skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> These papers that have been paid for by tax payers and peer reviewed for free should be made freely available legally.

I strongly disagree with this. Labor has value, and we shouldn't let capital alone dictate ownership. The people who do the research are more important than the bureaucrats who signed the checks.
It depends a lot of the problem. For a general least squares solution of the Ax=b problem, is your A matrix dense, sparse, structured? Do you need to solve it very accurately or just approximately? Are you going to be using this over and over with the same A but different b's? In that case, you may profit from a one time Cholesky factorization that can be used over and over very quickly. Is your linear operator A explicit (as in you can actually inspect the matrix) or is it a linear operator function in which you can only see the result of A(x) (and its adjoint A_adj(y)) ? In this case, you cannot use common factorizations (QR, cholesky, svd) but will have to use iterative methods (ie. Krylov space methods).

There's a whole branch in applied math that's called numerical linear algebra and deals with all these kinds of situations. One of the most important results is that you should almost never do an explicit computation of the inverse of a matrix. It is expensive and can be highly unstable. If you ever see a A\b or pinv(A)*b in somebody's code, it should raise a big red flag.
They don’t have lighted logos, as far as I know. Mine doesn’t from a few years ago. I’ve already replied a bunch of times showing why I think the laptop is ideal for most people.
Because they want a higher level of abstraction for 'all the other benefits' - and then just to get it work a little faster.

When we think C++ performance, we're thinking of something like a video or audio compression i.e. discrete functionality. Note a massive, enterprise level solution with myriads of kinds of business functions.

It would never get complete in C++ as that language has complexity issues which overwhelm everything else at some scale, more often than not.
> End users have to live with these choices, so we get to decide what is a flaw and what is not.

This is true, but it isn't some collective decision. Something you consider a design flaw others might see as a design win.
This sounds like a crazy level of entitlement. It’s sucks if I make something shitty but I’m not entitled to make it for you or anyone.
I’ve had similar discussions with friends. The thing is we’re all spread out all over from a timeline perspective. I’m ready now, many of them won’t be for several years.

Ah well.
I'm saying, I knew all the other students in the computer science program on a first name basis. Most of us even partied together. There were really only about 20 or 30 of us. We all knew what each of us were really capable of, and I didn't see anyone have any unexplainable wins in tests or assignments. The people who were failing just transferred to a different program.
High Performance Data Compression in a Tiny Package [video]
Compose.ai (YC W21) Is Hiring a Senior Front End Engineer
I've been burned by far too many subtle bugs caused by real differences in "drop-in" replacements to take that risk again. I've also been burned by too many vendors I thought trustworthy having their priorities change and causing me unnecessary work at bad times.

I work in a very slow moving domain where once we get customers, they tend to stick with a product unless you seriously screw them over. This has moved me to evaluating everything I do on at least a 10-year time horizon.

So in the case of GraalVM, what do I think the risk of Oracle wanting to charge me for every CPU in Amazon's data center is in the next 10 years at the worst possible time to have to drop real work and move everything to OpenJDK? I think it's unacceptably high. YMMV.
Yeah, why won't you use one if the most complicated, error prone and complex languages instead of Java.
nice cover up... now tell us what you've done
There are more amazing high budget TV series out now than I have time to keep up with. Many of them are foreign also. It went into overdrive after The Sopranos, so has been going steady for 20+ years.

Anyone complaining "nothing good" anymore just either have terrible taste, or don't know how to do simple searching for new content. Same for movies IMO. There are good films everywhere on almost all the streaming platforms too if you just look for them.
A good lawyer, like a good programmer isn't valued just on their output, but on the questions they ask that lead them to the correct output. This is much more difficult to encode.
Debugging the “AWS Lambda process exited before completing request” error
Not for medicine though.

Once a molecule is researched and found to work, it should be patented.

Although not if it receives public funding.
I wonder if we removed the ability for companies to patent, only individuals (or groups of individuals) would help. Limit the patent protection for lifetime of said individuals. I feel like that would remove the patent troll economy.
When you say copy, do you mean someone saw the other one and copied it, or did they independently come up with it?
Is LinkedIn Automation Dead?
It's easier.

There's a reason we use 'y = mx + b' instead of 'range = slope * domain + intercept' when we're doing math calculations. It's nice to use the long form when we're learning what the symbols are, but the symbols enhance readability when you're doing math, once you've become familiar with the meaning of the terms.
Cash does not have charge backs
How many other people do you imagine this sequence of events happened to over the past two weeks? To me it looks like you doxed yourself while also desparaging your former employer. So maybe you will remain fired?
Job: Graphics Simulation Engineer (Astrobiotic)
Counterargument: I get a patent for a special-purpose shell company MegaCorpA, license the technology to MegaCorpB for $1, concentrate all the profits in MegaCorpB and thus MegaCorpA will get a perpetual patent.

