skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was a weird year, I'm a work from home guy, I love work from home, but work from home is not as nice without the option to break it up by working from other locations occasionally. I need an occasional refresh I think.
How has this evolved over the years?
Patents aren't all that expensive. Defending your rights in court, however...
Air Force releases new B-21 Raider artist rendering
I'd say you have to be more specific on that.

I broke my leg once playing paintball, my personal time hobbies impacted my performance during work hours for a couple months due to mobility issues + appointment followups. Is it in my employer's purview to tell me I can't play sports?
I've not seen that video before and it's a beauty. Here Feynman lives up to his reputation as a showman, as that has to the greatest non-answer of all time to that question. It would be interesting to know how much physics the interviewer actually knew, as it's the same question I ask professional physicists whenever I get a chance.

The trouble with that question is it's just about simplest, most obvious question a layperson can ask yet it is one of the most profound and difficult in physics to answer at any level. QED gives us some wonderfully useful answers, we've the Master himself along with Schwinger, and Tomonaga to thank for that but it still doesn't tell me exactly what that field actually is to my satisfaction.

The matter of static fields, potentials and virtual particles is a vexed and complicated issue and one doesn't have to look much deeper to be at the cutting edge. For instance, I'm still waiting for some genius to give me a full explanation of the Aharonov-Bohm effect (here, it seems we've everything in the mix—charged particles, phase shift, zero electric field, the potentials/fields argument that Feynman mentions, even 'locality' is important—yet it's still not fully resolved to everyone's satisfaction).

I would have loved to hear Feynman's answer if the interviewer had raised the candle and the fridge magnet question, as it's one rung up from the magnetic field question. To remind you, 'why doesn't the fridge magnet's magnetic 'battery' go flat and it can stay indefinitely where it's put, whereas a candle radiates energy and after some hours it runs out?' It's obvious the candle radiates energy away at speed c and soon there's no energy left, but we're also told magnetic fields also radiate at speed c so what gives?

Right, now we're at the crux of the problem—in the thick of it so to speak. We really cannot answer this question without resorting to the depths of magnetostatics—QED and all that that encompasses, near and far fields, static magnetic fields, potentials, virtual particles, permeability, etc. It even raises the question of why c, vacuum permeability, μ, vacuum permittivity, ε, are the values that they are and no one yet knows.

Incidentally, I recall a while ago in the pages of New Scientist a similar question being asked of physicist Frank Wilczek about what actually is a field. His reply was to the effect that it's a 'type of matrix'. At the time, I thought surely he could do better than that. The fact is that at the most fundamental level it's not entirely clear.
But how much does Boeing pays for the service?

Because what I've seen happen is a large company uses its size to negotiate really the cheapest prices, and the only way the consulting company can make profit is by hiring the cheapest people, and even with that, the margins are thin at best. So obviously, they don't exactly get the best.

The worst part is that all these D-tier, fresh out of school guys gain experience and some may even get good at their job. Unsurprisingly, these people start asking for raises and promotions, and the consulting companies tries to charge their customer more, I mean, we are talking quality now.

But the big company financial department doesn't like it, so they make a new call for cheap contracts, get a new round of incompetents, etc...

In the end, everyone loses. The consulting company makes little profit, sometimes even losses and the big company always get shit service, which usually costs them more than what they save. As for the employees, the work conditions are often terrible and they usually quit at the first occasion. But the financial department is happy, they have a lower number in the "expense" column.
That's often a fairly accurate description of most magic tricks...
Meanwhile, Apple employees have been barred from developing personal apps for years.
> When you read math, do you need to describe the letters and symbols with English phrases in your head..?

I don't need to only if I already know what they mean. How does your brain process a character that you can't pronounce and whose meaning you're trying to understand from the code you're currently reading? Because my brain will need to assign something to it in order to use it.
Eh, re: macOS, I have an effort to make it possible without basically using the foundation crates: https://rymc.io/blog/2021/cacao-rs-macos-ios-rust/

There’s other projects that wrap the varying frameworks so I don’t think macOS is as bad as it used to be, but I foresee it still being confusing due to missing docs on Apples side…
The U.S. had a president not too long ago who tried to shake things up. Ended up giving the patent office truckloads of cash, considered it "job creation". Goal was to improve efficiency, but all it did was unthrottle submissions, and lower quality. On paper, it looked more efficient, apparently.

The U.S. also "harmonized" their patent laws with the rest of the world to reward paper-pushers who are "first to file", instead of those who are "first to invent." Should have been the other way around.

That with lowering submission fees and requirements drastically, those efforts basically turned the office into an even bigger joke.

Getting a patent means virtually nothing without enforcement and protection, and that requires litigation.
In the absence of a clear and direct conflict of interest (e.g., awarding contracts to vendors, making strategic decisions), what you do on your own time with your own resources shouldn't matter at all.

