skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This $290,000 ‘Robo-Taxi’ Is France’s Answer to Waymo
Microsoft's push for its cloud platform
The way Microsoft is growing its cloud platform is by making investments in hyper-growth local startups. For instance in India, it had made a substantial investment in Flipkart - India's leading e-commerce marketplace (which competes with Amazon.in). Soon after, flipkart announced that it will use Microsoft Azure for its cloud infrastructure. Seems like Microsoft is getting into a similar partnership with Ola.

Brilliant move or desparate one? Thoughts?
"When you have a hammer, you see everything as sexism".
> I'm sure this Waymo project does not take the perfection of Google Maps data as a given.

Agreed, it would be nuts if they did.

Construction happens all the time. One day there is a bridge, the next day there isn't. Roads get destroyed by storms. I'm sure they have some way of detecting that the map doesn't match reality and have a variety of ways of dealing with that.
Not quite like that at all. The Minoans were known to carve semi-precious gemstones and the Mycenaeans known to have adopted it from them from the 16th century BC (source: "Encyclopedia of European Peoples, Vol 2, entry on "Mycenaeans", "Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete", R. Castleden). From Minoan sealstones which are already exhibited in museums, the level of detail seems comparable to me. I'm not quite sure where the contrast with classical Athens in the article comes from.
Problem is, it was not a lot of patience what ended slavery in the US, it was a lot of violence.
I have nothing against companies minimising their taxes in legal ways. I understand the various incentives at play, and it makes quite some sense - all parties concerned appear to be acting predictably.

However: I do take issue with companies minimising their tax in ways that are not legal, but appear legal unless discovered.

I haven't the time or knowledge of various countries' tax laws to discover which is the case in this round of leaks, and unfortunately it seems the above two views are conflated in all the articles on the subject I have so far read. It'd be great if this caused some illegally hidden/minimised/shuffled/moved profits to be taxed appropriately, but it is all too easy to covet the rich man's "hidden wealth" and proclaim his methods "cheating" without knowing whether they were simply the same as you claiming your dry cleaning.

p.s. The adult in me suspects that is (as with most things) isn't a black and white issue; that the line between "legal tax minimisation" and "only legal so long as you don't find out about this part you have no way of finding out about" is both bent and blurry.
Dear Jacques (i'll stop with the game now ;) - I really emphatise with the social responsibility part of the story. The game Apple is playing with stored cash abroad is abject. Nobody is profiting from that.

But we can agree that it's not the nature of a corporation to pay more taxes than necessary? If people offer you crazy deals: agree. Governments should coordinate not to make crazy offers and perhaps even tit-for-tat those that do.
Yes, actually, you can ask the driver to take another route. Uber may just change the price.
And if you add the FIRE industries to that?

Or the addiction-feeding elements of healthcare -- opiates and other-than-therapeutic interventions.

https://www.selectusa.gov/financial-services-industry-united...
You also mis-spelled political.
No one here is celebrating demonetisation. And the initial hype about the digital transactions was long dead. Most of the people who were using cash, went back to using cash for transactions.
> Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information. I'm also happy Google doesn't show me clickbait because it knows I'm not interested.

But this is part of the problem, isn't it? You might not get the anti-vax information, but others will see that instead of REAL information.

And, be honest with yourself. Some of what you do want to see would be considered clickbait by others, it's just that Google already knows you well enough to show you things that fit your own world view.
> Don't fault corporations for exploiting legal loopholes to save money...

No, sorry, I'm going to keep faulting them.

> Stop moralizing the behavior of companies. They aren't humans.

