skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The spirit of taxation? This isn't a spiritual matter we're not tithing, the government sets rules for tax, and Apple chooses to follow them.

No one wants to pay extra tax, not even those people who want higher taxes. Case in point, how much extra tax did you pay last year? They pay what they are required by law.

Higher tax advocates end up wanting to see insane basic rates and those that want lower taxes propose exemptions. This is the fundamental negotiation that occurs when politicians from both sides of the table sit down.

The idea is to satisfy those that want to see high marginal rates and those that don't want to pay that much tax. Hightax Hilda gets to go back to her constituents and say "Look we have a 35% tax on corporations". Lowtax Lenny gets to go back to his constituents and say "Look you're not going to pay very much tax as long as you hire some lawyers and accountants."

If Apple got to set the tax code it would probably be a lower rate that was simpler to administer so they didn't have to hire so many lawyers and accountants.
The question was never a legal one (other than wrt changing the law), it was a moral one.
Except you lose out on (semi-)automatic updates. If you want to get the Market (and thus, GApps), there's a handy little Windows utility to do just that: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1399889
TLDR seems to be: we may pay a much lower tax on profits than most individuals do on income, but at least we have so much profit that we still pay a lot. Also, it's technically legal, so it must be ethical. And we donate to charity and stuff, so whatever.

Funny that they recognize in the response that they are primarily an US-based company, with US labour educated in the country, but instead want to pay Irish taxes. Or maybe they do get 30% of their worldwide profits from Ireland, who knows...
Here's the source if you just want to dive in: http://golang.org/src/pkg/text/template/parse/lex.go.

Having "grown up" in OO-land, the stateFn pattern was a bit odd to me. However in practical terms this pattern is pretty neat.
Precious little of the data stored in the world is textual content. It's hard to believe that choice of encoding standards materially impacts RAM or disk budgets.

Most of his points are not related to encoding size but to simplicity and standardization. I find those reasons to be very compelling.

I'm asking for clear counterarguments because I concede that my ASCII background could predispose me to UTF-8. Please be a little clearer, I really do want to know.
So my comment isn't very specific, but don't you agree that at some point in time for a business, bureaucracy, tax rules and governments can really get in the way of things? Rather than being critical about companies not paying taxes, we need to either look at closing loopholes, or make paying taxes easier/less restrictive/cheaper.
The NYT 'attacks' on Apple recently have annoyed me. Firstly the Foxconn story. All the attention was focussed on Apple and the other companies using these factories didn't get any bad publicity. If the NYT actually cared about what was going on there they would have exposed all the companies with issues in China.

Same applies here. Paying less tax in this way is something every multi-national company does and yet the NYT has once again decided to focus on Apple. Let me be clear, I'm not an Apple 'fanboy'. I think if the NYT actually cared about these 'issues' they would expose all the bad actors. They're just trying to get page views.

And honestly, this is not even a story. Apple are acting within the law, trying to maximise their profits. They sell their products worldwide and can take advantage of that to pay less tax.
Really good article. You'll get nothing from me but heartfelt agreement. I especially liked that the article was giving numbers about how inefficient UTF8 would be to store Asian text (not really apparently).

Also insightful, but obvious in hindsight: Not even in utf-32 you can index specific character in constant time due to the various digraphs.

The one property I really love about UTF8 is that you get a free consistency check as not every arbitrary byte sequence is a valid UTF8 string.

This is a really good help for detecting encoding errors very early (still to this day, applications are known to lie about the encoding of their output).

And of course, there's no endianness issue, removing the need for a BOM which makes it possible for tools that operate at byte levels to still do the right job.

If only it had better support outside of Unix.

For example, try opening a UTF8 encoded CSV file (using characters outside of ASCII of course) in Mac Excel (latest versions. Up until that, it didn't know UTF8 at all) for a WTF experience somewhere between comical and painful.

If there is one thing I could criticize about UTF8 then that would be its similarity to ASCII (which is also its greatest strength) causing many applications and APIs to boldly declare UTF8 compatibility when all they really can do is ASCII compatibility and emitting a mess (or blowing up) once they have to deal with code points outside that range.

I'm jokingly calling this US-UTF8 when I encounter it (all too often unfortunately), but maybe the proliferation of "cool" characters like what we recently got with Emoji is likely going to help with this over time.
Agreed, enough with the f-ing BS about asking the same question over and over.

Signal/noise ratio has taken a nosedive on HN lately; sad.
Concerning "cut at an arbitrary position" actually utf-8 is the only codec that can deterministically continue a broken stream because bytes that start a character are special.
Of course they'll say they comply with the letter of the law. That is the 'highest ethical standard' any large public corporation will claim. If we as Americans believe Apple, however noble, is evading the spirit of the law, we need to make the letter of the law more specific.
People need to define what they mean by a bubble, most of the companies mentioned are privately held, it's not clear this is like the .com bubble or that a crash would have wide ranging effects - unless someone would like to explain?
Social HomePage on Github
They dodge taxes here in the UK too. While benefiting from our infrastructure and educated workforce.
I'm curious: What could another viable business model be for a search engine?

