skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no innuendo. I explicitly stated the lowest hanging fruit - he barely pays taxes - as a simple example of how wealthy people use their influence to distort social systems. If you don't think that his effective tax rate hovers around 5% is a problem - well that's fine. I don't really want to debate the qualitative impact of vast concentrations of wealth on social systems and markets.

Quantitatively speaking, we can see that people in Musk's category of wealth have been increasingly effective at consolidating their wealth over the last 60 years. At least within North America and Western Europe. It looks like a deliberate effort to accumulate power - but it seems that you see this differently.

This concentration of wealth is certainly not necessary to launch a car brand. It has happened too many times over the 20th century to be true.
This is part of why engineers should so much now. We realize that 40 hrs a week is a joke, plus we'll be on call, and there will be maybe 21 days in a year where one can truly be fully off (and those 21 days will make the prior and subsequent week or two more intense anyways)...

So that's why engineers should demand $100 an hour times 3000 hours. Cause that's the actual math, not the lie of WLB that never happens.
The final sequence in the 1943 (yes, 1943!) movie musical The Gang's All Here ("let's throw a party to encourage people to buy war bonds!") is seriously psychedelic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJHfApfdWW0

It's Busby Berkeley, of course, but unlike most of his work, in Technicolor.
That may be true for the market as a whole, but tech companies tend to be very MacBook-centric. Windows tends to be used by some managers and a handful of graphics/games engineers. Or the cut-rate contractors they won't spend on for MacBooks.
From Bitcoin Arbitrage and selling carbon credits to other companies.
Interesting. I thought something like this was going on. I remember remarking to a friend that I got the feeling from some shows that the screenwriters had help from AI. The plots of some were at the same time more complex but had weird twists the people normally wouldn't think of. I am also not surprised the AI is mining TV Tropes. Now I think Diller is right that there is some "They are some weird algorithmic process" going on, but I rather like it. It's less formulaic.
I'm on the 12.0 beta, though. The article also doesn't put any hard numbers on the actual expectancy. If the smartmontools reading is wrong, what's my estimated actual TBW? Because at that speed it won't take all that long to reach the rated amount for a typical SSD (even at a multi X factor we'd still be talking about a low number of years).
I'm staying away from Lenovo ever since buying an IdeaPad laptop in 2018 with a fan so obnoxious that I literally could not get any work done. Lenovo needs to get their shit together.
The virtue of the patent is that it rewards invention, and its productization, in cases where either the invention itself or its productization would not have otherwise been profitable, either because of the difficulty of inventing it, or because it isn't affordable to be the first to develop it.

This suggests a very natural rule of thumb for patent admissibility: would the patented idea reasonably have been independently invented or productized prior to the date that the patent expires? Invention and productization are very different roles here, so perhaps an invention patent could last up to, say, 15 years, whereas a productization patent would only last half that.

So a “one click shopping” invention patent would have to argue that within 15 years nobody else will have the idea, and a “one click shopping” productization patent would have to argue that within 8 years of the idea being public but not acted on, nobody would have been willing to front the cost to productize it.

This allows precisely those patents which one would expect provide value, and not the rest.
Okay, my mistake. if there’s no patent there, there’s no problem there.
Kinda proves my point that the absence of patents allows innovation to grow, I have not seen any evidence to the contrary; it’s usually the “but what about the little guy” defense, not mentioning any “little guy” who was helped
Imagine a world where papers are written as a Julia Jupyter Notebook (or other nb format) that compiles to both a pdf suitable for publishing and also to a library that is directly consumable. The phrase "I'm using an algorithm I found in this paper" would become a much more meaningful statement.
Stop waffling about and buy IBM like I thought I should.

Oh, and AAPL also, but that didn't occur to me at the time.
The people: yes

Corporations with billion-dollar gold-plated megaphones: NO, THE PATENT SYSTEM PROTECTS INNOVATION, NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MATTER OF FACT WHY DON'T YOU MAKE IT STRONGER SO WE CAN BE MORE INNOVATIVE
2 is for resources available to you as an employee to do your day to day work – laptop, office, internet connection, internal software.

6 is for publicly available services – mainly AWS.
You can upload up to 96T using a Backblaze Fireball for $500.

With HashBackup (I'm the author) you would connect the Fireball to your network, setup the network shared directory as explained on Backblaze's site, and use a HashBackup "Dir" destination to create your backup. Then return it to Backblaze.

After the data is loaded into your B2 bucket, change the HashBackup destination type to a "B2" destination, add your B2 credentials, and you're done. The backup can now be accessed by HB as if it were uploaded directly to B2.
Europe doesn't have software patents neither and you have lots of complex teleco hardware.
> Almost nobody expects their "cotton candy" entertainment to require that level of effort regularly.

