skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great summary, I'd like to add

> while not dis-incentivising multi-nationals from doing business in each country

I'd argue that the incentive to do business in several countries is the profit they're making in those countries. No company is going to walk away from a company because they're being charge x% of tax on the money they earn. They might say they will, but they may as well be saying this...

"Because I don't want to pay you $1, I will reject the $5 this other person is going to give me."
"It's about the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law. At the end of the day tax evasion is illegal, when you're deliberately setting out to not pay your tax by hiding your money,"

This is so wrong. Close these loopholes so a million dollar accountant and a regular accountant play by the same rules.

It's as if a soccer didn't have an offsides rule and then some complained about teams taking advantage of offsides. Change the law and move on. Don't complain about companies exploiting a huge hole you created.
The political point here is that big corps are unfairly draining a lot of money out of the local systems they operate in. This leads to reducing services locally, starving the unemployed and the poor and straining middle classes big time. Exhilarating amounts of money are funnelled and stockpiled under the name of unaccountable entities named Apples, Googles etc. against many millions poor that wil need basic income to survive sooner than later. Is this the world we need, really? The principle is simple: local branch entities pay taxes locally just as any local small business.
To the extent that my understanding of European current events is aided by shared culture and a much better coverage of history, even including many more modern events, I find my near-complete lack of understanding of Chinese culture is a serious impediment to my understanding of articles like this. My university history classes basically ended at the Boxer Rebellion, with a brief interlude into using the Great Leap Forward as a hit piece against Mao (which, to be fair, he seems to have deserved, but that's all it was meant as. It wasn't meant as history of China).

For example: isn't China supposed to be Communist? How are there so many ludicrously rich people? Clearly, I'm missing some part of the equation in there that explains why I have this perception.

It's vexing because I tend to want to "fix" problems in understanding as soon as I identify them, yet I have no idea how one would gain an accurate image of China from the outside, given how much I've been told they control information flow.
> The terminology may be different, but ultimately upstart's "start on" directive establishes a dependency.

Actually, it is part of the upstart design that its event-driven architecture is not structured in terms of dependencies.

* http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#upstart-s-design-why-it-...
7 Ways to Improve Your Predictive Models
> We already had a period of enlightenment that disposed of the “old gods”. And they seriously believe an electrified god artefact would fare any better?

Plenty of people think that way about money, with the ends often justifying the means to astonishing degrees. We create things, then worship them. Plenty of people get manipulated to elect people, and that makes what those do right by definition in their eyes, rationalizing even hard facts away once they're taken; people basically get deceived and "voluntarily" make choices against their own interests as a matter of daily business; that's just more sustainable coercion, not freedom. There's one thing worse than not being free, that's not being free and thinking you are.
For the Mac, GrandPerspective.
"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"
If you have a low income and need all the money to buy food you get taxed on 100% of your income. If you have a lot of income and can save or invest 90% you only get taxed on 10% of your income.
It would require no operations staff and no maintenance?
That's a very good question. I will have to ask my mother, as that is literally her business, to know such things.
Freeagent also deals quite nicely with VAT, and you can set up for automatic direct debit... In fact I sometimes wonder what I'm paying my accountant > £100/month for :-)
It's worse than that. The "HQ" is in Ireland, but pays "royalties" to an IP holding company in the Cayman Islands, which is where all the profits go, on which no tax is paid. This is the "double Irish" referred to in other comments.

Edit: note that you can just go and read the accounts for Facebook UK here: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06331310/filing-h...

A very important piece of information is left out of the article: what Facebook UK is paying in "license fees" to other parts of Facebook.

The accounts show £131m in "administrative expenses", of which I can account for £86m in staff costs from the same document. £35m of that is a "share based payments charge", which represents the accounting treatment of share options. Of course, the shares handed out are shares of the US parent and not the UK subsidiary.

131-86=£46m which isn't broken down further.
> Irelands 12.5% seems very reasonable considering its so close to its effective rate.

Very little of the actual profits of Facebook are actually subject to the 12.5% corporate tax of Ireland.

In a European corporate tax evasion scheme such as Facebook's, there's typically four to five legal entities in two or three countries. The branch making the actual profits (e.g. Facebook UK) pays their profits as "license fees" to an entity Netherlands or Luxembourg that has a flat-rate tax deal. This money is then transferred to the Irelands, where it stays for a few milliseconds before it is wired over to another corporate entity in NL/LUX ("license fees" again), subject to a flat rate fee, and then through ownership deals gets transferred back to Ireland. This trick is called the "double Irish with a Dutch sandwich", and there are dozens of similar, widely-employed schemes.

If this money is actually needed in the US, it gets funneled through one or two hops in Bahamas, Bermuda or Cayman Islands or so.

