skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the market to function healthily there has to be “enough” viable competition and “low enough” barriers to entry and “high enough” barriers to crippling newcomers. We clearly don’t have that last piece today. A recent example is Microsoft building Teams and stealing Slack’s innovative ideas. Now they can deploy massive developer resources on it and take advantage of bundling alongside Office. What recourse does Slack have? Even if Slack had patents to protect their ideas, Microsoft probably has enough random frivolous patents and a large enough litigation team/budget that Slack can’t afford to fight. The idea of a “defensive” patent portfolio is laughable - the biggest companies use them to make small companies’ patents ineffective, not to defend themselves in some virtuous manner.
You're confusing, perhaps deliberately, employee mobility rights in California with company IP.

Thus your post makes no sense, in the English language at least.
Yes, there might be better policy choices. However, even with good policy decisions we would have to see them through while grappling with the extremely different demographics and other widely varying conditions. One of my education professors at Rice felt strongly that the USA needed a "Marshall Plan" for educational funding across the nation. I've always thought this sounded like a dream come true, but even I have to admit that one thing that makes wrestling with educational reform in the USA so different from most places is that Americans have historically been highly opposed to centralized control of how children are educated and favor more local decision-making and funding. It seems very messy compared to the streamlined top-down approaches in many other countries. So somehow one would have to win Americans over to accepting more centralized control and funding of schools, or get them to somehow ensure that schools in under-funded districts get the resources they need to enjoy whatever we all decide is the baseline for an excellent education. It seems like it would be much easier to go with the first option since we have over a thousand school districts in the country, but millions and millions of people feel that would be an overreach by the government. I'm all for learning from other places, but when those other places don't have to overcome the same problem it's hard to figure out how to replicate the things they are doing right.
The idea that a company felt entitled to sell its engineers is preposterous.
> Although I admit the worst environment probably is found in academia because of the lack of checks and balances (being in the wrong lab can really be a nightmare), I would argue the best environment may also be in academia.

Isn’t this equivalent to saying that academia has the highest variability?
Two things, really: if you turn down an acquisition that you feel your employees supported, you don’t get to do the “surprised pikachu face” when you turn it down and they go work there anyway. Secondly, it’s presented as if these engineers exfiltrated special knowledge with them... isn’t it fair to also give them the benefit of the doubt in that the same employees may have crucially developed the software themselves before leaving?

In either case I can’t see how this simply doesn’t point at mismanagement by Hooked. From any angle, they created an environment that made these guys think “my time will be better spent at Apple”.
> You can separate them but the original conversation didn't.

The conversation you're replying to, however, did. I know this for a fact because I was involved in that conversation and I made that distinction myself ;)
Comments like these are why I'm excited about the no-code movement. So much of the past decade of tech hasn't resulted in anything tangibly better or different. It's the same mundane ideas rewritten with ever-more-complex toolchains while legions of programmers argue why the latest blend of frameworks offer things completely impossible before them. Once we automate the ability to build these CRUD apps, we'll find out whether corporations still feel a $200k/yr UBI is appropriate.
It's not really that many cases. The ruling elite is small and there is a lot of money.
It's a hardware business, the software is just for managing a part of the process. Not a SaaS
Technical education should be considered an investment in the future of innovation, which benefits everyone in society, not as a goodie that must be distributed equitably.
Make a partnership/deal/whatever with your client to develop, maintain, and support the software for him, this other person, and anyone else who might be impressed with it. The software will be better if it works for more people, each of them will pay less, and it could become a minor regular income or a full-on software business for you.
read that as "largest breasts"
> IP rules favour the little guy

This is one of the most absurd and backwards claims I've seen on this site. Large companies are members of patent pools that prevent them from being sued by other members, whereas small companies without a large IP portfolio can't do anything without inadvertently violating someone's patent.
It’s far more convenient to propose affirmative action plans than to address the elephant in the room, which is that generally speaking, being a poor person in a poor community with a poorly funded school makes it difficult to compete academically with individuals who were raised in environments with more resources across the board (ie better teachers, safer communities, and more parental involvement due to not having 2 stressed out working-class parents).

Why don’t we simply address the quality of children’s lives and schooling in those less affluent communities?
So it would be better for these employees if they were barred from going to work for Apple?
Reading through it, there were some trade secret complaints: an engineer who re-created his project for Apple in a very short period of time, company documents that were kept and referenced by their former employees.

