skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The value of a single phone is zero, 2 phones grants each owner the ability to contact one person (2 units of value total), 3 grants 3 owners 2 each (6), 4 -> 3 (12), 5->4 (20). In other words, increasing the size of the network multiplies the value of the entire network by that amount (factorial).

In a phone network, there are a few different tipping points where the _ubiquity_ adds additional value. At a certain point, having a phone is worthwhile because everyone you could possibly want to talk to also has one. (this is also why I still have an account on Facebook).

The same can be said of a currency network. It becomes more valuable the more people you can exchange it with. People using US dollars outside the US gain value from knowing they have a trusted "stable third party" currency, and at the same time US dollars become more value to citizens of the US because they can now use that currency for purchases in that other country.

Having 20 phones with one owner is practically worthless, even though the network capacity is theoretically high. Distributing those phones among twenty people is what generates the real value. But you can't really distribute 20 phones equally among 200 people.

You need sufficient saturation of currency for its distribution to be of any real value, because you need enough quantity to be able to use it to do its job as a holder of arbitrary value exchange.
As I mentioned above, manual penalties can be hidden. I know this because there was no indication from any tool that there was a penalty against my site, and because Matt Cutts claimed that there was no manual penalty against my site, and yet a Google employee verified the penalty internally.

If you're a Google employee, I'd love to discuss this with you! My email address is waltergr@gmail.com .
But this assumes that the revenue from the consumption tax will 1) be the same as for the income tax, and 2) hit wealthy people enough that the lower benefit payout will balance it.

I don't really see how these can be true given that, as you state, wealthy people spend a smaller portion (a lot smaller) of their income than do poor people.

To toss out some numbers, let's say the wealthy person makes $1M per year at a 35% effective income tax rate and the poor person makes $50K per year at an effective 10% income tax rate. Let's further suppose the wealthy person spends half their after-tax income, and the poor person spends all of it. Total tax revenue in this case would be $355K under the income scheme, but if we switch to a consumption tax, the tax revenue drops to $55,500. There's no amount of benefit allocation you can do to make up the difference. On top of that, the tax burden for the wealthy person (after offsetting for the benefit allocation) is still massively lower than under the income scheme, even if they get $0 in benefits. You'd have to raise the consumption tax ridiculously high (33% !) to get close, which will effectively discourage expenditures and encourage savings, pretty much destroying the US consumption-based economy.

I just can't see a realistic scenario where this setup isn't regressive or generally a bad idea. If you want to keep a progressive system but also eliminate income tax, we need to consider a wealth tax.
IRpair and Phantom – Privacy Eyewear
I feel like I've seen more of the opposite (piss poor moderation) than the good. This is why on your average subreddit, the average quality of discussion is extremely low, with the top comments being low-effort one liners. In worse cases, sometimes the moderators because straight up authoritarian, censoring opposing views even if they're well-reasoned and thought out (any politics-related subreddit).
I'm just hoping the judges see this for what it really is - Oracle's unabashed greed. Google's pales in comparison.
I won't discuss my specific role in order to keep what shred of my anonymity might be left.

My response was mostly aimed at statements like one of 8ytecoder's examples: "Let's improve the accuracy of ad targeting so small businesses can reduce their spend but attract customers and grow". This is because the focus on small businesses is often a foil, and reality is much more morally ambiguous.

Actual small businesses are at the far end of the long tail. Very few companies primarily serve small businesses or primarily make their money from small businesses. In practice, in order of how much money is spent, the list goes: (1) large brands, (2) local/state franchises and political campaigns, (3) small businesses.

Most companies (Google/Facebook, for example) might coincidentally serve small businesses, but the real infrastructure and engineering investments are for the other two groups.

Small businesses tend to be the least sophisticated of the campaigns, because they honestly don't need much sophistication. Their numbers are too low to bring in real data science anyway, so it's more about being savvy at community presence. However, when you get to franchises and politics, the sophistication really kicks in.

Also, some of those small/medium businesses were for things like predatory lending companies. That realization made me stop and think for a moment about what "small business" actually meant.

Point being that I've seen and used (earnestly, at the time) small businesses as a sort moral foil while actually aspiring to develop technology for the other groups. And you believe it because you're paid to believe it.
> If you support the idea that APIs can’t be copyrighted, and ignoring the evilness of Oracle and Google, what’s your reasoning?

Copyright is the thing that applies to works of authorship, like short stories and music. You can't copyright a fuel pump for a jet engine. You can't copyright function. That's patents, not copyright.

Software is somewhat unusual in that it's at the same time a work of authorship (code, copyrightable), and a set instructions for a machine to interpret (functional), and pure mathematics (facts about the universe, not subject to patent or copyright).

