skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is simply not true. If we train a mortgage engine on redlining data, it will only reproduce the red line if it's predictive. I.e., the algorithm will only reproduce the red line if the red line is statistically valid.

I discuss this in detail here, with numerical examples: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/alien_intelligences_...

The fact is that machine learning takes biased inputs and produces unbiased outputs, and this is a pretty normal occurrence. If I tell you that my algorithm to target advertisements treated `displayedInterest x isMobile` with 15% more weight than `displayedInterest x isDesktop` because it corrected for bias induced by latency on mobile connections, you'd think nothing of it.
One of the things that's very interesting to me is how information asymmetry helps drive people to these kinds of companies. I don't know everybody's story, but when I was just out of high school, there was no chance (I believed at the time) that I'd be able to go to a traditional school. I had bad grades, my family was poor and nobody in my family had gone to university except for my father, who had quickly abandoned his post-University career for more blue collar work.

Wanting to try to make over minimum wage, I went to an ITT-like trade school to talk with an "admissions counselor" seeing if they would accept me (of course they would, for a price). I took a fairly simple "placement exam" (which of course I passed). I told the counselor I didn't have any money (no problem!) I was then shown a variety of ultra high-interest loan options which would guarantee I could get through the "program" (just sign here!). I remember getting odd, cagey, answers about the accreditation of the trade school, and couldn't imagine how I'd pay back a loan that large if I took it on.

I had the presence of mind to "let me think about it" instead of giving in to the hard pressure sale the guidance counselor was offering, went on to work my crappy jobs for a couple more years before accidentally running into an old friend who grew up in a similar situation as me and ended up going the community college route.

It was "real" college (for some value of "real" and "college"), was a tiny fraction of the cost of the trade school, and graduation guaranteed placement in a state school of my choice. That sounded too good to be true, at least the trade school had some kind of real cost associated with it. But I went and checked it out, it was all true. A.S.->B.S.->M.S. and now I have a career, no student debt and choice of great high-paying jobs.

Later, while I was attending community college, a coworker was going to that same trade school, hemorrhaging money and then one monday came in and told a story where they had gone out of business, didn't tell anybody, and just padlocked the doors over the weekend.

Of course he still owed all the money for his loans.
Since all the NNs have the same architecture, the breeding is done by taking some parameters from one parent NN and some parameters from the other to populate the weights of the child NN (in this case, indices that are 1 mod 2 are taken from the first parent, the others from the second one). In addition to this there's some random tweaks of some parameters (20% chance that any given parameter will be changed, with the change being uniformly random from the range [-0.1,0.1]).
I don't really get what Apple is trying to achieve with this letter. Looking at my (continental) European colleagues, it comes across as aggressive bullying by a U.S. company and clearly harms public opinion of Apple, which cannot be a good thing for a company that sells consumer products. Maybe it looks differently from the Irish perspective, but obviously Ireland is a tiny market compared to France / Germany / etc., which are all countries where U.S. companies' (legal!) tax maneuvers aren't looked kindly at and where such a letter can only do more harm than good. People don't like the European Commission, but they like "lecturing from the Americans" even less.

In the end, this matter is a very complex legal question (1. were the Irish tax deals actually "deals" or just the day-to-day application of the Irish tax code?; 2. if they were "deals", were they illegal deals under EU rules against state support?). It is going to be answered by the European Court, which I guess (or at least hope) will not make its decision based on an "open letter" posted on the Internet.
Your handwriting is pretty bad tbh. Could be the reason. If we were using styluses the problem might not exist.
Assuming the main story has tripped some sort of flame war trigger?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12388601

223 votes in 3 hours and it's half way down page 2?

It's incredibly important news, shouldn't dang et al intervene and reinstate it?
Edit: The other commenter actually bothered to look at the code. Scratch my comment.
Bullshit. Yes, all MNCs are dodging taxes where they can, but it's not like their finances are so easy that all you need is One Weird Trick and poof!, gone are the taxes. One of the multitude of measures Apple (and apparently nobody else) used was found illegal. The rest aren't, and Ireland is still a tax haven compared to the rest of Europe.
1) This rule is part of the treaty in which Ireland joined the EU - which was the very first thing added to Irish law.

2) That treaty (which is part of Irish law) allows for certain kind of EU laws (called "regulations") to be directly binding without the Irish lawmakers needing to do something actively. Your link covers another kind of EU laws (called "directives") which in fact have to be transposed before becoming directly enforcecable. However that treaty (which, remember, is part of Irish law) forces the Irish lawmakers to actually transpose them. If they fail they open the country up for litigiation which makes directives indirectly binding.
I actually made a title based on makebook.io, and @levelsio actually retweeted the thing and started the ball rolling so yeah - awesome guy :)
that was against the laws that one of the parties had signed up to is missing from your statement.
Case Study of Top Performers Emails During Job Hunt
Opportunistic encryption in HTTPS was meant to address this, but I think there were problems.
I wonder what causes this type of bimodal "quality of work" distribution.
Oh where to start...

