flexie

Business is what is stopping Google from not servicing Europe. Google makes huge part of its profit on search in Europe and pays almost no tax in Europe.

If Google stopped servicing Europe, one or more European competitors would emerge in days or weeks and Google's dominance would be threatened worldwide within months. It would be a completely suicidal move.

Yes, but your employer pays you some $100,000 for what is most people's best 8 hours daily. In most cases, whatever an employer did code in his spare time, which is related to the employer's business, would be inspired by or downright copied from whatever he or his coworkers did in the office.

If you don't like it, you are free to accept another job offer or to quit and make your own business out of that thing you were thinking of but didn't do because you feared your employer would claim ownership.

'Moreover, why is it legal, like in NY, for a company to say they own all your work both on and off the job'

Because it's really difficult to define which IPR is inside or outside the scope of your employer's business and easy to abuse for the employee.

Your email app might be clearly outside your search engine employer's business, until they decide to do this gmail thing. Also, most employees do something related to what the employer does.

I get it - it's tempting to solve the Harvard Business School issue by sending the MBA students to prison before they wreck havoc on the economy. But I'm not sure their dads would pay the exceeding tuition.

Also, there is the whole question of whether it would be fair to the other prisoners. Pretty soon the prison economy would be infested with cigarette derivatives and yard swaps.

Funny, I remember coming to NYC from Scandinavia thinking it was so humid and warm and impossible to get anything done during the summer months.

Guess it really depends on what you are used to.

Then, in the winter, the old NYC apartments were so dry and warm because of the central heat that typically couldn't be regulated from the radiators in the apartments. They just blasted on all winter and the only way to adjust the temperature would be to open the windows :-)

The US is leading noone if nobody follows. Who do you think will follow?

Thousands of treaties, conventions, agreements, and other arrangements are negotiated all the time. The Paris accord is just one, but a major one. The belief that the American government can be trusted to stick to a good cause, let alone stick to deals it has made before, has been eroded. American diplomats will find it harder to persuade other governments to do anything. They will also find that they have fewer favours to call.

You might as well argue that it's impossible to distribute beer to a country of 320M people, yet inhabitants of large countries don't go thirsty.

Whether we talk about a union of 320M as the US or a union of 510M as the EU, or whether we talk about a state like Michigan with 9M inhabitants or a nation like Sweden with 10M hardly matters. There are roads, electrical grids and similar infrastructure everywhere in the modern world.

It's not the distribution that's the problem. It's political will.

He didn't acquire a single bargaining chip. If anything, he handed Europe, China, India bargaining chips.

Trump is in for a rough time next time he tries to negotiate anything internationally, now when he has shown that he backs out of what many regard as a very important international agreement just 2 years after it was reached.

And on yet another issue, Trump shows the world that America is no longer taking the lead. Positioning yourself with Syria and Nicaragua is not taking the lead. He has put America last.

And I doubt it will be without repercussions from other nations. In the coming weeks we will see how there will be calls in Europe for blocking America in all kind of other international cooperation, including trade deals.

Let's see. Taxes take around 1/3 of it. Rent takes 1/6. Schools, kindergarten, nannies takes 1/6. That leaves around 1/3 for food, clothes, insurance, phones, cable, heat etc. for a NYC family.

A family I know in the East Village says they spend $12,000 per month. They live 2 parents, 2 kids in a 500 square feet rent stabilized apartment (a walkup). The 140 square feet living room has a kitchenette in the corner. I believe rent is $2,200 monthly. Last time we visited, my one year old found a syringe outside their door. Don't know what they make before tax but it can hardly be less than $200,000. I asked why they didn't just move away from Manhattan, but they would have to commute 1-2 hours more per day to find a cheaper solution. They were already aways from the kids 10-12 hours a day as it were so that was not an option.

Families in such situation is a big part of the so called upper class.

The article says top 20 percent consists of the households making $112,000 or more.

Many of those families live in places like New York or California where $112,000 is not much.

