skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Global companies offshoring profits and not paying enough tax (in the eyes of many countries) was a hot topic at the last G20 summit in Brisbane.

This isn't limited to Facebook, as the article explains. The issue and background here is that when large companies operate globally, each country has its own local subsidiary, owned by the global entity. Money is made in each country by selling goods or services. How are the profits sent upstream to the parent company? By charging costs for goods; or license fees for services. As the company chooses their own costs and license fees, they can effectively control in which entity they make a profit and which they don't. This is also how companies shift profits to no- or low- tax jurisdictions. See: Apple and their large amounts of cash held outside of the USA.

With increased globalisation, this is an issue for many countries. In Australia, for example (where I live), the roll out and success of Uber means that the taxi company tax base will erode. If Uber shifts profits overseas, the Australian Government gets less tax but still has to provide the same level (or greater) services. Uber's a better service, we want it to succeed, but tax is needed for necessary services.

While companies continue to do this, the answer is information sharing between countries' tax offices and laws to ensure a certain amount of profits must stay on-shore, while not dis-incentivising multi-nationals from doing business in each country. As this already has political attention, I'd expect laws in most major countries to deal with this over the next 5 years.

But Facebook are taking the piss here.
React Router: a comprehensive introduction
> And better metrics, such as mapping human networks from email exchanges

I don't think this metric survives Goodhart's Law. It's too easy to game.

> I guess the condensed version would be: understand humans better.

It's not that simple.
I'm a citizen and I think that. Perhaps you describe most citizens, but certainly not all.
Why should I? That alternative is FB, without bad rules.

Facebook already won with features and has approximately all the people already registered. From the communities I know, nobody would consider switching to a different service. It would just be a worse FB with fewer people on it.
I really would like to see google maps to make use of 3d touch to make zooming easier. Moving the finger up/down while pressing would zoom in/out. That would make one-finger usage of the maps so easy.
They didn't make a loss. Read the whole article.
People are assuming that the numbers reported are the result of using loopholes and that the reported loss does not accurately reflect how much money they make in the UK..

The reason the share bonuses are of some interest is that it seems odd to most people if they give away share bonuses worth 35.4m if they are genuinely losing that much money on the UK market.

Yes, it's possible, but the seemingly more likely explanation is that Facebook like most other large international companies are routing their revenue from the UK market through a more tax efficient separate corporate structure.
Actually, the problem is that keto diets are usually high in saturated fat. That increases the risk of heart disease.
The UK subsidiary was apparently making a loss, but the company as a whole wasn't.

This might mean they shuffled money around to avoid paying UK taxes, i.e. they engaged in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_mispricing potentially breaking the law.
I didn't know what a DPF was, nor what an injector was. This January, a 4000+ euros repair bill educated me. This is a seven years old car and taking this bill and the higher car price in consideration, I would have been better buying a regular fuel car.
Clinton explains in https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/9112 why they don't support this. If you really need it, you can implement it yourself by limiting the aggregation using filters https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...

it's obviously not real pagination but the github issue explains why it isn't practical. If you know of other systems that have paginations of aggregations, perhaps you can reference those sources in the github issues and they can learn some tricks how to do it.

As for top hits, the "from" option doesn't let you do what you want?
and to think there was an api to derive pressure from contact size back in 2.0

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UIKit/...

anyone knows any app usage of this? I remember some games had pressure calculated from the accelerometer, don't know if any did use this one instead.
TIL we pay 10-20x more corp tax than Facebook.

Sometimes I feel like a fool, but we've always said from day 1 try to do things as honestly as possible which I'm quite proud of, but there really doesn't seem to be much practical upside apart from not being outed and shamed.

First world problem I guess, at least we're turning a profit.

It is starting to make me a bit bitter though. For example, we've spent a LOT of time making sure we file and pay the full VAT due on all our sales which is insanely complicated. Then we suffer further with the new VAT Moss rules which are aimed at targeting these big businesses who are avoiding it as best possible, but the end consequences being an even bigger burden for small businesses like us.

Makes me wonder if we decided to exit if we could get a higher multiplier. Firstly we represent a reduced risk to the buyer, and secondly the buyer might see it as opportunity to absorb us into their accounting practises which would make us significantly more profitable overnight. I guess that is a potential benefit, but the idea of it ending like that doesn't sit comfortably with me.
One of the things I did when I was in my 20s was to look for some kind of great person to adopt as a hero, or a philosophy that would cover all of the tough questions. I guess my feeling was that there was some exact solution to everything and that putting myself in the right bucket I'd have a lot of personal questions answered.

Looking back, this is probably a good reason to wait until studying philosophy until your 30s -- you need some time actually living in order to put things in their proper place. Epistemology, especially, can really take your head for a spin.

