skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Public goods are chronically undersupplied in a normal market situation.

We already have strong intellectual property protections, and yet you still claim we have an undersupply of those kinds of public goods?

Is there a lack of software being produced?

Is there a lack of books? Of blogs?

If the right software algorithms or the right books or blog posts aren't being written, isn't it because we've broken culture to discourage sharing? Every good idea that generates the next great algorithm or the next amazing book or blog post is sparked mostly by other people's work. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.

What we've done is to discourage free exchange of ideas and writings, without actually preventing it (piracy is still commonplace, just not in polite company).

Western society has fetishized the ownership of practical ideas (inventions), as well as words and pictures and sounds, despite no evidence that it actually helps promote progress.

IP creation is high-risk even with current IP protections. Reward (for labor) is highly variable. Most work ends up not being worth much. So the reluctance of most people to toil to invent something is due to not having the financial security (financial independence or a secure job) to do that. Most people who aren't famous can't live on a book advance, and there's no model for advances on not-yet-patented inventions. IP protection does not remove those barriers.

> In fact the monopoly of the competitor gives them an incentive to find new ideas that the competitor hasn't found yet, an incentive which was weaker in the original situation.

In the software patent world, when that happens, the competitor typically isn't inventing new groundbreaking ideas as a result of being forced to; they're hacking around the patent in very obvious ways, sometimes resorting to sub-par alternatives. Why? to avoid paying a ridiculous patent license fee which the patent holder is using as a moat rather than the original intention of recouping whatever sales they'd lose to their competitor.

Companies like Apple and Amazon, if they don't get to wage cold wars against their competitors for things like 1-click or whichever corner or symbol you use to get your phone to do something, would soldier on and continue selling mobile devices. Not only would it not make any difference to anyone, but it would increase interoperability since companies would be more likely to reuse familiar design patterns.

Here's a pure algorithm-design case study on the horrible effects of patents even by non-trolls: h.265 patents discouraged and slowed down mass adoption and prompted a bunch of major companies to waste a lot of time developing a marginally superior but much less efficient alternative in AV1. And for what? What poor starving coder wouldn't have developed h.265 except for the piles of gold bars they received for their effort? Wait... they did get piles of gold bars, didn't they?
The last place I was at did it that way. I imagine it was to incentive early expense reports, otherwise you were stuck paying the bill. Also protects the employer if the expense isn't legitimate. But, it was pretty stressful as an employee.
But the problem is that the definitions of those derivatives are for infonitesimal change. What about far away points?
Less than what happens when you take a rock or brick through a windshield. For one, you don't die when your solar panel gets a scratch or a dent.
SpaceX Starship and the Von Braun Rotating Space Station
Kickstarter Has Fired Two Union Organizers in 8 Days
Setting the price of a limited, nonfungible, price-inelastic good according to demand is the very definition of rent-seeking.

There are, of course, alternatives to top tourism destinations. But allocating access to the top destinations on price alone, and where that price does not relate to underlying costs, strikes me as the essence of unfairness.
What's crazy is the benefits cut was supposed to be here last Sunday but Amazon hid the fact that it was coming from a warehouse in China.
I completely agree that the most difficult part of using V8 is the build process. In node we have three layers (!!!) of build tooling stacked together to insulate ourselves from it (gyp, ninja, and some extra python scripts), and it still requires constant effort to keep working. Deno just gave up and uses GN, but that requires some stupidly complex source layouts and yet more python scripts. Unfortunately, Google just doesn't care about making V8 work with external tooling, it's all about their chromium build process. And this is a real shame, because V8 has the best embedding API of any js engine I know of, it really is a joy to use.
That's about a 90-minute walk each way. Even in the age of podcasts and earbuds, that's a supremely unappealing way to cover 5 miles.
The kingfish looked like something more modern than an f-117. The f-16xl that lost to the f-15e looked like a modern European design. The boeing jsf was... Ugly, but the grumman one was cool looking. Its kind of a trend, the losers are so much cooler.
A friend interned with the Wisconsin DOT. One of his jobs was to review footage from what was earnestly "Google Streetview with higher resolution".

Actually Tesla might have a good dataset to work with since their system relies heavily on vision. Imagine location, timestamp, and sign verbiage sent to a server, if it stops seeing the sign in that area, also return an image next time a Tesla drives by for manual review, and file a maintenance request with the DOT with the click of a button.
This seems a somewhat ill-informed comment, since you shouldn't be thinking of something like Vulkan as a platform API in the first place. Vulkan (and most other APIs, e.g. OpenGL) is an almost entirely platform-independent API targeting modern GPUs. There are a small number of platform-dependent entry points for window system interaction and such like, but their surface area is a very small percentage of the overall API since GPUs are such complex beasts.
Places with good bike infrastructure take care of it (e.g. plowing).
I think for public sector, we have to look at it on the state level. Using the same analysis, in a democratic society, one vote has in theory more power than membership in a public sector unions, because with that vote you can decide more things than just wages of public employees.