The families I know in New York City making around $2-300,000 live paycheck to paycheck in tiny, old rented apartments. Both parents work until 6-8 PM, they barely see their kids except in weekends. They spent the first decade or so after college paying off student debt and now they have five figure credit card debt. Their life is void of luxury. No cars, no fancy vacations, no real estate, no savings, no shares, often no pensions savings either. Everything is spent on kindergartens, nannies, schools, rent etc.

You may be upper middle class if your family makes $112,000 in Oklahoma. But it simply doesn't make sense to regard people in New York City or the Bay area with such salaries as upper middle class.

It has become ridiculous with these booking sites. When you google a small hotel, often the first many results are hotels.com, bookings.com, tripadvisor.com etc. and the hotel itself is down to spot 3, 4, 5 or even lower.

There is a place for the booking sites, especially for exploring several hotels at a time. And they do offer some reviews and comparisons that can be useful. Sometimes, they also offer the cheapest price but usually it is just as cheap to call the hotel itself or book through its website. And it really feels good to pay the hotel that offers the services, instead of some tech company in the US.

The premise of the article is wrong. From 2009 and until 2015, the number of CS grads almost doubled and any of those economics majors could have seen that in the graph, even if their essays are "basically bullet points" and their field is dead simple. They could also have told the blogger that causality might go the other way; Salaries are high precisely because demand is bigger than supply. If (or when) high salaries cause more people to study CS, salaries will drop unless demand rises even more.

So we have a huge increase in CS majors in just 6 years. What could be the explanation for that? I would say that CS has become both more rewarding and more accessible in the last decade.

More rewarding because with better browsers, and with smartphones, you can simply do more stuff. And those who graduated in 2009 started studying just before iPhone, before Google Chrome, HTML5. Long before Tesla and SpaceX were household names, long before we again believed in AI and robots. The field has simply become more and more interesting.

More accessible because of Codecademy, Udacity, Udemy and the rest of the bunch. 10 years ago, learning to code meant reading books that were already outdated when you bought them and spending days in frustration trying to install whatever language you had decided on. Before you did as much as a hello world. Unless your friends knew how to code or you were enrolled at an educational institution you didn't have access to tutors. Today, you can get great tutorials online, and you can learn JS, python and many other languages without the hassle of installing anything. And once you are up and running, there are a plethora of libraries, modules, frameworks and ways of deploying which mean that you can do in weeks what before could take years.

Would it? 18 years ago? I doubt it. Google itself is really not as good in other languages as in English, even today. Could French google in 1999 have become world class in a non-native language?

All but a handful of EU countries. Lived in DK, ES and BG. I can tell you that very few teenagers speak English well enough to learn to program so they can start a Facebook at 18 year.

The US has one thing that Europeans cannot compete with:

One language spoken by close to all 320M Americans as a native language and spoken by More than a billion worldwide as first or second language and which also happens to be the language most technology uses, incl in documentation and tutorials.

Would Google have reached global fame if it had been in French to begin with? Of course not. What about if Facebook started at Bocconi and in Italian? No way Americans would have adopted it (let alone Spanish or Dutch).

Bureaucracy, taxes and other obstacles are possibly worse in the US than in most European countries (I lived both there and in three different European countries). We have very little to learn from the US in that respect. But without a common language it's difficult for Europeans. It's not a coincidence that most good startups in Europe are in countries where English is a first or very strong second language (UK, NL, Scandinavia etc).

Why people would downvote that I don't know.

https://www.recode.net/2015/7/15/11614684/ai-conspiracy-the-...

I would say that grenerally it doesn't matter much where ideas come from but since that's the point of the article they ought to be more precise.

And if everybody did that society would quickly spiral down into chaos.

Note how the conditions for invoking the castle doctrine are set by society, not by the property owner. It's not a method defined within the class. It's a method inherited from the superclass.

Law is full of regulations and court precedents that restrict what people can do to their private property. Here on HN people seem to think that private property is like a subclass in python where the owner is free to define whatever method or property he wants and overwrite rules inherited from the society superclass. It's not.