(I'm in no way taking Hooked's side here, but there were a few things that I can see them being validly upset about.)
Yeah, like that.
Again, I disagree.

He exposed what basically any G20 nation does and lives pretty damn well by virtue of doing the bidding of a foreign government that seeks to undermine democracy in the world.

Somehow that makes him a patriot.
Ok, now I understand what you are trying to do. I had no idea there was active research on that topic, I was lacking a piece of context to figure out why would someone care.

Your definition is equivalent to saying "TMs are not meaningfully different if their transition graphs are isomorphic", is that correct?
Real world nonlinear differential equations are notoriously difficult. Linear ODEs and PDEs are not, even in many dimensions, and many important real-world systems (building blocks of electronic circuits, acoustics and vibrations, optics, and so on) are linear, or are easily approximated as such.

Yes, for complicated nonlinear high-order systems, you need a numeric solution and when that's the case, that's fine. But for engineers, it's really important to identify when that's not the case.

This is really fundamental. The whole reason we can even define things like "impedances", "natural frequencies", "buckling modes", "reflection coefficients", "critical speeds", and "damping ratios" that let you actually design things like filters, speakers, ultrasound systems, lenses, motors, transmission lines, delay lines, antennas, rockets, and the Eiffel Tower, is because you can solve the governing equation analytically and then collect the solution and recognize an important term that factors out, get the formula for it, give it a name, and take note of the variables that it depends on.

Even for something as infamous as the Navier-Stokes equation, you can extract important parameters like the Reynolds number, Froude number, and so on -- which I hope I don't need to explain why they're extremely useful, even for a numerical design approach -- so even if you can't solve the equation, you can still get a lot of mileage out of the analysis itself.

(Even integrating factors are something that I've used "in anger" in my career, as part of an assignment to predict inventory stockouts).
The reasons are:

1) The California employee rights, which allow an employee to resign and start a new company in the same area. Boston doesn't have an IT industry because of their onerous non-competes, even though DEC and Wang were located there.

2) European nations often have onerous pension requirements that must be met even before hiring a new employee.

3) Silicon Valley has willing investors.

4) Governments across the world prefer dealing with large entities because of the overhead in dealing with multiple companies, so without the right startup culture, new companies just won't happen.
Treating him like a human being would go a long way toward improving his state of mind.
So, I've been doing a lot more writing lately. I've been thinking a lot about the process and how I can reliably get good results out of myself. I can definitely just pump out lots of words and disparate ideas, but the hard work is in editing. Taking all of those ideas, streamlining them, making them interesting to read, etc.

Do you have anything you could share on your writing process?
Fairfax County has excellent schools. In the 2013, the county participated along with several others in a cross-country PISA comparison. Herndon High school, which is not in a particularly wealthy area, performed right between Germany and Canada, and a bit below Finland: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/OECD%20Test%20for%20Schoo... (see page 104).
> Most governments manage to pass a budget every year.

Not exactly. Two things are going on here that makes the US "special". I would argue they're both design mistakes in the US government, its proponents will doubtless chime in that it's supposed to be like this, and presumably they are proud of the results...

1. Appropriations bills. In most countries it is seen as a foregone conclusion that the government should continue to operate. Politicians steer, but in their absence the ship of state continues onwards on auto-pilot. The US has never entirely worked that way, and last century the GOP intentionally destroyed some of the mechanisms to let it keep running in their absence, because of course they did. So, Congress must explicitly pass bills at least once per year that say the government will pay for things, or else important government functions just stop. Nothing like these Appropriations Bills exists in most countries.

2. Separate Executive. In most democratic countries there is ultimately a single elected power, even if it looks on the surface as though there are two or more political power centres, one of them is actually running everything. In this situation there is no conflict between policy and budget, so of course a "government budget" will pass.

One of the few upsides to another US civil war is it's likely that there would be an opportunity to redesign the US government in the aftermath. We've learned a lot about how to design governments since the 18th century.
(non-US, but don't think it's relevant to the answer. Other countries have similar scenarios)

It's not specified how the entrance exam exactly worked - if the exam + maybe other inputs are used for a ranking in which the best are picked, the group forming the top X students in that ranking can be quite different from X students randomly picked from the Y students with a good enough GPA (Y is substantially larger than X).

In addition to that, an exam can prioritize things through its design. The obvious one is fields (a school can focus on STEM, or language skills, or ...). But it can also target other skills: a simple example would be stacking it with questions that require more cross-discipline thinking, or quickly working with previously unknown things, which normal school exams don't tend to particularly test for.