The state file is atrocious, a constant source of pain. It is hard to set up in the first place, it is hard to import resources into it, it is hard to rename resources within it.

Sometimes, resources don't canonicalize correctly and will always tell you there's something to modify, even though there isn't. Other times, resources don't destroy properly because you are using some untested settings within them.

"It's alpha software" is the best description I can give. It has a ton of rough edges.

The pros: It's decently fast, and a lot more workable than the alternatives (cloudformation or simply tracking stuff by hand). It supports more than just AWS, including fairly obscure stuff like Cloudflare DNS records. It's conceptually solid.

Don't say no to it outright, but you should know what you are getting into.
When Should You Speak Up at Work
The corner store and Snapchat are both businesses but they aren't the same. Saying this isn't the same as saying that startups are better, just that they are different.
>Of course not. We tolerate mass injustice and violence [...] We harbor numerous misunderstandings [...] on vitally important subjects ranging from relationships to economics to science to mental illnesses [...]

I get your point but the author in the article is talking about "modern" not in terms of "morals" but in the (meta) philosophy of existence.

In his particular definition of "modernity", the world would meet that criteria when most of the inhabitants could look at themselves with philosophical detachment: e.g. Most of us would realize we have no special centrality in the universe (we're not the only higher life forms in the vastness of space). Our timeslice of humanity is but a microscopic blip in the 14 billion years of its existence. Most of us would seriously think it's possible that _we_ are digital avatars in "the matrix", etc.

Furthermore, the author feels that assessing "modernity" by looking at the technological progress around us is deceptive and therefore it's a bad measurement. Instead, he thinks humans reach a threshold of "modernity" when a large percentage internalize deep philosophical questions like the way Descartes and Hume did.
Tim would pay tax in the US only if it gets a sweetheart deal of 0.0005%
Ok, generation 60 and now a huge progress has been made. More than 50% of the cars are now able to finish almost all of the tracks. Very cool!
Fine, but then shouldn't Ireland pay the European Commission a fine or something? It seems unreasonable to make Apple retroactively pay.
Caddy is brilliant. Give it another year and I think it will have a significant share of the webserver market. I replaced about 200 lines of nginx configuration with about 15 lines of Caddyfile. This is mostly due to sane defaults and inbuilt support for Let's Encrypt.
Would that play be Copenhagen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_(play))? If so, I highly recommend the BBC adaptation with Daniel Craig as Heisenberg, Stephen Rea as Niels Bohr, and Francesca Annis as Margrethe Bohr.
Your link doesn't work.
I'm guessing the one where Apple had an effective tax rate of 0.005%
The EIC awards a max of ~$6,200 to people with 3 or more children.

How many people with 3 kids do you think are going to stop working if they get an unconditional government benefit of $6,000?

I think the EIC does a good job of addressing the need some people have to moralize about the sanctity of labor, I doubt it has much of any impact on the labor market (it mostly just makes the lives of some kids better).
* European governments collect whatever VAT they have instituted in their countries

* Their employees pay whatever tax they pay just like anybody else

* They pay VAT on all utilities they consume like every company ( shocker )

* They pay almost NO TAX over their profits unlike 99% of the companies, and that's the problem.

And if you think you'll benefit in any way from them not paying taxes, you're just as delusional as the "French communists in Brussels" ( whatever that even means?!)
In the spirit of #WeAreAllLeoMessi [1], they should launch a Twitter campaign #WeAreAllApple

[1] http://metro.co.uk/2016/07/09/barcelona-launch-cringeworthy-...
I think the reason for this is that this is the "please don't take the 13 thousand million dollars I owe" response letter from Apple, which probably disgusts a lot of people.
Good point. The sentence is confusing. When I wrote it I was thinking about expert systems, which really blossomed more or less during the 80s, and not about AI as a whole. I have changed that paragraph adding some of your comments. Thanks.
What a load of corporate BS. How does it make first place on HN?

"The European Commission has launched an effort to rewrite Apple’s history in Europe, ignore Ireland’s tax laws and upend the international tax system in the process."

Please. They got caught not paying any tax in Europe. Ireland's tax laws are not ignored (EU simple asks Ireland to tax Apple according to usual Irish rules) and there is in effect no agreed upon international tax system anymore (if there ever were).

"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."

