skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In the US at least, you do not need to register a trademark to enforce it... and one of the specific things trademark law lets you do is prevent people from misrepresenting the origin of a product bearing that name."

Unless you register, you cannot sue for damages and you are limited to state courts.

So how do you prevent people from using your mark?

You apply for an injunction. You would have to do this in every state where you want to enforce the mark. If you target multiple states, you would likely need multiple lawyers. How many of those free software authors will want to pay for this legal expense?

Until you succeed in getting your injunctions, and there is no guarantee you will succeed, there is no incentive for someone to stop using an unregistered mark. Whatever damage they cause cannot be recovered under a claim based on trademark law.
Post time of day is influential for most social media. This possibly depends on if a topic is more US or Europe relevant.

Different sources of the same breaking news seem to have widely divergent scores, well before the content is read.
And for those into video demonstrations, there was some excellent live-TV experimentation recently:

https://invidio.us/watch?v=updE5LVe6tg

https://invidio.us/watch?v=Gjin8t633pc

Laughs aside, the lesson I take is that this is really about familiarity and training.

There were entire courses devoted to the use of some of these things, most especially typewriters, starting with how to insert and align paper, as well as touch typing and styles in business correspondence.

Kodak produced amazing technical materials as with this 1945 manual (recently featured on HN): https://archive.org/details/KodakReferenceHandbook

Phones, boomboxes, and maps were ubiquitous, the latter also covered in schools as reference materials -- how to use atlases, maps, and the like, addressed in primary & secondary schools.
Let's hope, but I'm not holding my breath. Officials hold far too much sway over Chinese filmmakers, making it near impossible to create a quality film.
The crashed car prank is epic! Sounds like something Bertram Gilfoyle would do to Dinesh Chugtai's Tesla.

I wrote a "Flakey Keyboard Simulator" in 6502 assembly on the Apple ][ to drive my brother crazy.
I hope they succeed. We desperately need to adopt nuclear energy world wide.

The success of such a project would pressure western governments into adopting the technology to stay competitive. Especially when the cost of a kilowatt hour plummets.

I sure dislike authoritarianism, but on this one I think everyone's interest are aligned. Anyone who isn't misinformed or sentimental will support modern nuclear. I'm amazed there isn't more unity here in the comment section; this is an objectively good thing for humanity. The advancement of science.
Unstoppable Domains
Use your brain, when offered a role, do you like the product ?

Do you believe in it ?

Are they paying you a nice amount of money ?

If you can only answer 1/3 please continue to the purgatory state.
This subpage is a better intro

https://statecharts.github.io/what-is-a-statechart.html
I really don't care for FPS games. Back in the days of Doom on 800x600 monitors, I would walk away distinctly queasy after 5-10 minutes. I'm fine in actual autos, ships, and aircraft.

The other problem with VR is that it's entirely isolating from the immediate environment (AR slightly less so). Even headphones allow visual monitoring, and for the record, I don't much care for headphones or earbuds either -- having sound in your ears is very different from it being in the space (e.g., room speakers).
Living in Brussels / Leuven / Louvain-la-Neuve and commuting is quite feasible. Lots of smart people working there, I would recommend.
Wow:

> Over the past decade Boeing has skimped on research, development and capital spending, investing only 7% of its sales on average, compared with around 10% at Airbus.

(From the article in The Economist: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/12/18/boeings-misplac... )
The main danger of nuclear fission is that it destroys your finances by going grossly over budget. Fusion is likely to be worse in that respect, being both much larger and much more complex.
I generally recommend people think about it as two things: Learning or Earning.

If you are learning, you are getting something out of the situation even if it's not well paid. Don't stay there forever, or stay until you stop learning.

Then when it's time to earn: go work at a tech giant if you must, but also consider starting one yourself. Or if you can tell a startup is a rocket ship and have a chance to join, don't ask about whether you have a window seat, just do it, because those are often the best risk-adjusted returns you can get. Post-product-market-fit is an amazing time. (The trick is it is hard to tell if it's a rocket ship, of course.)

In the learn phase, I don't think it has to be about the money (though of course people have their individual needs). But in the earn phase, it is definitely about capturing the value you create.
A city of all billionaires sounds like a very small city.

Also, hiring for service jobs might be hard :)
Python's Built in IDE Isn't Just Sitting Idle
I'm working on a web player ripping off the winamp UI.

https://roadtolarissa.com/winampify
> the upside is that you get to work on something you care about

As a counter example, I found this is far more true at big companies, where you can switch teams until you find one that fits your interest, then at a startup where you are expected to work on basic infra that the company doesn't handle.
For the data/ML related jobs that I was looking for and the industry is moving towards, big companies have tons of valuable data that startups could only dream of acquiring.
My favorite book of the last 5 years or so.
But "possible / impossible" seems in itself to be a really useful classifier!