And it has a chance of picking up people who fit the profile for the school, but whose GPA is not good enough because they struggle with some subjects or with their current school - people can be gifted but do quite badly in traditional schooling. An extra entrance process at least gives them a chance to jump past that.

Random choice from "good enough" GPA just gives you a random set of generally good students. If you have a focus in mind for your school, you probably can create something more extraordinary by stricter targeting (although that's not without its problems and challenges!)
Yup

What's the largest gang?

A: The cops
> All they have to do is survive. They do not need to take over the world.

The is generally the antithesis of funds that invest in tech, is it not?
That sounds like something someone who has never been taken to court over IP rights would say. I have, and it cost us $10k to get told "you're screwed." by the lawyer that was suggested by friends as one of the better ones for startups.
When Fat Was in Fashion (1977)
It's not about shitting on your power users, it's about making your software usable for everyone.

"stupid people" is also a strawman. There are plenty of smart people out there who just want shit to work. They don't want to fiddle with everything like power users do.

Medical/healthcare professionals are a good example of this.
"human resources"
Everywhere I go in the Bay Area, people are sensible and wearing masks. Bay Area is the size of Switzerland in terms of population ~7 million people has similar levels of COVID rates since the beginning [1] [2]

[1] https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2020/coronavirus-map/

[2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/switzerlan...

I stay in an apartment complex and there are strict rules inside the courtyard - No one allowed without masks. All cleaning staff is PPE'ed up and UPS/Fedex delivery people are also wearing masks.

In contrast, LA and Sacramento area has done poorly - it presumably boils down to the culture and government competence? Not sure what measures lead to better COVID containment in terms of macroscopic policies/culture.
> Instead of me constantly bitching, we have code words for how I'm feeling. If I'm good, that makes I'm stable and relatively happy. If I'm okay, I'm probably depressed. It goes on from there. I'm able to talk about how I feel without getting into the details no one want to hear every day.

I want to mention how kind and empathetic this is. My mother had bipolar disorder and I’m very appreciative reading this comment from you.
Looks like your website is missing a sign-up form.
Slack's innovative idea was to build IRC as a service. They knew MSFT was going to come after them years ago. Why weren't they more prepared? Why did investors believe this day would never come?
> as long as that government actually listens to the population, doesn't indulge in corruption and earns the respect of people, not demands it.

Charitably, I think Rand's point would be that such a case is only possible if that government is not actually ruling the people, but merely providing services. (Not sure how much charity is actually justified, though, given what I've read of hers.)
>> A reward system based on paper publishing and conference speeches is fundamentally broken.

After reading that I'm wondering, what is the reward?
> Your intended audience will understand a point, and want you to go further. But the referees are often not the intended audience.

How do you know this? Like both you and OP, I've had my writing misinterpreted by reviewers. These reviewers may not be experts in my precise niche, but reading research is part of their profession. If even they misinterpret it then it is likely I was not clear enough. I have no reason to believe that experts in my niche would not also misinterpret it, and there's no way to verify this once the work is published.

Furthermore, vocabularies and terminology in a field can change. I find it very confusing when a paper from today and 15 years ago are using differing definitions for the same term.

As such I think defensive writing is a good practice, and I'm not sure why making your work more readable is ever a bad thing.

> when you would really just like to go into details on what's cool about the new type of mask, for people who actually care about better masks.

Defensive writing wouldn't stop you from doing this. It would ensure that a wider audience (across fields and into the future) can benefit from your proposals
My belief is that low-cost CGI that turns movie photography into comic-book level realism ruins the impression of reality in modern movies and grates on your immersion levels.

A poor-quality real explosion using only an ounce of explosive is far more realistic than 99% of CGI explosions. And don't talk to me how miraculously unscathed cars, trucks, and buses can roll about without suffering any structural damage. Anybody who's seen a vehicle that's been involved in an accident can tell that movies are all bullshit.

I deliberately stopped going to movies around 2000. I knew that, no matter how much a movie was hyped in the advertisements, it would be garbage to watch.
> This is a non-supported browser.

> Your browser is not compatible with this site. Please try accessing the site from your Chrome browser.

That’s a new type of hard fail. That’s the first time I’ve had Firefox be rejected.
There are lots of theories.

One of the main ones is that national policies around employee equity vary throughout Europe and are often severely disadvantageous (particularly Spain and Germany). Lots of European entrepreneurs are calling on policy makers to both normalize this within the EU, as well as making the policies competitive (e.g., [1]).

