skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Apple’s deal with Iowa, which includes about $20 million in a state investment tax credit and a 20-year tax abatement from the city of Waukee worth nearly $190 million, underscores all these elements.

Dumb question: how do these deals not violate the Equal Protection Clause?

Other businesses in Waukee obviously aren't privy to the same state tax credits from Iowa and the same tax abatement from the city of Waukee. Doesn't that mean that the tax code is effectively discriminating against all these non-Apple businesses?
There are many reasons why complex software fails in the 1% case. Concurrency is not the only reason. In my experience it is not the top reason. Our top hard-to-repro or no-repro crashes in JavaScriptCore are from non determinism introduced by the workload itself. Inside our engine we have many sources of nondeterminism that manifests even with concurrency features disabled.
how does that help anything if i have to choose a service-specific last mile?

maybe i guess in the short term we pay off google by agreeing to let them monitor all the traffic and hope that keeps them sufficiently well fed they don't feel like offering preferential handling to google services and partners.
> You started with a conclusion and then wrote a bunch of B.S. with cherry picking and misleading statements throughout? This is why I flagged it.

Can you expand on this and point to some of the misleading statements and why you think they're misleading?
I imagine you don't throw out the picture when you're bored, you just take a new picture over it.
New analysis of a known FRB source. They find new signals.

> The source known as FRB 121101 was discovered back on November 2nd, 2012, by astronomers using the Arecibo radio telescope. At the time, it was the first FRB to be discovered; and by 2015, it became the first FRB to be seen repeating. This effectively ruled out the possibility that repeating FRBs were caused by catastrophic events, which had previously been theorized.

And in 2016, FRB 121102 was the first FRB to have its location pinpointed to such a degree that its host galaxy could be identified. ... And in the early hours of Saturday, August 26th ... What they found was evidence of 15 new pulses coming from FRB 121102, which confirmed that it was in a newly active state.
Exactly - states competing on incentives obviously doesn't increase gross tax collection on a national level, but the article makes much bolder claims that it doesn't help anywhere.

Specifically this claim:
"There is virtually no association between economic development incentives and any measure of economic performance."

The article states that the 1.3 billion dollar data center will get $39 million tax break up front on hardware, and another $190 million abatement over 20 years from the city. They will invest at a minimum $20 million into Waukee, a city of 20k people, and expect 50 permanent employees + ancillary services.

Waukee will see a construction boom, higher employment, and more tax revenue. The state will see a reduction in the data center decline + additional tax revenue.

Unless they were sure Apple had no other option but Iowa for this project, the state and community were better off making a deal than not.
We've added this to 1.7.2 [1]
That will roll into production tomorrow evening.

Thanks for all the feedback HN community!

[1] https://github.com/edgemesh/edgemesh/releases
> Other businesses in Waukee obviously aren't privy to the same state tax credits from Iowa and the same tax abatement from the city of Waukee.

Sure they are - they can request it, just like Apple does, and be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. It's no more an equal protection violation than city government hiring one person over another is.
But, you cannot just leave the DPNK. See how you're wrong?
#Bitcoin enables Chinese entrepreneurs to export coal by burning it and using the energy to mine.

— Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor) July 20, 2015

https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/china/

Gold mining doesn't provide a useful service in return, huh?
As will_brown pointed out, Bitcoin isn't a necessary ingredient in smartphones, electronics, jewelry, medicine, dentistry, aerospace, glassmaking, like gold is.

http://geology.com/minerals/gold/uses-of-gold.shtml

Forget about US homes: How many homes in underdeveloped countries could one Bitcoin transaction power?
The scope of work involved is too great to remix and remaster all the records. I also know that most indie records are not kept in their multitrack form as meticulously as big label acts.
Many people think a monopolist could provide the lowest possible prices. However, anyone who thinks a monopolist would provide the most consumer surplus has an opinion that's at odds with the consensus.
Honestly I'm very confused by this whole sub-thread because I can't tell if kobeya was talking about my comment or ex3xu's. In my opinion ex3xu's comment was completely off-topic from the original article, and that's what prompted me to respond to him.
That would be a great tool. The only examples I've seen are when youtubers like portholer54 do it, presumably manually.
I don't think there is any common low level way, even among the Linux flavors. Android's graphics stack, for example, is completely different and doesn't use any of this.

If you want portable you're going to want something like SDL probably.
Maybe they're working on the "your first one is free" hook.

The 50 jobs at the data center will attract a McDonalds across the street and then Waukee can hit those McGuys with a Burger Tax.

Let's see. $208M at 5 cents per burger is only, uh, ...