I know games companies that let their employees work on games on the side, and publish them. It doesn't hurt the company, and the employees are happier.
Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy
There have been several proposals that would delay large crypto transactions by 24 hours or require them to be approved by multiple people. In no case are transactions reversed, but the idea is to introduce enough friction that hacking/fraud won't be effective.
Patents were created to encourage inventors to explain how their inventions worked. Instead of hiding their secrets, inventors simply published how their inventions worked and gained a monopoly to sell their use for a few years. A very noble intent.

Now, we're in the 21st century. We are no longer in the years of inventors like Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, Nikola Tesla... Inventions today are discovered by large groups of researches who get their money from many sources private and public. These researchers, the real inventors, often get just a small part of the profit gained from their inventions. The largest parts ends up with companies which get giant profits and benefits from the lack of competition.

While patents were invented to guarantee that small individual inventors could be protected from giant companies attacks and encourage information sharing, patents these days do exactly the opposite of that. Apple being able to patent the "genie dock effect" is a clear example that the "patent system" is broken.
Well it's on the GraalVM blog and GraalVM has two editions. Facebook probably don't care how many copies of EE Oracle sell, but it seems pretty reasonable for Oracle to use the adoption of GraalVM tech by large corporations to cross-sell EE especially because the justification for adopting it is performance, and EE yields much better performance gains again.
There is no chance Facebook is paying anywhere close to the published price.
> e-ink displays mentioned elsewhere here.

where? not this one ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779 ) I hope because I questioned it and I'm pretty sure it is false and written by someone who isn't actually even involved in the display industry. That particular post got cited by Boing Boing and multiple blogs and then subsequent HN posts started citing those blogs and Boing Boing. Basically a self-referential citation infinite loop. Please see my comment history. I work in the display industry and I'm not aware of what patent is blocking anything in developing electrophoretic displays.
I see that companies get lower taxes revenue linked to patents. Isn’t they then incentivized to fight for the patents and “protect” every part of the company for tax reasons? So the real fight is against tax attorneys, because if the patent is not valid the governmental tax attorney can argue that you should pay more tax?

So it’s basically noting to do with protection against competition
The problem is, Java written in that specific limited way is way less expressive, less safe and less productive than modern C++, not even mentioning Rust.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the actual purpose originally intended for patents was to get people to describe and record innovative discoveries, and eventually add them to the public domain for others to build off of.

I think transferability, renewability, and gaming of the definition of "novel" and "non-obvious", is actually what kills innovation.

The transferability is even more of a sticking point in my mind, because of it's endemic exploitation in the "automatic assignment of patent to employer" sense for disenfranchising creators of unrelated or only tangentially related work off the company clock. Then again, I can't offer a more elegant system to replace it, so I kind of have to take a Chesterton's fence-pill on that one. And besides which, having worked with engineering management, it does kind of degenerate down to "inform legal, and have them draft a waiver for an exec to sign stating the company waives interest", which is a functional, but less than ideal compromise.
A lot of workers are suffering from PTSD from abusive managers who were "uncool" and micromanaging the living hell out of them. I wouldn't call that funny. Not saying that's what's happening at Pabio but that was the first thought in my mind.
Root beer and Coffee have that type of following.
I would bet because it's not a true story.
Doctors Might Have Been Focusing on the Wrong Asthma Triggers
Economically infeasible for NPEs, sure, but still a rounding error for Big Tech.

The issue with schemes that make it difficult for NPEs is that they hurt the small inventor who cannot afford to capitalize their invention. Owners of capital may be able to form a monopsony to drive down the price of patent licenses and essentially squeeze out small inventors.
Does Google even make games? This policy only applies to developers under the games division. Non-games developers have significantly more freedom.
Wondering if it be viable to train a classifier on a set of patents that are known to be vague, abused, and pernicious and see what else it digs up.

This works for malware, and simple things like being owned by known patent trolls, who have selected them for their crappiness are easy indicators of what a bad one looks like, a history of litigation, clusters of ones with similarities, etc.

Surely this is somebody's ML driven patent troll startup right now?
Netflix has a tab to browse only movies.

Amazon does too. They usually have a handful of quality old movies (lots of junk too), but some of their originals are very good.
Ask HN: How do you organize your phone’s home screen?
Do you group into folders? How do you classify and name the folders? Or do you use multiple pages with a purpose per page? Maybe you even use the perplexing color-based organization. I’m looking for some ideas setting up a new phone.
Why book prices haven't kept up with inflation
I used to think this too, until I thought about it more. The biggest issue with taxing copyright is eventually only the biggest companies can afford it. Imagine if Disney could simply wait until Lucas couldn't afford the Star Wars copyright anymore, and then just acquire the copyright. So now Lucas gets nothing and the government gets billions. Everyone loses in that situation.

