mrbabbage

Corporate law is overwhelmingly state law. Every federally tax exempt entity is a state (or foreign) corporation or other kind of entity, and states (or foreign governments) impose rules on corporations registered in their borders.

Plus, many states levy their own corporate taxes. A nonprofit corporation needs to secure tax-exempt status from states as well as the federal government. This is a necessary implication of America's dual-sovereignty system.

this is correct. the main advantage of a VAT is incentive alignment. every intermediary producer must collect and remit VAT if they want to claim their VAT refunds for inputs. i.e., a seller of a good in Europe must collect VAT if they want to claim a VAT refund on whatever they paid for the good.

compare to American sales taxes, where sellers have no economic incentive to collect sales taxes beyond the probability of being caught and fined.

When you're driving the highway from the international airport at Keflavík to Reykjavík, the first big building you see is a massive Rio Tinto aluminum smelter: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ATHxAWRLKLMf8Gbh8

bcrypt has a built-in 72 byte limit, which helps with the DOS issue

Here's another link, from a source that's less personally invested in the ongoing controversy: https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-challenges-brazils-o...

We can see this in-action already. Places like California have effectively de-criminalized most/all drug use if you are part of the homeless population. Surprise again - there's more drug use within that community than ever before. It's difficult to walk through the down-town area without seeing overt drug use these-days.

Is this unique to CA? The street level suffering you see in CA cities is overwhelmingly related to fentanyl, an opioid. Infamously, the US is in the midst of the opioid crisis, with deaths continuing to rise unabated [1]. Places with harsher drug policing are also seeing rises in opioid deaths.

And while San Francisco is a top location for opioid deaths, the other top counties by death rates (Mendocino, Trinity, Alpine, Lake, Inyo, Humboldt, Nevada) are all very rural [2].

[1] https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...

[2] https://skylab.cdph.ca.gov/ODdash/?tab=CA

For what it's worth—the Library of Congress published a DMCA exemption for video games that require a use of a no-longer-available verification server.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/expanded-dmca-exemptio...

I realize the headline is designed to be attention-grabbing, but "lie" is pretty strong given the warning's actual text.

Could the warning be better phrased? Almost certainly—it's a four-sentence digest, designed for a lay audience, of an incredibly complicated area of law (copyright fair use). But the warning itself is completely accurate: There are conditions where reproducing a copyrighted work (which otherwise infringe's the owner's exclusive right of reproduction) is acceptable. And "one of these specified conditions" (quoting from the warning) is for scholarship. It's not the only such condition!

To me, this feels like the author is making a mountain out of a molehill.

How does distracted driving explain increasing pedestrian death rates in America while death rates are flat or down [1] in other industrialized countries? Unless there's a reason why distracted driving particularly affects America, I don't think it can explain this trend.

[1] https://w3.unece.org/PXWeb/en/Table?IndicatorCode=59

I totally agree that it's not obvious that an ML model is a derivative work. the language of the Copyright Act uses "recast, transformed, or adapted" to describe derivative works, and a pile of model weights isn't clearly that, IMO. I think it's fair to say that inferences directly replicating the creative and expressive elements (because factual information isn't copyrightable!) of a copyrighted work infringe. but I don't think it's obvious that the model itself does.

If one goes to their local library and scans all the books there to generate the models used to OCR text, does that make the OCR model and application derivative works of the books?

there is a court case [1] addressing an even more infringing use case: scanning and OCR'ing books to produce a searchable database. that case turned on fair use, however, and not whether the database was a derivative work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

the font size isn't ideal, but I find the line width to be a far larger problem.

a traditional book will have around 70 characters per line [1]. by contrast, on my screen (13" M1 macbook air at default screen resolution and browser zoom), suggestion 5 has 231 (!!) characters on its first line.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length

Federal law protects whistleblowers who confidentially disclose trade secrets to law enforcement: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1833

That turns off the animation but leaves the time delay in place. E.g. if you have a text field selected in the target window, any typing you do won't register until the fade in—fade out animation completes (exact same behavior as with the option disabled, but with the fade animation instead of the slide animation).

No, the joke is on us MacOS users who insist on its terrible Alt-Tab behavior instead of leaning into the gesture support.

But I do believe the gesture support has fundamental limitations:

1) you have to take your keys off the home row to render gestures. Not good!

2) gesture window switching / Exposé breaks down when you have too many windows open: the thumbnails become unrecognizably small.

3) to solve the above problem, perhaps you suggest using spaces. Well, MacOS's spaces support is also frustrating. It's impossible to turn off the animation and time lag switching between spaces! Sure, it's only a half-second, but a half-second repeated hundreds of times adds up. And spaces's interaction with alt-tab is totally broken: if you're using a given app (say Chrome), switch to another space where Chrome is also open, and then try to alt-tab back, it doesn't take you back to the last window you had open. Sad!

