skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This would make sense if you were talking about Zynga, but we're talking about Google here.

A dollar spent on Google's self-driving cars program will improve transport in California more than a dollar spent on resurfacing highways; a dollar spent on removing SEO spam from search results will improve education in California more than a dollar spent on paper textbooks full of lies sold by corrupt monopolies; and a dollar spent on developing Android will improve smartphones more than a dollar spent adjudicating pointless patent cases filed by patent pirates like Apple and Intellectual Ventures to eliminate competition.

And then there's the benefit to the rest of the world outside California.

And then there's the fact that a third of your tax money goes to the military, whose mission is to make the world a shittier place for everyone outside the US.

I'm not a huge fan of Google (see http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2011-August/...) but in a competition with the US and California governments for cost-effective ways to use dollars to improve the world, Google wins hands down.
I'd consider buying an Apple Display once I moved to a bigger house. A significant portion of Apple's customer base doesn't have cable, or any interest in cable.

But they still watch TV shows and movies, mostly on computer screens at the moment. Getting a Cinema Display isn't quite the same thing. I think a lot of people would buy an Apple display if it did the following:

* Had a beautiful display
* Seamlessly plays movies and TV shows from computer
* Was good enough, without obvious flaws, that it eliminates
* the anguishing 'which HD TV do I buy?' decision.
* Can be put in a part of the house separate from the computer, for social events
* Can also easily play music, for social gatherings.
How long until someone's running TCP over this? It's just a matter of time until we can use this with a cantenna to control very-long range drones. Combine this with one of the winners of the Groupon DroneGames[1] and you could control a fleet of cheaply-made drones across a wide range. Is anyone interested in creating an autonomous fleet to patrol their property and airspace?

[1]http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/02/dronegames-in-san-francisco...
Should Gittip use an ORM or raw SQL?
Screenshots aren't just of different apps, but of different kinds of apps. Showing me screenshots of a Twitter client and an accounting package is not going to convince me that the accounting package is running on the platform with inferior design values. Show me screenshots of Twitter clients from the two platforms. Or of accounting packages from the two platforms.
Fiber networks? Their employees security by funding Police and the Military? Health care for their employees and customers?

What infrastructure are translators and lawyers using? They still pay normal taxes because they extract profits from a given country and are ought to pay taxes on it. One shouldn't argue whether he or she is ought to pay taxes. If it was the case, 95% of companies and entities would argue that they shouldn't pay a cent. All using their own, twisted logic.

No one wants to pay taxes but avoiding them is unethical and doesn't help the society at all.
The first tab is for your username, the second is where you add the artists you want to follow (that's where you add Atmosphere), the third is where the recent releases are shown.

A UI fail though, is my fail. Possibly more work required.
Priorities. I would pay the lowest possible amount I can legally pay in taxes and give to things that I prioritize. For example, the ACLU, the EFF, and the NRA. You sound like someone who already gives but for everyone else's benefit, here is a link [1]. Contributions to the ACLU Foundation are tax deductible for charitable purposes. (This means talk to your accountant if you make a lot of money.) Give, won't you?

[1] https://www.aclu.org/secure/support-aclu-foundation
I'm not saying that running your own servers is always easier, nor is my stance one of emotional based paranoia.

I'm saying that "private cloud" products that you host yourself could be just as easy to setup and use as cloud-based products if developers wanted to build those products. Instead they want to nickel-and-dime everyone for every business function while retaining absolute control over access to the product. SAAS can absolutely be more expensive in the long run.

(EDIT: Coincidentally, gmail is down again today.)
If the CA government had more income, I'm sure they would just find new ways to deplete it even faster. More money does not fix behavioral problems. This is a common pattern which many fail to observe.
Nice trick, didn't know about that one. Thanks!
Oracle: Tape not just for mainframes
A good example of this is the Mortgage Tax Credit, a much loved tax break for average, middle class families. This is essentially a "tax loophole" for people who buy houses.

