abhi3

The purpose of granting patents historically was to incentivize innovators to bring their knowledge into the public domain in exchange for a monopoly for a certain period of time. Before patents, there was a disincentive to sharing your knowledge as others would free ride on it so inventors would just sell their products on their own and their knowledge would likely die with them. Imagine you developed penicillin but there were no patents. You just sell it and never tell anyone how you created it.

The first time SpaceX landed a booster we had 1284 upvotes 432 comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10774865), in less than two years it has become so routine that this submission has just 22 point and 4 comments.

Makes me wonder if one-day lunches to Mars and intra-planetary travel via BFR will also become so routine :)

removed

Maybe because the thread descended into flamewars and people don't come here to read that.

> Is it his fault if women are dumb whores?

If you must be abusive, at least qualify it rather than generalizing for half the population.

October last year: “Piyush Goyal assures electricity for all by May 2017”

http://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/piyush-goyal-assu...

September 2017: Government announces grand new scheme to ensure electricity for all by 2018!!

Talk about shifting goal posts.

Uhmmmm, does the Ottoman Empire or Mughal Empire still exist? The British Government is still run in the name for the Monarch who was the monarch of the Britsh empire while it still existed. The government is still run by the descendants of the British political elite (eg. House of lords) who carried out those atrocities. No common people should be blamed for sins of a regime but the elite who perpetuated and benefitted from those atrocities and passed on the benefits to their offsprings are fair game.

Here we have a business that is going after a huge existing market. For some perspective, Slack is valued at > 5 Billion

> Some people drink a little bit of alcohol or take pills (not something I would recommend)

I would. Some people have crippling stage fright every time while several others would get it if the stakes are too high (imagine being called to demo at the iPhone launches). I doubt that the author being a natural public speaker can relate to that.

It's not about not being a good/polished public speaker but more about being so paralyzed with anxiety that your hands/knees shake and your voice breaks to the point that you couldn't read off a teleprompter. You lose all situational awareness and enter a fight or flight mode. If that describes you then take propranolol. (after asking your doctor of course)

Lawyer here. In most countries, such terms would be set aside on the grounds of being unconscionable and against public policy. The consumers have no real bargaining power in the setting of the terms here and lack the sophistication necessary to understand that they are waving their legal rights. If you are going to make someone waive their rights you need to get not merely their consent, but 'informed consent'. Additionally, it is the companies duty to inform people if their data was stolen and can't make them agree to some self-serving terms before it does so.

Despite the SCOTUS ruling in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion if this question is put before a US judge, there's a good chance that the contract won't be worth the paper its printed on.

> the case is clearly being structured (intentionally by the government, one presumes) to force the test case of "is compelled decryption legal" onto the most unsympathetic possible defendant.

This is called strategic litigation for a rule change and is quite common amongst 'repeat-player litigants'. Prosecutors, insurance companies, and even the plaintiffs' bar routinely take unnecessary cases to trial if they think it would set a favorable precedent and also settle cases where they think a trial might set an unfavorable precedent.

I think the idea was to keep a defensive portfolio of patents so Google could threaten to countersue Apple or Microsoft if they ever went after an Android OEM. Kind of like a Tech company version of a nuclear deterrent.

Reading the title I thought the article was going to talk about how not to hire for culture fit nonsense like playing foosball or ability to down a keg but instead it talks about hiring people who don't care enough to keep up with tech advancements.

Facebook Feed, Youtube Feed, 4chan etc etc.

120 million USD in funding and such a spectacular failure because of one article. This whole episode goes on to show the power journalists have. I know the sales number were bad but with so much money the founder could have bought the market or pivoted but with no coming back from the PR disaster the investors most likely just wanted their money back.

Yes, outsourcing law and order to local communities has never resulted in race biased enforcement of the law has it? Local communities to electing judges and DA's and Sheriffs to be tough on crime by minorities if vastly superior no doubt.

> The skills required to carry out these attacks, for example, would make someone very valuable on a Western market.