It's always been here. Different places get to the epiphany at different times -- places like the Netherlands figured this out in the 1980s, in the wake of the oil crisis. [1]

The key change of the last few years has been very successful and very high profile car-free / car-light policies, most notably in Paris.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...

The primary purpose of an NDA is to allow the company to enforce trade secrets: the existence of the NDA is proof that the company took steps to maintain the secrets' secrecy. Nothing in this blog post looks like a trade secret to me; rather, it's one person's fairly high-level reflections on the work environment at a particularly high profile lab.

While he technically may have violated the NDA, it's really hard for me to see any damage or fallout from this post. It's gentle, disparages only at the highest levels of abstraction, doesn't name names, etc. I don't think it makes sense to view it in a moralistic or personal integrity light. Breach-of-contract is not a moral wrong, merely a civil one that allows the counterparty (Google) to get damages if they want.

As someone who came out at 18 (technically an adult), both:

- younger—I had a vastly accelerated "social puberty" bc I started so much later than most folks.

- older—for the reason you mentioned.

- but now younger again—I don't feel the same pressure to have biokids, and thus not beholden to the "biological clock" that forces birthing parents to start families in their 30s. I'm 32 and just went back to school, because why not! Plus, the pressure of the white gay dating scene forces me to take better care of myself (sleep, diet, exercise), which also make me feel younger.

Corporations are creatures of the state; they are legal fictions with no existence outside law. Why do you think they have boards? Because the state requires them to.

If the state deems it good policy for corporations (say, above $x,000 capitalization or y employees) to have employee representation on their boards, the state is well within its rights to introduce this condition.

They feel like Churchill's quip about democracy: self-evals are the worst system, except all the others that have been tried.

Ultimately, employers and employees need a way to ensure pay tracks employee value to company. At hiring time, it's easy: the employee presumably got multiple offers and so there's a quasi-market for that employee.

Later, what do you do, especially if the employee is otherwise happy at the employer? The employee can go out and periodically solicit competitive job offers to hold the employer accountable and ensure their pay keeps up with their skills. But this is super inefficient: even one interview loop costs the employee much more time more than the self-eval process. And this would impose a huge cost on employers, if a huge fraction of their candidates don't intend to ever convert and are just using the job offer as negotiation leverage.

Like, I hate doing performance evals as much as everyone else, but I'm not yet convinced there's a better system for solving the core problem of ensuring people's pay tracks their market value.

Should have (2015) in the title, but I absolutely love stories like this. Even wilder is the detail at the end: they recorded interest payments on the original goat skin until 1944.

Thanks Simon! I can indeed confirm that this script managed to saturate the database's hardware capacity (I recall CPU being the bottleneck, and I had to dial down the parallelism to leave some CPU for actual application queries).

Exact strategy to be determined—we're looking at various data layers at the moment. I wish we could do something simple like a rotating log file, but we want to be able to query it in the app (for instance, to show recent logins).

The second bullet point is underway! Getting audit events out of the main database will be a major headache saver.

The first bullet point is on our radar for the near term. We have a very natural shard key in our schema (the customer ID), with AFAIK no relationships across that shard key. And once we start horizontally sharding, we can do cool things like putting your data in a shard geographically close to you, which will greatly increase app performance for our non US customers. Exciting stuff coming down the pike!

To be determined!

More than I care to admit!

As mentioned downthread, we're doing some work soon to remove the audit table from the database, which will cut storage usage by over 50%.

We (Retool) are going to be doing this very soon and cut our database size by 50%+. And you're exactly right: it's so easy to get started by sticking audits (or other append-only data schema) in an RDBMS, but it quickly becomes a headache and bottleneck.

Hey folks—I wrote the post! This was my biggest Postgres project to date, and it proved quite tricky since I didn't rehearse with a test database of the same size. I learned a bunch about Postgres, not least the incredibly powerful NOT VALID option for safely and quickly adding constraints.

Happy to stick around and answer any questions you have.

Zulip came out in 2012, which predates Matrix.

ignoring dividends

Well, this is a bit of an unfair premise :) the whole point of equity is that it is a claim on a company's future profits, and companies return profits either via directly via dividends or indirectly via buybacks (which push up the value of existing stockowner's holdings). It's easy to forget this in startup land, where most companies are unprofitable and thus have no profits to distribute.

There is no defense for PG&E for the Camp Fire. This is an organization that is notorious for under-maintaining its assets. Its state of repair is so shoddy that it regularly turns off power for many days at a time ("public safety power shutoffs") to huge swathes of its service area. No other comparable utility does this - not San Diego Gas and Electric, not the Victoria Electricity Cooperative (Australian utility), no one, because they have entered the 21st century and don't need to resort to crude hacks like shutting off all power to prevent fires.

The proof is in the thread. Barely 10 years ago, PG&E pleaded guilty to another felony, when its under-maintained gas pipeline in San Bruno exploded, killed 8 people, and leveled a neighborhood. That utility has a cultural problem going to the very top that prioritizes profit over safety, and I sincerely hope it emerges from bankruptcy reformed.