It's just more fun to yell about tax loopholes that corporations utilize, because big faceless corporations sound more evil than tax breaks that John and Jane benefit from.
A red herring, I feel. If tax had been paid properly as you suggest then they could hold it in jurisdictions where it was generated, such as the UK. Instead it is moved to places like Bermuda through byzantine schemes to minimise the amount paid in the jurisdictions where the income was generated.

I'm sure you'd like the money to be "repatriated" to the US, but I'd like just some of it to stick around in the UK and Europe to pay for roads, schools, hospitals (and nuclear submarines) first.
Oh, I'd buy one in a hot second. A consumer focused consumer electronics device? Yes, please. But it makes no sense that I can see for Apple to get into the business. I wish there was a venue for me to bet against this cockamamie idea.
Agreed, I still find myself in that position a lot.
I think the title of the article is unnecessarily provocative considering recent political and military events. It might not be intentional but a little more thought into the title could have resulted in something with less political overtones, say, "Supporting Israel's Start-Up Community".
(Much needed) publicity for PPUK, and the issues of a censored internet.
> Great project managers are gold.

Don't know what the deleted comment said, but I second that. A good PM protects you from the nonsense that kills focus.
Hi,

You might want to check out Esprima (http://esprima.org/). You will find a couple of alternatives there. See http://code.google.com/p/traceur-compiler/ as well.
Meh. "Tax rich people" is not a tax plan. How do you tax them? VAT? Property tax? Income tax? Capital gains tax?

All taxes are distortionary. It's their nature. If you ignore the benefits gained from programs that tax dollars buy, all taxes are bad for the economy.

The problem with capital gains and corporate income tax is not (just) that they're bad for the economy, it's that they're de facto optional for multinational entities because of transfer pricing. Cash doesn't have a country, so anyone with more than one country just puts their cash in the country that takes the smallest piece of it.

Now we hear the cries of "but they made the money here" -- OK, sure. So make that the rule then, if that's what you care about. If you sell your product in a country, you pay its taxes. That's sales tax or VAT. If you make your money employing a country's workers, you pay its taxes. That's personal income tax.

If you like you can specify that the product tax will be paid by the seller and the labor tax will be paid by the employer. That may actually provide some amount of leverage to buyers and employees in price negotiations (to the extent it doesn't push sellers and employers toward other countries), but at the end of the day it is what it is: A tax that makes products more expensive or reduces the amount that employees bring home, but can't be avoided by sly accountants and tax lawyers if you still want to sell products or hire workers.
wow, great work! I can not wait to play with the inline and content widgets!
They first to to get it to work properly.
They pay their access fee for fiber networks, surely. As they are paying for all utilities.

Should police/military funding be used to protect corporations or citizens? Are citizens paying it with take home salary? Google could hire their own private military, likely for less than the tax burden you're implying they should pay.
Google Blacklists Mike Mann’s MakeMillions.com
Have you seen the new iMac?

Now, imagine apple making that thin and beautiful of a screen at 32", 42", and 50". They could price them at $499, $749, and $999. People would buy that.

There are 2 things they could do to really pull people in - make TV easy and put iOS apps on your television.

Make TV easy - have a beautiful UI that makes it easy. Less clutter, easier to read channel guide. Simple setup. Etc. Maybe channel search via Siri. "Siri, I want to watch Fringe." And Siri finds you that episode via maybe a built in DVR, Apple's catalog, Hulu plus, or the cable company's on demand stuff.

iOS apps on your TV. Seriously, $1 games on your TV. Even $6 premium games like Infinity Blade. Compare that to $60 games like Halo 4 or even "cheap" Xbox 360 games at $15 or so. People would go bananas for that. The trickiest part for apps is the control mechanism, but for games, most of them could be made to use a game controller similar to what OUYA is doing.