Most people love continuations of prior art. The vast majority of people have no problem watching a few films per year, and consider it a luxury, not an effort. People love seeing their favorite characters reappear and have done so long before film.

> When that's all there is, though, that seems like a problem.

Well... it's not all there is, so that's good.
double spending is related to consensus algorithm which is not specific to Bitcoin
A lucky few do have regular hours, but that could change anytime with a change in manager, skip-level, or even few senior engineers.
> please have it for free, my labor is worthless.

That's weird logic. Presumably you wouldn't create something you consider worthless - you'd create it because you needed it.
They both already run on Metal
> Then there's "it's all remakes now"—but 1) it's not,

It really is, if by "remake" you mean all ways of leveraging existing IP. Here are the top ten box office films of 2020:

* Bad Boys for Life (sequel)
* Sonic the Hedgehog (videogame)
* Birds of Prey (comic book)
* Dolittle (book)
* The Invisible Man (book)
* The Call of the Wild (book)
* Onward (original)
* The Croods: A New Age (sequel)
* Tenet (original)
* Wonder Woman 1984 (sequal, comic book)

Two originals. Now go back 20 years:

* Mission: Impossible 2 (sequel)
* Gladiator (book)
* Cast Away (original)
* What Women Want (original)
* Dinosaur (original)
* How the Grinch Stole Christmas (book)
* Meet the Parents (remake)
* The Perfect Storm (book)
* X-Men (comic book)
* What Lies Beneath (original)

Four originals. Go back another 10 years:

* Ghost (original)
* Home Alone (original)
* Pretty Woman (original)
* Dances with Wolves (book)
* Total Recall (short story)
* Back to the Future Part III (sequel)
* Die Hard 2 (sequel)
* Presumed Innocent (book)
* Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (comic book)
* Kindergarten Cop (original)

Five originals. Another ten years to 1980:

* The Empire Strikes Back (sequel)
* 9 to 5 (original)
* Stir Crazy (original)
* Airplane! (original)
* Any Which Way You Can (sequel)
* Private Benjamin (original)
* Coal Miner's Daughter (original)
* Smokey and the Bandit II (sequel)
* The Blue Lagoon (book)
* The Blues Brothers (SNL sketch)

Five originals again. I'm going by top box-office gross here because I think that's a good proxy for what is successful. You can look at other years, but there is a very clear (but not overwhelming) trend towards movies based on familiar content. It's not clear whether studios are leading audiences or vice versa. Probably some iterative process of both.

There's also a clear trend away from dramas. I think that's because drama (and non-slapstick comedies) tend to rely heavily on specific cultural norms for their effect which makes them translate poorly. There is a very clear trend especially in the last decade or so of Hollywood focusing on movies that will also do well in China in particular.
AI has an issue that AI assistants tends towards mediocrity.

In the mid-term this is great for sub-mediocre AI users who seemingly get a boost in performance/quality, etc, but people tend to not recognize that in the long term there is a dangerous feedback loop. AI models just regurgitate their training, pretending it's state of the art.

Every now and then people bring up the fact that relevant long tail Google results are no more. Every time we click through on the first page, we are collectively training google to be mediocre and in exchange it's training us to be the same.

We had the same debate around criminal profiling, insurance, credit ratings, automated censorship, even 'art'.

Programming won't be that different. It will be even useful in a limited sense. AI will give a lot of mediocre results for mediocre questions and the wrong answer for 'new' questions, but we won't know which one is which. But remember that in the long term we are feeding the outcome back to the models, so it's not real progress, it's just a proliferation of "meh".
Ya, like a bureaucratic DDoS attack.

> regulatory capture ... is the end result of ANY regulation.

All evidence to date supports this conclusion.

Can we do better?

Regulations are two-party, can be distilled down to us vs them.

How do we make them three party? Transmute them into trilemmas? (Tripods are more stable that bipods.)

Maybe grant a seat to the parties on the receiving end, the natural antagonists to the parties being regulated. And empower them appropriately.
Looking for a source, but oranges on the tree can be up to 4% alcohol when picked.

All of my DDG searches are just telling me how to make swill from concentrated orange juice.
Spend more time with my dad. I didn’t expect him to die suddenly and so young. So many times, I said things like, “Next year, we should (go somewhere, so something)” and now there is no “next year” for him.

Other than that, I’d be kinder to myself and ask for help more. I’d try to be nicer to other people, too.

But all the major stuff I would keep the same.
> I'd think a more reasonable approach could be, you have a patent for 15 years (or whatever arbitrary number is reasonable) or until the patent holder makes some multiple dollar amount from things that use whatever is patented.