The net result is not 12.5%, more like (12.5%)^2 - (flat rates paid in NL/LUX). Effectively down to a few percent.
Just as with sports betting in general, there will be a very small cabal of bookmakers and pro punters who absolutely clean up and everyone else who funds them.
We are not far away from that with the new regime, but ultimately that's mostly disproportionately onerous on small, risk taking entrepreneurs and small businesses.
I always thought that computer science graduates should only be employed as scientists. Anythig else is a waste. Why don't we have more software engineering courses instead?
Stoicism is a secular buddhism for people that don't like the buddhist brand.
Sorry, I do not get what you want to say.
I worry about the drip-drip-drip of information that the British public can (and probably will) use to end up at the conclusion that leaving Europe in the future will be the silver bullet to all of the issues.

Immigration from Europe > Leave Europe (we're an island!)

Can't deport or be cruel to alleged terrorists > Leave Europe (we don't need the European Convention on Human Rights)

Can't stop corporations playing the tax system > Leave Europe (the borders become hard, the taxes unavoidable)

Our press don't really need more reasons to whip up the anti-EU mob, corps shouldn't help them do so.
And people are still saying that Intel doesn't have any competition anymore because AMD is doing so bad these days...
Dell agrees $67bn EMC takeover
How about this:

sum(int(x > 10) for x in xs)

Just require the conversion to be explicit.
Dell Files Confidentially for IPO of Cybersecurity Unit SecureWorks
New origami technique makes paper much stronger
In the US we already have charities and they're not really taxed and if you donate to those charities, the money you donate is (generally) not taxed.
Which is funny because a lot of ferry routes go through Iceland http://220kts.com/ferry-flights/atlantic-ferry-routes.html
This arrangement collapses into monopoly very quickly. Facebook would bypass or buyout the local ISPs.

(A world of purely voluntary contracts and no compulsory purchase would never have got past the development of the railway or telegraph, so the whole prospect is ludicrous)
Does anyone else have fond memories of http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visu... ?
Return on investment weighs heavily on most business decisions. If I invest $X, by the end of the year I'll get $X*(1+return%).

Since companies can't invest everywhere at the same time, they prioritize investments. A higher tax rate might mean investing in that country later, as there are other investments than have a higher immediate return.

I could see a situation where an investment was profitable, but so marginally profitable due to the tax rate that the investment was delayed effectively forever.
Side topic, how much carbon capture could we achieve by burying crop plants after harvesting? It seems like only a small amount of biomass is harvested. Think of corn. I'm assuming the rest is turned back into co2 by decomposition?
Glad to help :)
Maybe because the graduates are trying to do something totally different from what they've been taught, therefore requiring a huge amount of self-education in parallel with their course? If 99.99% of physicists specialising in fluid dynamics went on to pursue careers in plumbing we'd see a similar unemployment pattern.
Why we need to Opt for responsive web design?
Am I alone in thinking corporation tax is idiotic?

I think corporations are incredibly immoral institutions (due to skewed incentive structures), however - ultimately it's a collection of investors, owners and employees.

Why not be honest and tax the corporations on the outflow of capital? ie. dividens, wages and sales tax

Corporate tax is ultimately a populist hidden tax on the whole economy b/c no one "feels" it. If you raise it everyone will whoop and cheer (b/c fuck big co!) and not appreciate it's impact on salaries or retirement funds.

Maybe I'm missing something?
The simplicity and power of Elixir: the ws2048 case
No. I've never voted, not once.

I do not believe I live in a democracy, even though that's what we're
calling it. I believe that by voting I'm validating a broken system.

Who are all these people making calls about everything and setting rules,
while knowing relatively little on the subject matter? I personally think
a democracy would be every eligable person being able to contribute to
the decision of (ie. voting on) these calls, rather than simply picking
the 'guy' who makes them. Let the experts in their fields have a say. I
don't know what such a system would look like - but only if something
like that were in place would I call it a democracy. What we have right
now is the illusion of a democracy. I'm not interested in voting, but
I am interested in fixing this mess.

Back down to earth.. I think the barrier to entry for understanding
current politics is unrealistically high: in order for me to make a call
on a party I need to know quite a lot of things about each. There is no
'official source', which forces me to google, which forces me to read
some third party source, whether it's a news site or some blog. Either
way it's more often than not a very biased opinion that does not weigh all
sides equally, and I can never form a complete picture. Too much time is
required to contribute for what I would gain from it, and I have better
things to do. Is anybody aware of an aggregator or a summary site of all
political parties views? Can I look up a party's stance on something and
cross reference what the other parties stances are on the same subject?
This is a great way to teach gerrymandering. It also illustrates the problem with 'Party X is evil, Party Y is not.'

Political parties (stripping away all else) are groups of people who identify with one another. Take that one step further, and they're groups of people that identify with one another and believe their group is the best one to represent the whole.

