skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its also not in my interest to reduce my net worth by paying taxes. But it happens promptly each year. Maybe its time we demanded this from the companies.

Also, I would argue it is indirectly in the interest of said companies and their employees if they prefer that their legacy is to avoid being referred to in the same bracket as the Enrons and the Arthur Andersens of the world.

The trouble is, they are also too big to fail now. The thing that petrifies me more than a thriving Facebook is a Facebook on the brink of collapse and which has nothing to lose.
I agree with the article, but reading it reminded me a bit of this passage from a (late-1970s?) book detailing why computers will never beat humans at chess: https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/751493208299929600
Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12385232
European Commission wants all forms plundering the coffers of Apple
Big data somehow being unbiased and impartial is a myth. The algorithms are still a product of humans. One notable example is a Google algorithm for labeling objects in photos that tagged black people as gorillas [1]. Now I don't have particular insight into the development process behind this algorithm, but this result may have occurred because the training data used did not include enough photos of black people.

Another example (from an old version of Picasa -- I'm not trying to pick on Google but I have firsthand experience of this) is when a friend of mine had photos of two different Asian people in his collection, but Picasa always recognized person B as being person A, presumably because it couldn't distinguish features unique to the faces of Asian people.

[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/google-apologizes-for-algorithm-mis...
Source code:
https://github.com/TomaszRewak/ML-games
Ask HN: Would Elon Musk Make a Better President Than Hillary?
> I can't remember exactly what my interest rate was but I know it was fixed BELOW the central bank rate at the time

The current calculation for the interest rate on UK student loans is (RPI + X)% (where X varies from 0 for people earning less than £21k, to 3 for people earning £41k pa or more).

There have been some moans about the interest rate; firstly because RPI is consistently higher than CPI, and secondly because both are consistently higher than the BoE's base rate. Still, it's a darn sight better than the other side of the pond.
This is false by the way. There are only four other HN submissions following this pattern. And of those, only one of them got more than 100 points.

Show HN: Iota – a text editor written in Rust (github.com)
221 points by gchp 628 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8734307
What about in podcasts?
I don't know how long ago that was, but 7% sounds crazy high for something you can't shake off with bankruptcy proceedings.
seek.com.au is a good start. If you're looking for a mobile role you could try Outware Mobile http://www.outware.com.au/working-at-outware/. I worked there some years ago (in Edinburgh now).

EDIT: Another place to take a look at is REA. http://careers.realestate.com.au/
Facebook CEO says group will not become a media company
Here is the European Commission's word on the issue: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-2923_en.htm
Meh. Not until i can drop a Android app onto Linux without jumping through massive hoops.
I know the name of Avalon Hill thanks to Advanced Civilizations for MSDOS. Sometimes I keep playing against the AI of this game. Very impressive for a DOS game, as it's hard to win it.
I'm not a lawyer, but as far as I know the European law is prioritary before its nations'laws (except constitution). Apple took advantage of Irish law.

What is retroactive here is the payment of taxes, not the law.
This won't directly answer your question but FPGA boards are now more accessible to hobbyists. That helps with popularity.
The EU is not a tax collection body, but there is this:

> The Commission can order recovery of illegal state aid for a ten-year period preceding the Commission's first request for information in 2013.

from the press release
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-2923_en.htm
Building an Image Slider with Vue.js
One of the best things I've ever read in my life. Thank you for sharing this.
No, not for writing. It's never safe. It will eventually eat your data.

But for reading it's fine. So by all means, you can populate from a main data store that you never otherwise touch.

Then again, if you're running just a single instance on really small data... What could go wrong?

Edit: Again, small stuff, locally, it's probably fine. But ElasticSearch wasn't really built to be a primary data store.

Sources:

https://aphyr.com/posts/332-jepsen-crate-0-54-9-version-dive... (This has links to other good sources, right in the beginning).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11325316

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11362069
You forgot to mention the skeleton in the closet on vp9's license terms.

It is patent encumbered, by Google owned patents, but they allow free use, so long as you promise to never sue them for patent infringement.

Given how many pies they have their fingers in, that seems like a pretty big catch.
She brings back the child-like wonder and joy of early "tuts" of hackerdom. The old "asciiz" were tutorials written by people who both _enjoyed_ programming, and found it mischievous.
Android support library 24.2.0 Password visibility toggle
Do you have any counter anecdote to the assertion?

Because nobody will make a study to verify that the sky is blue if there isn't at a minimum some dissenting opinion.
"Is the EC actually trying to apply a retroactive law?"

No. The whole agreement between Apple and Ireland was deemed illegal by EC[1], so now they must pay avoided taxes. You can't demand keeping stolen goods after being caught stealing.

1. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-2923_en.htm
The Ivory Coast is west and Syria is not even in Africa...
"Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies - this is __illegal__ under EU state aid rules," the commissioner said.