I think copyrights should be taxed like income. File a special return showing the income that copyright got you, and pay a percent. Audit it like the IRS audits taxes. Make it a tax on top of income tax. So for example Disney would pay their normal taxes, and then additional tax for income earned from Mickey, Donald, Darth Vader, etc. Maybe allow them to group copyrights for simplicity.

Then do patents the same way. Pay a tax based on how much you make from a patent.

And then once you do that you can get fancy. Allow anyone to use a patent and pay the tax, but have their tax get split with the original patent holder, or increase the tax and have to extra go to the original holder. Then invocation isn't stifled anymore. If you can make an e-ink reader and make it profitable enough to cover the tax, then great, everyone wins!
Then stop buying the crappy ones. Like with anything else, you get what you pay for.
You do realize the very first cars were electric? The only hard part of electric cars is the battery - which is third-party in Teslas.
Yeah, the current patent-system is completely ridiculous.

To pick out one especially bad problem: it's too inconsistent, relying on legal-battles to resolve inconsistencies. And then people are just afraid to do stuff, because they don't want to have to fight those battles.
Show HN: Mobile Website Builder with Messengers
My kids are so infrequent in their plugins that they sometimes misplace the MacBooks (given summer break they don't use their laptops as much)
None of the examples you give encourage (or even properly support) statically-typed functional programming with immutable data. The purpose of F# is to be an FP language with an emphasis on getting things done.

I think you should look again :)
Because it helps the customer everyone has copied Apple on battery management. If you don't like it turn it off and just let your phone die.
Dems are losing the multiracial working class on basic lifestyle issues
"Amazon wilt [sic]..." this typo in the putative official contract quoted here and in the OP actually makes me suspicious that this is a true cut and paste of an official contract. Lawyers are many things but typo-prone is not generally one of them.
Thanks for using it!

Yeah, I was sick of having to write build scripts in vendor specific formats and then not being able to run those builds locally without jumping through a lot of hoops.

If earthly didn't exist I think I would use a combination of make inside docker files to define my build and then use the bare minimum of CI specific configs to just call into those. That way when I need to switch from Travis to Github or Circle or whatever, I don't need to rewrite the steps.
Go through the whole process, and then when they give you the contract, ask for an exception, then if they don’t grant it, withdraw. The interview process for you will be good experience, and they’ll learn that they’re losing lots of good candidates with the stupid rule.
> Then I read a patent

If you're reading (non-expired) patents, you're doing it wrong. For one thing, that opens you to claims of intentional infringement and 3x damages. For another, there being a patent only matters if your thing works as you hope and the patent holder is litigious and there's actually a market for your thing and you can't find a bigger fish to buy your thing and make the litigious patent holder go away.

In the mean time, all the work to make your thing probably gives you lots of insights into other things to do if that one doesn't work out; and patents to file, if you're so interested.

Disclosure: I'm the named inventor on a patent (seems relevant).
> I'm curious which decisions you believe will be forced.

Decisions around how hard to work, how much to extract from customers, business model, suppliers, environmentalism, etc. Anything that is dictated by needing to be profitable. It is possible to run essential services at a loss or neutrally because they provide public benefits that are not easily capturable as private profit.

> And it may be that the company will need to make decisions employees don't like even if they're the ones who have to make the decisions, but at least then they're involved in the decision-making process rather than having it dictated to them.

Ideally they would be able to make decisions that serve them and their customers well. Not always possible, but market logic severely restricts the possibilities.

> At face value this sounds like an oxymoron to me. A planned economy is planned by someone.

There is a huge literature on how this might be accomplished. Local planning can be accomplished democratically at the ground level and information passed up and down a chain to larger bodies that gather more inputs. Smaller bodies at different levels of the chain can have various veto powers.
Possibly this?

https://blog.richardvanhooijdonk.com/en/the-entertainment-in...

https://tecreview.tec.mx/2021/04/26/en/how-to-make-a-blockbu...

>A team of scientists from the Spanish universities of Granada (UGR) and Cádiz (UCA) has designed the first computer system to help screenwriters write movie scripts that will do better at the box office, a model that makes use of artificial intelligence techniques to analyze the most successful clichés or tropes.
The only explanations I can think of are (1) altruism, (2) intent to profit from one's reputation, and (3) simply enjoying puzzle solving. Am I missing any? And are any of them so strange?
GTK+ on Rust is a thing that is seeing a lot of active work (see https://gtk-rs.org/). I think some of the core gnome stuff has even moved over to rust at this point (like libsrvg).
It was a direct quote from the article I linked: https://paygo.ghost.io/why-did-i-leave-google-or-why-did-i-s... - not a straw man I made up [0].

