skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you think they'd pay more or less tax in Dublin compared to £5k? Irelands 12.5% seems very reasonable considering its so close to its effective rate. France, Britain and Germany all allow massive write offs and loop holes that mean their effective rate is multiples lower than their stated corporate tax rate and this story will be forgotten by the Brits, Germans and French who'll turn around and repeat their condemnation of Ireland as a cheap tax haven when negotiating EU funding.

Starbucks get away with the same thing. Amazon intentionally doesn't turn a profit and so evades this whole situation altogether. Anyway Facebooks EMEA is already in Dublin.
In some areas, it would be so much better if countries were really ruled like sim games. You need more energy for growth and global warming threatens your future? You start building goddamn nuclear power plants. No political bickering, no clueless citizens protesting everything at random because of fear or propaganda.
But they have that advantage already, they can afford to do things as described in the original link. They employ a bunch of accountants, offshore experts, etc.

I am not exactly sure if similar means as described in the article I've linked would change much.
Nobel Prize in Economics Winner Is Angus Deaton
Walking like a Fremen in the desert.
That's not what I mean. I'm talking about what the tax money collected gets spent on by government - roads, healthcare, infrastructure, aged pensions.

If industry X was paying $100mm tax, and industry Y disrupts and replaces that, while paying only $20mm tax, the government needs to find $80 million to replace that tax shortfall.

Nothing to do with taxi related services...
and here in the US its done through proxies who sue to get access to donation lists, list of those who supported petitions, access to previously courted locked documents, and such, in order to shut down speech or actions they don't like. sometimes even government agencies get involved with political activist abusing their position.

so while China might codify affecting people's credit scores and "social" score make no assumption that similar hasn't always been in Western countries, we just like to paint others as bogeymen to avoid looking at our own flaws
Bitcoin Computing
I'm happy to see Chome is finally taking memory usage seriously. There are some heavy HTML5 pages that my 1GB android tablet can't even handle with Chrome, but run fine under FF. There are still plenty of low-end smartphones sold today with 1GB or less of RAM.

Google should heed the lessons MS learned with IE. If they want people to keep the default browser, it needs to be competitive.
> Global companies offshoring profits and not paying enough tax (in the eyes of many countries)

Also in the eyes of many citizens of those countries, not just the government trying to make the budget fit.
It is right of the press to point out egregious transgressions.

EDIT for brevity.
That is exactly the job of a teacher - to make sure you learn effectively.
GarageBand also uses accelerometer data to try get the velocity of taps on drums it works reasonably well, not like 3D Touch of course.
I was at Reinvent last week and attended a few of the IoT presentations. I have no commercial interest in IoT but am interested in tinkering with IoT just as a hobby.

I won a Intel Edison / Seeedstudio IoT kit with an edison already configured with a key pair for aws usage. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0168KU5FK So I guess I will get some experience with this.

They announced both device SDKs and the inclusion of IoT into their standard SDK. I haven't downloaded the latest python sdk (boto3) yet to check if the IoT functions have been added yet.

Their documentation seems to make this more complicated that it should be but I also was handed a Amazon IoT button https://aws.amazon.com/iot/button/ and was able to connect it to my aws account and my home wifi in 2 minutes. I have it sending sns messages to me when I click it. So now I have a reference project that can be inspected for quicker learning.

If you can, get yourself a IoT button from amazon to play with if you are interested in their IoT offerings.

Once boto3 has the IoT sdk I will write a mac os x client for acting both like a device and subscribing to devices.
Nobel in Economics Given to Angus Deaton for Studies of Consumption
This website is served on device with less than 45KB of usable ram.
> some tax avoidance schemes haven't been tested in courts yet

This is saying that they're guilty until proven in compliance. I'm sure you do lots of things every day that haven't been tested in court yet.
Why We Hate Ads
>> paying salaries

>Isn't that a tax paid by the employee, not employer?

It's technically both - there's an element of National Insurance tax paid by the employer and an element payed by the employee (then the employee pays income tax on the remainder). The core of your point is correct, though, the bulk of the tax paid as a result of salaries is taken from the employee
I guess the answer is always what you don't want it to be :)
The diesel tax advantage that has led VW on it's path to failure is pretty much exactly the same regulatory accident that caused the SUV infestation in the US. A taxation difference between luxury and utility, that America happened to pin to shape and size, while Europe (well, parts of Europe) has pinned it to the type of fuel. We'll see which mistake is easier to fix.
> Facebook reaps the rewards of the UK infrastructure. Facebook should behave as a responsible citizen and help fund that infrastructure.