"The Commission's investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years."

http://www.rte.ie/news/2016/0830/812819-apple-tax-ireland/
Episode Eleven: To Kill a Move Constructor
In bot we trust: How to get poor countries out of low-trust ruts
And that is why Microsoft went all out when Netscape started pushing the intranet idea, because it targeted the platform that MS had built up after they blindsided Novell.
I assume the connector is the doctor - why doesn't she have a work phone with the patient's numbers that she doesn't use Facebook on? Then the chance of patients being connected to one another is dramatically lower.
The analogy I've seen used on other sites is its like a food allergy, which is extremely important when selecting a restaurant or buying picnic food, but it doesn't significantly impair or impact social activity, or it only impacts it as much as you permit it to make you feel bad.
> The EC is now saying that even though it was legal

You are wrong.
From EC statement: Ireland gave ILLEGAL tax benefits to Apple worth up to €13 billion [1]

[1] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-2923_en.htm
> "As responsible corporate citizens, we are also proud of our contributions to local economies across Europe, and to communities everywhere. As our business has grown over the years, we have become the largest taxpayer in Ireland, the largest taxpayer in the United States, and the largest taxpayer in the world."

Nice logical fallacy here, positively reframing / dumbing down a company's obligation to pay taxes in ${countries_of_activity} as "we have become the largest taxpayer in Ireland". That's precisely what Apple is condemned for: for consolidating fiscal activity in a tax haven, Ireland, in order to pay ridiculously-small taxes for Euro zone Apple activity, rather than paying (bigger) taxes in each EU country.

Also, Cook mentions "6,000 people across Ireland [...] performing a wide variety of functions as part of Apple’s global footprint.". I have no idea what that number represents, scaled to a multinational like Apple. I'd be curious to know what you think of this number.
The letter is fucking pathetic.
They are literally trying to conscript fanboys to cause some drama so they are off the hook. For a company that literally has hundreds of billions floating about its just pathetic
Maybe Apple spent $10M or whatever in taxes in Ireland over the past 10 years. And of course corporate profits are imaginary so you can imagine them happening anywhere on the globe.

If I owned a small country on an island, I would be more than happy to allow Apple to imagine its profits were on my island and I would only charge $5M for the privilege. And I would be grateful for the $5M.

What would you do with your small island?
It was not legal. Ireland did not have the right to give a preferential tax treatment to Apple.
If we train a mortgage engine on Redlining [0] data, it will then red line. Algorithms are not somehow "fair" because there isn't directly a human in the path. They are as "human as we are" but only proxy and at much lower fidelity.

Not to Godwin the thread ... but big data has been used for immoral purposes since well, big data [1].

The even larger danger, is that people who don't know better, will simply "train a model" and having no overt ill-will, will still create a biased algorithm.

[0] http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1050.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
This is known as the "Double Irish, Dutch Sandwich" tax strategy.

And has been used by many multinationals e.g. Google, Facebook, Ikea, Coke for many years.
Did they ask the EC if it was legal in the first place? If they wanted a guarantee they should not rely solely on the approval from the government in Ireland.
Ukraine was in total disarray due to a violent revolution to depose its democratically elected president. The Russian annexation, i.e. intervention, was arguably done to stabilize the situation on their part. A referendum was held after the fact. Not to mention that Crimea was previously a Russian subject not 60 years prior.

I don't see this as unprovoked in the same vein as the invasion of Iraq, for instance.

The Ukrainian conflict is ineffably more complicated than they "started to like America." This sort of thinking is not productive when trying to make sense of world events. There are lots of factors at play here, economic, cultural, historical, political, and so forth.

This has been my only thesis from my OP. If you disagree with me, you're saying the Ukraine situation is as simple as Putin being an evil invader. I think that is a flawed, incomplete, and unproductive analysis of the situation. If you are interpreting me as defending Russia you are totally missing the point.
We had a similar case in the Netherlands with Starbucks.
The European Commission has the argument that if a company has a treaty with a countries tax office that results in them paying less tax than other companies without such a treaty would, then the EC regards that as a state subsidie of a company by that government.
A European government is prohibited to subsidise companies in a free market (there are exemption under law), they declare this an illegal subsidie and the government must get the illegal subsidie back.
As fare as I am aware, Apple is not being fined in this case, the Irish government is. Its up to the Irish government to continue this subsidy, they just will be fined again if they do.
Apple seems to say here that they might withdraw from Ireland because of the uncertainties around their tax evasion strategies, not because they will actually be taxed more.
Didn't even know "The Apple Community in Europe" was a thing.
> The EC is now saying that even though it was legal, they owe the tax anyways.