The 'You' wasn't you personally, but the general 'you' (similar to what you used in "you should... shut up?")

I'm sensing snark, but I'm genuinely not being snarky and I'm not really interested in fighting over this.

[0]: "After being acquired by Google, we had a “fun day” at the Google campus where we were shown around, wide eyed, to see the facilities. We had lunch in the cafeteria and while on line, a Googler ahead of us was overheard saying “What? Sushi again???” which became our inside joke around entitlement."
I don't know about the pseudoinverse in particular, but at least in the case of normal inversion -- you almost never want to invert a matrix, but sometimes you do, so it should be possible to sensibly express the idea of 'invert' I think.
It's cool I get to repost this twice in a row:

"Very cool and healthy that people on this website instinctively imagine themselves as the boss of random commenters on a website."
I thought patents expired 20 years from the file date? So you could only troll for ~20 years + anything manufactured using an infringing process. (so "you owe me royalties on the widget you made 10 years ago" is valid.)
Games are a pretty interesting category of software in that they're possibly the only interactive software a user would voluntarily use for its own sake.
Anti-games policies and agreements seem pretty suspiciously like "you can write any software you please as long as nobody ever uses it". Perhaps open source software development was only ever allowed under the assumption that open source software could never build a userbase competing with parent companies.

Competition could be pretty broadly scoped -- a hobby game could be dangerous to a tech company if it makes no money and has no special proprietary technology but concentrates enough technical acumen and useful experience in its developers/audience that they could recruit internally to found new companies.
Unless it impacts your performance during working hours to an extent that you are not reasonably fulfilling your duties - “impacting your performance” is too vague.
> The preference for static typing is I think over-represented in online discourse.

I think you're mistaken. It is my impression that the dynamic language advocates are, per person, more vocal than the static language advocates.

But as I said, that's my impression. And as you said, you think the opposite. That is, we both admit that we don't actually have data.

Anyone who does have actual data, feel free to supply it...
Thank You for Your Support
Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on performance management plan
The Graal team is huge. Like, I don't know, at least 70 people and probably more. So that's very expensive.

Oracle Java is best understood as two competing teams at this point. In theory GraalVM started out as a research project to feed improvements back to HotSpot and some of that they've done, like with the JVMCI interface that was added. But it didn't work out that way for whatever reason and GraalVM is now effectively a competitor to the 'classical' Sun Java product guys. They have different brand names, commercial models, feature priorities, price points, they are different organisations within the company. Fortunately GraalVM is not a fork of OpenJDK - it's a bunch of plugins and extra components, more or less. But at some level the difference is semantic because if you swap out the whole JIT compiler then maybe it actually is a fork? Not sure.

Anyway the original research vision was that C2 would be replaced by Graal indeed. The politics of merging such a total rewrite would be difficult at the best of times and it seems Oracle hasn't managed it, or perhaps they like having some internal competition for the OpenJDK guys. Certainly Graal team cares a lot more about modern marketing, about getting their tech adopted into other Oracle products and things that presumably Oracle management care about. Like the graalvm.org website vs the OpenJDK website is no competition. The former feels like an actual product, the latter is a bunch of wiki pages more or less.
> This OS and its shell later inspired Digital Research's CP/M OS, the first industry-standard OS for 8-bit micros.

The irony here is that MS-DOS was routinely derided for having "stolen" from CP/M. Having used the PDP-10 and PDP-11 before CP/M, I knew that CP/M was based on DEC's ideas.
Examining OnePlus' Performance Behavior: Optimization or Misrepresentation?
Many employment agreements don’t really define hours. If the boundaries are fuzzy that makes it difficult to determine what happened as part of the employment and what did not.

So deciding that work within a specific discipline should be considered part of the employment unless explicitly exempted can be a practical way to avoid 9-5.
I've seen this pattern before: problems encountered with a new or different technology are attributed to that technology, while comparable problems with the existing system are seen as the fault of specific teams/developers or just as the sort of natural bugs you get in software development. The same kind of problem that's seen as a clear reason to avoid the less popular tool is seen as just something to solve or workaround in the more popular case.

That's how politics generally works: there always has to be a plausible "objective" reason for something, it just doesn't have to be applied uniformly or even actually true.
AFAIK terraform doesn't have a way to inject user interaction on provider-level operations.

Anyone know if az cli or powershell module prompts users before it deletes a resource group?
> The e-ink patent is so frustrating.

Hmm.. I keep seeing this on HN. I then ask which specific patent and I never get a satisfactory answer. But I'll keep trying. I work in the display industry and am not aware of any specific patent that is blocking progress in developing electrophoretic displays. Are you? If yes, please please point out which specific patent and how it is blocking your design.