I suspect the American culture of "being tough on crime" isn't really about prison-employee unions, but has historical roots in the colonization of the American frontier.
Thermo-photovoltaics are a reasonable alternative to the internal combustion engines for the hybrid car of the future. Would probably run off methane or a 90/10 methane/hydrogen mix.
Another high-flying, heavily-funded AR headset startup is shutting down
It should be outlawed because burden to find out if someone has copyrighted this solution is too much
You're obviously just jaded. I agree with the post, I'm surprised when a large list of seemingly random large numbers cancels out like that. The secret of course is that they aren't random, even though they appear so to the naked eye.
> moat becomes a public good once the patent expires

I have heard this argument a lot of times, but I don't see how it applies to software patents in particular. At one of the previous jobs, I was doing some research, and there were lots of useful inputs: conference/journal papers, technical reports, thesises, and so on. The only exception are software patents -- I have never learned anything from them.
"The strlcpy and strlcat functions are available on other systems besides OpenBSD, including Solaris and Linux (in the BSD compatibility library) but because they are not specified by POSIX, they are not nearly ubiquitous."

This ignores how often they are (re)implemented in userland. glib, X and even the linux kernel have implementations. Perhaps we could just standardize what programmers chose rather than allow glibc an unjustified veto?
Dual-class voting has become popular because all the current founders grew up on stories of apple being taken from Jobs and want to avoid the same fate. In addition activist investors are a lot more common today than 20-30 years ago.
I love python and it is my main language for almost everything.

However, yesterday I was playing with python’s async/await and I came to the conclusion that it is a bit... useless.

Not a big deal, because i can use other stuff to accomplish the same I was trying to do.

Or maybe I was doing it wrong.
> Also, it is hard to create GUI applications vs languages like C#

While this is a problem, for many projects, I have overcome this by including a local web-server, that accepts requests from 127.0.0.1 and serves a web app as a GUI.

It's not a perfect solution, but It worked for me in many projects.
What are you talking about? The US has a huge amount of binge drinking at ages 16-22 and plenty of hooliganism, such as NFL games and holidays. I’ve lived in Barcelona and the only reason there aren’t as many drunk Americans is it’s far from most of the country.
Exactly. Imagine how their mind would be blown when evaluating sin(1000pi), which is exactly 0 with the taylor series of sin(x) centered around x=0.
Your explanation is a nice restatement or interpretation for what the equation f(x)=f(0)+f'(0)x+.... is saying, but it doesn't give any insight for why the equation is true.

and as there is no additional change that comes "out of nowhere", so to speak,

The whole explanation rests on this key point, and in fact this is the unintuitive part. In fact, it's not even always true. It's a "miracle" that it sometimes is true.
Amazon will let anyone answer your Alexa questions now
This is definitely feasible, it'll depend on how much you are happy to go for tools like those mentioned here or if you want to roll your own (which I expect would be enjoyable but much slower)

If your roll your own, you'll probably still want to reuse existing components for wake words, ASR and TTS, simply training them for your specific needs.

One tip: aim for higher than that 80% target - the sentence you mention that in had 16 words, so you'd expect 3.2 errors if you read that, which will quickly get annoying (it could throw your intent recognition off completely). If you've got the ability to restrict it to a narrow vocab then you can train a language model just with the minimal words needed and that should help the word error rate dramatically.
I think you didn’t read my full comment.
Because you just leave them wherever.

Edit: Not voicing approval for this practice but that’s how it seems to work in my city at least.
I guess it's a bit relative. You're not growing the wheat, growing the cane, milling the flour, etc either.
The answer to shader snippets in the SPIR-V world would be linking. I don't think that's well developed in the ecosystem if at all, but it's a perfectly natural extension.
Choco-pie is a delicious Korean snack made with chocolate and marshmallows:
http://www.trifood.com/chocopie.asp

You can find it at your local Korean market, and in Costco if you are in the SF Bay Area
What you vaguely label as poor design decisions are actually trade-offs and they make sense to a plethora of highly educated engineers.
Nothing you're saying is a disproof of what I said.

How do you know turning lead into gold isn't possible? Science. How do you know ether and phlogiston aren't real? Science. How do you know it's not aberrant for women to have large clitori? Well "aberrant" is subjective, so that's really not even a scientific claim, so science certainly can't be blamed for that. How do you know it's not medically beneficial to cut off males' foreskins? Science.