Perhaps not worthy of exa-scale computing resource allocation. When it could be put to better use in say, nuclear fusion instability prediction. And with the qualifier "possible" conditioned on "known astrophysics by humans in the early 21st Century". But still an interesting tool for likelihood candidate detection.

And it still seems constrained to me at least (not a professional astronomer) by the scale of astrophysical phenomena which would be detectable here across the vast expanse of space. It could be an infinite set, certainly.

But so far we have cataloged only a handful of significant sources of, in the case of gravitational wave interferometry, bursts: black holes, quasars, pulsars, neutron stars...

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/gw-sources
Yeah, I know. I had this problem too. I had $40K in credit card debt and $40K in student loans, when I got that offer. I probably should have mentioned that too. Having debt is a huge crushing weight and definitely prevents you from taking the risks needed to capitalize on opportunity given you.

It really did, for me, as well.
The difference is whether you see learning to do meaningful things on a shoestring budget to be itself a useful skill.

Boeing won't care if you save the project $5k by spending a week of your time coming up with a clever workaround. The week was more important than the $5k. Same for a high level role generally. But not getting work done for a week because your boss won't approve a $500 purchase... that would be frustrating and get old fast.
To be fair it’s mostly been the VCs learning how to extract more value and forcing that on the companies.

The VCs have naturally gotten better at what they do, which is bring returns to their LPs. The consequence is that they get more value from exits than they used to which comes at the expense of the employees and founders.
> this is basically Terry A. Davis levels of ridiculousness

But at least Terry actually went out and wrote his own OS (in his own JIT-compilable programming language!) instead of pretending that stripping binary blobs out of a BSD-licensed codebase and slapping the GPL on it counts as a "hard fork" or is in any way being a good free software citizen.

That is: it's all the ridiculousness, but with none of the technical merit.
Huge pet peeve 'why think about this when humans are starving out there?'. Mainly because it's applicable in any situation (similar "Why do this instead of training useful job skills?")
this is what you do when you have to deliver short term results to please your share holders every quarter.
How to Finally Make Something in 2020
Would it be overreaching to say that no two startup experiences are the same and therefore, generalizing startups vs. tech giants is not an adequate analysis for deciding whether to join a startup?

I'd guess it would be enlightening to compare 'the strangest day ever at my startup' vs. 'the strangest day ever at my tech giant'. Do you have an anecdote?
Captable slots for early employees range anywhere from 5 to 40% (collectively, not individually), depending on who the partners are and what the company does it might make sense to join a start-up. But it's better to be a founder and if you are risk averse then it is better to work for a big company with long term viability.

This definitely isn't one size fits all and there are a lot of people that will happily try to sell you on their version of the story because 'it worked for them'.
I think the questions/issues around this topic don’t really make sense:

A. Why are we comparing an employee situation at a FAANG company with what should be a co-founder situation? If someone is an engineer that can make something happen at a startup, they should probably be a co-founder rather than an employee.

B. Why are tech center startups trying to hire coders of a certain skill level that will be incredibly expensive due to local competition? If a startup is looking for skilled coders to implement the vision of the co-founding engineers that can make things happen, then there are plenty of remote coders in non-tech-center areas that will do a bang up job for a reasonable price. Note that many of these remote coders don’t want to or cannot come to a tech center. I assume that this is an issue because many/most startups are not good at hiring, on-boarding, managing people, managing remote workers, etc.

C. Related to issue B, why play the micro-equity game with coders at all when they should either be co-founders or they (as remote workers) can be paid a satisfactory wage without equity bait?

D. Why is this conversation comparing a job with (relatively speaking) a lot of hierarchy and politics at a FAANG with a job that should have a flat structure and a great deal of autonomy? These jobs cater to two different groups of people — the ones who like the former probably won’t like the latter, and the opposite is true as well. There are subtle sides to this (e.g., do your time at a FAANG to develop a network), but many people who succeed at startups are not folks you want working at a large company — they will go nuts, and they will drive the people around them crazy.

This whole conversation is bizarre to me. I think there are three relatively simple choices:

1. Take a company job if you’re a company person — that is, someone who likes structure and hierarchy. It might not be trendy to admit it, but many/most elite school grads fall into this category.

2. If you prefer things like autonomy, being close to the customer, and being a generalist, then go to a startup. Plan on leaving once it hits a certain size.

3. If you have a plan for an alternate path that includes both, then go for it — specialist work at FAANG, FAANG then startup founder, startup employee then startup founder, etc. Just know what you’re getting into, because it can be awfully tough to walk away from $300k annual comp as a 25 yo.

Most people I’ve known clearly fall into one of these categories barring some sort of life-changing event.
The big wild card here is SpaceX.

