skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True story: in the mid-2000s I was in the audience at an Apple recruiting talk for H1Bs at a European university (including one fairly-well-known then-Apple dev/manager). It didn't go very well: the audience was oblivious and largely uninterested, the Appleers were tetchy, I asked an impertinent question involving HyperCard. At one stage the rambling audience Q&A turned to a long discussion of the hypothetical possibility of Apple opening a European office at some point in the future. Now granted these were SW dev types rather than QAs or whatever, but ... I didn't quite have the heart to tell them about Cork.

I'm not so sure about this bit, but IIRC at this time (and a long time afterwards) Apple wasn't investing much effort in the pretence that Cork was a serious operation, to the extent that the access road to the site wasn't in good repair and hadn't seen attention in ages, possibly since it was built. [EDIT: I am duly corrected on this, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12390072 below.]
Unfortunately it will be years before myself and many others get to use BPF on our production systems as we have to run an "enterprise" distribution like RHEL or god forbid SLES. But yes it certainly is good to see steps being made in this direction.
Seen the article before. It's not wrong - Terraform is pretty great. But it's leaving out the parts where a lot of stuff breaks, behaves in unexpected ways, is missing critical features etc. A lot of engineering time has to be dedicated to terraform if you're going to use it in a serious stack (and it's overkill as just a toy).
>> "I wonder what percentage of this tax Brussels expects to appropriate for itself."

The money is going to Ireland. It is not a fine but back payment of taxes owed.

Looking at it from a 'brexit' perspective it's yet another reason I'm disappointed we left the EU. It's powerful enough to do something about this while our own government can only wrangle £130m out of Google.
> An actual software engineering degree concentration would be better for what most people actually want, but it's a rarity.

Part of the problem, IMNSHO, is that we have widespread disagreement with the profession of software 'engineering' (such as it is) about what is mandatory, what is excellent, what is good, what is minimally acceptable and what is intolerable. We even see that what some people think is mandatory others think is intolerable, and vice-versa.

I don't know that we'll be able to have an actual proper software engineering profession for at least another two decades, but honestly closer to a century.
Perhaps it's more like punishing a student for cheating in an exam with a cheat sheet that some teacher wrote.
Seems like nearly every HN thread has a discussion of the linked article's web design. Maybe not relevant to the author, but relevant to the audience.
To some extent, the 7.5 times (stuck with this arbitrary figure now …) more things that it does are not necessarily externalisable bloat—it hasn't grown an e-mail client (I think?)—but rather a response to the increasing demands of modern web pages. Offloading, say, JavaScript processing (a not-insignificant part of modern browser code, I think) to a separate application is surely possible, but also surely pointless.
Not at all - there's some clever wording at play here. Apple may well be the "largest" taxpayer in the world. But that doesn't require that they are the singular entity paying the largest total sum of taxes. It's pretty common to measure the size of corporations by market value - Apple is pretty much the "largest" corporation by that measurement, and since they do pay some taxes (a laughable amount, but it nevertheless wins them this checkmark) they technically are a taxpayer, too.
I'm going to let the courts decide this, and not some popular vote from some nerds with pitchforks on Hacker News.
Maximizing your Dataset in Excel
Then shouldn't all of them be in trouble right now too?
Nothing says devastating blow to the sovereignty more than a multinational company pressuring a country to give them illegal tax benefits.
When you bring the money back, you can find creative ways to invest that will grow jobs.
The size and contents of the stack might change from application to application, but it has a consistent definition as, "Whatever it is we need to hire developers to do, I can do all of it."
I think those in Guantanamo might care to disagree that they were afforded the luxury of the Geneva convention.
Thanks :)

Yup, I (as a developer of this thing) haven't created a documentation yet, but it's mostly due to the fact, that I have deployed this just yesterday and there are still many things that I'd like to change in it. But I will work on that :)
> Well, where would they go?

Any country that would give them large amounts of tax credits. I'm sure some countries would be willing to negotiate.

> I doubt they would just stop selling their product on the european market (it would still make them money even when paying normal taxes).

They could sell to resellers who would sell in Europe, if it came to that.
After they pay their taxes, I imagine they will post some billboards like this:

Dear EU,

Please use some of the €13 Billion in taxes to keep art in schools.

