Hacker News' "Who is Hiring?" thread, part 2, remote and locations - <AUTHOR> https://blog.whoishiring.io/hacker-news-who-is-hiring-thread-part-2-remote-and-locations/ <comment><USER2> I loved this line from the article "With unsolved US VISA problems for STEM workers, IT companies might have to get creative to hire potential employees." \-- Yeah, creative...like paying a living wage for the location. Pay salaries that will allow someone to rent their own 1B (not bunking) and the "shortage" will magically disappear.

<comment><USER3> Yep, the tired old "Shortage of Engineers" meme is bound to come up in any discussion about tech hiring that ignores compensation. Saying there is a shortage of something in a market only makes sense given a price. Sure, there is probably a shortage of Bay Area engineers if you're paying $70K, but I bet there is no shortage if you're paying $400K.

<comment><USER4> I think its a lot more complex than that.

If the cost of beef was increased 4x for whatever reason, then most people would just switch their preference for meat.

There are ofcourse a lot of greedy companies.

But a lot of the time the consumer demands a price point for software product, many startups cannot afford to pay 400K to developers.

I think its not a reflection of how difficult it might be to create software but stagnant wages for the average person.

<comment><USER5> The system of usury against land ensures that land costs adapt to absorb all available income after food/clothing/energy costs have been accounted for.

Why is silicon valley more expensive to rent in? Because people came with money and the banks agreed to loan at a multiple of the new wage ceiling.

If wages increase x4 guess what will happen?

We need to stop banks creating debt to issue against land otherwise it will always absorb all income. And therefore all productivity gains flow to the land owner.

<comment><USER6> >Why is silicon valley more expensive to rent in?

Because supply and demand. High salaries attract a lot of people to the bay and communities systematically refuse to build new housing to meet the demand so the price goes up.

You can do whatever you want to the banks but that won't change the fundamental of 2X people trying to live in X houses.

<comment><USER5> No, many hot-spots have large rentier presence including people "owning" and renting out multiple residencies which causes huge supply pressure.

Credit also typically increases ahead of wages which squeezes people further.

This isn't supply of people vs supply of homes, this is supply of credit. If you neutralise this you will see prices fall and be paying less of your labour to banks.

2008 - the credit taps ran dry => huge crash. Before that near unlimited credit saw land prices increase hugely. Neither on the up or the down did we see wages have such volatility.

<comment><USER7> I don't know why it is outrageous to say the solution to high rent is to build more.

We shouldn't worry about "squeezing" people out. Ours is a HUGE nation. We have A LOT of natural resources and there is no reason why we can't let people build more (outside of protected areas, of course).

People who are "priced out" should move to places where rent costs less. I keep hearing about property owners having enough political clout to block further development, depressing supply. They placate existing residents with tiny portions of rent-controlled apartments.

I fail to see how "gentrification" is a problem at all in the bigger scheme of things.

I don't think people renting out more places is a problem. If landlords hold supply out of the market to prop up prices, we can discourage such actions with a more dynamic property tax that places a realistic tax burden on under occupied or unoccupied property.

All that being said, we definitely need to figure out some way to peoperly educate people about personal finance.

<comment><USER5> I'm not arguing _not_ to build more I'm simply arguing with the notion that the main problem is one of supply and demand. It is not, there are other problems in the mix including taxing labour not land.

[https://www.amazon.com/Progress-Poverty-Industrial- Depressio...](https://www.amazon.com/Progress-Poverty-Industrial-Depressions- Increase/dp/0911312587/?keywords=progress+and+poverty)

<comment><USER7> > there are other problems in the mix including taxing labour not land

I agree to some extent. Property (land) taxes have to be high enough to discourage people from leaving it unused. I have no problems with fully replacing personal income tax but I'm not an expert and I have no idea if we can realistically raise the same tax revenue from land tax alone.

<comment><USER5> We can. Land ownership is far harder to hide. Land value tax is the establishment's worst nightmare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Remote work is not a silver bullet for solving the faux work shortage. Aside from the fact that there is no shortage in the first place [1], remote work is still very new. Without proper operations in place and a solid, tested, management structure you'll end up with a hodgepodge of culture and unhappy employees. I used to be bullish on remote work until I actually started doing it. It can certainly work, and I still encourage companies to explore it, but it's not a one size fits all approach, or a replacement for proper organizational management.

1\. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-s-solomon/the-myth- of-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-s-solomon/the-myth-of-the-tech- tale_b_9349542.html)

<comment><USER9> Those of us that have worked as remote engineers for a lot of our career know that most companies in general are just plain not managed in a way that would work for companies that have lots of remote workers, especially larger companies. Policies that discourage and undermine remote work that are popular with large companies include:

1\. Mandatory all-hands meeting times

2\. Banning popular communications platforms like Slack, Google Chat, Skype

3\. Expectations of all workers to be present continuously for their timezone instead of letting workers self-organize

4\. Performance and productivity metrics based around KPIs that do not actually measure productivity but presence

<comment><USER10> You left out:

5\. Incompetent IT Ops mostly staffed by cheap contractors to offset overpaying for terrible hardware and software from Cisco to ensure a complete inability to reliably utilize the corporate VPN.

<comment><USER9> Having been ops before I have to stand up a little. Not _all_ contractors compete primarily on price (in my case I was paid substantially more than FTEs and even other contractors I found out - 20%+ more than my peers, in fact) but also based upon scarcity of qualified persons. I've rarely heard of VPN that's consistently stable that meets the conflicting requirements that IT managers ask for. Juniper, F5, Cisco, and even smalltime crap based upon OpenVPN just constantly breaks repeatedly in many real-world corporate networks.

This doesn't mean that you're incorrect though - most IT O&S winds up going to lowest-bidding contracting companies and offshored resources that are measured upon the dumbest KPIs ever that completely leave out whether users are actually happy with anything at all. In fact, most IT in the F500 seems to have given up on ever making users happy. I'd say the better measure would be tickets / user filed - if a user never files a ticket, they're not complaining.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One additional reason that I've observed to add to the list:

* Declining dominance of the Microsoft/Oracle hegemony in secondary markets

During the '90s Microsoft and Oracle were particularly effective at entering emerging markets and pushing their solutions to such a degree that "computer programmer" became synonymous with "Microsoft/Oracle developer". Thus, if you wanted to become a software developer in one of these markets, it meant learning C#/Java, along with all the ecosystem, tooling, and inevitably...lock-in.

Fast-forward 20 or so years, and the Open Source movement is finally beginning to crack that shell of lock-in. Anecdotally, when I first moved to Turkey 4 years ago, technology job sites almost exclusively listed C#/Java positions. Today, I know many Python, Ruby, Scala, Go, etc. developers living and working in Turkey, and there's been an explosion of related conferences, trainings, events, etc.

The one last hurdle I see that needs to be overcome in these places is the notion that developer education is as much a concern for those that employ developers as for the developers themselves. Pretty much all of the conferences/trainings have to be held over weekends because it is still difficult for developers to get time off during the week to attend. Once that bit of cultural shift happens, I only foresee this trend accelerating.

<comment><USER12> Is there anywhere (e.g. blog) you've shared about your move and experience living in Turkey? Like, do you speak Turkish for your job?

<comment><USER11> Unfortunately I'm woefully behind on blogging, and there's a number of programming topics that are higher on the list than anything like that. In short, though, Turkey is a great place with friendly people, _breathtakingly- amazing_ food, and lots to see and do. I work remotely, and English is the _lingua franca_ of everyone I work with, though I have managed to learn enough Turkish to get around at home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Fast forward 5 years, now more than 20% of the positions there are open remote work! " At GitLab we think that remote only is the logical conclusion of this [http://www.remoteonly.org/](http://www.remoteonly.org/)

"High speed Internet." apart from that the tools (video calling, etc.) are also getting better.

BTW I think the rise of English is really interesting, I added that [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly- org/commit/4bff...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly- org/commit/4bffb3636ff3d59170c65642fc1062e17fb3927b)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for sharing that link, as I've never seen this Manifesto before. This puts into words so much better than the explanations I give people for why I prefer remote. It's interesting to see some of these on the list - -written down processes over verbal -async communication -formal communication over informal

We often hear alot about enlarging your net of potential talent (#1) and flexible work hours, but there's much more to it than that.

At this point, I can't imagine _not_ working remotely anymore. I'm just sooo much more productive and happy this way.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for your kind response. I can't imagine commuting for 2 hours pay day either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I happened to be in Russia when the Who's Hiring thread showed up. I have family there, so I was entertaining the thought of possibly moving there, or maybe staying for a year or two.

However, I noticed most of the remote locations were "US-only", and even the ones in other countries were usually local to that country -- "germany only", etc.

I was wondering how many of the "US-only" ones would accept me, since I am a US Citizen, just not living in the US. Or is there some kind of tax reason they have to be US-only?

<comment><USER16> I am from Brazil, since I graduated around 2009, I never got a 100% legal job, and never got a well paying job or contract.

I keep hearing that I should move, or should work remote, I always reply: "How?"

Because most countries only allow you to move into them if you get invited or is already wealthy.