Repeal Citizen's United then.
Couldn't the idea that ancient people were bad at art just come from their small populations, small quantity of discovered artifacts and not teaching each other their skills? Surely a single person could figure out how to draw on his own and that might be as rare as it is today. I don't know anyone who could produce pictures of people's bodies of that quality. One such special person might have made this seal, but not been around to make other seals from a similar period.
Baking Classes in Mumbai – Culinary Institute in Mumbai – Palate Culinary Studio
I think tax avoidance is morally justified. EDIT: Better phrasing - I think tax avoidance is not a moral problem. Laws are a moral problem, and tax avoidance is not against the law. /EDIT

The entity making the tax code (the government) and the entity that collects taxes (the government) are one in the same. If the government wants me, as an individual or business, to pay taxes at a certain rate X, they should write the tax code so that I need to pay taxes at X%.

I don't think it's anyone's moral responsibility to pay a certain percentage in taxes. From a moral perspective, people have different ideas about what percentage they should pay. If I'm a small business owner, I might believe that my contribution of providing employment to 50 people is enough, without having any moral obligation to pay taxes on top of that.

Or, I could be a hugely wealthy investment banker. I make $1mil a year. But I don't feel morally obligated to pay 30% in taxes because every year I give $300,000 dollars to charity instead. Or this one time I made a $500,000 endowment for the arts.

Taxes and morals are too separate to be linked so easily.
Tension Thai Gayu – Official Trailer – 2017 Gujarati Film – Durva Entertainment
Manipulating people into donating to certain charities (churches?) could certainly be an evil thing in my book. And ESPECIALLY VOTING FOR A POLITICAL CAUSE. That is not okay.

Fact is that morals are relative and software companies shouldn't be the arbiters of that.
I agree that companies are incentivized to pay the least amount of taxes just as they are incentivized to optimize their operating costs in general. I don't think that this letter denies that Apple has a rational reason for avoiding taxes. And I agree that this problem is best fixed by making tax avoidance structurally impossible. Pressuring market actors to voluntarily take actions they are not incentivized to take is not a reliable solution.

But, Tim Cook himself has framed Apple's tax practices in moral/ethical terms. In doing so, Tim Cook began a discussion about the moral/ethical quality of Apple's tax practices. This letter takes part in that conversation. The letter contributes to that conversation by making the very valid point that the moral quality of Apple's tax practices is very poor, according to Tim Cook's own standards. Regardless of the right solution to the problem, this was something that needed to be stated publicly and was stated well in this letter.
Fantastic font and great page!
AFAIK there's no way to escape asterisks on HN.
Backslashes certainly don't work. :(
if something isn't right but is legal, it should be made illegal. you cannot prosecute abuse prior to the change.
The vast majority of Google results I see are very poor quality articles optimized for Google. Wikipedia is almost always the best option. Either the algorithm they are using seems to be optimizing for the wrong thing, or marketers have gotten really good at playing the game.
Or rather, without a bit of tape. Tape was for writing, that's why many commercial disks shipped with the window permanently open.
No.
If I search for "takeaway pizza" then it's probably because I'm going to be somewhere else later. Why would I ever want to search for takeaway pizza when I'm at home. I already know where to get pizza there.

Searching for my current location is probably the worst possible default
If we want the rich to pay more taxes, it would be simpler to just raise taxes on the rich individuals. Things get more complicated when you try to tax an abstraction (a corporation).
The social responsibility part is what it is all about. If corporations use their legal and bargaining power to opt-out of the social contract then everybody will lose. There is such a thing as being too big and I firmly believe that most multinationals are no longer playing by the rules in the sense that they violate the spirit of those rules whereever they can by focusing solely on the letter of the rules.

That's a game that may work in the short term but the long term consequences are pretty grave, especially since there seems to be a concentrating effect of such moves where more and more control is ceded to ever fewer companies.

It will be hard enough to maintain a tax base that can keep the lights on in a country as it is with all the change coming our way, creating playing field differences like these between SME's and behemots is going to erode that tax base very quickly.
One of Neovim's capabilities that seems really promising is enabling rich GUI interfaces for an editor that does not simply emulate vim behaviour.

An instance of this is Oni[0].

