well, i tend to view reddit as the 'hacker news for everything' if that counts..
otherwise, i don't really think so. but i'd argue its related in that reddit has made such sites largely unnecessary. subreddits can be as narrow or broad in topic, and as open or regulated in curation as one wants. i see little value in a 'finance news' (for example) when there's /r/finance and probably around 100 other finance-related subreddits out there..
There exists /r/programming and /r/coding and HN is still here.
In my opinion the success or failure of a site like this depends whether or not it has enough traction to start a good community, which at the end is what makes the difference.
while i think it is a factor, i don't buy the whole 'good community' thing being as important as many here make it out to be..
i think hn benefits mainly from the fact its backed by some big-name influencers whose activities are highly relevant to its target audience. their presence is essentially a feature of the site that provides value beyond ‘link aggregation and discussion’.. it’s a differentiating feature, and is one that’s very difficult one for a new entrant, like a subreddit, to overcome. it also probably helps a lot that hn predates reddit..
these other ‘hn-like’ sites have no such differentiating features, and that’s why i don’t see them ever taking-off.. and given that reddit already exists, they’re often competing against subreddits which benefit greatly in terms of visibility.
It doesn't. Paul Graham has said he made it to be like Reddit 'used to be' (in the early days, most of Reddit's users were sock puppets of the founders, and it was pretty high quality).
Something that differentiates reddit with the set of HN clones is the discovery: on any subreddit you have a list of other subreddits and you can search for them if you want to explore about a new thing.
Every HN clone is its own little island and can only count traffic from Google to build a community after the initial HN announcement. They should try to link to each other, or at least there should be a wiki page somewhere that lists all HN for X.
I was hoping that the internals would be powerful, I want to see 4K games 5 yrs later. I do not think present internals will be able to push that many pixels.
pretty sure they wont, but i think that's sort of the point, and it speaks to the fundamental difference in how they see the market evolving vs. sony with their ps4.
i get a sense that microsoft views this as the last 'console' (in the traditional sense) they'll release.. everything from the architecture, to the internals, to even the naming, makes me think that this is meant to be just a 'box' - the one and only box you'll need - which will grow (in features and power), with more-and-more of the resources offloaded to the cloud over time...
i think their original policies around 'always on' speak to that vision, but that's just my guess, and is why i'm more excited about the xbox one long-term.
Also they're making a very transparent play away from games being the primary focus. IMO it's a very sensible move as long as gaming doesn't get neglected.
Of course PC sales will be low. When you don't have enough memory, you buy more RAM. When your processor is too slow, buy a new CPU, or you get a new heat sink and over clock it. You rarely have the need to buy a whole new box.
i agree that the increased (functional) life of pcs is a contributing factor to slowing unit sales, but its laughable to attribute it to the idea that people who once would have bought a new pc are now just buying more ram and upgrading internals.
the percentage of people who would have any idea how to do that, or even consider it as a viable option, is far to small to have any real impact on demand..
not sure, but as a wp user that made me sort of happy - probably the first time i've seen that on hn..
my guess would be ease of porting, though that's purely a guess. i am though starting to notice an increase in the number of same-day releases for wp as ios, and in some cases (like disney games recently) ahead of android.
though still small, i really think the platform's gotten to the point where it makes sense for devs to at least consider it, especially as many times the effort to port from ios is sufficiently small to justify the work.
this is really cool. would love to see one breaking-down wankel engines as well.
though i'm not technical by any means, i've always sort of got the high-level around how reciprocating/piston-based engines function. wankel engines seem a lot more efficient in terms of design but also weirdly complex. still kind of a mystery to me as to how they work and unfortunately there aren't too many cars around these days that run on em to check out..
yeah, in one of their releases they specifically mention the transaction will be completed using offshore funds.
and while i'd generally like to see some movement on policy to encourage large us-based multinationals to bring-home more of their offshore earnings (for reinvestment domestically), the current environment does play-out nicely for foreign m&a - which is at-least (in my opinion) a better use of funds than dividends and buybacks.
Remember that no other developed country besides the USA requires that local companies pay local tax again on foreign profits already taxed where they are earned. Most nations recognize that that would make investing locally costly and undesirable. It would also put local companies at a competitive disadvantage worldwide.
The politics of government greed in the USA has created a tax system where the USA government charges the highest business tax rates in the world and enforces punitive triple taxation of foreign profits. That's why USA companies are keeping their money abroad instead of investing in jobs at home. (The USA tax rate was second in the world until a recent Japanese reform, but Japan never triple taxed profits abroad, so the Japanese rate was always effectively lower.)