Most remote jobs I see, no matter where I look (I don't look only on HN) are US-only, or local only.

Most jobs that accept foreigners, have written on them: "Must already have H1B or Greencard"

So what I am supposed to do?

People criticize me when I complain that my yearly income has been on average about 10.000 USD, and I have to expend 2000 USD to build an "average" computer (or 4000 USD if I do it with only 100% legal parts with all taxes paid), saying that I am "stupid" for not working remote or relocating. But I am yet to see someone offer me a solution.

Even people that could hire me directly, sometimes say to me: "Oh, I loved your work, I am sure you will find work! Of course, I can't hire you, because it is against my company policy."

<comment><USER12> A way to get experience might be to suggest that you're hired as a consultant or contractor. It's easier for the company to do, but be careful that they still treat you fairly. I know a company in the UK that does this for its remote workers.

<comment><USER16> I don't lack experience. I lack JOB. Or REAL contract.

I've been working since 2009, I have lots of projects done, plus a startup.

But most of this, is not legal, usually I had jobs pretending to be contracts (ie: it was a day job, but paid as if I was a contractor, highly illegal in my country, because the government consider this a way to avoid following labour laws... and it is exactly that), low-paying contracts that don't follow all laws correctly either, stuff paid off the books, and so on.

But I found noone, in any country, willing to hire me 100% legally with fair pay, either as employee or contractor. (I did got some offers for legal work, but the pay was always less than my student loans, and later the loans I made to pay student loans, so not worth it at all).

<comment><USER17> As the parent said, you should try jobs coming from recruiters on LinkedIn (that's where they hang out the most) US enterprise companies hire consultants through the recruiting agency. InfoSys, Tech Mahindra, DataArt, Altoros, Ness, HCL, a bunch more. They will hire you legally but usually take half of what they agree with the hiring company. Say the hiring company pays $80,000 on a contract you'd only see maybe $40,000 on your employment contract. They take cut of an undisclosed amount. These are legitimate vendors. Basically outsource. Browse LinkedIn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you combine SF with Silicon Valley you really ought to combine Cambridge, MA with Boston, MA

<comment><USER19> Same with the LA area here. "Santa Monica" is mentioned once, but if you aggregated all the locations that fall into the Greater LA area, I bet it would rank higher.

<comment><USER10> It would also cover the land area of a small country. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Remote is still rare, it seems, because usual sweatshops are traditional habitat for pointy haired bosses and other parasitic "management".

For remote, the way Linux kernel or BSDs are being developed, one needs nothing but git, emacs and browser (well, in case of Linux also a working mail) and no management at all. How could, say, Amazon, even hypothetically switch to remote?

More seriously, there is no market for code - otherwise people would just pay per commit (passed all the tests) nice and easy. The problem is people with money doesn't need a mere good code, they need their positions, their bonuses, their status. They will pay you for filling a slot in the social hierarchy which supports them, not for your good code.

This is why, perhaps, remote works fine for "nonprofits", like FreeBSD, but for corporations it is still a heresy.

Again, there, it seems, is no demand for mere good quality code.

This, by the way, is connected with hiring. Almost no one hire for abilities, everyone is hiring for good school diplomas. (Which diploma Mike Pall has? Igor Sysoev was a college dropout).

If I am wrong, and there is a market for code - solved problem, pushed a commit, all tests passed, money transferred - please tell me, I would participate gladly.

<comment><USER21> > They will pay you for filling a slot in the social hierarchy which supports > them, not for your good code.

This is absolutely true but remote workers can still be FTEs that extend a manager's umbrella of influence. So really, working remotely is orthogonal to managerial pyramids of power.

If anything, hiring remote workers may allow managers to get _more_ employees working for them because they can get more bodies for the same amount of budget.

<comment><USER22> Not always. A friend of mine works remotely for a financial institution. His manager wanted to revoke his work from home agreement because he wanted to hit a target metric of number of man-days worked in a physical office to justify a corner office with upper management. Sad but true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We embrace technology for every stupid purpose imaginable, yet remote work facilitated by technology is generally viewed with disdain. It makes no sense, which is why remote work will continue to rise into the future. The dramatic centralization of our industry into a few locations also doesn't help with the crush of housing costs.

<comment><USER24> Putting a laptop on a cart, keeping it at just the right position relative to the whiteboard wall, and jotting down notes and diagrams for the guys on the other end, is frustrating. Repeating ~10% of the statements in a meeting because of audio issues is frustrating. There are a lot more technologies that need to be brought to market, or improved, in order to eliminate the drawbacks of remote work.

Right now, I find that working with the remote people is fine when there is some separation between our work, like an API, and it is excellent when I can get work to pay for me to travel. But debugging or pair programming over a call, where we can only share one screen, is just painful.

<comment><USER25> Have you thought about working in a shared screen session for code editing, with a parallel chat client for interactivity. Voice is just too low SNR for code.

<comment><USER24> Shared screen session? Are you referring to GNU screen, and suggesting that we collaborate on some sort of mainframe setup? That sounds like a really interesting idea, like that crazy shared tabletop interface the Wayland guys have been promising.

Right now, my setup is: watch the loudest person's screenshare on my small screen (1080p) and do everything else on the main screen (4K). Git push to a WIP branch every few minutes. It makes for an interesting git history, for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How does hiring remotely work financially? Should I set up a company and invoice the company that hired me? Does it make to go off-shore?

Any info would be helpful, thanks.

<comment> Const-me Depends on your jurisdiction + citizenship. In some places, you may work without setting up a company, e.g. being a sole entrepreneur.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I hope some policy makers in the government keep a watch on such threads. They will get an idea about the loss of taxes, that these remote would otherwise pay if they were to be employed in the US. Not to mention the social security and the indirect economic contributions. In fact all the anti-immigration camps should get a reality check at this point. In 5-10 years, most of the US tech jobs will be remote and not a dime of the remote worker's income will reach american shores.

<comment><USER28> Any American citizens working remotely still have to pay US taxes.

<comment><USER29> Isn't it above 1mln? (US citizen working in London told me he has to make the tax return, but he is not tax for anything below 1 000 000 $)

<comment><USER30> It's $100,000 not 1m. Many countries have a tax treaty with the US so that you're not double-taxed, but instead pay the greater of the local rate or US rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My own assumption is that even though remote work will increase, it will remain marginal and not consume most of the IT jobs out there.

The simple reason being that the biggest IT/tech companies have invested heavily in land & buildings (think about how Apple and Facebook have built huge "campuses" \- why they call the offices/building a campus, I don't know, but anyways ...) and they need to utilize those assets in order to avoid the "white elephant" problem.

Also, unlike "agile" software-development or on-demand hosting, they can't merely downscale their land & buildings as they would for their AWS clusters and they also can't sell these buildings, as they seem geared specifically towards the needs of their owners (it isn't just a regular old office-block).

So while _some_ startups of the future will embrace a remote-first culture, the big tech companies and many other regular startups will continue along with the concept of a fixed-location and fixed-office well into the future.

<comment><USER32> maybe not having land/building investments puts companies in a better position? To apply changes faster etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder if this is conflating Cambridge, UK with Cambridge in the US?

</comment><comment><USER34> Great post! A couple of nitpicks on the data presentation for the sake of making it even better:

1\. You don't have enough data to warrant 5 significant digits in the percentages, and even if you did, is it really relevant?

2\. The points in your plot are interpolated using some sort of spline, why? If the answer is: because it looks better than jagged edges, then you should probably remove the spline, because you're effectively adding extraneous information. On the other hand a linear trend line could be nice here.

<comment><USER35> Hey, thanks for the comments. And I agree. I will keep that in mind writing the next part.

(I'm an author)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Amsterdam is in Europe and in the top 20..

<comment><USER35> right. I've updated the writing.

<comment><USER37> Did you merge all Dutch jobs into Amsterdam? This would be sensible for some but not all locations in The Netherlands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Bear in mind that HN has mainly US based readers. So those insights are not reflecting the reality IMO.

<comment><USER8> If you read the article the author points out, several times, that he does not recommend taking this data as absolute truth throughout tech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wonder how meaningful the "remote work" is, considering the legal issues of hiring workers from another country?

What if there weren't any?

Time zones aren't always the problem, high-speed internet is often common, lots of IT jobs are location-agnostic.

It could have a serious impact on the job market - what is poor in USA is upper 1% income worldwide, so an ability to get a remote job at USA prices can make local jobs uncompetitive by huge factors.

What sort of effects would this have on the world? Or is it meaningless speculation anyway, since the legal restrictions aren't going away in any plausible futures?

</comment><comment><USER17> My observation this month happens to be UK/London job availability on "Who is Hiring" is increasing while the jobs for SV (mainly SF) is decreasing.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm increasingly curious about what kinds of trends there are in tech hiring outside of the English speaking world. Wouldn't the HN "Who's Hiring" thread being in English make it inherently biased in terms of global trends, especially when looking for the "next Silicon Valley" as the end goal?

Would a city like Beijing or Taipei be adequately represented here at all?

<comment><USER35> I've just run the query and it's 6 (not this month, all time) with Beijing as a location.