You can't accuse science of screwing up those beliefs: science is the only reason you know those beliefs are wrong. These are examples of science working.

This subthread started with me saying "Science is incorruptible. Scientists are not. Don't conflate the imperfections of the humans implementing science as being problems with science." If anything, your examples prove my point. What you've shown is that scientists have believed some wildly inaccurate things in the past, and science has corrected them.
This exactly. The point of patents is to encourage people to publish their research, but I've literally never heard of anyone reading through software patents to get ideas. The entire putative reason for their existence is basically mythical.

Furthermore, our company lawyer would probably choke me if he caught me reading patents, as then we'd be subject to much higher damages if we were ever claimed to be infringing something.
I broke my arm on one of those as a kid.
The claim that the developers shaping the WSL specification are experts is questionable given that the actual experts in shading languages -- i.e., the implementers building GPU hardware -- are looking at SPIR-V and seem to be pretty frustrated by the NIH syndrome of the web developer community here.
I just bought a new car. I was interested in a Tesla but don’t have a parking spot with an outlet, among other deterrents, that kept me from spending the initial $10k.

My commute is about 8 miles per day. If a solar panel on a Prius could give me an almost free commute I would have bought it in a heartbeat.
> This seems like a trivial easy-PR win for some legislators

Imagine a layperson read a news article about a complex topic in your field and instantly discovered a trivial easy win.

What are the odds they’d be correct?
Cool project. How would I use another map layer (don't have a google maps api key)? And why did you deploy to Heroku and not to AWS/GCP/Azure?
It's one of the definitions, and perhaps not the most fundamental.

In the complex plane (and all real analytic functions can be analytically extended into the complex plane), you can define the equivalent property as saying a (first!) derivative has the some value no matter how you chose to take the limit.

So just by virtue of having a well defined first derivative in a particular region you get all the Maclaurin series magic.
> Right, you need to specifically throw money and people at the problem of making LLVM faster

I repeat, Apple is the major sponsor of LLVM and is sitting on ~$250 billion in cash. If LLVM could be made significantly faster by simply throwing money at it, presumably this has also occurred to Apple management. I can't believe they're not doing it because it doesn't align with their marketing pitch.
The Java Sorting Conundrum: Comparable vs. Comparator Interfaces
> it is several years past due for Google to start investing seriously in a Go toolchain based on a mature compiler stack.

That's a bit presumptuous, prescribing specific implementation details based on the fact that it's "several years past due" that they replace their tech stack with one you would like to see improved.

Remember there already is a mature C compiler alternative for Go: gccgo. There's also already a first-party LLVM based Go toolchain created by Google (gollvm). Whatever hypothetical benefits you might presume would emerge from this kind of synergy already exist. But the community mostly isn't interested.

Also, Google also already invests a massive amount of resource into LLVM. In fact, the principal author of LLVM and Clang works at Google. But even when he was at Apple they were already shoveling resource into the project.
Everything I've ever read on the subject says that China is far and away the greatest infringer of IP. American companies have almost zero capacity to prosecute infringement claims in China, but Chinese companies operating in America have no particular barrier to suing.

Frankly, I'm amazed that American companies haven't banded together to call for the end of software patents to erase that enormous and expensive trade deficit.
When AT&T acquired us, they spent a lot of time selling us on the story that the customer service level would be maintained because they recognized it as one of the elements that set DTV apart from other providers.

When it was only a matter of months before the senior DTV leaders all announced their various retirements (after several having been placed in charge of AT&T areas), we knew it was only a matter of time.

Recently (in the last 45 days) AT&T has outsourced significant portions of their IT and finance and billing operations, on top of the already outsourced IT and customer service functions.

Now with them also having to fend off a very persistent activist investor I expect their focus to drift even more away from what the customer wants.
archive.is blocks resolution from the cloudflare recursive resolver. please consider using web.archive.org which doesn't block anyone.
I too often don't see why a thing would not be simple and straightforward, until I've done it a few times.
I don't like the internal browser, please give me the choice
(Un)Parsing in a Broad Sense
Do you have any idea what is happening in this thread? The comments are obvious spam from new accounts.
In response, I'll ask you this: how do you feel about the private ownership of assault-style rifles?

Risk is relative. What’s your standard for being secure? The rifle homicide rate in the US is 0.18/100k people [0], which includes hunting and "traditional" rifles in addition to assault-style weapons. Is your standard for security measured by this metric? If so, you should feel quite good. Or is it that you’re allowing the emotion aroused by splashy headlines to color your judgement?

To answer you directly: I wouldn't make my home more dangerous if I can avoid it, barring some counterbalancing upside. The counterargument that, "it's still way better than living in a favela!" doesn't work for me.