I'm sure being part of the top 0.001% of a small poor country with power and prestige unimaginable to those living in countries with rule of law would any day beat making six-figure in San Francisco and complaining about human feces on the street. I mean in the United States or any other similar democracy even the President is treated like shit by the opposition, media, and common folks. Watch this 20-second video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRMI4Z7ri8A

> The only way you can change something by protesting is by projecting power. You do that either by the way you do the protesting, i.e. by actively engaging the police forces in trying to reach the seats of power (Parliament, Government's buildings)

>Movements like BLM are ineffectual when protesting because they do neither

Can you imagine the tone of public discourse if it even appeared that BLM was trying to overwhelm the seat of governance? I mean people scream 'thug' and call in the National Guard at the sight of African-Americans breaking a supermarket window what do you think they'll do if it appears they might overthrow a government (even a local one)?

The most convincing answer to the Fermi Paradox I have read is that we are not seeing space faring civilizations because all planets have dysfunctional political systems and had to cancel their space programs under citizen pressure to 'solve problems at home first'.

Lucky that you live in a country with strong consumer protection culture and had to deal directly with google.

As we speak, Google's OTA Android updates are bricking thousands of $600 Nexus 6P as well and all the press cares about is hyping Pixel 2.

I explained that in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15088404

A lot of comments in this thread are misleading. What the Supreme Court has done is that it has expanded the interpretation of an existing Fundamental Right ('Right to life') to include a 'Right to Privacy'. Now this means that if any law is made that infringes on an individuals privacy then it'll be tested for reasonableness.

So before this judgment, the legislature could have for example made a law requiring all internet activity to be reported to the government or criminalized homosexuality (existing law) and anyone challenging the law could not claim that the law violated his privacy as such a right was not recognized.

After this judgment, such an argument could be made and the courts would test whether the violation of one's privacy is a reasonable restriction or not. So a law requiring you to have number plates on your car to be captured by traffic cams, or KYC norms for Bank accounts, reporting of your financial data to tax authorities could be held to be a reasonable restriction whereas laws such as criminalizing one's sexual orientation could be held unreasonable.

What prompted this constitutional reference was the governments 'Aadhar Scheme' which compelled 1.2 billion citizens to hand over their private biometric data to the government if they wanted to claim any government services. This judgment provides the test to be used while deciding whether the law and its applications are constitutional. Most likely the scheme will not be struck down in total but specific instances will be tested on a case by case basis. (eg. Aadhar can't me made compulsory for getting health services but can be made so for a Gun Licence as the latter seems reasonable but the former may not)

But at least most of us here have by now trained ourselves to be mostly immune to click bait. Don't want to go through the same process again but with misleading thumbnails this time.

>If war can be waged without loss of life the biggest incentive to avoid war is gone.

There will be a loss of life in any war. Note that they are called 'Killer' robots. It's just that the loss of life will be of noncombatants.

My concern is not countries waging wars against each other because that can always be deterred, but instead governments using it on its own people. Right now authoritarian governments need to worry about soldiers rebelling but computer code powering the robots isn't gonna rebel when you ask it to kill a city square full of protesters.

Uhmm you make a reasonable argument but I am not sure why it's a reply to my comment. I was commenting on peoples behavior in the workplace and not how they spend their free time. Did you just inadvertently create a strawman so you could attack it?

You see I like many people here aspire to be successful but neither do I have the personality to for example play dominance games nor the desire to develop such a personality and hence I wonder if that's something that might truly handicap one or just something that imposters do.

> affairs with a creepy married co-worker in Germany, machismo-driven muscling for VC connections, dominance games over which chair an exec sits in, PR firms hired to smear uppity former partners... it's like a movie.

I wonder how prevalent such behavior is amongst the truly exceptional people vs the imposters who just happened to be successful due to luck and in many cases sheer force of personality (seems to still work in old school industries). Part of me would like to think that the Zucks, Bezos and Gates of the world don't partake in such shenanigans and would rather just keep their head down and work conscientiously.

Allocating ones capital (simply owning things as you say) is a productive activity in itself. Without people competing to allocate capital for higher returns, a lot of things we all love wouldn't exist.

I drew an equivalency between the unquestionability of the immoral character of two acts (even that was not my central argument) and not between the relative degree immorality (which is what you decided to argue against).