Landlords cannot just evict renters based on the landlord's own terms of service, not even a renter's non-paying children or girlfriend with whom the landlord didn't contract, and not even the renter himself although the stopped paying: The landlord needs to follow the rules of society, go through a bailiff's court or follow similar strict procedures defined in society to ensure that mandatory law is followed.

Not everybody can set up a medical clinic on their private property, even if they offer their services for free.

TV stations in many European countries can't show hidden ads in programmes and cannot show ads for kids for certain products. Even though the viewers didn't pay. Even though they are free not to watch.

In most places landowners cannot freely decide to do what they want with their land, like building a factory, without taking into consideration zoning laws and without hearing the neighbors or wider community as well.

For millennia, what we today call criminal laws, have applied on private property as well. You can't just hit somebody in the face because they are in your house and the terms on the door clearly says that you can. Think that's ridiculous? Well, it used to be that restaurants in America could chose to serve whites only. It was the choice of the property owner. Until it wasn't. Courts and congress decided that such practices were so despicable that the general interest of non-discrimination outweighed the interest in business owners getting to decide for themselves. Same with businesses hiring men only. Today most of us regard it as obvious that non discrimination laws trump the interest of private owners. A few decades ago, most people thought the owner could choose freely whom to hire.

I hope we will start regulating the new advertising industry comprised of social networks and search engines more tightly.

> And you seem to miss the fact that with UBI you have no incentive to live and stay in an expensive area.

Like many people here on HN, I can work from anywhere with electricity, Internet and decent cell phone coverage. But I still strongly prefer a bigger city, and I even prefer to be close to the city center, not out in suburbia. The reasons are many:

- close to the city center I can chose between some of the best schools in the country for my kids. Outside the city center, I would have to chose a mediocre school. In the cuntryside, I would have to have to go with whatever is there

- I like going out with my wife. In the city we can chose between all kinds of cuisines, cafes and bars. In a village, we would be lucky to find a pub with fries. In suburbia that would be a strip mall.

- Shopping in easy in the city center. Whether you like it or not, you need to do groceries on a daily basis and to buy clothes etc every now and then, and this is far easier when you live in the city.

- I like to walk for things (walk my kids to school, walk to do groceries, or just walk for the sake of it). Curiously, I find that this is easier in the city center with sidewalks and parks than in the countryside, where I would walk in the side of a highway or road.

- In the city center I can do sports (tennis, soccer). Yes, I might find that option in the countryside or in suburbia, but in the city I can chose between 10 different teams, venues etc.

- I like people. There are many more people in the cities, especially younger people.

- I like to travel. I can take the metro to the airport in the city and visit hundreds of places within a a few hours of flight. Driving 2 hours to the nearest local airport to transfer to a bigger airport would kill that. I live far from my family and friends. They would visit much less if I didn't live near an international airport.

What I am trying to say is that I think nowadays people live in the city for many other reasons than work.

Please, start regulating and taxing these multinational advertising companies much more aggressively.

Once advertising companies like Facebook or Google reach a certain size, they should be required to pay taxes where the ads are shown to users.

Make a set of basic EU user terms and privacy policy for advertising companies masked as social networks, search engines, email providers etc, some of it mandatory, some of it that they can opt out off. But advertising companies above a certain size shouldn't be allowed to set their own (American) terms.

And please, split up these behemoths. It's not good for anyone that one search engine and one social network rules it all. They have EU-wide market shares above 90 percent. We would never allow that in industries as automobiles or television. We would never allow it for newspapers or tv stations. Somehow, we allow it for social networks and search engines.

It beats me why they don't just update their MacBook Air. This is the computer that serve most people's needs.

It's by far the sleekest (the MacBook and MacBook Pro being thicker and heavier), it's not exactly cheap but it's priced just right at around 1,000 euro, it's not fast enough for graphics work or gaming but it really serves the need of 90 percent of college kids and professionals who just need internet, emailing, a text editor and a spreadsheet, and to be able to watch a movie and save pictures. And maybe do some light hacking.