Well, the company slogan is "Billions and Billions Served."
For a lot of people, if not nearly all of them, it's a lot less effort to migrate to a new social network with your friends than it is to lobby to have some laws repealed, especially when it's clear that these laws are in the interest of the public and have been put together with serious thought and consultation.
I also thought the tone was unhelpful but the BPD patient dying in the Tulsa jail was reprehensible. Although his family just leaving him at a hotel in the midst of a manic episode was wildly unresponsible and they deserve some blame for what befell their son. I can't imagine leaving a family member in an emergency mental health crisis alone and surrounded by strangers. At the very least, they should have followed up on their son's location after they abandoned him to his fate. That being said, the police spectacularly failed and are ultimately to blame for his death.
I live in Kansas, I'm well aware. The story is much more complicated than that, there are a ton of contributing factors that stem from intentional regressive regulations.

The earthquake problem is caused by salt-water injection over-budgets (no, fracking does not cause earthquakes no matter what you read on the news). The better question is: why was this never an issue when business was _booming_ in the 70s-80s?

Obama's administration removed a key tax credit for prospecting businesses if they hit a dry hole (A tax credit that's available to any other business for failures). These wells used to be completed and leased as injection wells. Now, if a hole starts to appear dry, drilling is stopped and the well sealed and capped.

This has decrease the diversity of injection sites across the states, straining current infrastructure.
I think it is misleading to say everything was in return for only 50 jobs. Data centers require huge investments in development, connectivity, energy supply. All of these things take people to make happen.
Google can afford to break the law, small businesses can't.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/27/googles-1-billion-fine-what-...

Google broke the law because it was profitable to do so and I'd wager that google came out ahead even after the fine.

To the extent that we make it lucrative to break the law, we favor those who can afford the punishment over those who can't.
‘I will not bullshit you Uber will go public in 3 years,’ new CEO tells staff
Robots won’t steal our jobs if we put workers at center of AI revolution
The article was very light on details.

I wonder if this is more along the line of finding an exposed database in the wild, or tracking down OEM suppliers and buying samples.

It's hard to love people doing this, because they could have disclosed this privately, but I think it _is_ fair to impose a high cost on not ensuring security, and this is one way of doing that.
Just for all the inevitable comments about "the government should have just given X people Y dollars instead..."

Iowa isn't "giving money." It does not have the additional revenue before Apple arrives, thus, it can't give anyone those revenues. All it can do is tell Apple you have to give us, Iowa, less than the state next door... now whether this is a good economic plan I disagree. I'd rather have a thousand small businesses be guaranteed no regulatory or other fees for the first five years than a corporate overlord be granted no requirement to pass on the enormous amount of wealth they extract from the land and environment but that's another discussion...
I'd like to throw something out that I'd love to see in an (open) calculator like this that I've only ever seen implemented in some software calculators. I'd love to have a physical hardware dedicated calculator that would understand units and boast an easy to use multiple-variable solver.

I'd love to be able to ask my calculator questions like this: We have a sensor attached to a device that moves at 100 feet/second. Our sensor can be configured to sample it's location at a frequency in GHz. What frequency do we need to sample at to make sure that no to samples are further than 12 U (rack units) apart.

(100 feet/second) / (x GHz) = (12 U) [0]

I'd like to also be able to have user programmable units by allowing users to create a file that looks like this. I'd hopefully be able to create this on my desktop and push it to my calculator.

On the multivariable solver-front I'd like to be able to define constraints and get a sensible answer. Something like...

solve(x, y, z, min(x), y=10, z > .3, min(f(x)), max(g(z)))

Something like that... I haven't thought it through.

[0] - My answer: http://i.imgur.com/pimZnwq.png
> we come to Qualcomm, Samsung, Mediatek, and whoever else is shipping proprietary drivers for their SoCs and radios, and who don't provide binaries for new ABIs.

Vote with your wallet.

The librem 5 mentioned this week uses a 'liberated' i.MX6 chip because they want a phone with an upstream kernel. Technology wise, it's a little long in the tooth, but they're emphasising it's possible to not reward vendors for bad behaviour.

With RPi providing resources to de-blob and upstream the Pi, perhaps some entrepreneur will get behind a crowdfunded Broadcom based phone, with work underway on VC5.

http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=BCM7268-DRM-W...
I'll eat my shoe if a regulator ever gets even 2% total global revenue out of any of the top 100 software companies based on this.

In reality a bunch of small shops are going to go bankrupt because they don't have a "GDPR implementation" position filled and they didn't do some report properly.
For the most part, digital publishing's remaining lifespan isn't that long. Not as short-sighted in their remaining life...
Timeslicing makes it impossible for a program to accidentally discover that its threads or processes are not really running at the same time. For example, an infinite loop in one thread will not halt all other threads. To me, that’s concurrency.

Event loops are not like that. They run tasks to completion before starting other tasks and indeed the whole point of how you leverage an event loop is to take advantage of the fact that other things don’t happen at the same time. I would prefer to say other things don’t happen concurrently, and you would have understood my meaning.