Love, Apple.
Just have a look at Europe. Discussions about migration here go from "complaining about genuine policy problems" to "blatant racism" in the span it takes people to get slightly drunk, and that's just the start. If I had a nickel for every time I hear random people insulting others as "fucking Jews"…

Misogyny is definitely not as bad as it used to be, but it's still everywhere. And in many cases the victims don't report it for whatever reasons.
Aren't the core of it's operations incorporated in U.S?
Reality is a Shared Hallucination (1997)
It's a genetic algorithm, which means that it has a fitness function for how close the goal is to being met (choosing the furthest traveled car), and a 'gene', which is a sequence of instructions. The game utilizes a Neural Network to classify when it should turn/which way it should turn/how it should steer/etc, and then this NN is adapted into the genetic algorithm, which effectively generates random genes, follows each of those genes, then chooses the best 'fit' one according to the fitness function. Next, the algorithm restarts with the exception of now it's randomness is slightly based on the best fit gene from the last epoch, and repeat until you've got a gene that works.

Imagine having a wall, and a certain portion of it is sticky (since it's covered in invisible glue), but you don't know which portion, and you certainly don't want to touch it to find out. So you throw spaghetti at the wall, and see which portions stick. Next, you throw more spaghetti at the part that seems to stick, and repeat until you've got the entire sticky portion mapped out.

There's an old genetic algorithms demo with smart rockets and path-finding here: http://www.blprnt.com/smartrockets/ [warning: requires flash].

If you're actually interested in building one of these, Daniel Shiffman wrote The Nature of Code: http://natureofcode.com/, which is an introductory level book for this kind of thing. He uses Processing in the book itself for modeling, but he also goes over the theories pretty well.

If you want some formal literature, I took a brain and behavioral processing class in college, and the professor still has his slides up here: http://www.life.illinois.edu/mcb/419/sessions/index.php, along with links to papers and homework scaffolding.
Meet the entrepreneurs at the heart of India's digital transformation
IIRC, they will pay the bill in the form that they will collect Apple's money to help pay part of the national debt.

Ireland will probably not see a penny from it.
Thoughts on Post-Money Valuations
Independent contractors and employees are two different things.

It's quite legal to hire people to serve in roles that are not, under the tax code, employees but independent contractors, without being able to handle payroll. But that's not a status that a company can freely choose independent of the nature of the work, it's a status that is controlled by the nature of the work by rules set out in the tax code.

You seem to think that employees hired as employees can elect invoicing and 1099 status if the company isn't up to handling employment law requirements, order that the company can hire people as employees and then treat them as contractors until it is ready to handle employment law requirements. Neither is the case, and either is a situation in which the company violates many aspects of the law (and more if it doesn't pay timely on a regular schedule but instead waits for invoices.)
red-line - "The term refers to the presumed practice of mortgage lenders of drawing red lines around portions of a map to indicate areas or neighborhoods in which they do not want to make loans. Redlining on a racial basis has been held by the courts to be an illegal practice."

What's interesting is if at some point in future regulators extend "red line" to mean variable highly correlated to a protected class. Because if your using a variable and not checking how it correlates to a protected class and making financial based decisions on it. Couldn't you in affect transform the decision into a graph "women" on on side "men" on another(or what ever your favorite protected class is).
The letter is gross but I don't understand why all this is specifically about Apple? Aren't they using the same kind of tax accounting other multinational companies do?
I am a Luxembourger and I fully agree that the EU must close these kinds of tax loop holes. In the past my country made a little money out of these tax loop holes, this was immoral money that my country did not even need. Doing this, other European countries lost a lot of tax income. The only ones winning big time in scheme were the international companies abusing the EU and its people.
Cool, it's like COBOL for regexes. Now even managers can write them!
From what I'm reading the comparison seems more like after finding out that a person innocently, and unknowingly, borrowed a stolen car that not only are they losing use of the car, they are being forced to buy the car that they won't keep as well.

Losing the benefit, sure. Paying back taxes that don't exist nor asked for? There's a problem in there somewhere.
> But to use the web effectively without using those graphical browsers could take practice for the uninitiated. I have practiced this for many years and it has become like second nature.

Any tips? I would love to do this, both from my home computer and, all the more so, from my phone.
No, blame Apple. And the other companies exploiting these laws. Companies can choose to be good citizens and socially responsible. Apple doesn't need to be environmentally friendly - it chooses to. $14.5bn is a drop in the ocean of their $200bn cash stockpile that they can't even use, they can easily pay this. It's not going to hurt their ability to compete even if everyone else is doing it.
You say "yuck" but that open letter does contain more than just a few historical points. Set aside the "emotional" stuff and there are some statements worth taking seriously.

"we have become the largest taxpayer in Ireland, the largest taxpayer in the United States, and the largest taxpayer in the world."

An impressive feat for a company that has around 13% of the smartphone market and 7% of the computer market. Yes they're a big company with lots of revenues, but I find it hard to believe that if Apple was so aggressively dodging tax that they'd still be the world's largest taxpayer.