If Apple can get those two things right, they will be able to charge a real premium for a TV. The reason TV's have low margins right now is that they have no value adds or differentiation. It's hard to justify spending $1,000 on a "smart" tv when a $400 tv has the same picture quality for the most part and every $50+ add on box and blu ray player has "smart tv" apps like netflix, hulu, amazon video, picasa, etc...
It might be that the author uploaded it past creation. But then again, it's written in python - which AFAIK became popular fairly recently.
It would have been nice to show the FM modulation equation in use along with the code. I say this because most people underestimate the complexity of FM modulation and instead write an approximation that doesn't create the hoped-for result.

Here's a reference for the actual math:

http://arachnoid.com/phase_locked_loop/index.html#Detailed_D...

(search below the provided bookmark for "Frequency-modulated reference oscillator")
> These "loopholes" are not really what you think they are.

I am defining a loophole as anything that the media are getting into a frenzy about that is perfectly legal. If one prefers that they weren't using some technique to minimise tax, then it [that technique] is a loophole. If this means that they've failed to "define a framework for computing net income as opposed to gross income" that works, then that's a loophole.

> In the corporate tax case, complexity also comes from trying to avoid taxing companies for profits that have nothing to do with American operations.

I don't see what has got to do with it. Clearly no jurisdiction can justifiably claim that it deserves tax revenue unless a company has operations there. If it has operations there, it falls under that jurisdiction's tax code. If the company can avoid paying some tax in any particular jurisdiction that one would like it to be paying, then the tax code of that jurisdiction is broken.
>All Amazon can see is "some unidentifiable Ubuntu user is searching for this". That's hardly something they could report to any authorities.

It's surprisingly easy to take anonymous search data and figure out who it is. You might remember the mess that happened when AOL released anonymized search data (hint:peoples identities were compromised). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak

Consider the simple example of files that are named after the person doing the search.

Anonymization of queries is really really hard and I see no system academic or otherwise that would protect users from being identified.

For instance if someone were to accidentally click on a link to an amazon product and they had an amazon account it would immediately link the person and the query. Someone downloads a movie, searches for it to find it and then accidentally mistakes the amazon link for the pirated movie.
I wonder if they'll go after the smaller ISPs as well which do not block anything at all?
Pirate Party UK Donation page: http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/Help
I absolutely love these graphics. I am currently derping around with WebGL etc., making a super simple "space shooter" ala Galaga, and so far the enemies are colored circles haha. There are a lot of objects in that archive that will make rather neat spaceships and collectibles, in a graphical style I adore -- thank you so much!
Magarena and Unity of Command may not have a true AI, but it's still very good. Have fun checking them out.

Unity of Command is an old-school looking hex-based WW2 game. Magarena is a free program to play Magic: The Gathering. It has a few downsides and doesn't deal with fuzzy logic, but most of the time it plays like a bastard. If you underestimate it or hope it doesn't notice something, you'll regret it.
This is supporting Israeli startups, not the Israeli government. more and more Israeli startups outsource work to Palestinian high tech companies, which is probably a good thing for both sides.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/technology/29compute.html?...

http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/israeli-high-tech-compa...
Free rider problem. Google would get some benefit from it's local governments being more effective, but it would also pay a cost. Meanwhile, it's competitors keep high margins, and don't pay anything.

Say California closes tax loopholes. Then all California companies are placed on an equal footing. But they're now at a disadvantage to non-California companies that don't pay taxes.

Usually higher/simpler taxes will be the better solution. The higher the level they're applied at, the better, as far as the companies are concerned.

Recall that Amazon has been pushing for Federal rules on state sales taxes. Absent those, it's been simpler for amazon to fight paying taxes rather than set up a compliance system and pay taxes on a state by state basis.
I use Netbeans for JavaScript, Python and C++, it get's a rap as a Java IDE but it's actually an excellent JavaScript and C IDE.
> £6M on tax

£6M in corporate income tax, which is only one of many taxes (and usually the smallest component) that a corporation pays.