As far as I understand, the EU is saying that it never was legal under EU law.
Isn't this just simple tax evasion? How can a head office not be based in any country or have any employees?
Krugman is another example of a f* idiot who won a nobel prize.
Falling to 0.005%

[...]
In subsequent years, Apple Sales International's recorded profits continued to increase but the profits considered taxable in Ireland under the terms of the tax ruling did not. Thus this effective tax rate decreased further to only 0.005% in 2014.
You should probably keep reading.
> the point here is that this scheme was entirely legal

That is maybe your legal analysis of european union state aid legislation, but in the end it's the commission and the court of justice who have to assess it.
In a sense: yes. Apple made a deal with Ireland as to their taxation; the EU ruled it illegal, and judged that both parties must act like the agreement was never there.

That means Apple is due taxes to Ireland.

In a sense, Ireland is the guilty party. They entered the EU; that means they agreed with its rules. Later they made an agreement with Apple that is now ruled illegal in the EU. Yet, they will profit (in the short term) if this ruling will stand.

Note that Apple's only published issue is with the retroactive part.

Open question is whether Apple handled in good faith making that deal. I do not rule out judges would rule they did, because there are zillions of such deals, and because the EU doesn't mention anything about fining Apple (they 'just' have to pay the taxes they are due, with interest)
Except "ex post facto" contradicts "no exceptions": abide by the laws in play at the time, and it seems Apple actually did.
"Taxes for multinational companies are complex, yet a fundamental principle is recognized around the world: A company’s profits should be taxed in the country where the value is created. Apple, Ireland and the United States all agree on this principle. In Apple’s case, nearly all of our research and development takes place in California, so the vast majority of our profits are taxed in the United States."

So is R&D the only part of the company they believe creates any value? Why operate in Ireland at all if so? Should just outsource it all...

Of course they know better. The value is right there in the first paragraph:

"Thirty-six years ago, long before introducing iPhone, iPod or even the Mac, Steve Jobs established Apple’s first operations in Europe. At the time, the company knew that in order to serve customers in Europe, it would need a base there."
> In the days following the event, Younis ... used the organization's software to collect data on whether companies raised money on Investor Day. A handful of companies had. Others reported positive conversations.

A little surprising that only a "handful of companies" raised, although I don't know what "handful" means here. 5%? 10%?
Simply keep repeating the reply message payload until the next message payload comes in from the ETs.

E.g.
Earth receives the message: "How are you".

Then we send back in a nob-stop loop the message "We are fine. how's the weather?"

95 years later the aliens receive our message and immediately fires back their response "Great weather, here are some technologies that we think you may find useful"

However this message still needs another 95 years to travel to earth...

Thus we keep repeating our "We are fine, hows the weather?" message until 190 years later until their next message reaches us, at which point we can reply with

"Thank you for the tech, however it is about 200 years to late to be useful, nonetheless culturally interesting. Here's a Rick Roll in return."
In the UK they did exactly this: http://www.lawandtax-news.com/asp/UK_Court_Allows_HMRC_To_Im...

If you evade tax, you know full well what you are doing, even if it's technically legal you should expect to be retrospectively taxed, especially if you are exploiting the system to such an extreme.
The article emphasizes the fact that data driven decisions amplify not only efficiencies of the modern society, but also its inefficiencies. Which is probably true for any technology.
European governments already collect 20% VAT (equivalent to sales tax) on all Apple's products sold in their countries. Their employees in Ireland pay about 40% income tax, and similar levels in other European countries. They pay VAT on all the utilities they consume in the countries they operate in. It seems insane that the EU is chasing them for corporation tax as well. I smell French communists in Brussels running amok.
In Lithuania, one site is using its journalists to fight ad-blockers
I have been using the free app "MathPad" on iPhone for a few years now. It does the same thing (A LOT better). But the free version does not allow export to LaTeX, so this open source alternative is more than welcome.
by taking part in a race to the bottom

You mean countries competing for business? Why is that bad?

It would sound ridiculous if you applied it to companies "Car companies offering lower and lower prices is just a race to the bottom! If this keeps up we'll have no car companies as they'll all be bankrupt!".
But most software is promoted as "Production Ready" to these companies, because their producers need "Rapid Growth"-TM.

If this went bad, you see something like MongoDB happen.
This "message" is almost as bad as dodging taxes through loopholes.

It reads as the Apple Head of State trying to rally the troops, trying the "foreign aggression because they're so jealous" angle.
I am just curious, can you find a concrete example of where the interests of the people and state were put above the interests of the lobby groups of the big corporations?
And to use Cook's words "A company’s profits should be taxed in the country where the value is created." By this logic maybe the EU should get only VAT, which is paid by Apple's customers and not by Apple, but the US is left without a huge amount of tax money.
Yuck. Old black and white photos, emotional appeal to some sort of corporate heritage. Posturing as some sort of victim. Only thing missing is a tiny violin playing on that webpage.

