motives

Source? Assuming you're talking about 18% of traffic and not percentage of websites, how do you define what counts as traffic in that case? Transfer between AS's? Does internal traffic within AS's count? Does traffic between entities within the same AS count (e.g traffic from one AWS customer to another, or traffic from a Netflix OCA to an ISP?) I'm skeptical of any entities ability to fully measure the throughput of the internet even remotely accurately. The closest estimate you'll likely get is if you're a transit provider able to measure data transfer, and even then you'll be lucky to extrapolate within the correct order of magnitude from that for total global inter-AS traffic.

This is a point worth emphasizing, a tax being repealed does not necessarily imply a lack of efficacy, due to the aforementioned reasons of political influence/corruption etc. Switzerland has done very well with a global wealth tax, arguably being the highest standard of living in Europe.

My take is indeed probably more cynical and you're very correct about Delaware being well-trodden, but it does raise the question why the FAQs mention a bunch of well known corporate tax havens [0](Cayman Islands and Singapore) and not other well-trodden territories such as the UK, which has a really straightforward and efficient ecosystem surrounding startup law and incorporation (SeedLegals etc.) and plenty of history to extrapolate from. Also the FAQs mention nothing about having to be in Delaware, perhaps they should be updated?

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/faq#q25

Its so investors can leverage the massive tax breaks available when investing in US based startups. Hence why YC also lets you found in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. Note this is probably not the official reason, as it's generally frowned upon internationally to encourage tax avoidance.

It's worth mentioning IP law is applied on a per-territory basis (i.e. you have to register your IP in every territory you would like it enforced, and that territory's courts are solely responsible for its enforcement in that territory). Many countries government have laws which restrict IP in national security concerns [0], which nuclear reactors may come under. Furthermore, patents require the innovation used is published publicly, which may not be desirable for sensitive technologies like nuclear reactors. Trade secrets and the like are more likely to be used in this particular case.

[0] https://www.wipo.int/pct/en/texts/nat_sec.html

If there is sufficient deviation from GDPR (who knows what will happen from this speculative article alone), the UK will probably lose its adequacy to transfer personal data, which will materially impact how international organisations can transfer data. In fact the recent UK-EU adequacy decision explicitly states this [0]:

'For the first time, the adequacy decisions include a so-called ‘sunset clause', which strictly limits their duration. This means that the decisions will automatically expire four years after their entry into force. After that period, the adequacy findings might be renewed, however, only if the UK continues to ensure an adequate level of data protection. During these four years, the Commission will continue to monitor the legal situation in the UK and could intervene at any point, if the UK deviates from the level of protection currently in place. Should the Commission decide to renew the adequacy finding, the adoption process would start again.'.

The impact of a loss of adequacy will be significant on UK service providers, as it will become significantly easier from a regulatory perspective to just host within the EU for both UK and EU customers than to deal with the hassle of using UK datacenters.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_...

If I understand it correctly, the recent CJEU ruling on GDPR [0] should improve the Irish DPC limitations by allowing enforcement in other member states where violations have occurred (under certain specific conditions).

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/top-eu-court-says-natio...

They pretty much already offer this with outposts (its technically their hardware but its on your premises).

Nit: Switzerland as a country is a semi-direct democracy not a direct democracy. Only 2 cantons fulfil the criteria for the classical definition of direct democracy.

I've used JSON schema a fair bit for config files for provisioning infrastructure and its been great. For example I have a kubernetes clusters JSON file cleanly schematized which specs all the clusters I need (node pools, metadata etc), which I generate TS types from using 'json-schema-to-typescript', and then just iterate over these in pulumi. All I need to do is update the JSON file to update my infra, and the coding experience is brilliant with pretty much complete type safety.

The customisability is definitely a plus, you can make slate fit in perfectly with almost any UI. Whilst you don't get complex image handling by default, I think their image handling example [0] is a really nice minimal implementation which is quite intuitive.

[0] https://www.slatejs.org/examples/images

I'm not a materials guy personally so won't be the best person to explain the exact science behind them, but they're definitely a really impressive bit of engineering. I had a quick browse of this article and it seems to give a pretty good rundown of their history and why their properties are so useful for jet engines https://www.americanscientist.org/article/each-blade-a-singl...

I think the important point here is that even pilots dont know the full mechanics of a modern jet engine (AFAIK at least, I don't have an ATPL so not 100% on the syllabus). They may know basics like the Euler turbine equation and be able to run some basic calculations across individual rows of blades, but they most likely will not fully understand the fluid mechanics and thermodynamics involved (and especially not the trade secrets of how the entire blades are grown from single crystals).

This is absolutely fine, and one can draw parallels in software, as a mid level software engineer working in an AWS based environment wont generally need to know how to parse TCP packet headers, despite the software/infrastructure they work on requiring them.

Just as an example, IBM receives almost 10,000 patents a year. At $100,000-$1,000,000 per patent, that year of patents alone in 15-20 years time would cost $1-10 billion. That is most definitely not a rounding error and would constitute as much as 10% of their annual revenue just to keep that single years worth of patents. I think this sort of escalating pricing scheme would definitely help reduce the barriers for startups and new innovators, and prevent abuse by companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Thanks for the response, it seems my initial take was indeed unbalanced and hadn't factored in the potential of geographically distributed raises which benefit the founders local territories whilst bringing the benefits of significant US capital.