Tying patents to revenues of licensees does not work too, because any patent licensed to Samsung will instantly become void.
My buddy is the recruiter for this.

It’s a space company going to the Moon based out of Pittsburgh, PA.
mRNA vaccine possible link to rare cases of myocarditis and pericarditis
Strangely, after the patents for mechanical keyboard switches expired, keyboard prices seemed to have doubled or tripled, except for the really crappy Amazon ones that break after 6 months (I’ve been through two)
Jane Street (OCaml) and Jet.com (F#, sold to Wal-Mart) are two obvious $B examples. It seems to be more industry-dependent as well.
well... it's also the tech. The tech isn't ready yet.

There are no truly decentralized scalable blockchains right now. None.
Fronk sounds like the Fight Club of the developer world. Convincingly wrapped in the busted-startup fabrication, the cult probably lives on. :')
Too fat.
That's the story we hear often with software patents, but those are relatively new. There's a long history of patents for physical things which may be less obviously detrimental.

FWIW, if I remember correctly, the reason we can even have software patents is because a hedge fund ended up trying to patent their process for categorizing or rating investments, and in their drive to patent a process as opposed to a mechanism, new law was decided. I'm being vague because I don't remember the details enough to be authoritative and don't have the time to look them up, but someone else might be prompted to.

To me, I can see a benefit to physical and software patents both, but I think they have very different effects and should be handled differently. If software patents were genuinely harder to get because they had to actually be complex and novel, and also only lasted 5-10 years, I don't think we'd really have much of a problem. I don't know how to raise the bar on their complexity in a good way though.
One problem here is analogous to the separation of powers in government: education and testing are separate powers, and shouldn't be exercised by the same body. Educators ought to be doing everything they can to help students gain understanding, and such evaluation as is necessary for them to guide that process ought to be consequence-free, except to alert the educator to what next step is needed. Doing otherwise creates a needlessly antagonistic relationship between teacher and student, and causes all sorts of unhelpful incentives in both parties.

Evaluation of the success of that education, on individual and institutional levels, ought to be done by people not involved in the process of education. Such testing should be infrequent enough that live, in-person proctoring would be no burden. There is no reason for high-stakes evaluation to be a constant feature of education.

I don't think that'll happen anytime soon, but it seems like the right approach, to me.
The patent office should start demanding working models for everything. You shouldn't patent something unless it actually works.
Funnily enough, Oracle have been a very great steward of Java - they open sourced the whole thing completely for the first time, and it is under very heavy development once again.

To be honest, I would be much more afraid of google touching an open source project for that matter - they have a much worse track record.
We definitely need patents to protect intellectual property.

There is a lot of hard work and resources needed to actualize products that can be easily copied without any effort.
I have attempted a few patents in my time but it was too expensive and the process itself was daunting.

Now I use secrecy to hide critical methods and open source everything else.
Yes and no, Jetbrains did an incredible job on Kotlin with seamless interop with Java, trouble-free mixed Java/Kotlin codebases, as well as reducing the learning curve and mental context switching as compared to something like Scala.

At my company there have been several devs trying to introduce Clojure as well as parallel forays to introduce Kotlin. Overall, Kotlin has caught on and spread much more rapidly and with less effort.

This is not a statement of which languages are "better" given all things equal or what problems each are suitable for, but in my first hand experience it is easier for the average Java developer to pick up Kotlin. Of course we as a company are also cognizant of the IntelliJ lock-in as I suspect using any other editor would run into the same random bugs / autocomplete annoyances that the GP experienced.
Sounds like something one could expect from a docstring
It's a complex topic to really dig into, but I think you can at least say this briefly: Representative bodies at least have the potential to cooperatively work to their constituent's benefit. A monarchy can only be forced to do so out of fear.
I am not a lawyer nor am I looking to give advice.

Not all of that is legal. In IL others cannot claim ownership of the work you produce outside of company time and resources.

Additionally claiming a world wide right won't fly. I don't know what nations wouldn't allow for it with the conditions it was created in, but I am confident there are nations that would look at that contract and invalidate it or not accept it since Amazon did not develop or assist in developing it.

Theres another point in the agreement that would fall through: Amazon doesn't claim any kind of responsibility for the product made, but Amazon also claims priviledges to work not compensated for. (It's either/or .. a product violates other's rights and gets sued.. which one is it? You can't have someone that party owns it and is complete unreasonable for it)

Additionally the nature of the contract is a labor agreement. The labor being agreed upon is employment and has expectations.