But I finally realized that various forms of thought are not solutions, rather they are tools for dealing with the day-to-day issues that life brings. Different situations? Use different tools. The goal wasn't to find an universal answer, it was to fill a tool belt with the tools you'd need for an interesting and rewarding life.

An obvious corollary here: it's okay if the tools don't all work together at the same time. I'm a human, not a math equation. It all doesn't have to add up and be consistent in the end. (Very tough to realize and accept this as well!)

Today the three main tools I use the most are agnosticism, existentialism, and stoicism. Between these three I find that I am safely and soundly able to navigate various difficult ethical, moral, and professional questions. In addition, they give me direction for further joy and fulfillment in life. And extra bonus points: they do not preclude any of the wonderfully human and irrational beliefs I may want to pick up along the way, such as using supplements for life extension, playing the lottery, or choosing to believe in the Great Pumpkin.

Modern life is one of people instantly connecting together in mobs. Nobody can tolerate being bored, and it's very easy to spend a lot of your life without really thinking about what you're doing. Stoicism, existentialism, and agnosticism guides me in mindfulness, self-directed purpose, and the limits of my knowledge. I'm very happy to have them as part of my tool belt.
The UK press seems to have a field day when it comes to multi-national corporations not paying corporation tax.

We will no doubt shortly have a number of MPs telling us how unacceptable this is and that Facebook need to start paying up.

This all irks me a little.

362 Facebook staff on an average salary of say £65,000 will contribute at least £7,230,696.60 in taxes and NI to HMRC. Let's also not pretend that £65,000 is the average salary at Facebook UK, it's likely much higher.

Then we can look at those 'stock' bonuses that much of the article seems to point towards. There will likely be capital gains tax paid by employees on the sales of those assets down the line.

The UK has seen a strong economic recovery and remains a global financial centre and the business friendly tax policies of the UK likely contribute heavily towards this.

If I had a choice between Facebook paying £4,327 in corporation tax but employing over 350 highly skilled individuals in the UK, or relocating to somewhere like Dublin due to aggressive taxation policies. I know what I would pick.
I'm asking someone who is more knowledgeable than me on this topic. What would happen if you replace all (most) tax with VAT?

That would mean everywhere there is a real transaction, that generates greater value, that is where the tax is. It would also make it impossible for big companies to do tax evasion - since you limit the effects to the 'leaves' of the tree that is the economic system, you can catch the money before it escapes put the company 'tree' structure, out of the reach of the state.
Doesn't work with python3 (which is the only python I use on my machine)

Why are people still building in 2.x? :#
I don't know the facts, but I have a strong feeling that your view of that system is very idealistic and, at the very least, incomplete.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10230227
So they paid next to no corporation tax. Meanwhile their employees will have paid a stack of income tax & the new rules on VAT should mean that all Facebook Ad sales to UK customers are subject to UK VAT.

I don’t think the UK is being shortchanged all that much. When Google/FB et al were able to shift Ad sales to low-VAT regime holding companies, that was definitely taking the piss. This? Meh.
There's no such thing as unbiased people. Admitted bias is better than pretending to be unbiased.
They need to be a bit careful, because they risk causing much tighter tax regulation in EU.

I think this is going to happen anyway, as it's not just Facebook. Governments see it as a reduction in tax, and it's politically safe for a Government to do without getting voted out.
I don't mean that, and I have no idea what you have inferred it from. In particular, where did America come from?
I sure did and they responded with "blah blah tickets only cover 30% of the cost of public transport". I've noticed the most obnoxious advertising in public seems to be provided by the company "APN".
From https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/blink-dev/q5Q...
Can't comment on the FB case but most share schemes are structured so the employee pays the minimum (if any) tax on the shares - typically by holding them for a number of years
>I do not accept responsibility for feelings of offense others may feel in response to my speech.

If you know some people will be offended by a particular usage and you choose to use it anyway, then you are responsible for the resulting offence, whether you accept it or not.

Sometimes there are benefits which make the offence worthwhile, particularly when the offence is exceptionally uncommon. But using gender specific speech in generic/unknown contexts has no such benefits, and will cause offence fairly often. Singular they is easy and idiomatic, and I don't see any real excuse not to use it, other than laziness.

>It's not my job to manage their emotional state.

No, it's just a nice thing to do.
Complaining is a signal that you're considering moving. Smart companies absolutely will care. It's usually far easier to keep an existing customer than to win them back after they leave.
Using lpd to spool MP3s (2003)
I don't like commenting on others' politics and governments (Egypt in this case). I do for my own because I have the right to. But wouldn't a predominantely Muslim country vote for a Muslim government? Wouldn't a Christian-founded country like the US ensure its president is Christian? I think it's fair and logical.