But an API is at the intersection of the functional part and the factual part. What distinguishes a literary work from a fact is that the literary work leaves room for creative expression. A copyright on an expression of a fact isn't a copyright on the fact itself, because someone else doesn't have to use your expression. They can create their own expression, so you having a copyright over your expression doesn't exclude them from using or conveying the same factual information.

When someone creates an implementation of an API, the API itself is a fact about how to interact with implementations of that API. There isn't any other way to interact with other implementations, so there is no room for creative expression in that aspect of a compatible implementation, so there is nothing there to copyright. You have to use the same API for entirely functional reasons or it's not compatible. And you can't copyright function.
Other than easily controlled walled garden type accesses it is hard to limit with throttling.

Is there a way to determine how much information about a particular individual has been leaked out?
I'm faintly surprised reddit's redesign didn't kill it, like Digg's did.
> but at least up to 80s or 90s it was seen as being the highest level. It emphasized creativity, communication and problem solving.

What utter baloney! There were a few, very few special math classes that went against the system which delivered results. I went to one, I should know...
There were a few, very few special math classes that went against the system which delivered results. I went to one, I should know...
Not every company is Amazon but Bill.com is showing 57% year on year growth this year after 71% last year, with over $35m in quarterly revenue for the last quarter. With those kinds of numbers they can invest less in customer acquisition and turn on the money tap any time they want.

> Bill.com reported about $35.2 million in total revenue for the third quarter of 2019, representing nearly 57 percent year-over-year growth compared to $22.4 million in total revenue for the third quarter of 2018. For context, Bill.com’s total revenue grew 71 percent between the third quarter of 2017 and the third quarter of 2018. The company’s growth is slowing down, which isn’t unusual as companies mature.
This seems like a pretty big stretch. The realization that mixed emotions (as in happy/angry) being useful for creative thought somehow can be applied here?
Thinking from first principles, and forgive me for going into hippie philosophical mode here but I can’t see how an API can have copyright that is owned.

Creating an API is of course a creative process. Getting the API right is, for me, the most creative part of programming. When well written, it describes to a human how the software truly works, with the implementation really being the computer version of what the function name is already telling you. A browser rendering engineer could be defined just as much by the model that the DOM API describes as it is defined by the actual source code. They both describe the outside and inside of the same thing, a system which, when it’s interface is shared, is shared between us all and not just under the sole ownership of the first person to describe it.

It’s hard to see an API therefore, particularly a published one, as a traditional piece of intellectual property that can be subject to copyright. One cannot copyright F=ma or e=mc^2. Once these object models about software are discovered they are like descriptions of the natural world and their formulae are open and shared for all to use.

Yes: how you build your specific machine that makes use of and conforms to the API — the actual source code for function implementations — can be your intellectual property, but the underlying description of the natural world and its API are discoveries that are part of
the commons, for all to interact with, use, and re-use.

The only difference between natural laws, in my analogy to physics, and software APIs is that there is only one physical world with a limited set of natural laws that describe it. With software engineering we create our own new universes everyday, but they are common universes for us all to share.
Manual tests, yes. More in the lines of "user should be able to do this".

The developer does a round of these tests as best they can. Then they toss it to QA who tries to break it, but must also do the same tests.

It prevents a lot of bad design bugs, but adds almost no overhead.

Automated testing should be applied only where this manual testing becomes tedious or where we often make mistakes in testing.
Slightly off-topic and not doubting this particular story. Posts from this blog get submitted every few minutes it seems. Is anyone checking and verifying the numbers these companies and "startups" claim to make? If so, how?
What I learned from watching a week of Russian TV (2015)
Medicare is loathed? That's news to me.
IPOs have always historically been fundraising events.
It needs to be its own unique class of IP. The intersection between industrial design, spare parts, and patents deal with some similar issues.
Not in SF.
Use vararg for parameters to pass to iconv
Economists were wrong about the $15 min wage.
i had lasik when i was 24... now i am 44 and would say that number one its really good, but number two it only lasts for about ten years and then your eye sight starts to go bad again... my vision was 20/600 before lasik and 20/20 after lasik. I am probably going to have it done again...
I think the answer lies in compatibility and lock-in. Software and even hardware gets built against APIs. If APIs are protectable through copyright and a single entity can control who can and cannot implement that API as a provider, then everyone who has built software that consumes the API will be locked into doing business with a single company or its approved providers. As software engineers, most of us value the ability to compete and be interoperable and we recognized APIs becoming protected as enabling a new era of walled gardens and barriers to creating competing products.