This is irrelevant. There was an understanding that Apple could channel all European profits through Ireland and that the Irish government wouldn't tax them on it.

"We now find ourselves in the unusual position of being ordered to retroactively pay additional taxes to a government that says we don't owe them any more than we've already paid."

First of all, it isn't retroactively. The obligation not to receive subsidies was there all the time. Second, it isn't at all unusual. Numerous companies in Europe have had to pay back subsidies, including tax subsidies, to governments that didn't want them back.

"The Commission’s move is unprecedented and it has serious, wide-reaching implications."

If by wide-reaching implications they mean that corporations can't hide behind phony company structures and will have to pay tax, then yes.

"It is effectively proposing to replace Irish tax laws with a view of what the Commission thinks the law should have been. This would strike a devastating blow to the sovereignty of EU member states over their own tax matters, and to the principle of certainty of law in Europe."

The EU commission is proposing no such thing. It is merely calling a spade a spade. Ireland joined the EU openly, and signed the EU treaty that bans state aid.

"At its root, the Commission’s case is not about how much Apple pays in taxes. It is about which government collects the money."

As in no government, apparently.

"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."

Yes, it's complex, and much more complex than a company having to be taxed where the value is created. There is no such agreed upon fundamental principle, not even with United States, and even if there were, I would argue that most of the value is created where the products are either produced or sold, not where the R&D department happened to be located or where a company had placed its IPR.
It's time to bring the money back and create jobs in U.S. Apple cannot expect the U.S to cover it's ass from EU. Tim's answer 'well the taxes are high here, so we cannot bring the money back' is not valid because guess what - my taxes are high too and I end up paying them.
Change the laws to suit the morals most have.
Hiring engineers is truly a sourcing problem. Bad ad-copy is part of this problem.

When I interview companies, I almost always find something that makes them special (young engineers, exceptional tech-stack, real engineering-driven culture etc.). This is what I pitch to potential candidates.

Maybe ad-copy of (great) company is often bad, even if engineers write them because authors ca not see the peculiarities of their company compared to other companies. (In German we call this "Betriebsblindheit" and there seems to be no translation to English (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betriebsblindheit). Maybe this is one reason why recruiters / staffing firms still exist. Good recruiters know the companies in their market well, can judge them more or less neutrally and match accordingly.

Full disclosure: I am well-connected tech-recruiter in Zurich and if you're thinking of moving here and getting a tech-job, feel free to contact me - you find my email address in my HN profile. Also you can read my blogpost "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT": https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...
Sure, but the ISP is doing it at their level - i.e. probably between the CloudFlare node and the actual site - in which case Flexible is again helping them rather than hurting them.
Off tangent, but the biggest improvement in my software development productivity happened when I read Edmond Lau's book "The Effective Engineer" and started asking myself before I started every task: is this task the one which is highest leverage?

Edmond's definition of leverage = Impact Produced/Time Invested

You can read the book for more on Edmond's definition of leverage, but this seemingly simple idea did absolute wonders for my productivity.

I realized the Pomodoro technique was most effective for me for the lower leverage tasks, and not so much for the higher leverage tasks. As a result, over time I sort of moved away from using it.
Bingo. I have tons of jingles stuck in my head for products I have never bought nor world consider buying.

There are a few things that advertising is good for. One is spreading familiarity with a brand, but that has limits, especially with already well known brands. The other is psychological priming. You can actually hijack people's brains and change their enjoyment of a product through advertising by creating associations. This is similar to the way we have "comfort foods" that we associate with, say, being at home, etc. Advertising can prime your experience of a product and enhance your enjoyment of it, and also make it more memorable. Then you start layering your own experiences on top of that kernel and you build up something like a pearl of personal associations around that product. This is the true power of advertising, and it's huge. Jingles, I suspect, don't always play into that aspect or create much priming.
If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN".

Show HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

A better title might be Drool: A Kind of Lightweight Markup Language.

Good luck.
Sounds like an abusive relationship.
The students who are likely to go to these trade schools are often better served by the Community College system, but often don't know/understand it as an option.

One interesting statistic, <20% of CC students take out loans for school (the cost is generally low enough they can pay out of pocket), but ~20% of those students also default.
About the Bitter Business
they'd cut him off and go for whatever had the lowest monthly payment

What if this were a rational decision? For a person with low disposable income and no savings choosing the lowest monthly payment is the most rational decision.
They make it look like they're the good guys...

ITS NORMAL THAT YOU PAY PEOPLE WHO WORK THEIR BUTTS OFF FOR YOU!