Paying their employees an extra £96,000 (on average) per head isn't them being responsible? The money is being paid to UK employees who will (in theory) spend it in the UK. I'd have a problem if they did what Apple are doing in the US - sitting on wads of cash because it's too expensive to bring it back into the states, but this is a win for everyone. The money is redistributed back to the employees, and taxed appropriately, how is that a problem?
What about when your government becomes worst than, say, Saudi Arabia?
Some background: Jean-Claude Juncker, the current President of the European Commission has served as the prime minister and financial minister of Luxembourg. During his regime, they effectively turned Luxembourg into a tax haven for international corporations, allowing them to transfer "license fees" of trademarks, copyrights and other immaterial rights with effectively a flat fee (ie. no taxes paid, just a one time not-a-bribe fee paid to the tax authorities of Luxembourg).

The primary export product of Luxembourg is banking and financial services. They also have some steel production and industry, but effectively without their shenanigans on tax evasion, the country would be bankrupt.

A lot of this has recently come into daylight in the LuxLeaks [0] scandal.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourg_Leaks
He presently lives on his trawler, he's presently on an island 1200 miles west of Australia.

http://blog.mvdirona.com/
Yes, agreed, which makes it much more likely that laws will get passed to collect this tax as it will probably have strong political and voter base support.
And the psychologists involved in creating it know exactly how to funnel that refuse into your brain despite all your efforts to the contrary. There is no such thing as “safe contact”.
> No-one expects companies to pay the full whack of tax.

I do.
Don’t let the Nobel prize fool you. Economics is not a science
The dude was just curious. (downvoted non-anonymously)
Radical suggestion:

1. Persuade Dr. Coward to teach at a community college, where his strong teaching abilities can enable a broad crew of would-be nurses, schoolteachers, etc., to succeed.

2. Compel, by petition and other means, the Cal administration to grant credit for CoCo science and math college courses taught by persons with more than four years' faculty experience in Ph.D.-granting accredited institutions.
> relocating to somewhere like Dublin

Afaik Facebook is still overwhelmingly based in Dublin, employing three times as many as in the UK. They likely hire in the UK the bare minimum they really need. So yeah, they've already "relocated" really.

This is the same for pretty much any European corporation, btw. Anyone who could leave for cheaper shores, did so in the '00s. What is left are the essential crews strictly necessary to the job of tapping one of the richest consumer markets on the planet.

The "employment threat" is basically toothless nowadays anyway, because "new economy" numbers are ridiculous in the great scheme of things -- 350 jobs won't change much of anything.
You're not a fool, you're just not a multi-national with the ability to legally avoid/minimize tax.
It should also be the responsibility of the teacher, however, to guide you towards effective learning techniques.
This will be awesome for airships.

Fill it with hydrogen and seal it.
> "No-one expects companies to pay the full whack of tax."

Why? I don't understand why this is considered acceptable. I'm expected to pay the full whack of tax (income, VAT, etc), but somehow it's taken as given that corporations will pay 'less than they're supposed to'. How can we fix anything if this is the prevailing attitude?
I don't know if is the case of Facebook, but in general this is the story of most of tech companies, all are located in Ireland where they pay so much less taxes, and in rest of EU countries all this big companies pay this quantities or in the worse case the government return money.

EU is totally broken, one market with one tax per country; Obviously, all companies go to the country with less taxes. And the different is not 1% or 2% is like 10% or more.
My one-man-show consultancy pays far more than that in UK corporation tax. Of course that pisses me off, regardless of how you paint this whole tax avoidance scheme.

Someone said that "paying tax is for poor", and this goes a long way to support it.
@freino made a web-based 3D-touch demo that prints the value in question, however the javascript DOM attribute has values between 0 and 1, not 0 and 6.666667.

Check it out with an iPhone 6s/6s+ at http://freinbichler.me/apps/3dtouch/
Singapore Government Unveils Roadmap for Self-Driving Vehicles
Part of the problem though is that most businesses pass VAT tax on to consumers. Meaning that VAT tax essentially allows businesses to get their customers to foot the tax bill, and that everyone pays taxes corresponding to their consumption instead of their income. Usually you want the lowest earners not to have to pay much (if anything) in taxes, and VAT taxes don't allow for that.
What laws? In the UK I can us any name I like so long as I don't have the intent to deceive. WIkipedia says that's the case for the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_name#United_States

> Most states in the United States follow the common law which permits name changing for non-fraudulent purposes. This is actually the most common method, since most women who marry do not petition a court under the statutorily prescribed method, but simply use a new name (typically the husband's, a custom which started under the theory of coverture where a woman lost her identity and most rights when she married).[2] Most state courts have held that a legally assumed name (i.e., for a non-fraudulent purpose) is a legal name and usable as their true name, though assumed names are often not considered the person's technically true name.[3]

In the US the different rules for getting a name changed on official documents sometimes leaves people with official documents in different names, so even if you restrict yourself to documents issued by US government authorities a person can have two names.
In some other areas, it would be a disaster. I have a habit of ditching game parties where I don't like the outcome. Do we want people to take risk and then just drop it and leave when it doesn't work? Because we've been there with top management compensation.