My best guess for China is: they have to have something similar, although obviously not in English. They have a huge market with limited reasons to cooperate with English-speaking Internet. Also, Chinese Internet is isolated you won't see many services that are available in US or EU.

Fun fact there was an attempt to implement (copy) whoishiring.io [http://www.v2ex.com/t/213945#](http://www.v2ex.com/t/213945#) the reason they like it but no google maps in china.

(I'm an author of this blog post)

<comment><USER40> Makes sense. I couldn't help thinking about this post from a few months back, in the context of tracking geographic shifts in startup hiring:

[http://www.recode.net/2016/5/13/11592570/china-startup- tech-...](http://www.recode.net/2016/5/13/11592570/china-startup-tech-economy- silicon-valley)

I wonder if China's tech startups would impact the data if they had a presence on HN. Kind of an interesting puzzle

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> SF proper has 70% of "silicon valley" tech jobs? I figured south bay and the peninsula had much more than SF proper.

<comment><USER42> "SF proper has 70% of "silicon valley" tech jobs"

...that post on HN Who's Hiring. Big difference (biased towards newer companies) compared the the Bay Area tech industry as a whole. For instance, I'd bet that Google (Mtn View) + Facebook have more job postings any given month than the whole HN Who's Hiring post. And that's not counting eBay, Cisco, Apple, LinkedIn, Tesla, etc etc etc.

<comment><USER41> Yeah, plenty of listings likely paraphrased per Jim Gaffigan:

It's like, 'Hey, where're you from?' 'Me, I'm from San Francisco.' 'Oh really? Where in San Francisco?' 'Uhhh, outside San Francisco.' 'Where outside San Francisco?' 'Gilroy.'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Shocked not to see LA in the post at all. Santa Monica (an LA suburb, more or less) appears once.

</comment><comment><USER43> I find it very surprising that Tel Aviv, Israel (supposed "startup nation") is nowhere in those charts.

<comment><USER35> Please keep in mind that this only Hacker News Who is hiring, maybe other sources are more popular there.

Also, nearly every big city was already announced as next Silicon Valley by the press by now. The press is creating huge illusion here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Surprised not to see DC in the list of cities... usually shows up a lot in the hiring threads...

<comment><USER8> I'm surprised as well. When I moved from DC to Portland I saw a massive decrease in recruiter spam. Even two years later I still get 10 emails per week about jobs in DC. Portland on the other hand? Pretty much zero.

<comment><USER45> Out of curiosity, what's generating the job spam in DC? Profile on LinkedIn, or other sites?

I have the same thing going on.

<comment><USER8> No idea. I get random emails from shady "meetups" and networking events too. I can't report the spam and unsub fast enough.

The recruiter spam has transcended LinkedIn too. It's mostly direct emails from recruiters. I wouldn't mind if the jobs were even slightly related to what I do. It's pretty clear I'm a designer and frontend dev, but I get spam for Java and PHP gigs all the time...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> honest question: Any idea why Toronto (and Canada in general) is not higher in this list?

<comment><USER4> Per capita Toronto/Vancouver is a lot higher than London, its just that London is 8 million people while Toronto is barely 3 million.

<comment><USER47> I'm always amazed that Montreal hasn't taken off yet as an alternative to the two.

<comment><USER48> The language laws are a huge impediment, both for operations and hiring international people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> London is in Europe but Berlin in Germany? seems pretty ironic given recent news

<comment><USER50> London isn't technically in Europe anymore..

<comment><USER51> > London isn't technically in Europe anymore..

London is in Europe as much as it has ever been. Geographically, its status hasn't changed -- whether you consider the island off the coast of the European mainland part of Europe or not; politically, its still the capital of the UK, which -- despite having voted that its government _should_ withdraw from the EU -- remains an EU member, and not even formally on the exit path yet.

<comment><USER52> UK will also remain a member of the Council of Europe, a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, will probably have a Switzerland-ish deal on European trade, and will likely opt-in to a lot of European projects like the ESA and science funding/cooperation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pelorus Jack - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelorus_Jack <comment><USER3> Unfortunately, as often is with these things, the truth might be less exciting that the legend: [http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/10/pelorus- jack...](http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/10/pelorus-jack-hero- dolphin-guided-ships-dangerous-water-early-20th-century/) :(

However, if you'd like to savor the magic, the truth and the legend can be one and the same: who knows what really happened in 1909, after all :)

<comment><USER4> Is it less wonderful that, in moments of great danger and fear, this dolphin was a symbol of joy and good fortune for the sailors on the ship?

It's pretty magical to me to think that a dolphin, just doing dolphin things and playing in the wake of a giant wooden sea vessel, was enough to see those sailors through life-and-death situations.

Little reminders of good in the world, regardless of whether the reminders themselves are aware of it, can really change things for the better for a whole lot of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pelorus Bridge is the most beautiful swimming spot if you're ever in that part of the world. The bridge runs over the river which runs into the sound that Pelorus Jack was named after.

[https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to- go/ma...](https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to- go/marlborough/places/pelorus-bridge-scenic-reserve/)

<comment><USER6> Note to the unwary: If you ever find yourself in that part of the world, be prepared for everything you see to be accurately describable as "the most beautiful".

The entire south island of New Zealand is "the most beautiful"!

<comment><USER7> Heh. It looks like ordinary NZ bush to me! I'm not sure I'd say the entire South Island though, as quite a bit of it is boring farmland.

Here are the places in the article: [https://www.google.com/maps/@-41.051886,173.738907,51935m/da...](https://www.google.com/maps/@-41.051886,173.738907,51935m/data=!3m1!1e3)

Pelorus Sound is in the middle and extends down to Havelock. French Pass is at the top. There's not nearly as much regular boat traffic through either anymore, as most inter-island traffic takes the big Interislander ferry which comes in to Picton (just south of map), and then there's a road to Nelson (over to the west).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >In 1904, someone aboard the SS Penguin tried to shoot Pelorus Jack with a rifle. Despite the attempt on his life, Pelorus Jack continued to help ships. According to folklore, however, he no longer helped the Penguin, which shipwrecked in Cook Strait in 1909.

If this is true, it's the most amazing thing. Imagine a dolphin having a grudge with a ship

<comment><USER9> It seems too good to be true in my opinon.

<comment><USER10> Not _that_ far-fetched, though. Corvids, for example, are known to hold grudges against specific humans who have done them wrong.

<comment><USER11> A friend of mine had a parrot that greeted me and some friends as we arrived. Shortly after arriving on of my friends started making faces towards it and immediately it tried to attack him, but left him alone for the rest of the night.

As we left the parrot said bye to everyone but him.

A week or two later we came back. My friend had forgotten. The parrot had not and immediately attacked as he came close :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Of interest: the first link in the article defines _fl. <date range>_ as a standard syntax meaning the dates in which someone was know to be alive and _flourishing_.

I did not know this until today.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floruit](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floruit)

<comment><USER13> No one wins a flds medal after 40.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Almost more interesting than Pelorus Jack, and is currently observable is French Pass, the hazard he helped them navigate through...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_Aumiti_/_French_Pass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_Aumiti_/_French_Pass)

> The pass is 500 metres (1,600 ft) across, but the main navigation channel > (the "throat" or "narrows") contracts down to only 100 metres (330 ft) with > a 20-metre (66 ft) deep shoaling region. Most of the rest of the pass is > broken reef.[8]

> On one side is Cook Strait with a tidal range up to 2 metres (6.6 ft), and > on the other side is Tasman Bay with a tidal range up to 4 metres (13 > ft).[9] This can result in substantial pressure gradients across the pass, > complicated by a phase or time difference of about 25 minutes between the > high tides on either side. Peak flow in the throat of the pass is around 4 > metres per second (13 ft/s).[10]

> Near to the pass are deep holes where strong vertical flows can occur.[11] > In 2000, student divers taking part in a drift dive during the local ebb > flow were separated from their surface float and caught in a whirlpool. This > dragged them into "Jacob's Hole", a 68-metre (223 ft)[12] deep depression > south west of the pass. The depth of this descent resulted in multiple > fatalities. The group appears to have been drawn deep into the hole and then > returned to the surface again. A dive computer record of one of the > survivors show a depth of up to 89-metre (292 ft). According to the > coroner's report, the accident occurred on a falling tide, so the current > was flowing from the south west to the north east.[13][14]

</comment><comment><USER15> Thank you. What an amazing story!

</comment><comment><USER16> The most brilliant part:

Occupation - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER17> I find it quite sad that multiple people have tried to kill it :(

</comment><comment><USER18> What a beautiful story!

And as always the human being leaving his mark. One shot :(

</comment><comment><USER19> More about dolphins in this youtube video with dr. Laurance Doyle at 30 minutes. In it languages are compared and apparently language dolphins follow Zipf law.

[https://youtu.be/H30NipTkA5s](https://youtu.be/H30NipTkA5s) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law)

</comment><comment><USER20> There is a similar, and fascinating, story of killer whales co-operating with humans: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_Sou...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_South_Wales)

<comment><USER21> There is also this which is a bit similar: [https://www.livescience.com/20027-dolphins-work- fishermen.ht...](https://www.livescience.com/20027-dolphins-work- fishermen.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm a little late to this thread, but the French Pass looks like no cake walk to navigate:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2nCrjDRJb4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2nCrjDRJb4)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm waiting for someone to come into this thread and say the dolphin was just doing it for food.

