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Panama Papers Reveal How Wealthy Americans Hid Millions Overseas

Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm at the center of the trove of revealing documents, offered a menu of services to conceal the true owners.

Click to view the original at mobile.nytimes.com

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The Story Behind That Iranian Version of Modern Family

Yesterday, I wrote about an Iranian show called Haft Sang, which made news here in the U.S. thanks to a video posted by YouTube user Sina Haghighi. The ...

Click to view the original at www.slate.com

Hasnain says:

From 2014; I had no idea they tried copying the show. With culturally required changes, of course; in which Mitch and Cam become a hetero couple and Haley becomes a guy

Posted on 2016-06-05T17:58:07+0000

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Hasnain says:

"It may not end with happily ever after, but it’s a story I’m glad I was privileged enough to lend a few words to.

Yeah, it may have broken me so very, very badly, but I can’t regret Fable."

Posted on 2016-06-02T06:30:21+0000

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Hasnain says:

"Now, however, mathematicians have solved the cap set problem using an entirely different method — and in only a few pages of fairly elementary mathematics. “One of the delightful aspects of the whole story to me is that I could just sit down, and in half an hour I had understood the proof,” Gowers said."

Posted on 2016-05-31T22:41:44+0000

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Moving Forward on Basic Income

We have a few updates we want to share on our Basic Income Project: Our Research Director Elizabeth Rhodes is joining Basic Income Project as our Research Director. She recently...

Click to view the original at blog.ycombinator.com

Hasnain says:

"We think everyone should have enough money to meet their basic needs—no matter what, especially if there are enough resources to make it possible. We don’t yet know how it should look or how to pay for it, but basic income seems a promising way to do this.

One reason we think it may work is that technological improvements should generate an abundance of resources. Although basic income seems fiscally challenging today, in a world where technology replaces existing jobs and basic income becomes necessary, technological improvements should generate an abundance of resources and the cost of living should fall dramatically."

Posted on 2016-05-31T17:15:15+0000

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The New Napster: How Sci-Hub is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry - The Art of Ass-Kicking

There has been an explosive new development in how scientific research is read and distributed. It’s name is Sci-Hub. Founded in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan (who was, at the time, a 22 year-old graduate student based in Kazakhstan), the site has seen a major uptick in the last year. In February 2016,...

Click to view the original at www.jasonshen.com

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The Quiet Crisis unfolding in Software Development

About MeI’ve been working in software development for twenty-eight years. My current position is Senior Development Director at a software consulting compa…

Click to view the original at medium.com

Hasnain says:

An engrossing read on managing software developers.

"Even worse is when bug fixes are included in completed work item counts when those bugs are fixed by the software developers that caused them in the first place. For example consider a project that developer #1 is likely to complete in ten days with a low or nonexistent bug count vs. developer #2 who is likely to complete it in five days but the feature ends up with four bugs eventually being discovered, each of which take two days to patch. Not to mention the extra support costs and negative customer experience that will result from those bugs.
In this scenario developer #1 only completed one work item in ten days and developer #2 completed five work items in thirteen days. Which developer is more productive? Your own completed work item metrics are probably lying to you. Don’t trust them and absolutely don’t publicize them."

Posted on 2016-05-30T19:22:40+0000

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Poverty: What Does It Mean To Be Poor? - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Poverty is measured on the basis of income, but that is often too one-dimensional for such a complex phenomenon. Researchers have developed better ways of defining who falls below the poverty line, but do those concepts stand up to the test?

Click to view the original at m.spiegel.de