It’s not correct to have used the word “parallel” in that context since my example only needs one CPU.

I think it’s ok to think of event loop interleaving bugs as being concurrency bugs, but insisting that event loops are proper instance of concurrency is diluting the terminology too much IMO. Hence I much refer to use concurrency to mean the case where the interleaving granule is not under the programmer’s control.
> The problem with voice reco isn't recognition technology, that works fine, it is with having computers understand what the hell to do with the voice.

If I type "remind me at 9am to water the plants", it does the right thing 100% of the time.

If I say "OK, Google, remind me at 9am to water the plants"...not so much.

If it just got "remind me at 9am" 100% of the time, I'd be satisfied. The fact that"water the plants" becomes "watering lamps" doesn't matter--I can figure out what I meant.

But it doesn't transcribe "remind me at 9am" correctly. It knows what to do with that text, but it doesn't get that far reliably enough.

Maybe I haven't tried saying this to humans enough for comparison, but right now, I'm not satisfied with the transcription of even the most common phrase. (Well over 90% of what I say to my phone starts with "OK, Google, remind me ..."

---

For fun, I just tried reading this out to my phone, and it got that phrase all three times:

> If I type remind me at 9 a.m. to water the plants it does the right thing 100% of time if I say OK Google remind me at 9 a.m. to water plants not so much if it just got remind me at 9 a.m. 100% of time I'd be satisfied the fact that water the plants becomes watering clamps doesn't matter I can figure out what I meant but it

Not bad. It cut off partway through, and maybe I need to speak my punctuation, but it's less error prone than normal. Helps to speak very clearly, unsurprisingly.
Saw this happen a few times. One instance was when NCR (National Cash Register) headquartered in Dayton, OH decided to move to Georgia because it had gotten $60M worth (in 2009 dollars) of tax breaks and other incentives there.

It followed the incentives sure, so from that point can't blame it, but it had cost Dayton, an already struggling city, even more pain.

Another motive behind forced moves is to shed experienced (and thus expensive) / senior people who had been there longer. They are more likely to have families, kids in schools, homes, etc and so might not move.
Nobody is giving anyone money, they are just not charging them tax. It's an important distinction I don't understand how people keep glossing over it.

If it creates 10,000 local jobs, those 10,000 jobs are still going to get taxed. So the locale is going to get money, just not from the corporate tax.

So it's not a great deal but it's not a horrible deal. I'd prefer nobody made them but once on place does they all have to in order to compete. But if they built overseas they'd get no corporate tax either... so some slice of the pie is better than none.
That "$208M" is how much more would have been earned in taxes had Apple built the data center there with no tax breaks. However, it seems like the reality is that without those deductions, there would be no Apple there, and therefore not only no "$208M", but no jobs, no $20 million donation, and no whatever taxes they are paying (if any?). On the other hand, the article claims that according to research not offering incentives has no negative economic impact, so maybe they should've just not offered and Apple would have come anyway. Hard to discern what actually is in the states' and counties' best interest without reviewing the research, as this article isn't very convincing.
Most people will likely qualify for Disaster Assistance[1].

The issue is that flooding is a hard thing to cover because it's an expensive risk to ensure. Plus unlike things like tornadoes, hail storms, or theft, floods always affect a large number of people. Private insurance pretty much refuse to cover these types of things because it's hard to spread stuff out. That's why stuff like the NFIP[2] and the TWIA[3] exist—because the government can pool it over the entire area (at least, in theory).

[1]: https://www.disasterassistance.gov

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...

[3]: https://www.twia.org
Gone to reddit on mobile lately? Because its terrible. Full screen popovers. At a minimum you have to request a desktop page for anything usable. Its barely better than a paywall.
Heh, I appreciate the skepticism. I spent my first year here uncertain of whether this place was some kind of cult, and stayed away from it for a couple years afterwards, due partially to that uncertainty. (Note that at no point was I convinced it was a cult, much less a dangerous one, but P(cult) being more than like 0.01 is often reason enough to go do something else, all else being equal.)

I'm speaking personally in the following, not on behalf of the organization, because it's late, I'm about to go to bed, and everyone else is off on a vision quest or traveling. So this is all my opinion, probably wrong, but maybe of use to you.

From my own knowledge, I can tell you everything we are trying to sell: we charge a modest rate for overnight visits, we have an initial training fee, and we have a mindfulness in schools program that we charge money for. Of these, the only thing that comes close to being a significant source of income is visits. The training fee is largely there because we've found that there is an extremely high correlation between "not willing to pay a modest training fee" and "not actually all that interested in this training" historically, so having it helps to not waste anyone's time. Once upon a time, we tried to make our main living from the schools program, but at this point it's purely a service project and the charges are mostly to offset costs.