For eg. they would have collected a 20% VAT (consumption tax in the rest of the world) - which is another £80M, a 13.8% national insurance contribution, which would work out to be approx another £40M, and then on top of that a payroll tax.

I am not familiar with the other payroll tax rates in the UK but it is similar in most other countries - the three or four different tiers. In the USA payroll taxes are 5-6x larger than corporate income taxes. Add them up for Google in the UK and you get to £130-140M contributed from a gross of £395M - a very different story to the headline figures that are being argued.

edit: forget the figures, I don't know the UK tax system enough to even guesstimate, but the tl;dr is that corporate income tax is the smallest of a number of tax components that a corporation pays and arguing by taking out corporate income tax figures alone is misleading. This is the point that Google attempted to make.
Noah Webster did.
California roads are not paid for by companies like Google but by gas taxes. Why do people always bring up roads and other infrastructure?
Hint: You never have to distort a design for testing, if it's not a crock. It's a great indicator of brokeness.
It's even worse than everyone thinks, this does not just go for taxes. Guess how much Larry Page has to pay for a big mac meal: $6.

Does this seem fair to you???
But what were you promoting with these QR codes? If they were just stickers of codes with no indication of what they were for then I would expect hardly anyone to actually scan them. But if it were associated to something that might interest them, say an event or big sale, then the response might be higher.

If you put the codes on top of other people's advertisement's then one could assume that the advertising wasn't effective enough for someone to be interested in scanning the code. Plus if the ad didn't say what the benefit of scanning the code was since it probably wasn't designed with that in mind, then why would they bother?

Also, from my experience in online retail, a response of 2% is often considered a good return. Just depends on what you are doing.

I just think you possibly conducted a less than useful test and possibly came to an invalid conclusion.
> Google pay taxes on all US income (not to mention payroll taxes, consumption taxes, etc.). There is a massive miscomprehension of these tax stories as they are portrayed as Google, Apple etc. avoiding all taxes when this is not the case. The income housed in Bermuda is from non-USA receipts, each of which have already passed through a local tax jurisdiction from wherever they were generated. They are not avoiding any taxes.

Saying they've paid anything in the "local tax jurisdiction[s]" isn't quite true. In most cases they've passed through Ireland and the Netherlands, even if the income is from other European countries. In most cases they haven't paid any corporation tax at all on the profits made in the local countries.

Take Starbucks in the UK as an example. They had sales of £400m but paid £0 corporation tax by ensuring the company didn't make a profit in the UK. It paid various license fees to foreign sister companies, and even purchased its coffee from Starbucks Switzerland to help offset profits. £0 profit in the UK, £0 corporation tax due.

> The reason they are kept offshore is because if the funds were naturalized back in the USA they would be double-taxed. It is really hard to argue that Google should pay local taxes once where a product is sold and then pay taxes again on that same money when it is transferred back to the USA.

They wouldn't be double taxed, the USA have double tax treaties with many countries. The reason they keep it off shore is because they're waiting for one of those amnesties that would allow them to bring the cash home to the US and pay far less than they would have outside the amnesty.

Example with no amnesty:-

Google pay 12.5% corporation tax in Ireland on European Revenues by using "license fee", loan or other perfectly legal schemes.

Google move money from Ireland to Bermuda tax free.

Google move money back into the US and pay (to the US) the difference between tax due originally and tax already paid (in Ireland).

Net result is Google pay the standard 35% (or whatever it is in the US) tax on the money. It's just a chunk of it goes to Ireland rather than the US.

Example with amnesty:-

Google pay 12.5% corporation tax in Ireland on European Revenues.

Google move money from Ireland to Bermuda.

US announce amnesty rate of 5.625% and Google moves money back to the US paying a total of 18.125%. That's a whole lot less than 35%.