This is probably a somewhat cynical take, but Stripe Atlas' US only offering is a big contributor to international startup brain drain which is costing local economies significantly. When countries (such as within the EU, India or South America) invest so much in the education and development of young entrepreneurs, only for them to leave to the US for the allure of quick investment, all of their potential future value leaves with them. I understand there is a lot for these countries to do to improve investment conditions for high risk startups, but how can poorer South American countries (like those in the Stripe promo video linked) compete with the US in terms of the availability of capital? This is not solely Stripes fault, though in my opinion by promoting Delaware parent companies for international founders they contribute to the hindrance of the local tech economies of these countries.

I'd like to reiterate that this is a relatively uncharitable take, and would welcome alternate perspectives on this issue.

Out of curiosity, given that this is among the most sensitive PII that can be stored, where is this data located for Stripe? I think this looks like an excellent product and can absolutely see the utility for so many businesses, but as a European I would never want such data to be stored outside of the EU. If there could be flexibility in the location the data is stored I think many European customers would appreciate that. Thanks.

Also worth mentioning in the case of Ireland the KDB, whereby you can get an effective 6.25% rate on your corporation tax for certain R&D heavy activities (software etc.). This would be advantageous I think for most smaller businesses HNers are typically involved in if they wish to operate in the EU.

To counter your devils advocate, universities within the UK which perform the most cutting edge research in this specific field are already closely linked to specialist hospitals, and can obtain the kind of data they need on a targeted and explicitly consensual basis. The fallacy that more data inherently leads to better ML affords poorer quality research, and explainability often lags behind in these cases.

Its hard to compare NLP (such as pretrained transformer models) to medical ML because there are real and potentially fatal implications to misdiagnosis. The focus should be on small scale and explainable ML, not brute forcing patterns across large populations (which is more effective for insurance companies than clinicians). FWIW, I'm a massive fan of the potential of CV in diagnosis, and in aiding spotting abnormalities early, but I think the proposed opening up of data is absolutely the wrong way to see innovation in this field.

I feel this is a fairly pedantic correction, though of course you're very correct nonetheless. My opinion is that banning all of a nations major airlines from operating in your airspace is functionally equivalent to banning that nation. Belarus is much like Kazakhstan in that the vast majority of routes from its airports are by its national airlines. Most of the routes to the EU are flown by Belavia (Belarus' national airline) https://www.flightconnections.com/flights-from-minsk-msq.

Worth noting that the EU has banned entire nations (such as Kazakhstan and others) from flying in EU airspace before for not meeting safety expectations. It is absolutely within possibility to ban Belarus for an overt Chicago convention violation.

Indeed I was referring to yugabyte, apologies for the clumsy phrasing, I havent used crdb but I guess it is a postgres frontend layered on a KV store instead of a document store?

Definitely wasn't expecting the chief architect at Slack to reply to that example, really appreciate the response, HN is such a blessing in that regard :). The scaling datastores at slack is a super interesting read aswell thanks, does make me wonder if there was a fully 100% MySQL compatible version of yugabyte/spanner etc if that would have shifted the decision.

As I understand it, Vitess is basically a really powerful sharding system, which goes a step further than typical sharding solutions by basically making the shards one or more unique databases. In the case of someone like slack, because your tenant (e.g your company slack), is completely isolated from other tenants, you can treat that basically as its own database, and have a master for just that DB, allowing much better scaling. The big limitation on Vitess is cross-shard transactions, and the fact you have to make sure your schema has a clear cut sharding key (like your tenant ID) that works nicely with your application needs. The alternative for scaling transactional SQL DBs in a multi-master fashion are the "NewSQL" DBs like yugabyte and cockroachdb which are basically document DBs with a partially implemented postgres frontend, so don't have the full feature set of your SQL engine like Vitesse does but don't require so much attention to sharding. These are oversimplifications of the actual mechanisms, but give a basic overview of the tradeoffs involved, please feel free to correct me on any inaccuracies as I'm not an expert in DBs.

Forgive me for my naivety, but whats the point of the founders staying when you're taking out almost all the potential upside for them by acquiring them? Surely if they believed in the ability for their company to succeed long term they'd stick by it without taking an acquisition early. If your advantage is capital and experience, why would they not just go for a debt based option like clearbanc and retain their potential upside?

Sure, with respect to the language used in the original post, modal logic can be used as a formal basis for how we derive meaning from phrases like 'must' and 'never'. This has a lot of overlap with the field of deontology, which is a subset of moral philosophy which looks more closely at moral dutys and obligations. There are quite a few different theorys worth exploring in moral philosophy beyond just the deontological one, so I'd recommend starting with classical perspectives like that of Kant and making your own way from there.

I don't usually like engaging in political discourse online, as its very rarely fruitful, but I'd just like to encourage you to study some philosophy before making statements like these whereby you treat your own opinion as absolute fact (or at least your phrasing comes off that way to me). The nature of inaction on these issues is not necessarily inherently immoral, and I would personally argue its supererogation rather than moral duty, so whilst it may be commendable to stand up in these sorts of situations, in my opinion you are by no means morally obliged. This whole area has been a subject of debate for a very long time and the answer is never as simple as a generalisation that can fit in a sentence or two.

AAD implements SAML, OIDC, SCIM, LDAP, Kerberos, FIDO2 and more. Even if it was not a Microsoft product, it would have better non-proprietary interoperability than most other SSO platforms.

Azure AD is the biggest in the game by far in terms of SSO, stretching every vertical from education to investment banking.

If it wasn't considered a solved problem, we wouldn't have public CA's for our browsers to trust, as their very premise is based on having a secure way to store private keys. I think a FIPS-140-2 level 4 HSM and hashicorp vault enterprise will cover 99.9999% of all other use cases for private CA's and PKI.