Economically, mass low-skill migration has significant downsides for low-skill American workers. The "upside" is an increase in the total economic pie for U.S. citizens, but only because capitalists can exploit migrant workers even harder, and non-citizen workers' shares of the pie don't count.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-da...

[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinto...
Can you cite research to contrast the fairly well-known unsustainable agriculture practices that industrial complexes have lead to for plant based? I've yet to see an adequately done comparison between properly managed agriculture and properly managed meat production, e.g. non-monocrops vs. non-factory farming.
Quoting @shanselman:

There’s no scenario where I want to click on a link and use your “internal web browser.”

Ever.

This should be stopped. App devs are so desperate to keep us from leaving their apps that they insist on popping up their own WebView rather than launching our preferred browser.
Glad it was a success!

I have found that the reason many companies fail to embrace remote workers is that they can't handle the office workers they already have - who are often stressed in major areas by the lack of flexibility and the required commute (with increasing travel times).

It would be prudent for companies anxious in employing remote workers to start with senior and above, as these will often show the most promise and demonstrate that it is worth hiring for.
"I took a week off to play Classic, but I was tearing my eyes out after three days, bored out of my mind."
Seems like an odd complaint to me. What happens if your mirror gets hit by a rock on the highway? Or the front windshield? The solar panel is just another part of the vehicle that can be damaged, no?

If your car is being assaulted by solid objects at highway speeds so often that it becomes a serious concern to factor into your next car purchase, I very strongly suggest moving somewhere safer.
I encourage those who have enjoyed the efforts of Wintergatan to also check out the bandleader’s previous effort: Detektivbyrån. It’s a rare glimpse into Swedish street music and really captures a beautiful Göteborg vibe. It’s a nice Scandinavian minimalist approach to music that I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of.

For further Nordic minimalism I also recommend the band Múm from Iceland, specifically the album Finally We Are No One. This album features the beautifully calming lyricist Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, who was a former wife of David Portner, who some in America might know as Avery Tare of the band Animal Collective. She is featured on their 2005 album “Feels” singing and playing a deliberately off-key piano with some really interesting and very flower-child-in-the-fields melodies such as on the track “Did You See The Words”.
It depends. If its regular Cesium 133 then it's harmless compared to Cesium 137.
Imagine what Ken Thompson could have accomplished if he hadn't made all those poor design decisions!

And yet hundreds of thousands of working programmers around the world are productively using Go while still continuing to ignore the supposedly superior solutions.
Prices of transportation are already bottom low. Saving $80 more a month is not enough of an incentive imo, especially when you already pay for an extra 200 or 300 for having the privilege to drive a car.

Those decisions just raise pollution by induction: my transport is cheaper, so I take it more. It does not convert people over.
A bit like giving free moviepass: it doesn't impact Netflix bottom line, but people who used to go to the movies go more often while paying less.
Yea it's Cesium 137 that everyone worries about and it comes from splitting uranium.
Distributing user keys makes audits near impossible. Not a fan of ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.

We decided to keep user ssh keys in ldap and pin the key of the ldap cluster. If LDAP were to go down, we have local [only] accounts we can access the box via the console.
Have you seen businesses, that want to track assets, move to smartphone based tracking instead of traditional GPS tracking? Any pros and cons?
I'm using Safari Technology Preview Release 91 (Safari 13.1, WebKit 15609.1.3) on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) running macOS Catalina 10.15 Beta (19A558d) with the WebGPU experimental feature enabled and not seeing anything. I'd be happy to file a WebKit bug or Feedback Request if you'd like.
Why should they? Don't use it if you don't like the terms.
This was very good. Thanks for sharing.
Most people really can't run much over 7-10 mph. A bike and a skateboard both easily go faster than this. Eject and run is not really an option unless you want to face plant or do a skilled tuck and roll.

This gets more true the further you are from sprinting on a regular basis. And really unless you have practice you're not going to match speeds with the ground anyway
Apple embraced LLVM because Apple's lawyers are scared of version 3 of the GPL and consequently of GCC, and they need something to compile Objective C.

That is different from a belief that making LLVM better is worth management's attention or a slice of Apple's budget once it proved a satisfactory replacement for GCC.
It seems the Airforce likes their bombers from Northrop, their fighters from Lockheed, and unmanned vehicles from Boeing.
> The amount of people who understand terms like 'grok', but don't know how to use SSH certificates is effectively zero.

I don’t want to be antagonistic but that’s just not true. I’ve talked to a lot of people about this. Maybe 10% of people I’ve talked to know how to use ssh certs. These are technical people who are very smart and know what they are doing, and know what “grok” means. That’s why I wrote the post.

If you already knew the info in the post then cool! Sorry to waste your time.
Xrp