Or, if you are less idealistic, they want to win (I subscribe to the idea that they want to win because they think their way is the best way and they like the power).

Once you believe those few things, it's easy to understand why politicians aren't evil, they're just vested in their group; in the same way you'd be vested in your group of friends vs. some random sampling of people you met on the street.

Does this make our current set of political problems insurmountable? No; we just have to mold the system so that no one party can have absolute control even if they control the central government. Maybe by delegating a small set of powers to the central government and keeping most governing done at the local level. Maybe we could call it a constitutional republic?
From my tax knowledge, in South Africa it's difficult to get away with paying ridiculously low amounts of tax consistently. The corporate tax rate is 28% taxed on worldwide earnings. Though you prepare returns as a single entity (i.e. each subsidiary files its returns and the holding company would also file its own return), there are transfer pricing provisions, as well as provisions for connected persons (related parties/companies) that make it difficult to just keep 'profits' in Ireland without paying taxes on them.

If I could argue that if FB was headquartered in SA it would be paying at least 20% effective taxes, then surely the issue would be that the specific countries (US and EU) have lenient tax laws. Companies will keep gaming the system if lawmakers don't have the appetite to ignore company lobbying and do what's best for the income of their countries.

Whether the issue is that they don't want to lose the business of these tech companies is something else.
South Africa started imposing VAT on digital services sold by foreign companies last year. As a result my Google Play Music subs started costing me 14% more, funny enough as I technically shouldn't even be having All Access as I'm in an 'unsupported country'. Apple still charges me the same for music, which means someone had to take the loss to keep the value the same. Nonetheless, some people are unhappy, but our country gets to benefit with the extra 14% collected.
What specific aspects of the systemd dependency model do you feel exacerbate race conditions and circular dependencies?

Well, the article discusses all of that...

(Speaking of which, JdeBP helpfully linked to Upstart's pre/postconditions not being a proper dependency model, per the developers' testimony, and as I asserted.)

I'm not sure how the dependency graph could be persistent configuration because hardware can be hotplugged these days.

The idea of device units is not well borne out, as I mentioned. You don't need to create an object type out of a udev handle to order after devices or trigger hotplug events (the device node manager itself does fine, of course in the case of systemd, udev is part of the project, so...)

If the sequential vs. parallel startup discipline "primarily affects determinism" won't all these systems have the same issues with nondeterminism?

Not necessarily. It could either be more manageable if there wasn't so much indirection, see above (I'm afraid you just didn't get the article, and your original summary certainly implied as much). Additionally, one could forfeit being aggressively parallel for a more conservative approach like in OpenRC, s6-rc or even Upstart.

* I don't think anyone is seriously proposing starting up services on boot sequentially in 2015. Or even when a USB stick is inserted. Systems have 12 cores now and people can be very sensitive to boot times.*

Parallelism is but a small part of the complicated topic of boot time optimization. And yes, sequential strategies can still be really fast. Much of the speed increase in modern systems is not from parallelism, but forfeiting the overhead of the shell interpreter in favor of direct execution. Checkpointing can do far greater wonders for your boot times than parallelism can, anyhow.

I understand that systemd relies heavily on cgroups and other Linux-specific features for process isolation.

That's only scratching the surface of Linux-specific features in systemd.

As it is, I would be amazed if at least one or two of the BSDs didn't implement a similar init system to systemd in the next few years. And as it is, they probably won't share any code or concepts, unfortunately.

What will come of the BSDs is uncertain. launchd will be used in iXsystems products like PC-BSD and FreeNAS, and there's not much "code sharing" you could do there - it's already a complete product being ported.
I'm surprised as well; as far as I know, in many places around the world it was standard practice for people in villages to have a dedicated room in which a body would be stored for ~4 days before the burial, to make sure the person is actually dead. That technique was widely known for many centuries, if not millenia.
PyDev of the Week: Carol Willing
Why do people get mad at the company for not paying more in taxes? I presume they are following the law and paying what is required?

Why not get mad at the politicians who created the tax code?
> UK election outcomes have nothing to do with gerrymandering and everything to do with

> being a multi-party democracy using a FPTP electoral system, which tends to boost

> the representation of leading parties at the expense of smaller parties.

More precisely, FPTP tends to boost the representation of leading national _and local_ parties (the latter being best exemplified by the SNP) at the expense of smaller national parties. Small local parties are usually toast anyway even in proportional systems due to thresholds.

