phab

  > # There is no 2016 IOCCC contest
  > # There is no 2017 IOCCC contest

Anybody know why?

GET requests are specified[0] to be idempotent:

  > Methods can also have the property of "idempotence" in that (aside from
  > error or expiration issues) the side-effects of N > 0 identical
  > requests is the same as for a single request. The methods GET, HEAD,
  > PUT and DELETE share this property.

[0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-9.1.2

edit: formatting

Infuriatingly, this site is using vw units to set font-size; not only does this make the body copy text almost unreadably large on my HiDPI display (~330 PPI), but it means the text then refuses to scale when the page is zoomed out in the browser. Low quality.

> That would be like taking a programming language's syntax for assigning data objects and turning it into it's own standard for a text file format.

Looking at you, JSON...

The whole point of the article is that ambiguity in interpretation is to be celebrated, which is precisely what we see in the title. The title is an accurate reflection of the content of the essay in this regard.

  That people are so hung up on interpretation, on meaning, is no more than habit.
  Better to revel in uncertainty.

The point is that the article's title is another "unexploded pun", the principle of which is a central theme to the article; it is referring to Booth's analysis of one of the sources of the Bard's greatness:

  Shakespeare achieves this by weaving incredibly rich networks from the same
  kinds of “substantive nonsense and nonimporting patterns” that pop up in slang,
  jokes, songs, and nursery rhymes. Those dense networks of patterns, Booth posits,
  are “the principal source of the greatness we find in Shakespeare’s work.”

edit: formatting

The author's (eponymous) series on Graphical Linear Algebra is well worth reading, and has some interesting parallelisms to boolean functions & their manipulation.

I think it's pretty astounding that a customer complaint thread has run to 17 pages, direct contact on twitter, a HN story and customers going to such extreme lengths as editing their binary...

... and not one engagement from Spotify themselves on the thread. Seems like pretty poor customer support to me.

> Ethernet has no flow control.

Except it does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_flow_control

Whether people use it or not is another matter!

> Ireland did NOT set a different tax rate for Apple

It allowed Apple to pay an effective rate of tax much lower than that typically required of companies in the sector. De jure, no, they did not set a different tax rate. De facto, yes, Apple paid a significantly lower tax rate.

> "Fairness for everyone" is the same as "forcing bad outcomes on the individual".

I contest this unsupported assertion; you provide no argument to back it up. Ensuring a fair marketplace cannot cause "bad outcomes on the individual" for everybody, as this implies nobody benefits from fairness (a.k.a a law-regulated environment) (an everybody-lose situation simply doesn't make sense, otherwise anarchy would have taken hold centuries ago).

> Group fairness doesn't trump individual liberties

... In your humble opinion. This is an ideological statement with no support.

> What Ireland did with Apple is the same as a company hiring away developers from its competition

... Except that it's not the same, as the two are in no way equivalent:

* the labour market is very different to the market for corporate domiciling

* private companies have no necessity to exist; failure (consequent from labour market failure) is acceptable whereas a state's failure (or a diminished form, a state's failure to collect adequate tax revenues) is unacceptable

* The market for corporate domiciling in the EU was regulated and there were regulations in place to prevent this action. There is usually no such regulation in employment law.

So really, the two are not "the same" at all.

> Does it hurt them? Sure

This is in contradiction with your statement "doesn't trump individual liberties, as long as that ... doesn't harm someone else". In this case the poaching company is harming the target company, and so by your argument group fairness ought to trump individual liberties. On the one hand you argue for constrained liberty, and on the other you accept unconstrained liberty. The two aren't compatible on this simple a level.

In-reply-to: ZigZigZag: Once again, it comes down to a question of fairness; you describe Apple's tax deal as if it is a conventional part of fiscal policy where clearly it cannot be treated as such (indeed, if it were, and such tax deals were cut fairly across all corporations in this sector, Ireland would have quite some budgetary problems).

The argument is that the deal that Apple brokered would not have been available to any other company.

A country regulating an industry's tax across the whole industry, affecting every player equally, is very different to a sweetheart deal with one company that puts other players in that same market, both at home and abroad, at a grave disadvantage.

The modern EU is based on freedom of access to market and equality of opportunity. This is what is enshrined in the treaty currently enforced. The EU is not forcing "its members to give up tax policy", it is forcing its members to treat companies fairly across the bloc according to those policies which they have each set. Whilst this could be seen as an assault on their sovereignty, for a collective union to work there has to be common rules, and everyone has to play by them; thereby fairness is ensured. Everybody concedes an equal amount of their sovereignty for the common good (c.f. the ECJ). When one country doesn't play by the rules for its own gain, the others are disadvantaged, and so it is only fair that the central body of that union enforces the previously-agreed rules.

You have missed the point - this is about different companies within one state being charged different rates of corporation tax, not different states across the EU charging different rates of tax.

> if the EU successfully forces countries to pick a single corporation tax rate across the bloc

The EU is forcing no such thing. It is forcing countries within the bloc to not give any one company special treatment. The distinction is critical.