Back in the days of something like the yellow pages, it was also an advertising supported model (or pay-for-placement, something that might damage the credibility of a search engine). What I also found very interesting is the term 'yellow pages' is in the top 5 highest revenue generating search terms. [1]

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Pages
You're saying that if Instagram had a revenue model, each user would be worth on average between $50 and $125?
Could you define "fair share"? Near as I can tell Apple consumes very little in terms of government services - corporate registration, some contract enforcement, police protection, all very cheap stuff. It's highly unlikely they are a net drain on the government.

So how are they not paying their "fair share"? Perhaps you should define what you mean by "fair share".
Wow, the comments in this otherwise rational forum are astounding. Does no one really understand the purposes of taxation? Or are you all too self-inflated to realize that you are part of a public collective?
Don't you find it strange that things like roads to transport your products, education to give knowledge to your employees (and consumers!), and emergency services to ensure the safety and well-being of the public are all things we rely on to keep living our individual lives?
To replace these services with private entities would take their control out of the hands of democracy and into selected special interests.

I would say that HN readers and contributors are among the smartest people on the web; they are the intellectuals. So
please pardon my "rantiness" when I say that it is the responsibility of intellectuals to facilitate growth in their communities. And in this cyber-cosmopolitan age it becomes important to understand where the most efficient contributions to growth are going to take place. After all, life is infinitely finite. When you're 6 feet under the only things that survive are your genetic progeny and your intellectual progeny. Favouring conservative taxation in favour of purported "individualism" is not only selfish, but highly inefficient. Charities and government subsidies do not fill the voids required by collective resource allocation. To be more concrete: you can't build a socioeconomic infrastructure on top of capitalism. You have to do it the other way around.
Philanthropy isn't as widespread in Europe as it is in North America. That's because European taxation models are such that there is a "safety net" (one which is akin to our emergency response system, but more robust and covering more edge-cases).

Pardon my frustrated response, but I just don't think HN is on the same page when it comes to the benefits of democratic "socialism".
I would imagine no one at valve is an expert at managing backups for hundreds of machines and keeping an appropriate level of redundancy. Valve is definitely a company that is going to focus on where it can do better then others. They probably use many outside services to handle the things they don't want to have to worry about or specialize in. Other companies will handle it better because that's their focus, Gabe definitely gets that.
No, but when people say, "Nice Sweater," and I ask, with a sparkle in my eye, "Do you want to hear about it?" they often say, "I thought they were flags."
Fl0wer.png.html
What part of that process requires UTF-16? JavaScript doesn't require UTF-16; it just requires Unicode. You could use UTF-8 in your JavaScript implementation as well.
Everybody's favorite ad company is also doing the same thing btw.

Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Lost to Tax Loopholes

Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-sho...
I have spent so much time looking at graphs, I wanted smaller to be on the bottom and to the left, as in Cartesian coordinates. Though I know it's a bit weak. The color differentiation is even worse in the photo than it is with just the yarn. And it's tricky to find a yarn with enough distinct shades.
As I stated, I read the article and am familiar in fact with the bold "hey, I said I'd give you my personal opinion" transition that he makes midway through.

He has no actionable thesis, just a vague "we should look out for each other" message that makes it easy to read into it whatever you want to see. Yes, we should look out for each other. We compel this via taxation. If we aren't compelling corporations to do what we actually want given the rules we have set up, let us change the rules.

In other words, the actual problem that he is talking about, whether he chooses to address it or not, is that systemically we have a taxation problem. That's the only interesting thing to discuss here.
How, exactly, do you see me as arguing that anything but numeric foolishness is going on here? Investors, in bubbles, frequently find ways to justify the numbers – often with talk of how the old rules don't apply, etc., etc.

In this specific post's case, however, the author fails to see the lack of quality in the numbers which he (barely) uses.

Trusting bad numbers without really digging into them is little different than "ignoring the numbers", as you put it. They're two sides of the same coin – sloppiness because of excitement or other failed thinking.

As for your last argument – I'm not sure what to make of it. On the one hand, just a few lines above you argue that the numbers are usually "right in front" of investors and that bubbles are caused by ignoring them... but then you argue exactly counter to that and say that seeing bubbles isn't easy and that data can't tell you when there's a bubble.