It's exactly those amnesties that mean large US corporations can do this. Without them there would be little reason to hoard money offshore as it could never get back to the US without the full amount of tax having to have been paid on it.
There is a lot of science in economics, but where it becomes unscientific is when humans are involved. Much early macroeconomics made the simplifying assumption that humans made rational decisions, and that they had perfect information when making these decisions. That is useful for some models, but the real world is much more complex than that, and that is why the models often don't reflect reality. There is a lot of science in economics though.

If the business tax rate is different to the individual tax rate then this creates some distortions, but more importantly there is the issue of double taxation. In New Zealand dividends/drawings are treated as tax paid, i.e. the business has already paid tax on this income, so no further tax is due. In UK, and I think USA, the individual would be taxed again, hence there is a double taxation on business profits, which does seem kind of unfair.
"Tax competition is a good thing"? How does that make any sense? If competition is a good thing for a particular service (say, firefighting), then you don't need to fund it with taxes, and indeed shouldn't; you can fund it by charging the consumers of the service. It's only the services for which competition-on-price is actually a bad thing (e.g. health care, stock market regulation, and indeed firefighting) where you can morally justify funding them with taxation.
Those taxes are hard to avoid, but they are bourne by workers/consumers, regardless of who you collect them from (i.e. the economic incidence of a tax is not the same as the legal incidence). I.e. foreign entity Google profits doing business in your jurisdiction, but your citizens (both consumers in your country and workers in your country) bear the whole tax burden.
What are the benefits of making an actual Apple television over the current "Apple TV"?

Really the only thing I can think of is some kind of integrated iSight camera for "Facetime on your couch". And maybe some noise cancelling microphones for Siri. It could be neat but I probably wouldn't buy one.

All the other stuff like DVRs and whatever can just be done with an upgraded AppleTV puck.
True, but the most popular method of decoupling seems to be via using an abstraction layer of some kind. At some point you need to talk to a concrete "thing".

It's also difficult to know ahead of time how much abstraction is the right amount ahead of time.

For example, you abstract disk access through an RDBMS but you might want to change DBMS so you abstract that through an ORM. But maybe you want to switch away from RDBMS altogether and go with a NoSQL solution or do everything with message queues or REST APIs? Should you abstract up another level also?
Many western economies have a graduated tax system, that is the more money you earn, each additional dollar is taxed at a slightly higher rate than the previous dollars (or euros). You will experience this as the harder you work the more money you are obligated to give to the government.

But here is the rub, what if the Government spends the money you gave them on an all expense paid trip for themselves to Las Vegas where they ran up big bills at strip clubs and on luxury suites? How do you feel about that?

How about the Greek people, their economy in flames, their country ruined, where "not paying taxes is a national pastime" according to The Economist.

The insight you are missing is that when "your" opinion of the government's fiscal policy is destroyed by abuse, "you" feel completely justified in exploiting all the legal ways to not give them any more money than you have to.

It is hard for an individual to fix government it is easy for an individual to minimize their tax burden. So people take the easy way out.
Gridy.js
You do realize this is highly unusual behaviour, correct? OP's question was more or less hypothetical, in that almost everyone who isn't a programmer sends exactly the amount they have to, and no more.

(and often less, if they think they can get away with it)
Netflix spends $1 billion on exclusive content
> I don't know how it compares to the modern scene, but there was definitely a large amount of RTS modding and mapmaking going on long before 2005. Particularly for the old Command and Conquer games, which were much more accessible to modders than modern, full 3D titles. It's much easier to plonk down some 2D or isometric tiles, carve a vehicle model out of voxels, or edit the "ini files" of those games than it is to create a similar experience with a full fledged 3D modeler and modern toolset.

I recall giving Tanya the cruiser gun via those .ini files. Good times.
Corruption in China: A Comparison with the U.S. In Historical Perspective
That's a good idea if the password was human-generated. With computer-generated random passwords, like gH8r;2CpyyK!a, you might want to optimize differently.