We cheered for Compaq when they reverse engineered the IBM PC and started selling computers that could run software built for the IBM. We cheered Linux when it created a free alternative to the proprietary Unix interface. We cheered WINE when it made Windows APIs available under Linux. This kind of interoperability gives the rest of us the ability to reuse our own software without being beholden to the companies that created the original target platform.

Incidentally, there's a slight distinction in wording around API copyrights. I don't think there's a doubt that they can be copyrighted. Anything that is written down, recorded or filmed automatically receives copyright protection. The interesting question is whether there is a fair use exemption for interoperability. I think it would be obviously wrong if Google had taken Java and its APIs, renamed it Gava and then started pushing developers to write Gava software instead of Java. But they didn't, they just made Java be able to run on a new class of devices. If all you're doing is helping to ensure that existing code written by other developers can work with your product, that's a benefit for those developers too as well as the end users that buy and run the software.
Tired comment. Software companies have huge margins and can easily become profitable by scaling back investment.
I created an account, log in, and just see a page with a bunch of "subwikis" on completely random topics ("Woodworking", "Mountain Biking", and "Icelandic Horses" are the top 3) with no subwiki having more than 9 members, most only having 1 or 2.

Now I will log out and probably never think to log back in again.

(I know this might sound like I'm shallowly dismissing it, but this is just my honest experience as a random casual internet person. I hope they can make this more appealing and succeed, especially since I support any attempt at toppling proprietary monopolies).
Pernosco System Debuginfo
> The journal Nature says the open-access encyclopedia is about as accurate as the old standby.

https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-bri...
Yes they do cover software. Software is patentable:
https://www.bitlaw.com/software-patent/history.html

Software is copyrightable:
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/how-register-copyrig...

The precedents establishing those rights are long, they go back decades. You really don't have the facts.

I didn't say these rights extend to every kind of idea or writing. I said software writers and inventors should have the same rights as writers and inventors in any other industry.

Really, I ask this in all seriousness, why shouldn't software writers have rights over what they write? Why are words in software different than those in books or movies? Why shouldn't inventors of software have the same rights as inventors of mechanical devices?
“ Nobody is after all taking away your version of python 2 or ability to use and maintain it”
No, but they are taking away the right of anyone who does this to call the result “python”, and that is user-hostile.
No. Speciality is Accounts Payable which is quite a different business.
Regarding the point in the first paragraph: In that case, that is a legislative issue. A judiciary is not empowered to be lenient in their judgment on copyright infringement because of compatibility and lock-in.
A decade is obviously too long, but there is some value in taking a long time to decide important matters. If you rush everything in a short time span, you risk getting carried away by the public opinion and political environment of the moment. This can be especially problematic when it comes to the kind of deep constitutional issues that we expect the Supreme Court to grapple with; the court needs to keep a certain distance from the propaganda du jour. Besides, it's not uncommon for people on the death row to dig up evidence that exonerates them many years after the case was deemed closed. If we sped up the whole legal system and carried out sentences asap, they might not have been given enough time to do so.

Meanwhile, the system can be surprisingly agile if it needs to be. New York Times Co. v. United states only took 12 days from the first hearing to the Supreme Court ruling! Of course that was because Nixon wanted to rush the case, but in the end he lost hard and the heat of public opinion probably didn't help, either. In the case of Google v. Oracle, nobody seems to be particularly in a hurry. Both sides can afford to drag out the dispute as long as they want to.
Fakespot, I think you mean...
Software is both patentable and copyrightable, so there's no blurry line here. You are trying to say it's blurry, but it's quite clear.
It's getting very popular, and I'm thinking in terms of supply and demand. Also, the world will be very different.
> It is maybe the best place to work if you have no sense of ethics, want to take it easy, work 9 to 5 and maximize your money.

Hey, that's me to a t. Google is not actually that great for that. The pay is average and they make too much of a song and dance about helping people, even if you're working on ML used to ferret out dissidents in China.

The good companies for 9 to 5 casual evil are small >50 man shops which require security clearance to work at.
Kind of, Mastodon is the 'Twitter' part of the fediverse, PeerTube is the 'YouTube' part, Pixelfed is the 'Instagram' part, there are even people who try to use ActivityPub for things you do on GitHub normally. And you can follow and interact between all of them (theoretically and to some degree actually too).

But what you're looking for sounds mostly like Diaspora, which is quite old, it's from back in the Google+ days, and never really took off.
Yihaa! I guess this will provide the equivalent of a Windows Symbol Server but for Linux. Retrieving debuginfo and sources för Ubuntu is a mess. I've heard that Feodora is better but they're both leaps behind Windows in this regard. Bruce Dawson has sön a blog series about setting up a symbol server för Linux. It was fiddly.
https://www.whereisroadster.com/
This was my experience with ello. And mastodon for that matter.
Thanks! I work closely with several people at Stripe already across many different teams, so not really holding out hope for anything. Very happy and content with where I’m at.
They didn't take it from the public any more than Led Zeppelin took their songs from the public when they sued those who violated their IP rights.