I strongly disagree with that last point – the housing bubble was definitely spotted using data before it burst, as was the last tech bubble. It's just that few wanted to believe that the old fundamentals still applied. But thus far, they always seem to.
Yes, they are. It's what changes the device from a standard computer (with an indirect interface) into direct manipulation of objects on a screen. With Palm OS-style scrollbars or desktop scroll wheels, you are manipulating an object that affects something else.

With iOS-style scrolling, there is nothing to learn. That's one of the biggest issues with Android (and, conversely, one of the advantages of Windows Phone and iOS): because Android has not been able to match the fluid scrolling and realistic physics, it breaks the illusion of physicality that the original iPhone managed to first create in 2007.
5.5" limits the usefulness, a lot of the parts I want to make are going to be 6.1+" - I'm primary thinking of things like cable holders, replacement HDD holders, etc..
May I suggest adding a favicon? A red triangle maybe? :)
"Apple (14 P/E), Google (18 P/E), eBay (16 P/E), Yahoo (17 P/E)"

Those are some nicely cherry picked examples of mature companies that have been around for a Silicon Valley century. But I don't think the bubble involves mature tech companies but rather is in the private markets for emerging tech companies. The recent IPOs are certainly indicators of this...

Linkedin - P/E: 940

Zynga - P/E: No earnings (6B mkt. cap.)

Groupon - P/E: No earnings (7.5B mkt. cap.)

Pandora - P/E: No earnings (1.5B mkt. cap.)
"If we want to be a society, that comes at a cost and somebody has to pick up the tab at the end of the night and the system to make that happen is called taxation."

Your own summary simply repeats the fallacy. That someone must pick up the tab does not imply that the tab must be larger than it is today, or that the tab must be paid for by this particular chunk of money. It does not follow. It is not a logical argument.

It isn't even about libertarianism. It doesn't even rise to the level of an argument against libertarianism, because it isn't well-formed enough to even be called a proper argument. "We need a thing" and "We need more of a thing" are two completely different arguments, and you shouldn't allow one argument to be substituted for another without noticing.
Because a solder layer would have much higher thermal transfer rate per area than thermal paste. And the IHS is bigger than the die, resulting in better cooling (because there is more 'bandwidth' (=area) at the point where TIM is used).. which was pretty much explained in the article.
Lots of things come to mind ...

1) paying for fine-grained index controls, eg you publish something new, head over to search engine and tell it to spider your site, or you tell it to spider it between 2 am and 3am, whatever. You could also use this to test updates you're making ... imagine being able to do a dry run on your new version and see this is going to cripple your SE traffic. Or get your new article analyzed before you publish it.

2) dress listings up ala ebay ... not sure if they still do it but they used to do cheesy crap that let you make your listing stand out more than the other guys, if there's a tasteful way to do that on a CPM basis it would print money

3) charging for an api like bing etc are doing

4) charge for reports on phrases, websites, industries

5) charge for telling you why your competitors are outranking you

6) charge sites a subscription ... AOL probably gets most of their traffic straight from Google, and they probably deserve almost none of it, so make them pay for that traffic. The large, eyeball-driven sites could easily be discriminated against.

7) charge low quality sites to un-penalize them. This is not a pardon, it's just a reset and it'll eat into their margins but whatever, they need your traffic.

This all revolves around two things: tax garbage sites, and provide tools for legitimate sites. These feel like low hanging fruits to me, there'd have to be much more interesting ways to monetize it than these.

The only hard part really is getting people to give a shit that you made / have / are a search engine.
Earlier discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3899213
Options have value in finance and in life. Instagram possessed the option to turn on advertisements inside the app, and the option to sell virtual goods, and the option to implement any number of other revenue schemes, which would have immediately generated significant free cash flow. The fact that they did not exercise any of these options does not mean that the options themselves are valueless.
Thank you for that much necessary snark. It's tiring to read articles on tech sites by people who have never really worked in tech (reporting about tech is not working in tech, much like writing movie reviews does not make you a film maker) who think they know better than everyone else.
More broadly, lots of data that doesn't lend itself to a single figure has either repositories (like the Gene Expression Omnibus) or supplemental attachments to the paper that can be included.
You have to consider how things were before Freud before dismissing him. Before Freud there was no idea that the mind subconsciously processed information. Although his ideas of how psychology works were very "infantile", they were the first attempt to investigate the subconscious, thus revolutionary.
I'd absolutely argue that it's immoral to take advantage of loopholes that break the clear intended amount of taxation that society asks of you. If a society decides it wants to levy less tax, that's rather different (and fair enough).

Equally, I think it's fairly naive to expect corporations to be moral, since there's very little incentive for them to be so - I merely respect those that are more.
He almost certainly flubbed it on purpose, or is just lying. Also, it was never meant to differentiate geniuses.