Some can not accept that dolphins are more sophisticated than some humans, on the basis they are smart and maybe bored.

<comment><USER24> Dolphin equivalent of a trainspotter. Doing it for food would be objectively intelligent.

<comment><USER25> >It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars, and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.

-HG2G, Douglas Adams

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> [https://www.reddit.com/r/dolphinconspiracy/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dolphinconspiracy/)</comment>


AWS Compute Cluster #231 on Top 500 - <AUTHOR> http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/11/14/AWSComputeCluster231OnTop500.aspx <comment><USER2> Each (cluster compute) instance has 2 quad core processors. The machine on the Top 500 list has 7040 cores. So at 8 cores per instance (880 total instances) and $1.60/hr per instance, that comes to $1408.0/hr to run this machine.

No idea how that compares to other machines on the list. You would really need a TCO analysis.

When I run our 250 node EC2 cluster of small instances (around $25/hr) I get nervous that it won't shut down properly. $1400/hr would be pretty nerve wracking...

<comment><USER3> I wonder if cloud clusters will get GPGPU, since that seems to be a factor these days. It's not much use for a general purpose web server though.

<comment><USER4> They have compute nodes with GPUs. From their website:

      22 GB of memory
      33.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core     "Nehalem" architecture)
      2 x NVIDIA Tesla "Fermi" M2050 GPUs
      1690 GB of instance storage
      64-bit platform
      I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)
      API name: cg1.4xlarge

So they have new awesome Fermi GPUs but the instances cost $0.50 more per hour than the standard HPC compute nodes. Generally exciting for anyone with GPU code and the desire to run on a cluster.

<comment><USER5> Those are available now, but not with the comment was posted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I ran about 100 performance benchmarks on this new cluster compute instance and published results on our blog. It uses Nehalem X5570 with 16 hyper- threaded cores (8 physical), HVM, and 10 Gbps non-blocking network for the EBS volume. Out of 134 different virtual and bare-metal cloud servers I've benchmarked from EC2, Linode, Rackspace and other vendors, the EC2 cluster instance is the fastest in almost every category (CPU, disk IO, encoding, database, others).

[http://cloudharmony.com/b/2010/09/benchmarking-of- ec2s-new-c...](http://cloudharmony.com/b/2010/09/benchmarking-of-ec2s-new- cluster.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> For me, the biggest thing about AWS has been easy access to * ridiculously* powerful machines for not very much money -- a few of us decided that we wanted to build a markov chain from the entirety of Wikipedia, which is quite doable if you have access to a box with 68GB of RAM. That's quite a bit more than a standard student laptop.

I think on the last run we got about 2/3 of the way through; we should be able to do the whole thing if i ever get round to running it again.

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting. I just read the article _Can Cloud Computing Reach the Top500?_ , which concludes that EC2 won't crack the top 500. I wonder what changed.

<http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/pauldj/pubs/uchpc09.pdf>

<comment><USER5> I think the two big changes are that the nodes have 10Gb network cards and full bisection bandwidth. They're also HVM instead of PVM but I don't know how much that matters for this benchmark.

<comment><USER2> Internode bandwidth seemed to be the limiting factor cited in the paper, so that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be interesting to see if Amazon will donate/discount AWS services to non-profits and research institutions (e.g cancer) to leverage this node power to make up for processing shortfalls.

<comment><USER2> They do award AWS in Education research grants. We got one related to cancer research in fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _"One of the fastest supercomputers in the world for $1.60/node hour. Cloud computing changes the economics in a pretty fundamental way."_

Good luck getting much computing done at $1.6 an hour... Supercomputing speeds are bound to cost a lot more than that.

But it's still cool to have an account on #231 of the top500 list. I have to brag about it someplace.

<comment><USER5> Why wouldn't you be able to get much done on this cluster?

<comment><USER10> You would, but it's slightly misleading to say that two dollars buy you an hour on a supercomputer. It buys you an hour on a tiny fraction of a supercomputer. Once you reach proper cluster size, you'll pay significantly more; maybe even more than on a "normal" machine of similar power.

<comment><USER9> > maybe even more than on a "normal" machine of similar power.

To be fair, it has the added benefit of you not having to sell a cluster of PS3's on e-Bay after your number crunching is done... I think that could be the biggest change cloud computing brings to HPC.

<comment><USER11> when I price out my services (which usually come out to being cheaper than ec2) a rough rule of thumb is that the monthly fee should be around 1/4th the capital cost of the hardware.

When thinking about the rent vs buy equation, this is something to think about. If you only need it for a month or less, you almost certainly will save money by renting. If you keep the hardware for a year, you will nearly always save money by buying. (of course, it's a little more complex; if you have have a bunch of hardware knolwedge in-house and can sell hardware that was used for a month at nearly full price, it might make sense to buy even for one month's usage. If the opposite is true, e.g. there is something in your organization that prevents you from hiring hardware contractors, or you have budge for MRC but not for capital costs, renting might make sense longer. I just use the 'four months' as a starting place.)

This is leaving aside the "of reasonable size" bit. If you need 256MiB of ram and a tiny slice of a x86 CPU in a data center, it's nearly always cheaper for you to rent a virtual than to own a physical bit of hardware. But for large clusters, you usually need enough ram/cpu to justify buying and hosting a real (32GiB ram/8 core or better) server.

<comment><USER9> It's a bit more complicated than that: your computing needs may vary with time. One month you may need to do a huge amount of processing on a thousand- node monster while the next you would be perfectly happy with two Nvidia GPUs for number crunching and visualization. In order to justify the purchase of a given computing capacity, you need to make sure you will have use for it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A (relatively) complete guide to every kind of legal hurdle a startup will face - <AUTHOR> https://launch.gust.com/blog/guide-to-startup-legal-needs?utm_source=hn&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch <comment><USER2> The problem with delegating these tasks to a service like this is the lack of accountability when your company-as-a-service provider screws up a filing or something else. If you're starting a company, responsibility for these bureaucratic matters starts and ends with you. You can hire a law firm but you still have to trust them, and you still have no meaningful recourse if they blow it. You just simply have to spend the time to learn how this stuff works. I never stop being amazed at how much money and effort people will waste just to avoid reading carefully.</comment>


Government Should Regulate Automated Decision-Making - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-17/algorithms-that-manage-people-need-human-regulation <comment><USER2> Can we get a regulation on non-experts making laws about things that do not understand in the slightest.

<comment><USER3> You say that as if lawmakers never at least try to work closely with those experts or even have some expertise themselves (hint, they do).

<comment><USER4> hint, it doesn't show</comment></comment></comment>


How Sweden became an exporter of jihad - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37578919 <comment><USER2> What is a country to do? Deportation seems a reasonable approach when faced with people who refuse to assimilate and who are bringing the failures of their nominally former civilizations along.

</comment><comment><USER3> The truth of what is happening is too inflammatory not to attract the ban hammer.

I'm not blaming Dan and Scott for that, they need to maintain civility and order, but it is nonetheless true.

</comment><comment><USER4> 10 years ago, this article would have been on The Onion.

<comment> T-A 13 years ago, reviews like this one graced the mainstream Swedish press: [http://www.svd.se/fran-svenskhet-till- delaktighet-7NY3](http://www.svd.se/fran-svenskhet-till-delaktighet-7NY3)

It's about a book by an activist-turned-politician-turned-author who spent a few weeks living in one of those places (Rosengård) after several well- publicized incidents, trying to understand their causes. The book's title is a reference to rock-throwing immigrant youths; they mostly seem to target police cars, but ambulances, fire brigades and other ethnicities than their own are also at risk. It's still going on.

The failure of integration in Sweden is not a new problem. It just keeps getting rediscovered over and over again.</comment></comment>


The IRS collects data on Coinbase account holders - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-you-own-bitcoin-the-irs-is-coming-for-you-1521192601 <comment><USER2> Could the IRS do me a solid and send me what the capital gains on my crypto currency are? I'll pay the taxes--I just don't want to have to calculate the taxes.

I know, I know. Intuit and H&R Block refuse to allow that to happen, but if we could stop prioritizing entrenched industries, that'd be really nice.

<comment><USER3> _> >Could the IRS do me a solid and send me what the capital gains on my crypto currency are? I'll pay the taxes--I just don't want to have to calculate the taxes._

Unlike stocks which seem to be entirely traded on exchanges, bitcoin could have been obtained through mining (unlikely, but possible) or a true person- to-person trade/barter. In order to calculate capital gains, one needs to know the cost-basis (i.e. the price you paid to acquire the asset). If bitcoins are deposited into your Coinbase BTC account, there's no way for Coinbase to know what you paid for them, hence difficult/impossible for them to calculate the capital gains.

<comment><USER4> "Unlike stocks which seem to be entirely traded on exchanges" \- no.

You could have bought stock directly from the company, in an IPO or secondary offering (where it does not go through an exchange), from an individual or broker not intermediated by an exchange, etc.

