Dorsey has enough money, and Twitter is his legacy - echoing the other comments here that this looks like the first step in a managed departure.

Haha I am Irish too, 94% British, 6% American...can I ask where you're from? I am from Dublin.

I would have a midlands accent (and a US mother).

> Third party ad networks can transact on AMP pages. (http://rubiconproject.com/press-releases/rubicon-project-lau...)

> Reducing bounce rates that are due to slow pagespeed is probably a good thing!

Have you tried SleepCycle? Marketed as an alarm-clock but it has some relatively useful sleep analysis dashboards.

Haven't tried it. I only sleep with my phone in the bedroom when I'm oncall, otherwise, whatever the phone wants out of me can wait until I wake up.

If it works based on sound, that won't work either, because I sleep with air cleaners running on high in the room (and earplugs).

SleepCycle is accelerometer based, actually. You put the phone next to you or under your pillow, and it tracks your motion based on vibrations in the bed. I believe the app tells you flat out that it won't work on memory foam beds.

You don't need to backup to the cloud, have people forgotten about physical hard drives?

I do have a physical hard disk for my backups but I also backup some critical data "on the cloud" (actually, some servers of mine). There is always a chance that the pc and the disk are stolen by a burglar or my house catches fire. Then there is the matter of making the encryption and access keys survive any of those events.

Yep, a good mitigation plan is a 2tb time capsule. All my precious cat photos are backed up on the regular, encrypted and within reach.

As long as you remember to keep that drive unplugged - otherwise it'll get cryptolocked with everything else.

What are the advantages of contract work in the UK?

As others have commented, you trade the perception of job security for much higher pay and tax breaks. Companies will let you go when they no longer have work for you, but finding work isn't hard for someone resonably talented.

In IT? Buckets of money, and a ridiculously low tax rate. When I was contracting, I actually felt guilty at how little tax I was paying (about 9% effective, as opposed to about 30% typical for a wage).

Downside: binge-and-purge income (this is why I gave it up). Shitty work for shitty people - where there's muck there's brass, and where there's muck there's contractors cleaning out IT toilets that haven't been cleaned in years.

What is the rationale for the lower tax rate?

I'm mostly curious because in the US it is somewhat the opposite - employers are required to pay a tax for every employee, so if you are self-employed your tax rate actually goes up.

Because they pay your umbrella company, something something corporate magic.

I think the real reason is that the tax system is biased to the already well off.

yeah, you get the money out the umbrella company via dividends rather than salary.

As long as you can legally avoid some of the issues surrounding IR35 (taxation rule, not law, specifying who is a contractor and who is an employee) and know the rules about pay vs dividends you can pay significantly less tax.

A lot less even on an umbrella (akin to a w2) you make a lot more that a permanent employee. It always surprised me how poorly paid American contractors are relative to full timers.

One chap on Stack over flow seemed to think a 15% premium was a good deal id be looking for 50 - 100% - I looked at a 6 moth contract for Perl at companies house and at the day rate I would have gone in at £400) I would have been on £100k Gross and around 80K after Tax.

Probably less taxes.

Yes it is a nationwide scandal, in IT, media, even the civil service and the BBC. If it looks like an employee and quacks like an employee then it should be taxed like an employee.

No it is not a scandal and no I am not an employee. I have no expectation of ongoing work. I come in, I get going fast, I work efficiently and smartly and I leave when the project is done.

Very different ballgame to permanent employment. Permanent work also pays really badly as a rule.

As long as "when the project is done" is a reasonable length of time (ie. weeks or months, not years) then I'd say you're not quacking like an employee.

I don't think working efficiently and smartly is a good criterion for judging whether or not you quack like an employee.

Well given the standard of perm workers I've been around lately... it seems to be a different mindset and good contractors seem more aware they're there to get the job done.

YMMV of course. And yes, I tend to find six months is a good timespan, project dependent of course. I know there are contractors who hang around at places for years, that seems like something different.

No that was the contract for personnel services scam not IT contracting which is treated far less fairly than say accountants or lawyers.

Very true, but it's more about solidifying a pivot away from music annotation than simply buying a new domain.

Now they can annotate anything. Imagine if the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy had granular explanations on annotation.

They can move into new territories without the brandname causing confusion.

My question is whether annotating anything else is actually profitable.

Is annotating anything actually profitable? Perhaps in an "enterprise" form for internal document review or whatever.

I think the biggest factor in this is that baremetrics hooks up with Stripe.

It's very likely that someone who runs a website and is reading Hacker News will be using Stripe, so this is an incredibly targeted audience for that service. Maybe not such an externally valid case study, but interesting none the less.

That is a truly beautiful website. Product looks awkward though, my finger felt empathy cramps.