Also, you don't need quick, one-line, anecdote to explain why 1 (one) is not statistically significant. It's actually pretty obvious.
For "fair share", I'd settle for "not grotesquely underpaying as a % of income, compared to peons like myself". This isn't about Apple specifically as it is about distortions from the fact that big players have the means to pay a lower % of taxes than little players.

As far as what they consume, they're based in the US, with the best technical workforce in the world. Everything about Apple is an only-in-America story. Turning around and saying "Oh, all we consume is some police protection" is pretty dishonest in view of that. Like they'd be fine if you transported the campus to Sierra Leone and hired good security? The only other countries developed enough to have conceivably yielded an Apple all levy higher taxes than us (VAT vs corporate income notwithstanding), and a higher regulatory burden. "Fair share" isn't so much to ask for, when you look at the competition in terms of countries.
I'm just saying that if we standardize on encoding, we dont need to talk about encoding. Which is my interpretation of the original document.

Separate point: There is no such thing as an abstract string or integer in a computer, no matter what language you are using. Every string in a computer has an encoding - you have to store it as ones and zeros.

If we standardize on UTF-8 as an encoding, we just dont need to use the awkward phrase "UTF-8" in ordinary conversation.
Only if it's treated as human-readable text. But a great many text files are not, in fact, purely meant as human-readable text.
Good question. I built a site to help us decide:

http://techbubbleforeveryoneorjustme.com/
Do you naturally miss the point, or do you have to put effort into it?
The file seems to be a png with some html tags in it that trick the browser. Seems to work on firefox and conkeror but not on my chromium.
It's highly unlikely Apple tries to offset any guilt it may have over tax avoidance by hiring a few extra people. Ignoring a few inefficiencies, companies try to minimise (in cost and number) their workforce in order to maximise profits. If they can get away with their current tax structure then they're only losing money by hiring more staff.
I know what you're saying, that actual retail sales are not a big deal for them. However, you're making a category error in that "Windows purchases" (as well as Office, etc.) are what defines their customers of Microsoft's software arm where there is no parallel situation on the Facebook side. That is, at all levels, Microsoft's customers are interacting with the same stuff: Microsoft software.

For Facebook it's different. Facebook's customers are consuming and interacting with an entirely different resource than Facebook's users. In fact, I'd say that Facebook's customers (advertisers et al) actually have very little social interaction with each other on an experiential basis compared to Facebook's users. This is to say that Facebook likely puts a lot of work into ensuring that nothing on the customer side gets inadvertently shared, unlike the user side.
JS does require UTF-16, because the surrogate pairs of non-BMP characters are separable in JS strings.

'<non-BMP character>'.length == 2
'<non-BMP character>'[0] == first codepoint in the surrogate pair
'<non-BMP character>'[1] == second codepoint in the surrogate pair

Any JS implementation using UTF-8 would have to convert to UTF-16 for proper answers to .length and array indexing on strings.
I'm always curious as to why such an obvious bug couldn't be detected automatically. Some piece of code is printing a user name without sanitizing it. Fixing that particular bug is easy, but the real challenge is that the existence of the bug proves that your verification methodology has holes.
> What part of that process requires UTF-16? JavaScript doesn't require UTF-16; it just requires Unicode. You could use UTF-8 in your JavaScript implementation as well.

Actually, JavaScript _does_ require UTF-16. From the ES5.1 spec:

> A conforming implementation of this Standard shall interpret characters in conformance with the Unicode
Standard, Version 3.0 or later and ISO/IEC 10646-1 with either UCS-2 or UTF-16 as the adopted encoding
form, implementation level 3. If the adopted ISO/IEC 10646-1 subset is not otherwise specified, it is presumed
to be the BMP subset, collection 300. If the adopted encoding form is not otherwise specified, it presumed to
be the UTF-16 encoding form.
Roads, education, emergency services.

Ah yes, the classic tiny list meant to justify taking $6 trillion per year out of the economy in the form of taxation.

Roads? Laughable. Let's run that budget up against SS / Medicare / Military, and see where our taxes are really spent.

Education? Oh my, yes, the government is doing such a stellar job inflating the cost of education to infinity, while results get worse and worse.

Emergency services? The ones that people are increasingly having to pay extra fees just to use?

Special interests already control the items you listed. In case you missed that whole Federal unions thing; or the protected road workers unions that typically dominate at the state level. Or the teachers unions that protect their own to the harm of students, which is why we spend so much more than anybody else and get such radically worse results.

Government services in the US are about as far away from being in your hands of control as they could get. Which is why the TSA gets away with such extreme abuse, or why our infrastructure is collapsing despite the government having doubled in size in the last 13 years.
At the moment spf13-vim is, indeed, more feature-rich. There is also no Windows support yet. I'll provide a way to easily select plugin sets for a specific language/technology. Thanks for your feedback !