Software has a real and tangible value. Songs ... well, you decide their value, but I don't understand why the value songs create should be protectable, but software not.

That's really what this is about. This is about granting to those who write software the same rights to that property as anyone else who has rights to what they write.
> I'll let you do the math, but just the 10^12 kg along should tell you that the idea is quite infeasible before you ever get to doing the actual calculation.

Did you try the math?

10^12 J (i.e., 10^12 kg moving slowly) is a lot, but it’s not an extinction-level event. 4 x 10^12 J is 1 kiloton of TNT equivalent. A big boom, but if well placed...
Do you think Jews want the world to forget Hitler?
I’m the founder, and although I can’t speak for the other posts, I can assure you the numbers are real. Several posts in my personal and business Twitter feeds can confirm.
Other retailers usually pay better wages and care at least a little about the returns. They catch on $370000 quicker https://www.newsweek.com/22-year-old-allegedly-scammed-amazo...

Selling fakes is not skimming off the top, you get at least 1000% margins and Amazon doesnt seem to care all that much as evidenced by above link.
You can start somewhere and then if you see that it doesn't stick around you can easily move your account to a different server and take all your followers with you, it's build into the software. In that sense it's even nicer than email where you need to tell everyone that you moved on to a different email-address manually.
Google is not greedy? Oracle paid money for Sun and the property Sun owned at the time. Google said, nope, we'll just copy that property for ourselves and keep our money. That seems greedier.
Thank you very much Glen! This is very comprehensive.
Happy to not be selling my soul to another Evil Inc or having a boss... tried that several times before.
The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online
2? Lol
U need 3 for 2/3 voting. Idiots
Would be nice if you could use flowgraphs to program any fpgas on the radio.
Having jars only work with specific oracle JVM versions is not at all unusual.
Formal methods to the rescue: https://math.stackexchange.com/a/3437635/115703
If you genuinely believe programmers have a higher iq than normal, dunning kruger would like to have a word with you.

To many engineers are way to convinced that the fact they know any kind of engineering makes them automatically smart at everything outside of their narrow domain of expertise (eg: programming).
>The good companies for 9 to 5 casual evil are small >50 man shops which require security clearance to work at.

Where do I sign up?

(Edit: this is a serious question.)

(Second edit: Mencius.)
I think you have an extra factor of two there. If you need 20 MHz without aliasing, you either need real sampling at 40 MS/s or IQ sampling at 20 MS/s, but IQ sampling at 40 MS/s is overkill.

Nyquist works differently if your samples are complex.
From ideas presented in the paper, it seems as one ascends up the hierarchies of (engineered?) sets of boundary conditions each irreducible to the preceding and also indeterminate to the next so as to be a vehicle of conveying information and potential energy required for greater advancement, that a "from" perspective is necessary to understanding the "at" details; thus a teleological interpretation of existence is assumed by existence.
Apparently, the US Department of Defense determines the richest person in the world.
Wow, weekly all-hands. What a waste of time. God save anyone who works in a company like that.
And I thought a few extra vipers was bad! I can't even imagine the level of ensuing bullshit...
20 MHz only requires 20 Msps of complex samples. It would be 40 Msps if those were real samples.
Checkout transferwise. Similar function, less jank
You can with RFNoc blocks in GNU Radio, but that’s specific to Ettus hardware.
Misleading title. SCOTUS refused to hear the case. They didn’t rule in Google’s favour.
By using the official app then you get the ads, and won't be singled out as unprofitable by google. Hopefull as a result hopefully you won't be banned.
Why Hoon?
Thinking cynically, could an Oracle win increase demand for programmers? Companies may need to hire lots of extra programmers to audit what they have, and possibly rewrite or make trivial and mechanical API changes to avoid infringement. Sort of like the broken window theory from economics - break ALL the windows.

I mean, API-copyright plumbing wouldn't be my first choice of work, but might make for a decent part time remote job while I spent most of my energy on something else that is actually useful.
I agree. It's hard to make grandiose statements about a mundane thing that is just business trying to make money. In the little company I own, I've eschewed, grand mission statements, although I do secretly harbour one.

None of my team would believe me anyway.

My pitch is more mundane: please give me good service, at least as much as you would want from any contractor that you might have hired to work on your own home. In return, you should expect that I am a good customer for your services, one that you would want to do repeat business with, and that serving my company is a profitable for you. I don't know if they actually buy my pitch, (they haven't yet quit! :-). I hope its a reasonable one.
The Future of UX Research