TL;DR I hope someone comes after them legally in an agressive manner for this. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too.
Complexity in web development: a growing problem with simple solutions
I had a colleague who did some work on PDP-11 on his early career. Excited, I asked "So you were using C (language) there?" "No, it's too early" He told me, kind of dismissively. In retrospect it was obvious - The PDP11-based Unix of the Lion's Book [1] was what I had in my mind, but that was probably more like an academic pursuit than a foundational OS of commercial software.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Lions-Commentary-Unix-John/dp/1573980...
Having spent a significant amount of time developing and patenting new technology — I think patents are both necessary, BUT need an overhaul.

Particularly, I think design patents are likely positive, but I think utility patents need a different mechanism. For instance, I think the patent should work for X% of revenue of a given item is provided to the patent holder, provided they don’t reach an agreement. This would ensure anyone can use patents and the revenue would be defined. I also think a patent should be limited to 3 years without it being put to use. “Use” should have a lower bar, but effectively made or reduced revenue in some manner.

In reality, you can build what you and ignore patents. Patents don’t matter until you are in business and make money. At which point, if someone uses you; you’re already successful and they’ll want a slice of that success. This is the advice I’ve always been given (from investors and attorneys, off record).
Bingo. And it goes vice-versa; because software engineering standards are so lax (read: non-existent) in most academic disciplines and domains, on the rare occasion where you get accompanying code to an academic work it may be impossible to actually much of the source to the original work itself.

During my dissertation I had to collect implementations of about a dozen parameterizations of a process I was studying, with the intent of coupling them/incorporating them into a set of climate modeling experiments. All of the implementations were in Fortran (which in and of itself wasn't a problem, albeit it was annoying re-writing or re-factoring some F77 code to play more nicely with the more modern Fortran codebase in which our climate model was written). Of these codes I collected, the majority of them had bugs which restricted my ability to reproduce the reported results from the original work they accompanied. One or two of them had significant flaws in them - answer-changing bugs which, when corrected, potentially would yield different results from those reported in their original papers, and might actually lead to different conclusions.

One of the nice things about the Jupyter ecosystem of tools and Julia is the ability to more closely replicate equations from the original paper. It seems dumb, but in my anecdotal experience I've noticed fewer significant bugs when colleagues have used these features. I've also noticed a propensity for scientists and researchers to write clearer, better-documented code - if your next line of code is going to directly mimic Equation 13 in your paper, why wouldn't you go ahead and write a comment saying so?
Obviously it is not derivative work anymore when huge international corporations let their "AI" copy the code verbatim./s

Emperors new clothes and all that.
Unless it impacts your performance during working hours
Patents were supposed to provide enough information so that someone else could build a widget, in exchange for a limited time monopoly on that widget. "You teach the world, we'll let you eat for a while on that."

What we got: A convoluted, arcane and rent-protected process which is gamed by the big players, and in fact diminishes advances by sowing fear, expense and uncertainty.

I'm a software engineer, but a while back I got a chance to read hundreds of patents (with expert help from some compan lawyers) in an attempt to carve out an "IP space" in an already crowded and contested space. Pretty eye-opening. In a couple of cases the parties we were looking at were trying to patent stuff you could have lifted from a textbook. The screening process for "is this a patentable idea?" seemed utterly broken.

To this day I can't keep a straight face when a lawyer says, "... and here, the '843 patent teaches that....".

/Teaches/, yeah right.
> Every company brings the A-team to win the bid for a contract. Later they'll gradually switch them out with the much cheaper juniors they hire for that particular project.

Generally, you need the A-team at the start because there's a lot of very critical work that needs doing. After a while, it's mostly maintenance, so it's silly to keep your top people there... you can still call them in when they're needed.

This is just resource efficiency.
Yeah, I just got an M1 Air after hearing people talk about it as a sort of religious experience, and I can confirm that even with high expectations I'm incredibly impressed with the battery life.

It's worth noting that the stories about crazy battery life (getting through 4+ full days on one charge) come when you use the Apple apps and don't have the brightness too high. If you have the brightness high and use Chrome/lots of non-Apple stuff then you'll have good but not insane battery life. If you set the brightness to a medium-low level and use Apple apps then you'll get ridiculous battery life - I managed to use 17% battery for a full working day the other day (Safari, Sublime, a node server, Postgres, the notes app, and two terminals open.)

When I bought the thing I told myself that using Apple apps was what came with the territory, and I'm actually not missing much. The Safari devtools are great. I do miss uBlock Origin (the alternative for Safari seems to be AdGuard which is not great.) But Safari is a solid browser - certainly snappier than Firefox on Windows or Linux, competitive with Chrome, and I haven't run into any compatibility issues yet.