- https://github.com/onivim/oni
That doesn't prevent companies from moving all profit generation out of all countries but the lowest taxed.
> as people need time to acclimate

I suspect it will be the opposite. Who-ever releases driveless taxi's first, people will clamour for the experience. People will be ordering rides for the sake of it for initial weeks/months. Then assuming the experience is safe etc, people will go by price and ride availability which driveless is sure to win.

I also guess there will be some big drama about the danger, then find out it wasn't the cars fault. E.g Massive headline about someone dying in a Waymo car and then we find out they decided to climb out the window while moving or something like that.
I "have" about 150 pcs of NUC model DC3217IYE. Three years later about 10% are dead.
No good migration story for existing data, that'll hurt us quite a lot. :(
There are quite a few papers that discuss the application R-CNN (Region-based Convolutional Neural Network) for object detection and classification [1-3].
On websites such as Medium, you can find lots of blog posts on object detection using popular frameworks such as Tensorflow (e.g. https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-train-your-own-object-...).

[1] Faster R-CNN: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.01497

[2] Single Shot Multibox: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02325

[3] YOLO9000: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.08242
A) that paying the taxes required of you by the tax code is a proper, moral action.

Does paying more taxes than required by law make you a more moral person or entity? That's a fine debate.
John Oliver did a piece on this last Sunday:
https://youtu.be/8bl19RoR7lc
Show HN: A fast HEIF to JPEG converter aimed at thumbnailing
The second one: Taxes are not moral for a corporation, they are a cost and a compliance concern. A world where even tax seeking corporations do not hold tax offices to the letter of the law and the deals they make is a lot more messy than one where corporations follow a clear line: min(Tax | Law abiding). Governments should fix this. I would call this the Peter Drucker way of looking at this.

Morality (let's call it CSR) is a corporate concern. All for that. UN-goals etc. I would mainly point to suppliers, environment, customers as options for corporations to act morally within their functioning as a business. Morality-via-tax argument is second order at best. Who knows if the taxes are justly spend?
Most of the posts from friends on facebook are personal posts and even the ones that are my friends commenting on posts or sharing stories are at least somewhat interesting to me because I want to see what my friends think are interesting or important.
From a business POV I agree about using every means available to reduce taxes and companies must use every means at their disposal for the sake of their shareholders.

BUT as a small business owner I have no chance to get even remotely to the 1-7% tax rate that apple has, instead I look at my 32,5% tax rate and cannot help feeling angry, because I could really put that difference to very good use.

This practice of international tax scheming only benefits the already big companies, the ones that have the least problems of all entities to actually pay taxes.
How to replicate “Let’s Enhance” service without even coding
5 Facts on Reverse Mortgage – Infographic
HR Consultancy in Mumbai – Hr Outsourcing Solutions in Mumbai – EdgeSetter
IBM is a large company (380K headcount) with a design staff. They produce A LOT of textual material for clients that are paying serious piles of money.

Typography is a fickle, subtle thing that can influence people without them being aware of it. While on HN, folks may pretend to prefer stark naked HTML, that doesn't fly with the general public.

IBM decided it needed a refresh in that area. Good for them and good for the graphic design professionals that did the rather impressive work here.
When checking out a new branch or planning a new feature - ask yourself, if you would deploy it today and the customer sees it - will he notice it/benefit from it.
Of course this does not work for all features/long-term things, but it helps to look at it from a customer perspective.
First focus is: customer gets his job done (core features & UX)
Second focus is: customer is happy using your product (these are all the other things that are nice to have + UI).
I suspect they could have used curved polished bronze mirrors for magnification.
If there was only a single government in the world that would be true but really there are many governments making and collecting taxes, and their tax codes interact in unexpected ways. At this point I truly believe that it's not possible for a single government to unilaterally avoid such "optimizations" without some help from large multinational corporations leading the charge to coordinate tax codes across countries. I think letters like this are pressuring Apple, which has already claimed to be more morally inclined, to try to help in that effort.
I agree with most of your story, but I do think there will be deaths from Waymo/Tesla/Uber. It'll have a very negative impact on the tech sector, but I also think they'll learn from their mistakes and after several years they'll get better and trust will be rebuilt.