"the vast majority of our profits are taxed in the United States"

Is this true? Are a majority of Apple's profits taxed in the United States at normal business tax rates? If so, that would put the flurry of accusations into some degree of proportionality.

"The opinion issued on August 30th alleges that Ireland gave Apple a special deal on our taxes. This claim has no basis in fact or in law. We never asked for, nor did we receive, any special deals."

"It is effectively proposing to replace Irish tax laws with a view of what the Commission thinks the law should have been."

Which if this is the case, the UN has a problem with Ireland's laws, not with Apple. This is the first piece of news that has made me wonder if the UK was right to brexit.
Apple pays VAT, employment tax in Ireland and certainly a couple more. They avoid paying corporate tax by using a Irish sandwich Double Dutch tax structure (where you create subsidiaries of subsidiaries, and pretend all the value creation happened in over-seas territories where corporate tax is negligible).

Apple is probably right in saying that the total of VAT, employee tax, etc. is the largest in Ireland, the US and World: they are the largest company in the world, so that statement should be fairly obvious. If someone who makes 1M$ per year pays 0.5% taxes, he still pays more than someone who pay 20% of their 24k$. That’s why this statement is seen as disingenuous: the ratio to your revenue is was matters.

The European Commission, the vast majority of observers and almost all Hacker News members are right in saying that they paid virtually no (0.005%) corporate tax, because that was the point of the statements they made to tax authorities around the world.

On whether what Apple did was legal: the stated that their all their value creation happened in the Dutch Antilles, which is patently false. That is nothing short of lying on your tax form. The Irish government accepted it because they were strong-armed into accepting that or seeing jobs go elsewhere. That type of coercion is also something that this letter lies about.

In the US, John Oliver pretending he is the Head of a Church whose main tenet is his personal enrichment is widely accepted as a legal, and deserving of a tax break; in the EU, such statements are considered disingenuous (that’s the fancy word for “bullshit”) and treated accordingly.
and wall off the borders while we're at it. /s
> I would like to think that after 20 years of effort, Netscape actually does more than 7.5 times as much stuff as it did in 1996.

Does it though? In 1996 it included a mail client, a news client and a gopher client along with its HTTP & FTP clients. It even had JavaScript back then (I'm just going to take a moment to lament that JavaScript could have been Scheme — I don't even like Scheme as a language for programs, but as a language for web pages and web apps it would have been plenty good enough, even excellent!). It displayed images; it displayed HTML.

Honestly, 1996 was a pretty good year for browsers.
Book Review: A Truck Full of Money, Biography on Paul English
In my humble EU citizen's opinion, they certainly should be allowed to.

Once they pay their 14B in taxes.
What changed ? maybe the fact that moore's law has stopped coupled with the rise of the cloud.

And with the cloud, Google trends could be misleading - a small startup(with deep expertise) could deploy a service based on FPGA on the cloud, and have access to a very large market, possibly with people not even aware of the FPGA inside.
What evidence do you have that one specific classification error resulting in a tweetstorm was the result of bias at all? I've been mislabeled as a tank in at least one image processing demo (admittedly, this was well before the era of deep learning). Image classification errors happen.

Also, it's a bit strange that you suggest ML algos are racist against Asians. You do know that Asians are wildly overrepresented among people building such algos, right?

Consider the possibility that some classification problems are actually more difficult than others. As one example, darker objects are harder to distinguish than bright ones and there are very clear mathematical reasons for that. That's true even in fields where questions of "racism" don't make sense, e.g. in MRI (magnetic resonance imaging is non-optical, but contrast still matters): https://www.chrisstucchio.com/pubs/wf_segment.pdf
Kudos to him for wanting to be "free". Whatever that means. Although my main take-away from it: if you're going to live in a van you should learn to fix a van. Having his dad do all the heavy lifting here really pusses this article out.
Then lets sanction all murders by state in Syria, because they are only murdering traitors and terrorists so it's LEGAL also because they say so. There is something like international law in case of Syria and there is something like EU law for member countries. While being a member of EU you have access to whole EU market. So no, what they did was ILLEGAL. Apple exactly knew what they were doing and knew it was against EU law, they only thought they will get away with it.
I've always taken it for granted that discrimination and inequality would be the natural result of any optimization/ML algorithm, especially when maximizing for profit or any other utilitarian goal. I wonder why people would be surprised by this logical outcome given that it has been long known that statistical discrimination is profitable, and companies rarely have incentives to improve equality and diversity.
From the EC's press release:

> Since June 2013, the Commission has been investigating the tax ruling practices of Member States. It extended this information inquiry to all Member States in December 2014. In October 2015, the Commission concluded that Luxembourg and the Netherlands had granted selective tax advantages to Fiat and Starbucks, respectively. In January 2016, the Commission concluded that selective tax advantages granted by Belgium to least 35 multinationals, mainly from the EU, under its "excess profit" tax scheme are illegal under EU state aid rules. The Commission also has two ongoing in-depth investigations into concerns that tax rulings may give rise to state aid issues in Luxembourg, as regards Amazon and McDonald's.
It does... if said government passes a law that says individuals that fit certain criteria are exempt from income tax.
It's still on page 1 for me, item 21.
The dome was about living in the small space with a shitty roommate for a year.
Right, and in that case the worker would not be punished for the illegal activities of the employer.
Very true. Both are global companies, even though their headquarters are there. I wonder what fraction of their income can be attributed to the SV area, and how that translates to their contributions to the GDP.
http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~kstanley/neat.html
OK, let me give you a simpler example. BMW is domiciled in Germany. It builds cars there. When it exports a car to the US, it has a US subsidiary company that employs people and helps to sell the car in the US. BMW doesn't sell the car to its subsidiary, it sells it to a dealer (a separate company domiciled in the US, think "Jacks awesome BMWs, Toledo"). The profits that the dealer makes when it sells the car are taxed in the US, because it is a US domiciled company. BMW will probably pay something like sales tax and in some countries there will be import tariffs to pay. But the profit that BMW makes on the sale of the exported car, the difference between the price the US dealer pays them and the cost of all the raw materials, labour, marketing etc, is realised in Germany, and that's where they pay corporation tax. Because, where the hell else could it happen??
Trump's website throws a captcha every time I access it from Central America. This is for read only pages. I can only assume CF doesn't care too much and certainly doesn't educate customers very well.

Edit: I'll also admit I love CF as a customer. It makes things fast and easy. But it's concerning. Sorta like every time I use Google search.
I'm surprised the term "disparate impact" hasn't come up. I'm too well versed in anti-discrimination law, but it seems like this is the term for exactly what they're trying to avoid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact
We announced it in May (https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-ca-encryption-origin/), and built it for some of the exact reasons you specify.

We've made the generation as simple as possible—just two clicks—and also offer an API for users aiming to automate the process: https://api.cloudflare.com/#cloudflare-ca-create-certificate.

At some point during onboarding of new zones/hosts/etc. I'd like to start encouraging users without a (valid) origin certificate to install an Origin CA cert.

Curious to hear your thoughts on how else you'd "push it" more?
Ikr! It doesn't even say if they tried to grow potatoes.
They probably will be next.
>how they hell would they even do that, given that they don't have the full set of accounts covering all the company's operations, to even know whether the company was profitable or not.

But they have the accounts of the local subsidiary.
And that local subsidiary either makes a profit or not.

And, the company is taxed in each country of operations, for relevant operations.
I'm sorry, that you feel that way, but instead of criticizing me as "insulting" and "indulging" in "pointless theatrics" maybe you could explain how and why his argument of "Myth of Ram" and O(√N) holds any merit.

Just by looking at his graphs you could argue, if it's about RAM he should just look at the the part from 10MB to 8G, which shows an almost ideal approximation to O(n log n). The L1 part is even better then O(1), which is curious in itself.

So please excuse me if i'm a bit sarcastic about the "groundbreaking" insights. "Myth of RAM" seems like an attention grabbing caption, and i couldn't help to comment in an according way. No insult or harm ever meant. If perceived as such i do apologize.
You make it sound legally straight forward, but I can't see how this constitutes state-aid; the double-Irish and dutch-sandwich were/are completely legal tax-avoidance schemes, for instance.

Apple isn't headquartered in Ireland, Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe are. The EU says these subsidiaries have been making untaxed profits, but it's not obvious that they've made any profits, ever (that's the whole point of the tax scheme in the first place.)

The grey area seems to be that there has been a cash hoard in Ireland which legally is on the Apple Inc. balance sheet, but hasn't been taxed. Again, however, Apple Inc. is not domiciled in Ireland so it's not the Irish governments job to collect that tax.

What am I missing?
> As Ars has noted in previous coverage, the techniques are theoretically effective, but their utility in real-world situations is limited. That's because the computers they target still must be infected by malware. If the computers aren't connected to the Internet, the compromise is likely to be extremely difficult and would most likely require the help of a malicious insider, who very well may have easier ways to obtain data stored on the machine.

Nonetheless, an interesting technique. Is it even possible to have a useful workstation these days without any USB devices?
You're not sovereign if some other entity can micro-manage your tax policies. It's a big stretch to call U.S. states "sovereign" but even they get to decide on how they give tax breaks.