The problem with patents is that they are national laws. A 15 year patent on a fusion reactor can be ignored by manufacturers in other countries after waiting 1 day without obtaining a license. Then domestic manufacturers are saddled with legal fees and court costs for decades.

A better reform would be to require the patent filers to declare the quit price at which they are willing to immediately release the discovery into the public domain in exchange for a one time payment. Then if an inventor patents a fusion reactor, and other countries begin manufacturing it immediately while ignoring the patent, domestic manufacturers could crowd source the money to pay the quit price to the inventor to have the patent office destroy the patent after 1 day as well.

> You could also add a minimum number of years (obviously less than the max mentioned above) so companies have some protection across various metrics.

As long as the original inventor gets a cash reward why is a minimum time necessary? If the patent is destroyed one day after being filed the inventor still has the original copy of everything they built and cash reward, they just don't have a monopoly on the ability to make additional copies, and neither does anyone else.
Someone still has to bring the food out, handle requests not on the tablet along with complaints, and bus the tables. Tip doesn't apply to fast food, so that's not a good comparison.
* Anything that is copyrightable cannot be patentable. That should be obvious. "inventors" must be forced to choose one protection

That's the case today. Algorithms can be patented. Computer code can be copyrighted. These are different things.
>If 51% agree that the other 49% should be enslaved does not make it ethical or right, but in your worldview that democratic government would be "tied to the will of the people"

Of course democracy requires a constitution and a stable society to work. If there is no constitution that protects human rights and a majority thinks enslavement is okay, democracy isn't the right tool anymore. That's a description of a failed society at war against each other. I'm not suggesting that all problems can be solved by vote, just that it's much better to solve problems by vote than by bloodshed or by who has the most money, if you have that option. In a failed society, such option does not exist. That doesn't mean that democracy doesn't work. It clearly does in several countries.
> I'd think a more reasonable approach could be, you have a patent for [duration] or until the patent holder makes some multiple dollar amount from things that use whatever is patented.

I don't think this can work in practice. How much money has amazon made off the 1-click patent? If a company patents a new machine that lets them run a factory on half the workers, how much money does that make them?

Even for devices, this seems sketchy.

What percent of revenue counts towards the patent? Is the $100 kindle $100 towards the e-ink patent, or $20, or $5? If the device has 50 patents on various components, is the revenue counted 50x for them, or is the cost divided between them?

I think that enough patents are on internal processes and machines that revenue won't be directly tied to, i.e. on things that aren't consumer goods, that this sort of strategy won't help.
>Of course many users will scream because things are changing but honestly if they want to move forward they have to ignore them.

Sorry, I completely disagree. An OS should be a dependable stable platform. The Apps are what drive productivity, and I want to keep the software that I purchased running for as long as I can. The vendors probably would love to sell you the newer version that works on OS version N+1. I don't want to keep re-buying software just because the OS vendor deprecated a library/framework. That's just my view.

I've told this story before of how we installed an XP app (i.e binary was created ~15-20 years ago) on W10 and it just worked w/o any fuss. In biotech you have a lot of very very expensive commercial software and you can't just treat the OS as the 'flavor of the month' and not care about backwards compatibility. There are many industries that are the same. We think of Autodesk as this giant company, but (correct me if I am mis-remembering) some dude analyzed their financial statements and concluded they only have like 20-30,000 paying users, but at $4,000 a pop, it adds up. If I purchased their product for $4,000 the last thing I want is some OS vendor to follow some UI fad and render my application incompatible.
I saw this at a couple previous companies. Top executives didn't have private offices. They had desks in an open area, BUT they also had dedicated conference rooms.
Yes but the notable incidents are not "car stopped for plastic bag"

The incidents that I have described would actually be resolved by 3d scanning technology (not saying that thats the correct approach either)
Exactly this. I find it interesting that most people seem to forget that we have immune systems that have served us well for our entire evolution and human history, and all of sudden we ignore that same system that was built exactly for this kind of thing.
I've read three definitions of "cargo cult" and still don't know what it or your reference to it mean.
Plenty of them are willing to watch people play video games, even if they don't want to play them.
Amazon has tons of movies but many of them you have to buy/rent a la carte. At least in the US, there's Red Box for mostly recent films. You can also subscribe to Netflix' DVD service--although their back catalog isn't as good as it used to be.
That's exactly what the article actually says, that stock buybacks have not (yet) hindered Intel's ability to invest in R&D, and the problems are elsewhere:

"Given the availability of these sources of funds, the vast sums that Intel has wasted on buybacks have not thus far imposed a cash constraint on its investments in semiconductor fabrication. Rather, it has been a deficiency in organizational learning—the essence of the innovation process—that has hampered Intel’s implementation of process technology.