Of course that statement misses some of the “why not < state in the US >”. The tax treatment in other states is the same, and several have similarly employee friendly policies. If anything, Seattle has become a clear rival to San Francisco, and has restrictive employee policies with regards to non competes (c.f., Microsoft used to sue high profile transfers to Google, Amazon sues ~everyone who leaves AWS, etc.).

I think the combo of those things suggest that it comes down to density and freedom of movement. Silicon Valley leapfrogged other places thanks to Shockley => various forks => Intel, Apple and others offering serious equity (the Boston scene didn’t keep up on this front). That fed on itself over and over again, leading to persistence. Seattle is now a powerhouse as a legacy of Microsoft and then Amazon, and all the folks that have come out of it.

By contrast, Europe has only had a broad single market for
~30 years. But it’s still super fragmented both in terms of laws and some would argue more importantly by language. 45 years ago when Apple and Microsoft were founded, they were able to hire any engineer in the US (and beyond) that spoke English. By contrast, most European companies were highly national with fairly minimal migration between countries.

Europe is closer now to the conditions of the initial Silicon Valley setup (freedom of movement, access to knowledge, everyone speaks a common language), but its decades behind in terms of a history of successes. I believe that the companies spawned from Spotify employees, and so on will spread throughout the European startup scene. But it still takes time.

tl;dr: Europe still has some structural barriers, and just a much “younger” startup scene.

Edit: plus it’s always important to remember that post WW2, most of Europe was spending its time recovering from the war.

[1] https://notoptional.eu/en/policymakers
The same thing happens to every gifted student program in America, not always so dramatically. One example is how many public schools now push uninterested students who lack the preparation to succeed into AP classrooms. Usually not for diversity, but to meet targets set by the state education department, or the nonprofit funding the AP program in states where the education department's main priority is killing the public schools. It comes from the same place as the diversity-based campaigns, though: the belief that everyone is entitled to, literally, the "same education". Whether you measure it as a percentage of the student body or by how well its demographics match the student body's, a program that aims to provide specialized education to a select group that wants and needs them isn't going to look productive through that universalist lens.

The problem is, the universalists are kind of right. If you reserve a disproportionate share of increasingly scarce resources for the top students, it will tend to perpetuate whatever inequalities exist in the rest of society. The individual success stories might make nice reading, but the statistics usually tell a different story. So I think what's really needed is first abandoning the idea that educational equality means everyone gets the same lessons and support and so on, and then make reforms that make the system better at cultivating a wide range of talents and interests, instead of the current system that's only capable of giving meaningful support to people who aspire to go to college for STEM, music, or athletics.
> A company with 100x the resources of another, never needs to worry about IP or innovating, because it just plucks off other people's work, integrates into it's own machine and receives the market surpluses, risk free.

Which is why we're all typing this on DEC machines running OS/2 on AOL internet with 3Com modems.
I think everyone is relieved to be able to speak in it own mother tongue. So yes, I can understand you.

I have to say as a foreigner in the UK, the typical 'we don't say what we mean'-approach here is tiring and waste of time.
Maybe something more like this https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/happy-senior-woman-talking... ?
Georgism might be an answer to the problem of sprawling cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

The concept of gaining public revenues mainly from land and natural
resource privileges was widely popularized by Henry George through his
first book, Progress and Poverty (1879)...

Economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have observed that a public
levy on land value does not cause economic inefficiency, unlike other
taxes. A land value tax also has progressive tax effects. Advocates of
land value taxes argue that they would reduce economic inequality, increase
economic efficiency, *remove incentives to underutilize urban land* and
reduce property speculation.

Unfortunately most Americans have not heard of it, and it would probably be labeled socialism by elites if it was brought up seriously.
I'm not american, but I listened to this Planet Money podcast[0] and they talked about how Trump planned to enforce the following rule:

>If congress wants to add a new regulation, they have to find two outdated regulations and remove them.

I have no idea how it went.

[0] episode including transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/659049880
Me too. Taught myself C with that!

This generation, CPM support and everything: https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_09/page/n33...
This is what demo papers are for. Submit to a demo track, and don't take negative reviews personally :)
We should rid of the term 'poaching'. There's no such thing. We're not animals, we are free to accept a better offer it comes along. The CEO should have counter offered with something more substantial, but he couldn't so the engineers went to greener pastures.