Be prepared for a five year self-driving winter that will slowly subside.
IIRC in The Everything Store, Stone recalled how Jewellery was a struggle because of its high value to weight ratio. Pharmaceuticals will probably be a similar problem, but I'm sure Amazon will have a process built in to manage for this if they chose to move into the area
Someone needs to write a post about quitting reading posts about quitting social networks
That's absolutely true, the closer to the root nodes of EU you get the cheaper the bandwidth is. Heck, in Romania you can even get 10Gbit on a small datacenter for a few thousand €.

So sure, if the larger nodes can weigh up the smaller ones in a distributed network, then it might be plausible.
This is great. I really really hope they have a stable and big enough source of revenue to keep the development going.
Not humans
They aren't humans.Stop moralizing the behavior of companies.
> Having money parked abroad waiting for a tax amnesty that may never happen

Except that, Trump, (who paradoxically hate tech companies) is pushing for this tax amnesty. In that case parking money aboard paid big time for shareholders.
Once they get the software down, they'll need to find a way to lower the cost of those LIDARs. No one is paying $150k for a self-driving car, and it'll be difficult to recoup that investment as a taxi.
How does this fit into other areas where Apple brands itself as going beyond what is merely not illegal, and sets a high bar for itself?
apparently that xtra $ isnt quiete reaching their IOS 11 team in constructive ways.
Everybody else has already long since figured that out of course and are cutting their corporate income tax rates significantly, while half the political sphere in the US is still arguing about taxing corporations more.

Meanwhile, in Sweden: 22% statutory corporate income tax rate; Finland: 20%; Denmark: 24.5%; Norway 27%. Those horrible socialists!
Amazon is particularly irritating for this. If you use, for instance, amazon.fr, the UI is only available in French, even though it's mostly a translation of the English UI on amazon.com.
Governments should coordinate not to make crazy offers and perhaps even tit-for-tat those that do.

A preferable alternative would be for customers to consider a company's ethics in their purchasing decisions, and to encourage their peers to do the same. If it became socially unacceptable to have a new iPhone because of Apple's choice to pay such a trivial amount of tax (legal or otherwise, that's besides the point) you can be absolutely certain Apple would quickly stop funnelling money to tax havens, and they'd probably have a big marketing drive about how much they care about paying tax to fund better wages and welfare for soldiers, teachers and nurses too.

Social pressure is far more powerful than governments. It's just harder to 'control'.
From what I can tell VCL was simply the "pioneer" of what afterwards became "the bog standard approach" from VB to WinForms, Qt, Gtk etcpp. Essentially an OOP class hierarchy with everything inheriting a root "Component" class, most of them wrapping win32 / OS "prim components" C API, coupled with a visual editor with a layouter / component placement / Properties pane.

Now, stuff like this abounds in the Web space but will never feel as "lean" because there's no comparable "underlying-OS-provided-component-primitives". If you insist on such a route without "downloading half the internet", you're stuck with HTML's Form primitives --- not rich enough. If you avoid "28 properties to connect/style", 90+% of web-savvy adopters are gonna balk and bark "where's all the well-known CSS props I should be free to apply?". If you ditch shared stylesheets and expose CSS through a per-component Properties Pane --- in a naive tool, consider the generated HTML, not a sane idea.

Look, these "big UI frameworks" for the most part strip down during builds (with modern web-dev tooling) to the only-what's-used essentials --- certainly for the JS parts, hopefully for the CSS parts too (though not sure this has ever been a real problem to begin with tbqh)
IndexedDB is a hellhole, but it fitted the NoSQL trend at the time - that's why it was picked and SQLite dumped as "fossil".

I'd love it if someone takes the time and creates a SQL engine based on IndexedDB so one can do serious SQL work instead of working around the many limitations in IndexedDB.
> Maybe governments should simplify their own tax rules

I can't see that happening. Tax policy is used by most governments as a fine grained tool for all forms of signalling. Not just economic either: alcohol, tobacco, fuel, renewables etc. all use the tax systems to promote social change.