My understanding is that the people of Egypt voted for a Muslim representation. They got just that (for better or worse). Until el-Sisi, with his military power, decided it didn't suit his own views.
Nobel prize in economics won by Angus Deaton
How Game Theory Solved a Religious Mystery
API+Discovery:+11+Ways+to+Find+APIs
The new way of community farming
I don't have a hope that this tax issue will be solved any time soon. There are hundreds of billions dollars involved globally, and when you are talking about that much money... It's very hard to do much about it, let's be realistic.

I quite agree about the attitude expressed here (Let's Just Give Up on Taxing Big Corporations, http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-10-08/multination... ). It's not fair but there's not that much that can be done.
> In software, qualification and even experience does not correlate with ability.

> If you have a newly qualified accountant, doctor, architecture it is assumed they are at least competent to some basic standard (and it is expected there competence increases with age + experience).

> This is NOT the case with software, it's possible to be a software engineer with 10+ years experience and still be terrible.

Having known my fair share of software engineers, accountants and doctors, I can guarantee you that they are not that different. In every case some less experienced people are better than some more experienced people, and in every case some people dedicate part of their free time to their area: while some software engineers spend time in OSS and blog posts, some accountants read all the new legislation and participate in conferences, and some doctors read a lot of scientific papers and give lectures.

And yes, software engineers also read stuff and give lectures. But the amount of reading required by CS is a lot less intensive than accounting or medicine.
So the CEO says
"it's the first time that anyone's demonstrated a technology that captures CO2 that has the potential to be scaled up to be large enough to be relevant from an environmental or climate point of view."

How about the Bondary Dam full-scale CCS plant that came online a year ago and is currently removing about a million tons of CO2 annually? Doesn't that count? I don't think anyone is questioning the ability of that technology to be scaled further.
Just general feeling compiling some packages and messing with 'openssl speed'.
The state of JavaScript tooling
How to Make Money with Mobile Games?
I'm somewhat optimistic that Facebook will fix this someday, and I didn't want to end on a recruitment blacklist or something in that case. Still, you're right, next time I get one I'll make it clear that this is the biggest reason I'm uninterested, and that if they fix it they should feel free to contact me again :)
I run my own business here in Germany and I'm all for getting every penny out of every tax loophole possible.

But then in my peer group I'm the only one who thinks that way. Most people would rather want everyone else to be as highly taxed as themselves than lower taxes overall it seems.
The particulate filtering technology for Diesel engines has been rushed to market. As well as DPF filters, EGR valves are another thing that get clogged with soot and fail if you do too many short trips. The diesel engines Vauxhall/Opel use are particularly susceptible to it. I had one fail in a 5 year old car, bought the part myself for £200 and my father in law helped me change it but that would have been a £500 garage bill in itself.
Inside the Race to Stop the Next Mass Murderer
Transport for London Unified API – Location of Things
In the UK employers have to pay a "National Insurance" Contribution on top of the employee's contribution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Insurance
Customer Relations as real engineering? I'd say that only "architecture" or, better, system design should be engineering work. Conceiving and planning a product (not its implementation), as well as making it fit the market, that's not engineering.
If they hold them for 5 years there is no Cap Gains tax to be paid on the shares.

Arguing that the tax employees pay should be taken into account when calculating a companies tax provision lacks merit. That's employees tax not the companies - this is especially true for companies such as Starbucks where if they were not monopolising high street space by abusing the tax system and small local coffee shop would happily take their space in a fungible manner meaning the employee tax payments would still take place and there would be no net loss for Starbucks not existing.
That's why it has to be done across many countries so global companies cannot play one country against another. Your assumption that there are only two options doesn't apply.
Can't remember where I read it, but I remember learning that it is very rare for schizophrenic people to question their sanity. So the fact that you are considering it should give you relief that you probably are not.
Fairphone 2: Designing a competitive device that embodies our values
The only real advantage they have at the moment is momentum, and lots of VC money allowing them to survive much higher customer acquisition costs than otherwise. Otherwise, they're a specialised variant of online grocery ordering, which at least in the UK is a huge and very competitive market. They even have the advantage of being able to mail orders, because they're not trying to deliver anything frozen, so logistics is essentially just a case of negotiating a decent rate with a courier.

I'd be really surprised not to see quite a few companies pop up in the same sector, there are already a couple I know of, possibly targeting particular niches such as oriental food.
'some tax avoidance schemes haven't been tested in courts yet'

Probably because the law isn't either fit for purpose, or clear enough for someone to litigate.