Corporate taxation is one of the few tax issues where Congressional Republicans are often more sensible than Democrats, from a purely technical tax policy perspective. Obama is willing to work with them, too, but nothing seems to get done. It's one small part of the ongoing failure of Washington.
And god forbid you're a US citizen living and working overseas. You still have to fill out US tax forms for both state and federal tax. The federal government won't charge taxes on anything under ~$90,000, but the states sure will expect you to pay your share of their taxes, even though none of that money was earned or spent in the US.
I hear a lot of ex-pats who move to a non-income-tax state (like Texas) just before they move overseas. If your US residence is still in a state with income tax, even though you don't live there you still get taxed on your overseas income because as a US citizen you still have residence in your state even if you don't live there. It doesn't matter if you're physically there or not.
The only other alternative is to renounce your US citizenship if you never plan on coming back.
From what I recall, they wouldn't have to pay tax twice, they'd have to pay the difference between the US and Irish taxation rates. Other countries don't do this, but other countries also have huge tax evasion problems as a result.
>I think getting companies pay tax in the US for sales in the US would be less internationally antisocial...
IIRC, that's precisely not what these tax repatriations are about; they're about sales abroad that are received by a foreign subsidiary. They avoid repatriating it back to the (US-based) parent company because they suspect if they hold onto it long enough the US government will issue yet-another tax holiday.
I would argue that there's a hand full of countries where being based is more than "notionally" beneficial. The U.S. is definitely among them. I'm not suggesting that the tax should exist but let's not pretend that being based in the U.S. is not dramatically different/better than being based in most other countries you could throw a dart and hit on a map. It's not as if these companies couldn't just move their headquarters off-shore to avoid the issue altogether.
>>It's not as if these companies couldn't just move their headquarters off-shore to avoid the issue altogether.
Which is always the risk when you call for something like the parent wants.
Huge companies, like Microsoft, have offices all over the world. Microsoft has about equal numbers of workers, and revenue, inside and outside the US. The same could be said for Apple. That makes the US a huge market, and it makes sense they are based there. But if being based in the US put them at a disadvantage in the rest of the world (e.g. they had to pay tax twice), it is likely they would move, at least notionally.
There is a big problem with companies that don't pay tax anywhere, or nominate very low tax countries. A coffee company in Europe famously buys coffee cheap with a subsidiary in a low tax country, then sells it to its other business units for so much that those units claim to run at a loss. No coffee ever passes through its small but extremely profitable office in the low tax country. That's annoying, as it puts the burden of subsidizing welfare salary top ups for its underpaid workers on me.
To suggest a solution - The answer here is to tax sales in the country the buyer is in, rather than taxing profit. Sure, it'll kill some low margin companies, but the overall economy will work better because it won't be so skewed by how easily a particular industry can dodge tax. I suspect financial services would do particularly badly.
In terms of this merger, if the tax was on transactions between companies (and I think it should be, though smaller), if Microsoft France funded the deal, it should pay tax in France.
note that this is just my personal opinion (and is in contrast to what seems to be the consensus), but i tend to believe that firms are more efficient in investing excess capital, to drive long-term growth, than shareholders, who have largely become about maximizing short-term profitability (and often at the expense of long-term growth).
and while i'd agree that firms often overpay in the hope of realizing ‘synergies’ that rarely exist, an acquisition is at least an investment in something tangible (ip, product lines, people, ...), which at least has the potential to generate value.. and while it may fail to do so (or do so sufficiently as to offset the costs involved), i view it as a better use of funds than direct returns to shareholders in the hopes (from a macro view) that they are able to efficiently reinvest in value-generating activities.
edit: just want to add that i realize that if one views a firm’s primary function as to maximize returns to shareholders (as many do, a fair view), then m&a, with its high probability of not paying-off, would be considered less favourable than a direct transfer like a dividend. i however tend to view a firm’s function more along the lines of ensuring its long-term survival and growth (which, in-turn, and ideally, should generate significant returns to shareholders, and drive innovation).
otherwise, i don't really think so. but i'd argue its related in that reddit has made such sites largely unnecessary. subreddits can be as narrow or broad in topic, and as open or regulated in curation as one wants. i see little value in a 'finance news' (for example) when there's /r/finance and probably around 100 other finance-related subreddits out there..