It's also quite handy for deflection i.e. if your economy's not doing as well as you'd want in an election cycle, blame the elites. Hell of a lot easier than actually making any real change as that's too hard to do without pissing off voters.
That's a quite modern idea, businesses can be socially responsible, but somehow the recent thinking is that they should dodge as much tax as possible because somehow that's their priority.

It's a moral decision to dodge tax, not a requirement that their shareholders can sue over. That's just a (very thin) excuse.
Most cash "parked" abroad is being invested in stocks and other financial instruments - and much of it in the US - not kept in a checking bank account. In fact, Apple's "Irish money" is managed by an Apple subsidiary in Reno, Nevada, and is invested in all kinds of assets in the US.
You can safely assume that Trump pushing for a tax amnesty does not have small-time shareholders of public companies in mind. I'd look a little closer at his inner circle where the major beneficiaries of such a move reside.
AdonisJS v4 – MVC framework for building full stack applications
I suppose it was a long time coming. SQLite was very convenient for me while the product was in a very early development stage, with everything changing rapidly.
Singles' Day (11.11) Pricing Tips for E-Commerce Retailers
Tencent takes a 10% stake in Snapchat parent Snap
The problem is that these companies through their lobbying power can influence governments and decide what is and isn't legal. If you define what is legal, you can legally do whatever you want.
I wonder how long it took to train.
Images in emails? Are you serious?
> Money left over could be used to pay dividends to shareholders or to doa tech acquisitions or long term investments in Apple projects which would benefit the shareholders in a more direct fashion.

I don't have an opinion on their tax strategies but the money saved is not sitting in a box waiting for amensty. It is used to fund R&D and acquisitions. Though they can offset or sell the results to an offshore Apple entity so that they pay lower taxes.
> Oops!

> Bold, Medium, Text, Extralight and Thin should not be used in websites.

Why not?
And I think that it is morally justified that I should be able to use roads, send my kids to school, and drink water that has been paid for by all those not smart enough or earn billions enough to avoid paying taxes. I think it is morally right that I shouldn't pay my fair share because I and my other well heeled chaps can lobby governments in some small country to pay 25 times less tax than others. I think it is morally right to do whatever I want as long as it is legal (in some country I can influence) regardless of how much it costs others. In short I think it is morally justified to be legally and unconscionably unfair to others.

Sir, in short, your moral arguments are non sequitur.
No ethics does not mean just following the rules

The definition is "moral principles that govern a person's behaviour or the conducting of an activity"

A LE person is not ethical because they follow the rules - to use a DnD Trope
Tax avoidance, incentives and Economic Development
ELI5: why Wolfgang Krach needed the paradise papers to write this letter? Are paradise papers just an information leak that don't contribute to solving any problem? Except obviously when you can find plain corruption based on these papers.
> Money left over could be used to pay dividends to shareholders or to do tech acquisitions or long term investments in Apple projects which would benefit the shareholders in a more direct fashion.

This assumption is incorrect in a world where the US is only about 40% of Apple's revenue and slowly dropping (eyeballing from [1], happy to be corrected). If you are going to be investing to grow your revenue outside the US, it makes no sense to repatriate the cash generated there already.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/382175/quarterly-revenue...
As an Irish citizen, I feel embarrassed by the way we have dealt with Apple (and other behemoth corps). We simultaneously gave these organisations "free parking" and a "get out of jail free card".

I don't blame Apple for taking advantage though. I would.
Nope, Google won.
Someone said a few weeks ago that buses that run very often on the same route is just a very expensive train.

I think for self driving to realy work well, we have to ban humans from driving (and perhaps make it a felony to interfere with a self driving bus the same way we cover assault on a bus driver).

I thought it would be easier to implement self driving trains than to implement self driving cars. Who is working on that?