You can keep stock certificates in a safe deposit box, and then later transfer them into your brokerage account, they have no idea what you paid for them.

This is a solved problem, cryptocurrency is not special. If they have the cost basis they can tell you, if not, they can leave it blank.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the clarification. To whit, the few retail equity US and Canadian trading platforms I've used (Schwab's, Interactive Brokers, Scottrade before they became TD Ameritrade, Questrade) also do not provide an explicit feature that purports to calculate capital gains, so Coinbase seems to be exhibiting feature parity with equity retail exchanges. Coinbase and other retail equity trading platforms _do_ provide an easy to calculate gains/losses made from your trades, but as we are both saying, gains/losses shown in the accounts may not necessarily correspond to the actual capital gains at the end of the year in certain situations.

 _> >This is a solved problem, cryptocurrency is not special. If they have the cost basis they can tell you, if not, they can leave it blank._

We're in agreement - this is a solved problem that the retail investor or their accountant needs to calculate manually via aggregation of the entire lifecycle of the asset(s) to properly account for capital gains (or losses).

<comment><USER5> _To whit, the few retail equity US and Canadian trading platforms I 've used (Schwab's, Interactive Brokers, Scottrade before they became TD Ameritrade, Questrade) also do not provide an explicit feature that purports to calculate capital gains_

You should probably call the IRS tipline and say "I think [Schwab] isn't filing their 1099-Bs, you know the thing which reports cost bases and short- term/long-term capital gains for retail investors, and accordingly they're on the hook for billions of dollars of penalties, but to keep the math easy just write me a check for a billion dollars rather than what the law actually says you owe me for this hot tip."

Or, in the alternative, you could look again.

<comment><USER3> >> _Or, in the alternative, you could look again._

I checked again, and you're right. Interactive Brokers is the only platform I still infrequently use but it does have a list of pre-filled tax forms available for download. Worksheet 8949 is also pre-filled, but this is probably where one would need to submit a revised version if previous cost- basis amounts need to be adjusted as in the specific edge cases we're talking about above.

Coinbase seems to have sent 1099-K documents to eligible customers which isn't as detailed as 1099-Bs since I believe the Ks only report gross transaction volumes over $20K[1].

[1] [https://www.irs.gov/businesses/understanding- your-1099-k](https://www.irs.gov/businesses/understanding-your-1099-k)

<comment><USER4> Your memory may be due to this information being new as of 2011 for most brokers.

[https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self- employe...](https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self- employed/cost-basis-reporting-faqs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the tax implications I've often thought about is those that heavily trade among different cryptos.

If I buy $10k of Intel, it grows to $15k and I sell it to buy $15k of Google, I owe tax on the $5k gain.

Now, perhaps one could argue that there is no "liquidity" event by trading one crypto for another. But perhaps the IRS argues there is a phantom liquidity event during such a trade. The IRS generally doesn't like someone to be able to trade assets without recognizing a gain, otherwise it breaks down the fundamental framework upon which the entire tax system is based. The law provides a few provisions for tax free trades, but they are specifically prescribed by the tax law, such as a 1031 exchange between real estate holdings.

If you've heavily traded between cryptos over the past year with massively appreciating values, I would be worried that the IRS would claim you should have recognized a tax gain with every trade. For some, the ramifications for such a perspective could be huge.

<comment><USER7> The problem is, USD is the only legal tender. When I sell Intel stock, that where I made profit in USD. I pay tax on that. But if I trade BTC for DOGE, I haven't made any money. All I have done is swap tokens. And just because someone would pay X dollars for tokens, doesn't mean I made any money.

I mean where does it end? If I tell you I'll pay you 10000 dollars for the pocket lint in your pocket, did you just make a gain of 10k? Do you now owe the IRS 10k? If you haven't actually made any legal tender, how can you be taxed on a trade at all? The value of something is completely relative, speculative, and ever-changing.

<comment><USER6> Profit or gain may be measured in USD, but a transaction does not need to include USD to generate a taxable gain.

The IRS has all sorts of rules involving barters, meaning trading one asset for another without USD being involved in the transaction at all. [1]

Say you buy a car for $10k, let it sit in your garage for 30 years and it now becomes a classic vintage worth $30k. If you go and trade that car for a new motorcycle worth $30k, the IRS requires you to record your $20k gain on the car when you make the trade for the motorcycle.

Where does it end? When you've paid the IRS the tax you owe, as per the law.

Regarding the pocket lint, if you tell me you'll pay $10k for mine, I have no gain. When the sale happens, I recognize the $10k gain and pay the tax. This seems to be a pretty typical transaction for pocket lint or a truckload of butter.

1\. [https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420](https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420)

<comment><USER8> Or actually if it was literally pocket lint, y'all could probably get away with having the payer file form 709 and the seller doing nothing, and nobody would owe any tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Only a problem if you're trying to evade paying taxes. Otherwise it's the same as any other security trading platform.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does that mean Coinbase will give me a 1099 at the end of the year?

<comment><USER11> Just pray they don't give you a 1099 with _grossly incorrect values_ like they generously did for me.

<comment><USER12> Was it a 1099-K? [1] It reports gross payments, not profits. The IRS knows this; it's their form.

[1] [https://www.irs.gov/businesses/understanding- your-1099-k](https://www.irs.gov/businesses/understanding-your-1099-k)

<comment><USER11> I know that this is the total transactions and not profits, and the numbers are way, way off. I have a local copy of all my trades, of course, and they match perfectly with the transaction history available on GDAX. But the numbers that Coinbase reported on this 1099-K are completely wrong. They literally put the wrong numbers in the 1099-K. And as one would expect, dealing with Coinbase support is about as much fun as being set on fire. I fear that Coinbase is going to end up costing me a lot of time and money because of their botched accounting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While generally I tend to favor less government involvement, especially when it comes to privacy, I find myself on the other side of the fence here.

Ignoring the arguments about what Coinbases is _legally_ required to hand over, it seems like Coinbase withholding this information from the IRS really only favors criminals. If you're a law abiding citizen you're already giving all this information to the IRS yourself. Every Coin-fiat transaction is taxed and must be reported. So there's not much difference for you. It's only if you aren't following the laws that this has an impact on you. So I find myself in _favor_ of the IRS snooping around in Coinbase's business. More compliance means less average taxes.

That said, there are nuances. What information exactly gets provided to the IRS is important. Exchange/transaction events? Sure. Money in/out? Ehhh, maybe not. Bitcoin address data? Definitely not.

(To be perfectly clear, this is _not_ an instance of "if you have nothing to hide". This is an instance where we're _already_ giving this data to the government, and that's _necessary_ because of our tax laws. There is no equivalence to other privacy cases.)

</comment><comment><USER14> I thought it was hilarious that the Coinbase blog announcement of their tax reporting explicitly states that this reporting is completely useless for the 99% of Coinbase users who have transactions on other exchanges and ICO's. [https://blog.coinbase.com/new-tax-tools-on- coinbase-4d259854...](https://blog.coinbase.com/new-tax-tools-on- coinbase-4d2598544d9e)

I'm founding www.ZenLedger.io to help crypto investors and CPA's to comply with IRS law, aggregate ledgers across exchanges and wallets, and make everything easier. We also undo things like Coinbase falsely classifying all coin movement off their exchange as a taxable sale when they know it's most likely a non-taxable transfer. So, we help you pay less taxes. Check us out please. We have a great team of developers and business/finance professionals working hard to get it all done for you.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is not surprising at all, and it's been a long time coming.

It will be more interesting when the IRS starts trying to get your electric consumption data (assuming people aren't using solar panels, and/or live in a jurisdiction whose electric companies don't have to hand over such information about their customers to another governmental body) because more people are mining (inflationary) cryptocurrencies and trading that for other "assets" without going through 3rd parties like Coinbase (i.e. needing to upload any forms of government ID).

I wonder if this is the kind of stuff the G20 finance ministers will talk about at their upcoming meeting[0], though I kind of doubt it.

[0] [https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/International- Relat...](https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/International- Relations/G-20-finance-chiefs-to-discuss-fair-trade-cryptocurrencies)

</comment><comment><USER16> My prediction: they will store the history of all Bitcoin transactions and try to identify all wallet owners; when identified they will check if profits were reported and if taxes were paid; if not -> good luck; the same for other countries in the world </end of my prediction>

<comment><USER17> How is that even a prediction?

> store the history of all Bitcoin transactions

Bitcoin conveniently does this for them

> and try to identify all wallet owners

That's the headline here

> check if profits were reported and if taxes were paid

Which is the IRS' job

<comment><USER18> >Which is the IRS' job

Ever heard of the 4th Amendment?

<comment><USER17> Sure. And so has the IRS, which "persuaded a federal judge", according to the article.

I guess they thought it was a _reasonable_ request to get the data of the 25,000 US citizens who made significant profit with bitcoin in those years, when only a few hundred reported such earnings in total.

<comment><USER19> That's an estimate at best. How many if tbise who profitted actually cashed out?