The generation of high levels of productivity from P&E and R&D expenditures requires, as a second social condition of innovative enterprise, organizational integration, working in combination with financial commitment.

Organizational integration mobilizes the skills and efforts of large numbers of people in a hierarchical and functional division of labor into the collective and cumulative learning processes required to transform technologies to generate a higher-quality product and, then, access markets to attain economies of scale."

...

"Accepting stock yield as the measure of enterprise performance, in recent years Intel’s senior executives who exercise strategic control have lacked both the incentive and, increasingly we would argue, the ability, to implement innovative investment strategies through organizational integration.”

[1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27783913
What about competition in education? If my three children attended schools other than neighborhood public one, it could cost us more than $100K per year. Public schools are almost monopolies. The Democrats, heavily supported by teachers' unions, do not talk about competition in education.
Expiration of copyright would have to mean instant and irreversible transition to public domain. In that case, Disney would have to pay reasonable money to Lucas, so that he does not let his copyright expire out of spite.

Also, 20-30 years of automatic or very cheap copyright mean that the original creator has a lot of time to make some money off it. Although there are works that only became "hits" after decades, this is a fairly rare situation.
"Taking a ton of time and resources (and potentially risking attrition) to migrate a thing that works to a thing that _hopefully_ works often simply doesn't make business sense."

And yet it happens all the time. And the decision is rarely based on anything but a veneer of technical merit.
Yes, I would easily bet the average person values not worrying about battery and heat. Coffee shops, lecture halls, airplanes, or even just around the house. It is amazingly liberating to almost never have to worry about charging it, and just be able to close the lid at a moments notice and not worry about Windows’ problems hibernating or standby or whatever.

Look at the comments in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27784640

And it’s not $450 more for just that. It’s $450 more for a higher quality product with higher quality components that have a higher probability of lasting many years (based on the track record of MacBook Airs).
They used to (for Stadia), but recently laid off their entire game development studio before they could release a single game.
This is certainly awful for anyone trying to develop a game outside of Amazon while they work at Amazon. But one has to stop and ask, is that really a thing?

If you worked for Coca-Cola, would it be ok to develop a soda that's not theirs? This is an age old HR problem called work for hire. Amazon is ensuring that any work you do on video games while you work there is theirs. In other words, it's work for hire whether you do it at home or not because Amazon is in the video game business.

Same goes for working with the other guys. Would Coke be ok with you moonlighting on a Pepsi product? They aren't.

The hot word here is that either you work for yourself or you work for someone else. Not both in the same industry simultaneously.
Plasmon
Escalating fees still seems like a great way to limit the damage to small investors while turning the screws on NPEs, though. If the owners of capital can form this monopsony hurting small investors in the escalating fees case wouldn't they be able to do the same in the constant fee case? Is the proposition that they would be able to keep the monopsony together better with a bigger incentive (avoiding potentially high patent fees once they escalate)?

It seems to me that yes it doesn't do much to reduce the use of patents by Big Tech that they are actually commercializing. It would be nice to solve all the problems but it seems like it solves some of the problems that almost everyone but NPEs can agree on in a neat way without too much collateral damage.
Isn’t that kinda the point of a patent?
Even for unsafe code Rust was designed to be more ergonomic than C (like pointer arithmetic operations). That said a safe wrapper would be preferred to unsafe everywhere.
Check out the Criterion Channel: https://www.criterionchannel.com/
Biden to sign new order cracking down on Big Tech
I agree, most of these wouldn't stand up to legal scrutiny.

That also means that someone has to test that in court, which is incredibly expensive, especially since Amazon has some of the best lawyers who will likely drag this out until the plaintiff gives up, or is willing to settle.

Since most employees don't have resources to do that, this likely not going to get challenged unless it becomes a PR nightmare.
People who don't believe those kinds of thing deep down tend not to make jokes like that.
Where do you draw the line, is the context as generic as "AI" or "ML", implying that anything AI related, even if not directly comparable to your employers product is owned by the employer?
Not strictly curve grading, but when I was studying electronics one of the professors had a 9-step algorithm for processing raw scores into grades. That involved normalizing the lab scores between different reviewers (so that harshness of a particular reviewer would be compensated for). He also assigned `cos(percentage_from_other_test as radians)` instead of resits if you missed one of the tests for valid reason but had shown up on the other.

On one hand I really like the former approach and could understand the latter (organizing resits is likely a huge PITA). On the other that's the only professor I heard of that was attacked with an axe by one of his students.