ITS NORMAL THAT YOU PAY TAXES TO THE COUNTRY YOU OPERATE IN, since that country provides many services to you and your employees.
Or people in the EU get angry that it's hard to compete against US monopolists 'tech brands' who pay 10000 times less tax percentually.
Corporation tax is supposed to be a tax on the profits of a company levied by the government of the country that the company is domiciled in. Apple is not domiciled in the EU. It has to have subsidiaries to employ people in those countries, but I absolutely agree with their position that their profits should be taxed in the US, not in the EU. If the EU wants a bigger slice of the pie, it can impose tariffs. That's what countries did in the past, and that's what they are trying to do now, but they are just claiming it's a legitimate corporation tax, and whipping the austerity-weary locals into a frenzy by pushing stories into the media about all the "profits" the large multinationals make in Europe and claiming they don't pay any tax. This is just not true, nor is there any basis in history for this kind of taxation. If they want to, they should at least be up front and say they want to impose a tariff. I just can't believe the HN crowd, who supposedly are interested in startups and running their own companies, are being drowned out by the lefties on an "evil corp" soapbox.
You can't benefit from someone else doing something illegal and keep your benefits. One of the principles of Western law.
EU governments, including the Irish one, are free to set different tax rates for different industries. (They are not free to set tariffs but that is because tariffs are a core EU competency as defined in the treaties.)

Member states are not free to set different tax rates for different companies. This is part of the deal of joining the EU and has been part of the treaties since the beginning. The only surprising thing here is that it took so long for the EC to stop this.
Where (in the Western world) are racism and misogyny tolerated?
> people and their companies

Oh? Apple, Google and other US-based multinationals are owned by their European employees?

> creating tons of jobs in a high unemployment country

Less creating, more shifting them from other countries. It benefits Ireland at the expense of the rest of the Union.
but the point here is that this scheme was entirely legal

Yes and no - the EC's argument makes a bit more sense imo: Yes, it was legal in the sense that Apple broke no irish tax laws. But the tax laws themselves have violated some higher-level EU laws that Ireland had pledged to obey - at least that's how the EC sees it.

Perhaps a more fitting (but still horrible) analogy were if you make an employment contract far below mandatory minimum wage. Neither you nor your employer is violating the contract and both of you might be perfectly happy with the conditions - but your contract might stil cause disadvantages to third parties (other workers) and might violate state laws.
Interestingly enough, I found out quite a few years ago that my father followed the same path as you. I had always known he went to a university, graduated in computer science, and worked as a database administrator. I never knew which school he attended. When I found out I asked him if it was the same university I saw in computer/television ads and he said yes.

After a bit more discussion I think it's safe to say that DeVry is (or was between his time in the 80s and your time) a different breed of school than ITT. They seem to be a real school that just accepts anyone. Drop out/Graduation rates be damned.
Navy sailors and prisoners get fresh food, interact with more than six people, and can phone friends/family without a multi-minute time delay. It's more than just cramped living.
Esenyurt Straponlu Escort Balıketli Bahar Hizmetinizde
> Imagine if you included your race and ethnicity and sexuality in the title - that'd feel silly, right?

Historically it has been correct English to use the masculine pronoun where it could refer to either sex. I understand the reasons to prefer a different construction ( I also find "their" or "one's" to be preferable) but comparing standard English to explicitly calling out ethnicity or sexual preference is virulent.
The most exclusive restaurant in America
mySQL regex is a bit of a nightmare. It contains a lot of character classes that can be confusing if you don't use them often. I guess "escape syntax" is the wrong phrase.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/regexp.html
11 Ways to Convince a Prospective Customer to Try Out Your Service
This actually the worst piece of public opinion I have ever read from Tim Cook. It hurts their brand, it exemplifies American ego when it comes to dealing with other countries (please, don't tell me that you not paying taxes is some kind of sovereignty crisis for f*'s sake) and worst of all, it's poorly targeted. It's Europe - on average we do not like big corporations and we laugh on 'liberties', which are in fact money extortion by big players. I do not know who in Apple PR greenlighted this, but he/she might not survive the consequences.
I was applying for more loans to finish up college when they told me my intrest would be 8% for this loan. I said, "wow" (catches breath) "isn't that a little high?" I will never in my life forget what that woman said to me. "You should be thankful, other students are getting 11%"

This was in 2010, shortly before I graduated they made it impossible to ever get out of these loans with the new bankruptcy thing.
> the vast majority of our profits are taxed in the United States.

That's not even true! As you say, they keep their profits offshore to avoid US taxes: http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-taxes-offshore-ireland-e...
Estonian Government Selects Ericsson, Apcera and Guardtime
>and create jobs in U.S.

So instead of selling the products from Europe to Europe, create jobs in the US and sell them from there?