As with all things Elon, SpaceX is built on a financial pyramid. It either wins big, or loses big. And Boeing is a clear loser if SpaceX succeeds. A rule of thumb is that the rare big projects that will do well starts announcing that they are ahead of deadlines early, and that continues. Big projects that won't do not declare slipping deadlines until they can't hide it, and there is never any sense of what the real schedule is.

Right now SpaceX is announcing that they are ahead of deadlines. Boeing is consistently slipping.

What would the losses be? Well consider:

Boeing is counting on billions of dollars for deliveries to the ISS. They are being heavily subsidized and do not have a proven technology for doing so. SpaceX is running routine missions and if their Super Heavy works out will see a dramatic cost drop.

Boeing has billions more at stake with the SLS system for deep space launches and a return to the Moon. But the project is in peril and missing deadlines. Political connections favor Boeing. But if Super Heavy is anything close to what is promised, Elon can as a publicity stunt afford to (unpaid) do missions for a few million dollars that Boeing failed to deliver for 10s of billions. How long will the gravy train continue?

And the giant wildcard is SpaceX suborbital flights. Suppose that SpaceX delivers in the next 5 years on a point to point flight time from anywhere on Earth to anywhere else in a maximum of 1 hour. It will take time for people to conclude that it is safe. But consider, a first class transatlantic flight costs $10,000 and takes ~14 hours. If the SpaceX launch costs their estimated $2 million and carries an average of 250 people, they can charge first class prices for a 30 minute flight, and take home a $500k profit per trip. Anyone who has done a long plane trip will see the appeal of not spending 14 hours in the plane. So your first class passengers switch to SpaceX.

The economics of airline travel are that first class tickets pay a very large chunk of the fixed costs of the flight, while economy tickets pay the marginal costs of adding a person to the flight. Take away the first class tickets and average tickets have to go up in price. The result? Higher ticket prices, more passengers per plane, and a consolidation in the airline industry. SpaceX does not have to take that large a fraction of the volume to trigger that consolidation.

The phrase "consolidation in the airline industry" should be extremely worrying to airplane manufacturers. Fewer and fuller long-range flights means that nobody needs to buy new airplanes for a while. Which means that Boeing's core business craters.

The long and short of it is that if SpaceX delivers, Boeing dies. We will know one way or the other in 5-10 years.
Sorry about that. Lots of other companies are going to make money, and that's a good thing.

It's certainly a bad thing for large tech firms to take out increasingly large portions of global profits. It also might be a secular trend without end.
I agree, and I'd also recommend Vajra Chandrasekera's story that responds to it and reframes it in postcolonial terms:

"The Negation of the Negation of the Negation" ( http://www.bigecho.org/the-negation-of-the-negation-of-the-n... ).
Or maybe we are the dominant species because we cooperate so well. :)
Project Virgilio: Data Science E-Learning
Fusion would be a national security level tech - like FTL travel or general AI. Heck, it would be beyond national security level. Nobody would share that without some geopolitical considerations.

To put it in perspective, the US is fighting china over relatively mundane nonsense like 5G, semiconductors, etc. Fusion would be many orders of magnitude more important than any tech we have today.

The US exploited the control of oil to conquer and rule over the entire world. Every nation on earth is a vassal on some level ( even china and russia ) to the US because we discovered and exploited oil first and pretty much ended up controlling most of it around the world. The international world order is an american world order because of oil. If madagascar or north korea discovered fusion, they would control the commanding heights and they wouldn't share such a secret without getting something in return. If that is the case for madagascar/north korea, major nations like china, japan, france, germany, russia, india, turkey, nigeria, brazil, venezuela, etc who don't want to be under american domination would be even more incentivized to keep it for themselves.

What is the value of limitless free and environmentally friendly energy? Priceless. It's the type of tech which alters human trajectory and the world order. Not only is fusion priceless in and of itself, it's priceless in terms of it's derivative effects. Discovery of fusion can lead to general AI and vice versa.

In other words, ain't nobody sharing fusion tech - at least not without significant strings attached.
I don't think there is a "the setup" that universally works for everyone. As much as product makers would like to believe there solution works for everyone, it depends on their circumstances. I have to be brief to make the train but here are some tools (US Focus):

1) Are you trying to get in control? This is where you are constantly living paycheck to paycheck, and bouncing checks. Than I would do the following
a) Get in the habit of saving where it is painful to spend. So start putting any percentage of money into a 401k if your company offers it. Ideally target to get the maximum match. But whatever you do start.
b) Start documenting all, let me re-iterate, ALL your spending big and small. I recommend Quicken, but an Excel spreadsheet, google sheet works as well. The act of becoming conscious of your spending makes you reflective.

2) You are in control and saving a little bit and bonus you pay your credit card balance in full each month. Here the goal is becoming more optimized (I didn't say optimized).
a) Choose a bank that tracks your spending and look at it and automatically pays bills.
b) Start putting away money in something like wealthfront or betterment (I prefer the latter). Put it in a 401k or tax deferred vehicle to start since it will reduce your taxes.
c) work on eliminating leakage (services you don't use, unnecessary fees etc).