Apple's been paying virtually no tax for years because it's argued it's legal to do so. Now the EC deems it was illegal. GG WP - you lose. Time to pay up now.

I'm sure due to the amounts involved that this potential event was in someone's "risks" column and hasn't come completely out of the blue for Apple.
How Much Has Vanguard Saved Investors? Try $1 Trillion
Dow launches all-PE laminate for flexible packaging industry in India
That's because Go hasn't been historically very good at keeping binaries small.

However things are starting to get better: https://blog.golang.org/go1.7-binary-size.
> the laws preventing incentives aren't protecting the weak they are protecting the strong.

That's not entirely correct. These norms were introduced to open up nationalised markets like telecoms, mail etc, which would otherwise remain forever locked on national boundaries. This allowed an equal field for businesses across the Union. Of course, established markets tend to favor the richest players.

This approach is supposed to be complemented by infrastructural funds, where German and French taxpayers effectively pick up the bill for rebuilding Ireland or Romania to a state where they can compete on an equal foot.

> Neither Apple not anyone else would give 2 cents about Ireland

That's very unfair to Ireland. Ireland has a natural advantage nobody can take away: sharing a language with the richest and most powerful nation on the planet. That's worth a lot, in this day and age.
Ideas that Have Harmed Mankind (1946)
Monero Rising: Why Dark Markets Matter
You have two options other than ebay:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/880022/civilization-total-g...

A completely recreated version of Advanced Civilization w/fantastic all new art. There are people such as printplayproductions.com [1] who will make one-off copies of prototype games on request from sets of files, but will probably run you in the $150 to $200 range. This is the copy I have.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/184424/mega-civilization

Currently available in retail boardgaming outlets, very deluxe and very huge. Extreme boardgaming. Retails around $250.

-----

Both of these versions come with all of the expansions and supplementary material, and Mega-Civilization comes with a lot more, driving the maximum player count up to 18(!). Both options are cheaper than trying to accumulate all of the original material on ebay, and the components are nicer.

Just trying to be helpful...

[1] http://www.printplaygames.com/prototypes
> it seems Apple actually did.

According to Tim Cook/Apple's PR team.
No need. In 2014 they paid 0.005% in Ireland.
Latency is a bitch.
Saying that "It (Apple) has helped create and sustain more than 1.5 million jobs across Europe" is a far stretch if the majority of that number are app developers for who it makes no difference where Apple is located.
New Microwave Device Produces Single, Tunable Photons
The EU's argument is that it was always illegal under EU law. In their view the analogy would be you local council say the you don't have to pay income tax, and then a court finding they didn't have the right to make that agreement.

I don't really have a view which is correct, but I think it's important to note that the EU doesn't accept it is acting retrospectively.
You've got an unusual definition of "sovereignty".

I'm not sure about US states (I would have thought they are considered sovereign member states of the Federation, but I haven't researched the issue), but the much less incorporated European Union certainly consists of "sovereign" states.

Or was it just a linguistic shortcut for "Ireland has submitted itself under treaties and laws of the European Union"?
"A company’s profits should be taxed in the country where the value is created."

"In Apple’s case, nearly all of our research and development takes place in California, so the vast majority of our profits are taxed in the United States."

And yet the value creation seems to be happening mostly in tax havens... and NOT in the US. Nice try, Timmy.

Be a sport and put your money where your mouth is, and repatriate all that foreign stash cash to the US, and I am happy to side with you. Yet somehow, I believe this won't be on the menu anytime soon...
No, you got it wrong. There is/was no loophole and it wasn't legal.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12388945
It just felt like there is at least one HN submissions each week about a new text editor written in X on the front page. Seems like writing a new text editor in a new language is the new Hello World!
This is not a surprise.

Europe is the most communist region in the world and that's why European economy just keeps on declining.
On the other hand, making citizenships "sticky" can dissuade people from some crimes BECAUSE they're citizens.

In the war of terrorism, U.S-citizens caught fighting for Al-Qaeda/ISIS are tried for treason (potentially carrying a death penalty) while foreign fighters could be afforded the luxury of the Geneva Convention rights.

And yes, I am a naturalized US citizen.
Unlikely for many years (if ever), compiling HDL down to an image to flash FPGA with takes hours. Routing wires etc is very difficult process and is very compute intensive.

JIT for FPGA is quite possibly mathematically impossible.
Of course not. We tolerate mass injustice and violence (even state perpetuated, both at home and abroad), and racism, and misogyny. We think vengeance is justice. We savor "redemptive violence". We routinely believe that mercy is weakness. We harbor numerous misunderstandings and superstitions on vitally important subjects ranging from relationships to economics to science to mental illnesses to sexual orientation and gender to recreational drug use.

Modern? We're practically medieval. But at least there is some glimmering of hope that we understand our problems and are working to fix them.
Controversial pension paper will be published after all