<comment><USER20> It's not just a matter of tracking those that cashed out as taxes are on the net profits of individual trades. Even converting between coins (ex: sell BTC, buy ETH) is a taxable event.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So if I made a whole $32 off of my experiment on Coinbase (invested $50 when the price was around $273.59/bitcoin and then sold when the price was around $459.69/bitcoin), will the IRS really care about their cut? I honestly expected some kind of documentation from Coinbase with respect to taxes, such as a 1099-B. I never received such a document.

I also read somewhere that the IRS is only coming after people who made $20,000 or more. (Note: I couldn't read this article due to the paywall)

Should I be concerned that they'll try to get their $10 from me and then pile on a bunch of penalties?

<comment><USER22> The IRS once sent me a letter because I had slightly underpaid my taxes where they informed me of the amount I had underpaid and assessed a 10% penalty.... for a grand total of ~$8.

They weren't jerks about it but they do seem to have a weird attention to detail for certain matters.

<comment><USER23> For an individual, it's a detail. At scale, real money.

With 150 million tax payers, if they had a $10 cut off everyone underpaid, that's a potential loss of $1.5 billion, over half of the annual national parks budget. Not so weird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Chain-splits. These occur when a cryptocurrency branches into two or more versions, as bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash did last year. Investors are often entitled to new coins as a result.

Does this right generate taxable income?"

Huh.

<comment><USER25> This is probably the biggest open question, with no good answer.

For Bitcoin Cash, if you declare that, what value do you use? Futures price before the fork? Price immediately after? Which exchange? And the price fluctuated wildly, so they all seem arbitrary.

The alternative is to claim a cost-basis of $0 when you actually realize those gains, which makes a hell of a lot more sense to me, but the IRS might disagree. Who knows?

And what about Bitcoin Gold or the dozens of super-shady forks? Technically they have value, but it's value I don't think I'll realize because they're so shady. You have to go through the trouble of clearing your wallet of 'real' Bitcoin, and then import it to whatever 'totally not going to hack you' wallet software you need to use to claim it. Even if you don't lose your 'real' Bitcoin, all the other shady forks could be stolen. It's clearly not 'real' in the way that traditional securities are.

<comment><USER26> Further, anyone can fork a coin at any time; there could be dozens a year. Am I supposed to keep track of every single fork of every coin I hold?

Also what if I haven't imported my private key into the forked coin's wallet? Do I have to report the income right away or only until after I've gained control of the coins?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've wondered what to do if I won't or can't prove that I control BTC that I transferred out of coinbase wallet into personal wallets?

I will definitely pay my cap gains on the small amount of coin I sold (BTC->USD within coinbase). But I have no idea about first in first out, when is it a wash if I buy more?

I don't even want to think about trying to calculate cap gains on purchases made with BTC since the price is almost always different even if I buy BTC on coinbase and use it to buy server time 60 minutes later..

</comment><comment><USER28> What would happen if someone was to lose access to their wallets? Would they still have to pay taxes? If my memory serves me right, close to 4 million bitcoins are missing.

<comment><USER29> Regardless of whether you lose them you pay taxes when you make a taxable transaction, being either exchanging FIAT to crypto or crypto to a different crypto.

<comment><USER30> If you itemize deductions, and the loss is large enough, you can deduct a loss or theft.

So if you mined and then traded $100k in Bitcoin for Ethereum and then the Ethereum was stolen, you would use form 4684 to claim the loss against your taxable income.

But I haven't heard of anyone doing this yet and I can imagine it would get some scrutiny from the IRS, seeing as it would be hard to prove a loss or theft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My only concern is that I bought Bitcoin for a friend because he had trouble setting his account up. Now that tax time is coming up, this has me worried that I'll get singled out because what I claim doesn't match my account. He's filing for his portion of things, so it should all work out in the end, but I don't want to be audited to have to explain that.

<comment><USER32> I am not a lawyer or cpa but it sounds like a similar case when someone may have invested in bitcoin and immediately realized they were over extended. So they decided to reduce their position for a small transaction fee. Unfortunately this was enough to make the trade a small loss and ultimately I don't know many people who pay taxes on losses.

<comment><USER33> Am I missing something? You pay taxes on gains, not losses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Asking for a friend. If X buys a few bitcoin and then transfers it to a gambling site and proceeds to lose it all does stupid X (the goddamn idiot) owe any taxes? The only way X can show that he/she didn't retain the bitcoin is to show transfers to the gambling website (transfers in and no transfers out, because as I said earlier, X is a dumbass).

</comment><comment><USER35> without paywall - [http://archive.is/cHYve](http://archive.is/cHYve)

</comment><comment><USER36> PSA. 1) Withhold 35% of your gains for tax. 2) Realize any losses before the end of December, and reinvest #1.

</comment><comment><USER37> Privacy coins and decentralized exchanges will start rewarding individuals who engage in untraceable tax evasion, which will get easier over time. This puts a negative reward signal on honesty.

The current governance system will have to adapt or die. It's not much different than any other disrupted industry, except this one is armed.

</comment><comment><USER38> Of course it does?

They're doing a whole KYC thing.

</comment><comment><USER39> But but but. Bitcoin is anonymous! /s

</comment><comment><USER40> Why fear a government agency with aging equipment and lack of employees due to continuous budget cuts by politicians who don't want their buddies audited? The IRS can't keep up with tax law changes and collect much of what they are supposed to collect already much less add new and more complex things to track.

<comment><USER17> So, if you were American, had a coinbase account, and made significant capital gains in the years under investigation, would you not be worried?

Because it seems to me like they are very much capable of enforcement, as exemplified by the article.

Rich people in the US don't avoid taxes by stymying investigations they give 5% of their income to Republican candidates and PACs, and have the law changed for them.

<comment><USER41> Coinbase has already issued tax forms for those who owe capital gains taxes because of cryptocurrency sales. So this isn't in any way new or unexpected.

<comment><USER42> I don't think that is correct. They are issuing 1099-K's for people who are accepting Bitcoin payments through Coinbase. They haven't issued any 1099's for people who only have a capital gain from buying and selling.

<comment><USER43> True, but they did add some tools to the tax center tab to make it easy to calculate your gains/losses for tax purposes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Germany ready to block Google Maps for patent infringement - <AUTHOR> http://skift.com/2013/03/09/google-maps-facing-ban-in-germany/

<comment><USER2> The source, Florian Mueller, is an "analyst" for both Oracle and Microsoft, so take this with mountains of salt.

</comment><comment><USER3> If Google are blocked could this also pose a problem for other companies such as Apple, Nokia, TomTom?

</comment><comment><USER4> Ouch.</comment>


Updated Ask HN Archive - <AUTHOR> http://remembersaurus.com/askhn.html

<comment><USER2> This is brilliant, but didn't I see it submitted just a day or so ago? And yet I've looked, and not found it.

Regardless, I've added it to my ante-pre-alpha "Great Articles" project.

Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER3> A "back to top" would be helpful.

Or, I'm not a big fan of vertical static menus, but because the page is so large, using something like: [http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/omnislide/index.ht...](http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/omnislide/index.htm) <http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/staticmenu3.htm>

</comment><comment><USER4> Thank you for picking up the torch!

<comment><USER5> Maybe you could link to the new list from the old one too?

<comment><USER4> I will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great work! Maybe you could ask Gabriel for permission to merge the lists ?

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome stuff. Did you write a script to find all the Ask HN posts?

<comment><AUTHOR> I used a couple of different script for all of this. The first intelligently crawled HN, trying to minimize the amount of total hits to the server while still grabbing every post. It also dumped most of its internal state to file every few seconds, allowing me to kill and restart it at my convenience and to easily grab only the new posts when I update the archive.

The second took each post on HN (all of which were saved to disk), found those that were ask posts, and then generated a document with the title of the post, the score and number of comments it received (allowing to me rule out looking at 90% of posts, as they had < 3 comments on average), and markdown ready for copy/pasting into the final document.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like it, thanks.</comment>


Simple, Energy-Efficient Recycling Process for Lithium-Ion Batteries - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/environment/simple-energyefficient-recycling-process-for-lithiumion-cathodes <comment><USER2> The problem is that in each state in the U.S ,there are different laws. Unless their is so type of federal mandate, very hard to implement.

[https://www.call2recycle.org/recycling-laws-by- state/](https://www.call2recycle.org/recycling-laws-by-state/)</comment>


Exquisite Forest, a collaborative animation platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.exquisiteforest.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I like how the branches are represented as actual branches.

But I do not understand why they chose to build a Chrome app instead of a Web app.

<comment><USER2> It's not a Chrome app, is a web app.

However, the guys have just released it and haven't had much time to make sure it works on other browsers yet. The only thing that shouldn't work on Firefox at the moment is the audio as it uses Web Audio API. We'll look into it asap.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know!

Nothing works in Firefox (14 / OS X) or Opera (12 / OS X) at the moment.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Will Lose Location: The Location-Flawed Social Graph - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jakerlevine.com/post/975307901/facebook-will-lose-location

<comment><USER2> It's an excellent point, but I don't think Facebook's current lack of friend categorization will stay forever. I think it's only a matter of time before Facebook brings better organization to the friends list. Foursquare's best bet is likely the game mechanics themselves, if they can make them appeal long- term.</comment>


Supporting DRM-Free Music - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001113.html <comment><USER2> "Better quality. Less money. And no evil, consumer hostile DRM! It's almost unbelievable. Needless to say, I've been buying as much music as I can from Amazon to vote with my wallet and demonstrate to the music labels that yes, giving the customer what they want does pay. And _you should too_."