Our main source of income is donations. We rely on people seeing this training as important enough for them to give significant amounts of their own money to it. That has so far in our history happened enough for us to continue to exist. If it ever stops happening, we will probably stop existing. (FWIW I'm currently one of the largest donors. I'm not doing it because anyone asked me to.)

There is a more general thing though, behind what you're saying, which I'm reading—correct me if I'm wrong—as "this is a super confusing, suspicious-looking online presence, what is these guys' deal?" That, I can definitely affirm. We are, as an organization as well as a demographic (people who are apt to give significant portions of their lives to monastic training), not super good at the art of marketing, presentation, or taking people's money. This is why there's a stereotype of spirituality and religion as fluffy, nonsensical, and counterproductive.

There is another side of that phenomenon: people who are very good at marketing, presentation, and taking people's money tend, as a demographic, not to be super good at caring about the world or indeed anyone else. (Which of course is why there's a stereotype of business and corporations as evil, soulless, and greedy.)

Fixing that, you may or may not have gathered from our confusing online presence, is our organization's raison d'être. We think it is great when being good at doing stuff is correlated with caring about the world and things other than yourself. We would like it to happen more often. Hence the leadership training, the business skills, the other stuff that is kind of weird to see for monastic organizations.

I'm curious what you mean by "compatible with Buddhism." I'd also like to know which pictures hint at Zen.
You guys are all nuts for taking this silly project seriously. I'll just use my phone.
I tried fontforge once. Frankly, I couldn't figure it out how to get it to work after playing with it for a few hours. My dreams of building custom programming-oriented ligatures for a proportional font are still unrealized.
Many people do. But look at Xi Jingping instead if you're so hung up on the leaving being illegal part.

Also it's the DPRK
I draw the line at whether the interleaving granule is under the programmer’s control or not.

For example, I can say that when a task executes on an event loop, no other tasks are executing concurrently to it because the event loop executes tasks sequentially.
I assume it's because it's less easy to game, rather than say "oops we made all our money in Switzerland that year".
The math isn't as simple as $280M for 50 jobs and it's unfair to frame it from that perspective. The facility itself will cost $1.3B. That's a direct injection of capital into the surrounding community. Even without the jobs; Apple is improving once (~)worthless land.

Some property tax revenues or no property tax revenues?

A silly race to the bottom.
Basically it's, would you like to have $0 in taxes paid by Apple (by assuming they won't come to Iowa if they aren't given a discount), or would you like $76 million in taxes and $100 million in public improvement funds that will mainly benefit Apple?

But it proves the asymmetric negotiation power Apple has compared to constituents. Apple is in a position to say, take it or leave it. And the constituents can't really do that, for them to move elsewhere is much more expensive, for possibly not much of a gain. So basically Apple gets a significant advantage because local officials are looking at money rather than fairness. Why doesn't everyone get the same discount? Oh well, that wouldn't work would it?

It also shows that at scale the property taxes are possibly too high. Which means the property taxes in general are probably too high. But now, because of this "deal", the constituents have even less negotiating power to get their taxes lowered, because the local government sold them out, and now depends on their taxes even more seeing as they can't raise Apple's property taxes for 20 years per this deal.

"This puts Iowa on the world stage," Gov. Kim Reynolds

Debi Durham, director of the Iowa Economic Development Authority, "All eyes are on Iowa for building this technology ecosystem," she said

The handful of eyes that give a crap about this story, will see how far Iowa has debased themselves. Iowa just got its 15 minutes of fame, it's already over, you're not getting anymore out of this deal than what's already happened. Unless of course, you whore yourselves out yet again to another company. That's what you've just advertised, Iowa.

Two perspectives from inside Iowa:

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2017/08/25/7-thi...

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/readers/2017/...
It looks like a graduate student at George Washington wrote a paper on this question:

http://taxprof.typepad.com/files/65st0033.pdf

You've piqued my interest here. It does seem a bit strange.
I wonder if there is a movie where a medical device company sells hundreds of thousands of remotely accessible life critical devices but doesn't really give a shit about security.
Netflix has a new gawker documentary
Wow MuddyWater's page looks terrible, but the report can be downloaded here : http://www.muddywatersresearch.com/research/stj/mw-is-short-...

You have to agree to some ... interesting ... terms of use including not to distribute the link above, but I guess that ship has sailed.
The follow-on question to an ask like that is nominally a variation on "So, what would that enable you to do?"

From there, I can then start digging into what the real problem is. Maybe it was a desire for greater performance, or easier deployability. Maybe his concern was about protecting intellectual property, and he thought that binaries would be harder to reverse-engineer than bytecode.

All of those could be legitimate problems, and none of them would really be solved by a Java-to-native compiler.
No, you probably can't buy any of the stuff anywhere online that he packs into those boxes, from outside of Japan at least.

He makes items available you simply would not be able to easily obtain otherwise.