Most players are lousy at games they play, because they make movies they enjoy instead of movies that are proven best.
At least this is now not an MMO, so all dong-building will happen in people's personal worlds.
Michael Dell, MSD Partners and Silver Lake to Combine Dell and EMC
By volume or mass?
Tax as money needs to move otherwise it has no value.

If you want to pay the least possible taxes, don't be surprised if your government will do its best to not support you, to not help you, to not listen to you...

"The less you pay, the less you'll get paid.

The more you pay, the more you'll get paid."
Along the way we've been offered ways to get around this and that which we've politely declined. Most obvious one being put your HQ in some country you've never been to in your life, we'd save buckets.

Also, if you get down to the metal with VAT there's a lot of ambiguity (opportunity).

My experience is that scale is not a prerequisite for it being economically beneficial.
Nobel in Economics Is Given to Angus Deaton
> certainly seems like people are less likely to engage in trolling or extremely bad behaviour if things are linked to Facebook

People do jihadi recruiting on Facebook, despite obviously being under surveillance. I think we'd need figures to back up this idea that "real name" policies reduce abuse, rather than content policies, codes of conduct and IP bans.
> They're still paying tax on everything else, including renting offices, paying salaries

So is every other company operating in Europe, and they have to pay their corporate taxes. But the multinational corporations evade their corporate taxes and get an unfair competitive advantage.

A practical example: a hamburger and fries from a local franchise costs 2 eur (about 20%) more than one from McDonalds, because the latter doesn't pay their taxes to this country, using the same "license fee" trick as Facebook, channeling all of their profits through Netherlands, Luxembourg and/or Ireland.

These tricks are known with names such as "double Irish with a Dutch sandwich".
Yes, I am using the correct case.
http://beaconpower.com/operating-plants/ but there are others, some even quite old. More often selected for niche reasons than market peak load balancing. e.g. site one at long end line of insufficient frequency stability.
My heart sank as I read this post and looked at the product. This has everything going against it.

First: Online comments are a notorious anti-feature on many sites. You're basically making it so that they're instantaneous and impossible to filter. Major sites have to do an enormous amount of human reading/filtering just to have comment sections that aren't filled with horrific, violent, sexual imagery[1].

Second: This is a B2C product. If your customers are users, then your customer-acquisition costs are high. If your customers aren't users, then your customer-acquisition costs are still high, but your sky-high user-acquisition costs become fixed costs (you can no longer monetize your 1st user, but more like your 100,000th).

Third: Have you ever seen a live web chat on any site? These were popular in the late 90s as a drop-in feature that non-coders could use. They were absolutely full of filthy comments. I've seen chats that had 100+ messages per minute, and they were totally incomprehensible. That's even without any professional-level trolls involved.

Fourth: If you think this was a good idea because a business guy and marketing guy liked it, then you need to take a look at every failed business. There's almost always some sort of "expert" behind it. Even professional investors don't know if ideas are good or not; only customers do. What customer discovery have you done?

My strong advice is to work at least part-time. Don't go into debt for this. Get people to use it first, and then decide to put money into it. And if you can't get anyone to use it or invest in it, it's not because they "don't understand". It's because this wasn't a smart move.

I'm telling you all this as someone who's been there before. I've failed at exactly this kind of business. It took a long time before my delusions finally evaporated and I saw that all the people warning me were right. It's great to dream and be optimistic, but when you truly have a great business, people will give you money for it. If you don't get money soon (investors or clients), move on.

1. http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/08/11/jezebel_to_g...
Waiting for the follow-up article "Don't let the Nobel prize fool you. Literature is not a science." :)

Joke aside, the argument that "A Nobel prize in economics implies that the human world operates much like the physical world" is not really the best argument I've heard in the "soft vs hard" sciences debate.
That's how most of Europe does VAT: food, cultural and other essential products enjoy a very reduced VAT rate in many (but not all) countries here[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax#Tax_rates
VAT is the most unjust tax there is. People with low income spend it on things like food, clothing, housing, entertainment, that are all subjected to VAT, whereas richer people have access to the stock market, investment, and tax lawyers, and pay relatively less VAT. VAT is effectively a degressive tax, if you leave only VAT then you accept a system where the poor pay for the rich.

However this is already the case in Europe because the VAT rate is so high. For example for France, tax revenue in 2014 was 74B€ of income tax, 39B€ of corporate tax, and 139B€ of VAT. I'm guessing this is a political game where you have to keep income tax high enough so that the inequalities are not too obvious.
Re-posting my comment from the Guardian thread that came up earlier ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10371728 )

Corporation tax in the UK is payable on 'profits subject to corporation tax'. In laymen's terms this is roughly equivalent to to accounting profit.