As far as I'm concerned, if they (are obeying the law) and getting away with it, then articles like these only expose that the government are the incompetent ones.
The UK subsidiary made a "loss" whilst paying out millions of bounds of stock bonuses. Either Facebook UK is the most incompetently manged company in the world orrrrrrr...
I was running the basic web server detailed in the post, but I didn't really have to do anything else. It's a public IP, notably a Digital Ocean IP. Internet scanners will pick it up.
The issue with VAT is that as usually applied it is an extremely regressive tax. Poorer people spend a far higher proportion on their income on purchases that have VAT applied. If more categories of basic goods were zero-rated or exempt, or if other mechanisms were used to make the VAT burden less regressive, then it might be viable.
This is part two of the series. Covered this week:

Searching for stops, Retrieving stops and stations with facilities, Finding stops near a co-ordinate or in a bounding box, Finding StopPoint information for all stops on a line or bus route, Finding the locations of other things, Santander Cycle docking stations
As the parent commenter said, they are helping fund infrastructure by paying their employees a lot of money, a portion of which is taxed.
It's 250bn around dozens of countries, i.e. a few billions here and there -- worth paying attention to, but not enough to sell all our rights for. I'd rather let them get away with a few billions than become (even more of) an indentured servant for Big Corp.
Is the metal light or just the structure?
Yeah but bonuses will be taxed at 50%. Corp tax is 22% so it's better they pay their staff more and report less profit.
That would give them a permanent unfair advantage over small and medium sized companies. In my country such companies employs loads of people.
> provide the same level (or greater) services

I don't agree with that in all cases, and I particularly don't agree related to Uber.

When I lived in NYC, I often called "311" to complain about taxi-driver misconduct. This was the only outlet, and you really only did it because you wanted to feel better. There were never any direct consequences that you knew of.

If you consider the decreased cost of operating the 311 service, as well as lower taxi-related crime, less drunk driving, etc., I'd guess that a government would spend less when Uber had replaced all traditional taxi services.

(You can also think of Uber as redistribution of wealth from wealthier to less wealthy, since riders will usually be wealthier than drivers. In that case, Uber makes tax revenue go up, since poorer people usually pay more in taxes.)

Edit: Clarified some language, since no one seemed to have understood anything I said the first time.
> 362 Facebook staff on an average salary of say £65,000 will contribute at least £7,230,696.60 in taxes and NI to HMRC

Let's not pretend all 362 Facebook staff are paying tax via PAYE.
More trickle down economics!

Is it 1992 again?
> FB was making a loss last year

They don't make actual losses - they pay all of their profits as "license fees" to some offshore entity to get their accounting show no profits. This probably means Luxemburg or Netherlands where they have a personalized deal with the tax authorities and the taxation of immaterial property is very low.

In reality they made a shitload of money, and are using creative accounting to make it look like they made a loss. This is tax evasion, not making a loss.
That's usually how it's done when you buy a new plane.
The article is ultra thin on informations. What is the news? That FB UK transfered profits out of the UK to avoid corporation tax?

Is that a problem? I honestly don't know. What is the intention of corporation tax?

I would think that the "who uses our streets and is protected by our police has to pay for it" tax is VAT. How is FB doing in terms of VAT?
I believe that's the US proposed FairTax, isn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax
That doesn't stop ~60% of new restaurants from failing, though.
I'm all for it. Imagine Times Square illuminated by art instead of ads.
Not a clone. Hellofresh was founded in 2011 ( http://goo.gl/Dct4ZY ) and BlueApron in 2012 ( https://goo.gl/gCQ3SI )
Well, I don't think there's a huge difference, the money is taken before people ever see it although some people will claim a bit back.

However, there is also employers NI which is definitely paid by the employer, at 13.8% over a low threshold.
On my Android phone, at least, this can already be achieved with a double-tap of sorts.
The thing is that is the employees that pay the the income tax _not_ Facebook. Facebook (and others) are still not paying the taxes on the the income they earn from operating in the UK no matter how many people they employ at high salaries.

The choice you present is a false one, the multiplier productivity effect that Facebook employees gain from operating in London as opposed to Dublin far outweighs what Facebook would end up paying in corporation tax under a more reasonable system.
yeah from the way it compress and bends I's hard to see how it's going to replace structural elements as the video implies.

maybe fuel tanks shells? having the tank collapse as it's used instead of being filled with vapors would also reduce flammability in general.
Yep.

I use the BIND tool named-compilezone to canonicalize zone files, which allows me to apply simple regex parsing, because I can assume one record per line, all fields present, and no abbreviated names. Main disadvantage is it is not very fast.
Ask HN: Tools/best practices to read python project codebase?
What are the tools should i use to read any python project codebase? Any best practices which i follow while reading the codebase?
Is Consumption too Smooth? (1987)
Yes, here too. But pressing might be more intuitive then double tapping.