2) You are in control, think more in terms of building wealth.
a) Start thinking in terms of applying savings to appreciating assets (homes and eventually second properties for cash flow). Zillow and Redfin allow you to understand the market.
b) Look at becoming more aggressive with investments. Look at a percentage to go to growth or dividend funds. But look for a goal of secondary sources of income. Both Schwab and TDA have good platforms to see this.

jonahbenton is right, there is no set it and forget it, but there is get the max out of the time you do when you have to look at it. You have to reconcile, with so much digital theft it is easy to have funds leak because of fraud.

If you are truly looking for a set and forget, get adopted by a wealthy person who will set up a trust fund for you, but full all others, internalize good money habits.
Last I checked, Socialists were the ones who tried extremely hard to get everyone to be physically active. It was the Machismo Cuban Revolutionary who fought and won against decadent bourgeois ideology. Not the Sedentary Cuban Revolutionary...
I guess I was one of those middle class scholarship kids. There were lots of them around and they were my friends. The private school kids honestly tended to keep to themselves. It's a part of my Stanford experience I found most jarring.
Good eye! I’m really into entrepreneurship: starting a podcast next year and going to do validation on an idea I have before I start building an mvp.
I just don't see a new company starting up that one day will need Bazel doing that with Bazel. There is just too much overhead, you won't ever become that company that needs Bazel if you start out that way.
If China gets fusion energy first they will obtain unimaginable power, hell the same applies to the US. While stopping climate change would be great I also fear for what we might put in its place.
> I'm still bitter at how they murdered KHTML.

Murdered? Thanks in large part to the work Apple did to transform KHTML into WebKit, WebKit and its derivatives (like Blink) have utterly dominated the browser marketplace. I have a hard time reconciling your characterization of Apple's action with the facts.
I think another reason that people are wary of joining start ups, is they've realised that:

a) The market is now incredibly saturated, and being an early equity owner in a start up that will be worth billions is very rare now. Gone are the days of a unicorn every month or two.

b) People have noticed the trend of FAANG companies buying up start ups, and that this is the goal of many (most?) start ups today. Reach critical mass, get a good valuation and customer reviews, get bought out by tech giant. If you want to work on the most viable new products, just join a tech giant and work on one of the projects they've acquired. (Or wait till the company is bought and join them if they are still independantly run at which point they're not really a start up anymore)
There's also Spotiamp. Not sure if it it still works.
> Interesting thought: many suspect nations with frontiers flourish due to having an "escape valve". I am curious to see what an unlimited escape valve will enable.

Can you expand on this? I think I understand the general implication but it’s not something I have considered before. If you have more thoughts/writing on this I’d like to ingest it.

If I understand correctly the idea is “undesirables” can go to a place where they are free to explore their ideas.
I don't think it is crazy silly to expect that, before a dyson sphere is built, dyson rings would be built. I think that's where the distinct IR signature is coming into play.
When the AI bubble pops, will they go home? I was in the middle of the dot-com bust, and the visa workers didn't go home, making finding a job in CA difficult. I had to go out of state.
There would be no need to share fusion energy, fusion energy would allow you to single handedly take over the world.
Sure, it's hard to give up McDonalds and coke too, but I wasn't talking about what you want to eat, I was talking about what you should eat.

If you want to avoid overly-processed food (like TFA), then do you best to stick to things that have one ingredient.
> Gone are the days of a unicorn every month or two.

My friend, I've been building software professionally for big companies and small since 2001.

There were never days where there was a unicorn every month or two.
SRE has a lot of people without degrees. I don't know if SWE is still an ivory tower but just SRE salaries at G and FB can debunk this theory.
Yes, Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre is based on Arch Linux and focused on user freedom. So a lot like Parabola, but with maybe a stricter freedom definition and slightly different goals. Looks like they found the goals of the project are incompatible with the GNU/Linux operating system and had to find a new operating system to base on.
In part yes - in America there is a Libertarian philosophy that doesn't match what the rest of the world calls libertarianism, big-l Libertarianism seems much more heavily focused on fiscal freedom at the expense of freedom of opportunity, while little-l libertarianism tends to value freedom of opportunity and freedom of expression above the purely fiscal freedoms.

Sadly, both groups tend to cling to the term l/Libertarianism which can confuse things. I mostly mention this because different people will read your self-described libertarianism differently with some people reading it as Libertarianism.
The director of my product unit took me out for coffee and basically said as much. Congrats on the move, and if you ever want to come back, email me directly.

It was one of the classiest things that ever happened to me in my business career.
IMO the indigenous/native populations of North America being almost wiped off the continent is one example. "Brute force / no rules" worked in that regard for the colonialists / settlers.