Something irks me about being told to go buy things... through an affiliate link.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182760></comment>


FourSquare switches from Google Maps to Open Street Map - <AUTHOR> http://m.engadget.com/default/classic/article.do?artUrl=http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/01/foursquare-replaces-google-maps-with-openstreetmap-mapboxstreets/&icid=eng_latest_art

<comment><USER2> Their site is fucked :/ [http://www.engadget.com/?m=%3C!doctype%20html%3EHello%20hack...](http://www.engadget.com/?m=%3C!doctype%20html%3EHello%20hacker%20news%3C!--)

<comment><USER3> Oh wow, thats a fairly big screw up on their end...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure FourSquare could probably write a long explaination of why they decided to migrate, but simply put, the tl;dr version could be summarised as:

"We can't sustain a $8 CPM hit." (I'm assuming $8 since they use custom styling). Most sites can't even sustain a $4 hit. If I could guarentee $4 per 1000 visitors to my site (income through advertisements) I would be a lot richer than I am today.

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems that Google has been proven completely wrong with their pricing. They're targeting the bigger companies, which don't see shy at all to reach out for alternatives which offer equal quality and accuracy. Once these companies switch, Gmaps will also lose its "trusty" image. As long as the competition will keep up with providing easy integration, and API functionality, it will no longer be the #1 choice for the bigger companies. And they're not going to get their income from smaller, unless they drastically change their price- model. OpenLayers is so great though for these kind of sites, that just need that extra dimension of detail on maps.

</comment><comment><USER6> Previous discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3649873>

</comment><comment><USER7> I had asked this question of Google and received a response from a Google Maps Product Manager a few months back. I wonder if they still feel the same way.

[http://www.quora.com/What-is-Googles-strategy-in-charging- fo...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-Googles-strategy-in-charging-for-Maps)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for posting this. Maybe I'm just grumpy from trying and mostly failing to get some GIS data for the small business I work for, but when I read between the lines of this statement I read either "we have to pay a lot to license this data, and those costs are based on usage rather than a flat fee," or failing that at least "it's expensive to own and operate a fleet of Street View cars to collect this data, and besides that you're not going to find this quality of data cheaper anywhere else [for now, at least]."

I seem to recall that I'd see TeleAtlas and/or NAVTEQ copyrights on maps.google.com for the US. Now I mostly see "(C) Google." (But also "Sanborn," whom I haven't heard of, when I zoom in; <http://www.sanborn.com/.>)

I welcome OSM shaking this market up. I believe that the losses OSM may inflict upon the existing map data providers will be made up for several times over by all the interesting applications that will arise from its availability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Making the GMaps Api is the best thing that could have happened for Open Street Map and probably Google Maps in a while. The OSM Map Data is good enough for most. In turn since more sites are going away from GMaps it gets more popular and the data gets better. Google will probably integrate OSMs Data back into Gmaps. Thus sooner or later Google won't need to pay licenseing fees to the card guys. Because their own data (from Google Streetview) + OSMs data will be enough.

<comment><USER10> Google doesn't use the OSM data now, and probably never will due to license reasons. Just their own data will be enough, no need for OSM.

<comment><USER11> Why? Even if OSM is as good as GMaps?

As far as I can see, they have still a lot of value in the direction/navigation infrastructure and places directory (which is where foursquare actually compete with google).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> what on earth has happened with engadgets url structure?

tried (albeit briefly) to re-write it to get to the desktop version, failed a couple of times before i spotted the desktop link at the bottom, which looks to append ?m=false, and now the first piece of content in the body element is the word "false", presumably debugging stuff, hope that's sanitised properly!

<comment><USER13> It's not:

[http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/01/foursquare-replaces- googl...](http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/01/foursquare-replaces-google-maps- with-openstreetmap-mapboxstreets/?m=%3Cscript%3Ealert\(3\)%3C/script%3E)

Interestingly, Chrome doesn't execute that because it finds the source of the script in the request. Good XSS avoidance idea.

<comment><USER12> I tried that in chrome too, saw it didnt work and presumed the site handled it, not my browser, IE9 avoids it as well, even shows a little popup saying the site has been modified to prevent xss, latest FF still displays the alert though.

<comment><USER14> Safari also appears to prevent the alert. Must be built into WebKit.

<comment><USER15> Nope. Ipad show the text

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> OpenStreetMap is an interesting project in crowdsourcing geographical information.

I am really curios and heager to find out what would happen if more companies will start sharing their efforts with OpenStreetMap.

I would love to see the project getting some efforts and recognition from a larger community :) .. Who know what can start out of this..

<comment><USER17> I really want to like OpenStreetMap, and I think it has a ton of potential, but right now I think it's just too difficult to contribute to it. The only choices for map editing are JOSM and Potlatch and neither of those are very user friendly.

Just now, I tried correcting a missing street near me, spent about a half hour playing around with the tools, and gave up. As OpenStreetMap gains popularity, I hope some of these companies using the data will devote some programmer resources to improving things so that "regular people" can contribute too.

<comment><USER18> For small tweaks to the map, I found Potlach (the flash editor) to be OK. I've made a few edits to fill in the odd missing road or mark the point where the name of a local road changed.

What exactly did you find difficult?

To add a new way (OSMese for a linear feature of some sort) abutting an existing one, click where you want the road to start, then click where it ends. Congratulations, you have a new "way"! On the left give it a type, name etc etc. If you need to split an existing linear feature into two parts, click on one of the nodes, then click on the scissors to split it, then you can apply the correct values to each sub-section.

<comment><USER17> This morning I was trying to use Potlach to extend a street around a corner and end it in a cul-de-sac. I was able to get the street to curve around, but I couldn't really figure out how to make it end in a little neat circle like all the other streets around here. And I couldn't figure out the way splitting and joining. I had lots of problems with trying to move around, and also I got "stuck" in draw mode, so I would end up with road paths that went all over the place, then I had to go back and delete them. Maybe my mind is just too used to programs like Adobe Illustrator.

I might try some more editing later -- my first few impressions of it were just that it was too hard to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I came here to say that I hope they improve the default map theme, but then I realized I'm off to the Maps app anytime I want to actually play with the map or get directions anyway.

</comment><comment><USER20> Sorry if this question was already asked elsewhere, but how much roughly will FourSquare save with OpenStreetMap? Obviously cost is a critical factor driving this decision, and it would be great to know how much the delta is exactly. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER21> [http://blog.foursquare.com/2012/02/29/foursquare-is- joining-...](http://blog.foursquare.com/2012/02/29/foursquare-is-joining-the- openstreetmap-movement-say-hi-to-pretty-new-maps/)

</comment><comment><USER22> God damn capital S.

When will the internet learn?</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to get into DMOZ? - <AUTHOR>

I have been submitting my site for almost a year now and still no luck.  I am placing it in the right area and creating a great description.  My website looks better than most and has great content.  What am I missing?<p>Any Ideas? <comment><USER2> That is the problem with DMOZ. I don't know if it still works or not, but there used to be a way around the lengthy delays by creating an editor account with DMOZ in the category you are trying to get your site in. Once you as an individual are an editor you can approve your listing yourself for inclusion. I haven't played around with DMOZ in a long time so I don't know if this hack still works or not.

It used to be that Google gave juice to sites listed in DMOZ, but I am not really sure how much play that has any more. I would really focus on other avenues if that is why you are trying. I don't think DMOZ use is that significant that it will impact your rankings or site visits overall.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do you want to be listed there?

To be honest, I had no idea DMOZ existed until now. The idea seems kind of quaint. It's looks like they're trying to recreate the early days of Yahoo search.

<comment><AUTHOR> From the research I have done DMOZ helps you with ranking better for Generic Results when you get Listed in their Database.</comment></comment>


The Persian Rug May Not Be Long for This World - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/world/middleeast/end-of-an-art-form-the-persian-rug-may-not-be-long-for-this-world.html <comment><USER2> We have a huge (10'x13') Antique Wool Persian Rug made in Kashan before the revolution. Not quite sure how old it is, but the dealer claimed it was likely first imported in the 1930s. We also have several cheaper machine-made Persian-style rugs from a few different places.

The real one is the centerpiece of our entire house, and a treasure. It definitely has a quality and beauty that the machine-made ones don't possess. They're one-of-a-kind works of art. At some point it was repaired and there's a little difference in the dye colors where the patching was performed. Knowing it has some history really adds to the feeling of value. It's an antique you can walk and lay down on. If our home caught fire, I would probably grab my computer and that rug and leave the rest to burn.

It completely transformed the room we put it in and brought it grace and character. The machine-made rugs we put furniture on top of and are already starting to fall apart in places, even the nicer one we paid lots of money for before we got smart.