Employee salaries, bonuses, etc are generally deductible; if you pay me 50K, that's 50K out of your bottom line.

The employees in question likely pay a variety of taxes including but not limited to the standard income tax. In an extreme scenario (recent graduate + highest tax band) that could be 61% rate.

(For comparison, the 2015 rate for Corporation Tax is 20%; so as far as the Exchequer is concerned, a salary payment is preferable, at least in immediate terms).

In summary, I think there's a discussion to be had here about abuse of taxation frameworks but the headline here is bait; the bonuses are irrelevant, any oddities regarding transfer payments etc. are what should be focused on.

edit: My position on taxation in general is that we should be focusing on Capital Gains Tax (taxes the gain on appreciation of assets such as shares) and Income Tax (taxes income from sources such as employment, share dividends).

Taxing corporations seems like it can only ever be arbitrary at some level, because they don't.... 'exist', for lack of a better term. They can be ephemeral, relocate, etc.
Oh right, thanks. :)

I mistook it for a link along with "new" "threads" "comments" as the title, "saved", appeared next to it.
Jersey City Proposes Legislation to Legalize Airbnb
Yeah, wouldn't an empty soda can be 99+% air by volume?
Uber can only exist in a society with a detailed and rigorously applied legal code, decent transport infrastructure, and wealthy citizens. I'm sure there are more requirements.

As Uber benefits from public spending on these things, they should also contribute to their upkeep.
Well, in hypothetical laissez-faire capitalism taxes would not be needed to provide infrastructure - Uber would just have to pay its fees for driving on private roads (etc.). This would drive prices up, but fairly divide the costs between the roads' users. Although I must admit I have no idea how things could look with purely digital companies like Facebook. I can think of local ISP-s charging the company for allowing access to the website, but that would probably become just an additional earning opportunity for them, without any noticeable positive influence on the local population.
The Global Mobile Innovators Tournament – Enabled by IBM and 4YFN
You have a lot of problems with your argument.

If you have a local taxi company, you make tax money from that company. If it's at least in your country, you make tax money from that company. If the support employees are in your city/country, you make tax money from those people.

So if the company is not from your country, and their support/offices/profits all go somewhere else, it's a loss for you (as a city or country) because before you got to make more money from the local taxi companies. Which you would hopefully use to pay for different services (not sure why you think 311 is the only conceivable cost here).

And honestly, you think rich people pay more taxes? Sorry, it's just not the case. 1 person making 100x more than an average person is going to pay less net taxes and will buy fewer things (even if it's more expensive stuff) than 100 people.
Dell to buy EMC in $67B deal
WebCrypto + localStorage means the site has access to the private key if it wants to. That means that any script injection exploit can compromise everyone's keys.
Michael Dell, MSD Partners and Silver Lake Combine Dell and EMC
I read the GitHub issue but I don't think it's practical or even possible in some cases to keep all the previous pages in memory, especially if you have a web service.

My use case is that I have around +20M documents with non-unique hashes and each query should return an arbitrary amount of documents matching the query / filter as well as calculated meta-data based on the results in the aggregation field.

Now the issues is that if you want to have only one document per hash, you need to use a TermAggregation on the hash field followed by a TopHitsAggregation of size 1 to obtain the actual document rather than the hash field.

At this point you have many many buckets containing a single document but:

- you can't paginate them since TermAggregation doesn't let you do pagination for the reasons you explained and linked to above

- you can't calculate an aggregation on all the returned documents since all of them are in their own separate bucket (by hash)
I think there's a lot more grey here than you're making out.

I'm all for minimising taxes within the legal framework, but that does not mean I agree with all the legal details.

In this particular case, there is something wrong with how large multinationals are able to avoid paying any taxes at all, it's a major problem in my country, Belgium, as well.

I don't agree with your last statement that people would rather want everyone else to be equally highly taxed than lower taxes overall.

I think people just want their tax legislation to be _fair_, and while that is definitely a fungible concept, these large multinationals are crossing the line for the majority of people.
There is only a disadvantage if you place value in externals. The most important lesson in Stoicism is that only the things in our power are good or bad, whereas externals have no intrinsic value.

"Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth - that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death."

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html
Introduction to Offline Web Applications with ServiceWorker
Buying Google.com
Clever yet Easy Ways of Using Apple TV for Your Business
Shameful. Just shameful. I don't care how it gets sugar coated, if you claim to be working for the good of humanity (in facebooks case by connecting people together) and then you loophole yourself out of paying taxes, you are morally bankrupt.