all the profitable countries and get a paper tax-loss in the unprofitable ones? I can't believe I'm this far into debating such a ridiculously stupid idea.

>> They pay almost NO TAX over their profits unlike 99% of the companies, and that's the problem.

What companies that are domiciled outside of the EU pay corporation tax in the EU? Corp tax is levied by the govt of the country of domicile, always has been. Why is it suddenly up for debate?

Corporation tax is supposed to be a tax on the profits of a company levied by the government of the country that the company is domiciled in. Apple is not domiciled in the EU. It has to have subsidiaries to employ people in those countries, but I absolutely agree with their position that their profits should be taxed in the US, not in the EU. If the EU wants a bigger slice of the pie, it can impose tariffs. That's what countries did in the past, and that's what they are trying to do now, but they are just claiming it's a legitimate corporation tax, and whipping the austerity-weary locals into a frenzy by pushing stories into the media about all the "profits" the large multinationals make in Europe and claiming they don't pay any tax. This is just not true, nor is there any basis in history for this kind of taxation. If they want to, they should at least be up front and say they want to impose a tariff. I just can't believe the HN crowd, who supposedly are interested in startups and running their own companies, are being drowned out by the lefties on an "evil corp" soapbox.

I've been compiling some notes on exactly this topic for the past few weeks, your question prompted me to post them here: http://dubhrosa.blogspot.com/2016/07/how-to-dive-into-largec...

TL;DR: don't "dive" in, figure out the inputs and outputs and work from the outside in; make lots of notes as you go; don't browse the code aimlessly, write down a question you want to answer and focus on that, then write down the answer when you think you've got it; don't get too hung up on the editor/IDE; possibly controversial/YMMV: turn off syntax highlighting; page through a file from beginning to end spending 5 seconds per screen when you open it for the first time.

Recently I decided to do something about my handwriting, and I went from barely-legible scrawls to being able to write in any of a dozen fonts in the space of a few weeks (less than an hour practice a day). If you want to fix your handwriting, start by slowing down, and try to write just a few sentences in a nice, consistent style.

Think of it not as writing, but as doodling, just with letters being your doodles. Once you've played around like that for a few hours, look up some penmanship resources and try to mimic some writing styles. If you really get into it, try some calligraphy, it's a lot of fun. People regularly comment and compliment my handwriting now. (But if I go back to top-speed, it becomes a scrawl again.)

I never click on a rollingstone link since about 2 years ago when opening the site on my android handset in the UK resulted in a malware popup that managed to charge something to my phone bill via payforit.

I went straight to the video and about 1 minute in I was sure it was some kind of college humor parody. I guess startups are under a lot of pressure to conform to type expectations and PR companies will make them look a certain way in these promo videos, but seriously, it's so extreme now that it's just laughable. The head of engineering was the only normal person in the video. To make something like this there must be a core group of hardcore engineers, and I can't help but imagine them collectively eye-rolling in the face of all the vice presidents with their perfectly tousled hairstyles and oh-so emphatic TED-talk styled speech.

Leaving aside the gimmicks in some of these examples, it is a fact that when you need to communicate quantitative information machine generated text is a great solution. Our company builds analytics and dashboards for fund managers and traders (the people who manage most pension funds). Infographics and charts only go so far; eventually, the user has to extract the key information, or communicate it with a colleague, which means verbalizing.

[ShowHN:] We built our report generation system (in Haskell) that can create a custom report for every portfolio or market index, and can be tuned to the user's risk profile. We've released a public version that anyone can use for free that covers most global indices and sectors:

https://apps.otastech.com/morningreport?listtype=marketindex...

In our experience, the turns of phrase that initially give the impression that the text has been written by a human quite quickly become irritating noise. Our users need to absorb information quickly and accurately, and comprehension is aided by adhering to a standard structure and avoiding figurative language.

> ""almost certainly an underestimate", because a number of climate-health relationships are not measurable due to lack of adequate data".

How can the very lack of evidence and data logically support a claim that any estimate is either too low or too high with any "certainty"?

Interesting that you mention HA/replication, reading the article I was swept along with the pg evangelism but I fully expected at least a grudging concession to mssql on replication.

We use both pg and mssql, I was surprised the article didn't mention replication. While one might be justified in describing pg as more "developer friendly", mssql is more "enterprise friendly". As a developer, I prefer pg, but as a stack designer, I still lean more toward mssql. Put another way, if I'm joining a project as a developer, I hope they're using pg, but if I'm consulting and designing a stack for a company I'll probably recommend mssql, almost definitely if they're doing something that requires replication, and/or the team isn't going to have lots of db expertise.

I guess this is quite self-contradictory on one level but I think it's a fairly common view (having checked with some colleagues).

I know that pg has support for replication, but it certainly isn't as easy to set up as mssql, and you need to do a LOT of reading to figure out what flavor you should use, and it's not entirely obvious what features you get with each, or which ones are really recommended and which are semi-deprecated.