If you're patient and look around, you kind find them at fairly steep discounts, and now that the market is opening up, I expect the prices to drop even more. Our rug was appraised at something north of $15k, but we bought it for less than $2k. Quick checks on the internet show me similar rugs for around $6.5k. (here's one that looks superficially like ours [http://esalerugs.com/red-palace-rugs-kashan-persian- rug-2219...](http://esalerugs.com/red-palace-rugs-kashan-persian- rug-22199335#))

When we decided to get a rug, we went through lots of research and shopping, finally decided on a Persian-style rug and hit rug markets and dealers all over our area. For us at least, the color schemes of the made-in-Iran rugs (over the often cheaper Pakistan, Turkish or Afghan handmade rugs) really was unmatched in hitting our taste.

Sorry if this sounds like a commercial, but these really are special objects. It's a shame that there's so many middle-men in-between the weavers and the buyers, I'd much rather have paid the weavers directly, but stupid global politics get in the way. I'm very excited for the slowly thawing relations with Iran, there's so many really wonderful cultural things I'm hoping come exploding out of that country.

<comment><USER3> This might be just my perception, but persian rugs always seem to be on a great sale. Special price, only for you, my special friend etc. I have a big aversion to buying a rug, because the whole process feels like I'm being swindled.

<comment><USER4> I think that's a culture clash. Persian culture is very big on bargaining. My father was an immigration lawyer and he told me that if he had a Persian client he would have to increase the price and allow himself to be bargained down to the normal price.

I'm with you, I prefer not to bargain but I don't think it's fair to equate bargaining cultures to swindlers.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if this inverse effect happens. Suppose someone from a bargaining culture is forced to deal with someone from a retail culture. Do they feel like they're being ripped off because they weren't given a chance to ask for a lower price?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nothing tells me U.S. official policy towards Iran is changing more than subtly favorable articles like this appearing in the New York Times.

<comment><USER5> they ran this piece on the same they ran an editorial denouncing the government of Saudi Arabia for exporting Wahabism. this is not subtle stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Certainly a tangent, but can anyone share tips on where/how to pick up traditional wool rugs without getting taken for a ride? I get the distinct impression most vendors are buying way low and angling to sell way high...

<comment><USER8> Just as a note to you: when I drive through Teheran, there are often rugs in the middle of the road so cars drive over them. This is how they are made "old" and sell for many, many, dollars.

<comment><USER9> I'm not doubting you, but wouldn't the tire/brake residue, oil drips, etc. render something less "old" but more "roadside trash?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are several reasons for the dying popularity of Persian carpets

1.Changes in tastes: beautiful though they are, they do not go with much of what passes for modern decor

2.The availability of substitutes: many other alternatives are available, including Finnish, Swedish, Danish,German, Indian, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Chinese carpets.

3.Concerns about authenticity. Was that "Persian carpet" made in Iran or in Turkey or in China ?

4\. Transaction costs: carpet dealers in local shopping malls vary from dodgy to very dodgy. Some of them have had "going out of business sale" signs up for years. I know that they will try and rip me off. I do not want to waste time bargaining with them and trying to spot the genuine items in their stock.As for learning about knot-per-inch and all the terminology that goes with it, heck it is just something to put on my floor.

5\. Here is a typical ad: "Retail Price: $7836 Online Discount Price: $3134 Price After Extra 50% Off: $1567"

What is a fair price for this ? 1567 ? 567 ? 67 ? What does this even mean ? Sure sounds dodgy.

</comment><comment><USER11> How much would their $400 6x9 rug cost in the US after markups?

I'd love to have a few nice rugs but that price seems very low. I'm curious at what volume does it make sense to go there, buy, and ship back rather than buying ones that have already been imported.

<comment><USER2> It depends mostly on knot count and condition. Higher knots per inch, the higher the price. Silk (instead of wool) makes the price 3-4x higher.

A fairly low knot count (about 100 kpi) Shiraz rug of about that size would run somewhere between $1300-$5000 most likely. If you hunt around I would expect a "great deal" to be ~$1000.

Here's an example of a Shiraz-style rug with 140kpi. [http://esalerugs.com/red-5x8-shiraz-lori-persian- rug-1109053...](http://esalerugs.com/red-5x8-shiraz-lori-persian- rug-110905317)

Once you get into higher knot counts (300+ kpi) the price increases very quickly as well. But I personally think it's important to see what that knot count difference looks like in person. There's a very big perceptual jump in quality and it's almost like going from 8-bit graphics to modern 4k in terms of how the design looks.

An example:

Here's a 150kpi Kashan rug $3300 [http://esalerugs.com/red-10x13-kashan- persian-rug-110909188](http://esalerugs.com/red-10x13-kashan-persian- rug-110909188)

and a 400kpi Kashan rug of similar design $13000 [http://esalerugs.com/red-10x13-kashan-persian- rug-110906616](http://esalerugs.com/red-10x13-kashan-persian-rug-110906616)

It's very hard to tell across the web, but 400kpi compared to 150kpi is night and day.

I've seen high knot count silk rugs that were easily in the six figures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had a Persian rug mouse pad that I really enjoyed and got a lot of nice complements on. Just a dye-sublimation printed imitation, but it still looked and felt luxurious. I wonder if anyone makes real Persian mini-rugs that size, for doll houses perhaps?

<comment><USER13> [http://www.amazon.com/Lextra®-MouseRug®-blues- white-10-25/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Lextra®-MouseRug®-blues- white-10-25/dp/B000F6H0F2)

Was it this?

<comment><USER12> That looks like it!

I wrote a cellular automata that you can start with a symmetrical configuration, that I called a "Persian Rug Enumerator" because each frame looked like different Persian Rug! You could make a lot of unique mouse pads that way.

[https://youtu.be/nQQBmkmmCw4?t=4m55s](https://youtu.be/nQQBmkmmCw4?t=4m55s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel conflicted about "Persian" rugs. So much child labor goes into making them that by buying one you are helping support a dispicable trade in human misery. At the same time they can be highly beautiful and practical. I have decided to take the same approach as with Ivory - old ivory is fine, but new Ivory is not. I have a few antique rugs that I really love, but I would not buy a new one.

<comment><USER15> But unlike ivory, that cannot be made without dead elephants, it possible to create a Persian carpet without child labour. Children used to mine coal, but we still have coal. So we can still have Persian carpets.

I used to live in the middle east and when I left I brought a medium-sized pile of them. They are great and very utilitarian. The one in my living room is nearly a hundred years old and has seen many generations of dogs, cats and in all probability goats. They can be cleaned an repaired in a way rare for modern products.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but it is really hard to ensure this as a consumer. Most rugs don't come with a label "made with slave labor". By only buying old you get to avoid supporting continued abuses while still having an item of beauty and practicality.

<comment><USER6> A lot of the stuff you use every day is made with what is practically slave labor, often child labor too. Not that it makes it any better, but there is no reason to single out rugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I do love beautiful, high quality Persian Rugs. But, alas, the wool makes me sneeze.

<comment><USER14> They do make silk rugs, but it feels like a crime to walk on them.

<comment><USER16> Funny you mention that. We purchased a beautiful silk rug. Have it hanging on a wall.</comment></comment></comment>


Maxima - <AUTHOR> http://thingwy.blogspot.com/2015/07/maxima-versus-mathematica-should-i-go.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is still sadly as relevant now as it was then. I checked out the examples and they still fail.

</comment><comment><USER2> Well, but Maxima is open source

<comment><USER3> And that is in itself valuable, but for those to whom free-as-in-beer is good enough (and want their integrals to be solved, rather than having the option to contribute code solving integrals), there's Mathematica for Raspberry Pi ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A 2015 critique of the package vs mathematica.</comment>


An introduction to computational semantics - <AUTHOR> http://www.akornilo.com/computational-semantics/ <comment><USER2> _The problem of identifying different meanings of words is handled only by AMR_

This is incorrect. In frame semantics, polysemy is expressed in that the same lexeme may invoke different frames. For instance, go to the FrameNet website and search for "run":

[https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/index.php?q=luIn...](https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/index.php?q=luIndex)

Currently, there are eight different meanings associated with the verb "run" in FrameNet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I did not know that. I will update the post soon. Thanks for pointing it out.

<comment><USER2> You're welcome!

Besides that, note that the "Desired" frame contains a "Focal_participant" frame element which expresses the affected participant of the desired event. For instance:

        Do [I Experiencer] WANT [him Focal_participant] [to see me Event]?

If that FE is absent, we can assume that the Experiencer is affected. Thus, the analysis

        [The cat Experiencer] WANTS [to go Event].

does contain the same information as the AMR triangle in your article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is pretty good, AMR inconsistencies aside. It's a nice resource to point people to who have no idea what a "Computational Semantic" is and why I do them.

Also, props for including AMR at all.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any good markets to sell your desktop / server software? - <AUTHOR>

I am currently looking into selling my software through Codecanyon but they charge 55% per order on non-exclusive sales which seems really high.  Have you had any luck with Amazon or know of any code canyon alternatives? <comment><USER2> I've sold some cheap scripts on [https://gumroad.com/](https://gumroad.com/)

The marketing is completely up to you though, and you don't get the benefit of being listed in a directory of software for sale.</comment>