During the 2015 elections the system worked exactly as designed, by favoring parties that are strong in one or more nations of the UK at the expense of parties that are a bit meh in all of them.
Actually, the data cleaning isnt so bad. Open Street Map is what you want. I wrote a piece of software for locatable that parsed a given chunk of OSM (in this case, all of the UK mainland) and pull out stuff like hospitals, transit stations, land usage types and so on. I had two models: a zone and a poi. Zones were an area, eg a park or a forest or an industrial park that you could specify as an include/exclude + buffer distance. Eg: At least 10mi from a forest. Poi is point of interest and had the same search semantics: put me 1mi from a GP surgery or a supermarket. Or put me at least 1mi from a primary school because..er...mistakes were made...
Mostly because that's what ships with most distros that are in production use currently.
video http://youtu.be/31dwMAg-Hx4?t=330

slides http://www.opencompute.org/assets/OCP-Summit-V-Slides/Mainst...

specs http://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Server/SpecsAndDesigns#Speci...

The LES shall provide sufficient ride through capacity to maintain proper PSU output for 35 seconds (+/- 500ms) minimum plus walk-in period of no less than 10 seconds (+/- 500ms). The power supply shall meet the reliability and operating life with drop outs at a maximum power of 1600W for 5 seconds then reducing to 1425W for the remainder of the drop out.
The power supply shall be capable of operating at greater than 1425W to 1600W continuous drop out but reliability and operating life of the battery are not guaranteed.
I signed up for an account on Draft Kings last year after seeing a ton of advertising for it. I had been seeing the daily fantasy sports stuff for years after the U.S. destroyed online poker but allowed for betting on fantasy sports, but hadn't tried it and it didn't seem all that popular. After signing onto Draft Kings, I saw that it had obviously become extremely popular.

I dabbled around a bit in the NBA games and quickly saw some strategies that would likely work if tailored more. However, it was entirely clear that the way to win money in those contests would be to build a model that could spit out lineups. In the big tournaments, a model could easily create a large number of high-variance lineups. In head-to-head or smaller games, it could create lower-risk lineups.

I started to draw up a lot of ideas on what the model could do to try and predict things like playing time, share of points/rebounds/assists, etc.

When it came time to actually build it out, I shelved it, largely because it was going to take time and money to work with the type of stats I needed, but also because I'd assume there are already a lot of people on these sites doing this. In fact, I'm assuming everyone who is profitable on those sites is running model-generated lineups. There are still lots of fish pumping money in, but the people taking it out would be at least as, and likely more, sophisticated than what I could do.

There is an extremely popular NBA bettor and he runs a multi-million dollar operation, hiring several analysts to help him make his predictions. In fact, he's actually consulted privately with several NBA teams because his analysis was ahead of what many NBA teams were doing several years ago.

If those are the types of people you're up against, it's a battle of algorithms, not people.
They should have a new tax where a companies profits are estimated globally and then a percentage of that is allocated to the countries where it trades based on the amount of trade done there. So if facebook's global profits are $2.9bn and it does 50% of trade in the US then it should be taxed as having made 1.45bn there and then pay US tax (35%) there so $507m there, even if they claim all the profits were made in some tax haven.

It seems a simple solution but there is probably not much lobbying money in the politicians bringing it about.
[Ebook]Porting to Python 3
WTF Female Celebs Wardrobe Malfunctions Pictures
Why should Facebook get to enjoy an advantage over
36 companies employing 10 people each at a similar
average salary?

Let's turn it around. How would you go about taxing a corporation that didn't make much profit last year
There already are systems for the BSDs that can import systemd units; and have been for more than a couple of years now.
This is partly true. What I've seen personally is that with each increase in the tuition I experienced they were busy throwing that money at facilities and whatever else they could think up. Some of it was decent like actual improvements to aging buildings, but most of it was BS facilities like completely redoing the student center which had no real issues and been renovated barely two years earlier. It seems like the universities are following the same pattern that many hospitals have done: if they have money they must spend it even if it's not to the benefit of its consumers or its shareholders. It's like these institutions have replicated the Stalinist "make every thing big" mentality.
You can buy water for even less than a soda.

Here's what the left-leaning NPR says about Food Deserts and poor people's access to food.

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/15/132076786/the-root-the-myth-of...

And here's the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/health/research/pairing-of...

And here's the progressive magazine Slate:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2014/02/food_deserts...
>I feel that's a sad attitude when you're making every effort possible to contribute as little as possible.

Even the minimum is more than enough. I'm not talking here about making my own dutch-irish-sandwich where I pay no taxes or just straight out lying when declaring my taxes.

It's more about getting it from 40% to 30% by depreciating my iPhone as an instrument for software development, etc.

But maybe I'm just lacking the moral strength to voluntarily pay more than I need to. ;)
Viewed in the historical context, Seneca the younger lived in the time when crucifixion, impalement, and gladiator games where in full swing, so the comparatively speaking, the bad then was quiet a bit worse than the bad now. In my view that makes the grand parents comment quiet shallow.