CTO: Do you support replication? mssql: yes, and it's pretty easy to set up. pg: well, we've got 3 or 4 ways of doing that, depending on what you want exactly, method A isn't really maintained any more, and method D looks like it's going to be great in a release or two, so maybe that's the one to bet on, but in the meantime you have to put up with a bit of pain.

(dramatisation, probably inaccurate paraphrase, but that's what the cto heard)

Buddhism: Not Always So, and anything else by Shunryu Suzuki, What Buddha Taught, by Rahula

Smarter: A Mathematical Bridge by Stephen Hewson, it will make you grok the real structure of mathematics even if you're starting with fairly basic undergraduate level math, and it will make it immensely easier to tackle new areas of mathematics.

Pattern recognition and machine learning by Bishop

Popular: Coders at Work, Founders at Work, Behind the Cloud

We'd always love to have more types of data, but we haven't yet prototyped anything that uses additional sensors. At the start we really thought that reliable heartrate and bloodpressure sensing watches would be on the market very soon, and we kinda designed the early versions with that in mind. As the product developed, we were surprised how much useful status information and trend analysis could be done with just activity and location data.

The long term trend analysis of this kind of data interests us a lot, in the simple case of activity levels, most seniors go through a very gradual decline, and there's no point at which anyone recognises the need for intervention and a change in exercise habits. I think if people had the analysis more readily, they'd see this and it could have quite a positive outcome by prompting people to make changes in habit to recover their former activity levels. The same analysis should work equally for chronic conditions, and if you can merge information about medication then you should be able to recover a very complete picture.

Deosn't RAID usually at least give some warning if you watch the syslogs? (Genuine question, I am not a sysadmin, we have linux servers with hetzner on software raid 1 and a couple have had single-disk issues which we spotted straight away in zenoss and had hetzner replace the disk. Am I incorrect in thinking this is normal?)

I'm not participating but I can understand the backlash - over the past few years I've had plenty of junior developers arguing that we should all be using mongo for everything, because it's "web scale" and it can handle "big data", before they even know what a query plan is. A lot of what we do as developers is, and should be, mentoring new devs, and helping to strike a balance between prudent adoption of new technology and understanding the utility of mature technologies, like SQL databases. It has tested the patience of many competent, pragmatic, experienced developers to have to repeatedly justify the use of standard SQL dbs on applications for which they are completely adequate. So the backlash is to be expected.

"As soon as he started drinking, you could see a little smile on his face. That's when he could talk to people, or tell a joke."

Coders in general are susceptible to alcohol for these kinds of reasons. Add in flexi hours (hey it doesn't matter what time I show up as long as I ship code, right?), and it's practically the ideal job for a functioning alcoholic.

I've seen dozens of fellow programmers slip down the slope. It's particularly bad in the financial sector in London, where "trader culture" of hard drinking, drugs and women is seen as acceptable. Usually it's well concealed until early to mid-thirties. Often their situation rapidly degenerates after a relationship breakup or family bereavement. What's fun and social when you're with your friends in your 20s isn't so much when you're 35 and lonely.

It's striking how casual and uninformed the general attitude to this drug is in our industry, e.g. http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works-creativity/

Very cool. How about a bunch of these located in places like the Louvre, the British Museum, that become available to rent when the museums are closed to physically-present tourists?

The timezones work out great for people in the US, and the museums have nothing to lose since it's all incremental revenue.

great to see anything that helps finding property in London easier. Any reason you're only showing flats and not including houses as well? I'd imagine once you go outside zone 2 houses will be in the majority.

A good starting point for more rigorous evidence: http://stoppredatorygambling.org/category/research-center/lo...

I've been interested in the topic for a long time as I have a relative who spends most of his income on lottery tickets. Any time I can, I ask people who play the lottery why they do it. Most of them spend a tiny amount and it's something they have a little bit of fun with their workmates or family, these are the "normals". But about 20% of the players account for 80% of the ticket revenue, these are the people playing out of desperation because they are in a poverty trap and they have no other way out. They are foregoing essentials to pay for the lottery tickets, so if they didn't play, they wouldn't accrue the money they "saved". These people are often on the brink: depressed, panicked and alone. A lottery ticket is a temporary "self medication" with which they can temporarily quiet their anxieties, until of course, they need the next hit.

Lotteries are a tax on people who are desperate, not ignorant. Even if you understand the math, your utility function changes so that you're willing to trade a small expected loss for the long shot chance of solving all your problems. I don't buy the idea that swathes of lottery players really think they're making a value bet. Just because they respond with anecdotal evidence when you confront them with the true odds, doesn't mean they're really arguing the facts, they're just protecting their hopes.

If you don't have the required visas for entry to the destination country the destination country will charge the origin country the cost of sending you back. Apart from the cost it's just a lot less hassle all round if a passport problem is discovered before you actually travel.

I can see both sides on this one, you should certainly be self-aware enough that you periodically reflect deeply; I think the danger is that far too many guys in their 20s get into a rut, paralysed into inaction through over-analysis; your 20s and 30s are the time you should be vigorous, active, taking risks, exploring, having experiences, and doing so will result in more self-knowledge than sitting in your room contemplating the universe. In general, it's better to err on the side of action - when in doubt, build something.