I think it's interesting to hear the number of developers switching from Linux to macOS as they get M1 Macs. Personally I was a diehard Arch-on-a-beefy-Thinkpad guy (two extended batteries, three SSDs, etc etc) and in the first day of using this Mac I was completely won over. It all just works so seamlessly, performance is great, battery is incredible, screen is gorgeous, speakers are by far the best I've ever heard on a laptop, and shockingly I actually like the keyboard. The webcam is your average laptop quality (aka not great, and a disappointment in contrast to the rest of the hardware.) I do miss the pageup/dn keys, but aside from that, as almost all the M1 reviews end, "this is the best computer I've ever used."
Patents foster innovation.

Without patents people who are technically skilled but socially inadequate would not ever try to build stuff.

Same goes for those who can promote themselves but just love the technical challenge much more and want to focus on that.

These are among the most productive demographics and without patents they'd be sitting idle because they would be too scared of working thousands of hours in vain, just setting the stage for the socially competent people to rip them off and cut them out of the enjoyment of the monetary and social rewards for the thing they have built.

At least with patents there is some sort of protection or I should say an illusion.

Say you have an idea and then one of the big guys with deep pockets and a huge marketing and PR department steals it from you or executes in a way which becomes world class, with a patent you have grounds to sue and you can also go to lawyers and convince them to work pro-bono because they'll get so much media exposure.

You can also go to a bank and ask for loans to promote your story and you can get a favorable interest rate due to the fact that you have the optionality to settle for cash.

A patent gives you options. It's also a concept which unlike so many corporate jargon terms is easily understood by the general population, and that is an advantage when you are a small startup or individual inventor going up against a behemoth...it enables you to convey social hatred against the giant company

A much more complicated instrument such as NDA/NCA gave the Winklevoss bros the ability to sue Zuck and to put themselves on the map with the movie "The Social Network", a patent as I said is much more clear and easy to understand, both for the courts and the court of public opinion
I think the bigger question is, will this be more than an exercise in confirmation bias, and even if it makes a valid determination, will it actually lead to policy change?
Spend as much time as possible prepping for interviews and the minimum amount of time you can at your current job. Hope that you don't get fired within the first 6 months and begin actively applying for other roles as soon as possible and when you are ready. The expectations of your current role sound impossible for anyone to maintain. Working hard at your current job will only leave you burnt out. You should put all your energy into interview prep so you can land a job that will not leave you exhausted like this one.
What advice was given in the message you are replying to?
I’ve had very similar experiences, I don’t think this felt exaggerated at all
A bounty system for patent invalidation might be nice. An idea could be:

* When you get a patent, you put up a bond.

* If someone invalidates your patent, they get the bond.

* Otherwise, you get it back when your patent expires

An extra, funny, probably impractical idea is that when filing for the patent, you decide on the value of the bond. But, the value of the bond is the maximum payout you can be awarded for a given instance of infringement. So, you have to essentially 'price' the value of your patent yourself.
Doesn't this create bubbles of like minded people? Do you believe that to be desirable?
No they don’t. But the process and cost is not working for smaller inventors.
Well, there’s plenty of evidence of how patents have delayed innovation until after said patent lapsed, like steam engines, e-ink displays mentioned elsewhere here.

I would like to see any evidence of patents actually helping innovation increase. It should be plainly obvious that the negative side effects ARE actually the main effect.

It’s one of the few things I think the US constitution completely whiffed on, by mentioning patents at all.
"Tesla robotaxis will still be ready by the end of 2020".

Well he is just a bull shitter like any salesman selling cars or before that aluminum siding.
OpenAPI Generator v5.2.0 released with 3 new generators
> I don't want to have to watch three previous movies and two TV shows to fully enjoy the movie that's in front of me.

And then you still won't enjoy it, I promise you.
>"Trying to get full feedback would require someone to be able to read likes of every user, not feasible."

I think that with a fully transparent system this is not only feasible, but easy.
> so for the foreseeable future if you want Graal features, you'll have to use GraalVM

This isn't true - you can use Graal from a JAR just fine.
Not really for use with python, but still worth a look since it brings some interesting syntax along.

http://coconut-lang.org/

> Coconut is a functional programming language that compiles to Python. Since all valid Python is valid Coconut, using Coconut will only extend and enhance what you're already capable of in Python.

> Why use Coconut? Coconut is built to be useful. Coconut enhances the repertoire of Python programmers to include the tools of modern functional programming, in such a way that those tools are easy to use and immensely powerful; that is, Coconut does to functional programming what Python did to imperative programming. And Coconut code runs the same on any Python version, making the Python 2/3 split a thing of the past.
I actually have a PR open to add this to the site, but I have no clue who maintains the effort. :(

Recently pushed out a 0.2.1, and did a mini write up here for anyone interested: https://rymc.io/blog/2021/cacao-rs-macos-ios-rust/
That feels backwards. A patent nobody wants will be public domain. A patent that's actually stifling competition will stay protected. It'll at least cost money to stay protected, so it's not completely backwards, but I don't think this is the right approach.