Update the MacBook Air and I would buy it right away.

I don't know you any better than your co-founders and in general I would say that those who either 1) continue to finance or 2) continue to work should have much more of the equity than those who quit. If one or both of your co-founders leave, or if an investor doesn't follow up on his investments, you would want that party to have much less as well.

I feel bad for your co-founders that you guys haven't had a vesting schedule in place or similar so that you would lose most of your equity now when you quit. Imagine having to work for free or for low pay in the future just to hand over 1/3 of the result to someone else. I don't know if 10 percent is too much or fair. I

I know you could say that you have worked for 16 months for free or very little but right about now is when it usually gets really tough. Your savings are probably up, maybe you haven't found a product market fit yet, maybe there are no customers yet. Doubts set in, both in you and your partner, family and friends. Now is when it hurts to continue.

So right now, I think the decent thing to do would be to increase the capital by a lot and let the co-founders subscribe for those new shares but have the shares vest gradually as they continue to work.

I also think if would be a decent thing to let the possible investor know that you are quitting before he commits.

To imagine that a 20 year old college kid from Akron Colorado can reasonably expect to outlive most people just born a few hours drive away in South Dakota...

Actually, she's been imprisoned for 7 years (3 years before she was convicted).

Through my work as a lawyer I have dealt with manufacturing of consumer electronics quite a few times, usually when things go wrong.

Most European companies have their products manufactured (assembled) in China. In a small gadget, there are easily 200 little parts that are produced by dozens of different Chinese companies. As always in business, there are regularly problems with quality or delays or price hikes, and then the client considers moving production back home to Europe. But such considerations always strand on a number of troubling reasons, and it's not that the gadget would be more expensive in Europe. Actually, the price increase nowadays would be less than one might think (for example from 10 euros to 15 euros on products that sell to stores for 50-100 euros and part of that extra cost would be recouped in not having to ship the products so far).

The real reasons are that there are almost no manufacturers in Europe who have the required knowledge, that European manufacturers cannot deliver as fast (they are smaller and have much less manpower) and that European manufacturers are not able to source the components in Europe anyways. Maybe we could get part of the components in Europe, but surely not all 200. In China, they are produced locally and can be delivered in hours or days. In Europe, we would have to have them shipped from China.

I don't believe production of the current consumer electronics will be moved back to the Western World. Phones, pads, monitors, flat screen tvs, laptops etc. will continue to be produced in Asia. After all, that's where the manufacturing infrastructure and knowhow is. What we can hope for is that the next generation of products will be mass produced here; robots, electric vehicles, drones etc. But I doubt it. Salaries in China have been at the level of the cheapest countries in Europe for a while but manufacturing has not returned in scale. Your next 3D gadget is likely going to be produced in Shenzhen or Malaysia, not in Romania, Portugal or Michigan.

Agree and edited, although it really is two units under the same government - and that's where the blame belongs.

The damages caused by US agencies* are easily underestimated. It's not just the equipment rendered useless and data lost due to their software. It's also the millions of hours spent by IT departments worldwide battling with infected computers and securing not yet infected computers. Damages are easily in the tens of billions of USD.

And then there is the loss of credibility of the US government and the companies involved.

*Edit: FBI changed to US agencies.

AT&T was founded in the 1870s. But it wasn't until 1925 the research activities had gotten so massive that they spun it out in Bell Labs.

Apple and Microsoft are around 40 years old, but Amazon and Google are much younger companies and Facebook is not even a teenager yet (although it's no longer run by one).

Give these companies a few more years to build equally impressive research wings :-)

Given that today's airplanes need several km runway to take off and to land, and that people often need to transfer from one plane to another, we are probably not going to have many more airports per city than we already have in a foreseeable future.

But if an airport terminal could just be a series of small waiting rooms, one for each plane, sort of like today's gates but where where you met up directly at the gate with your luggage 30 min before. Then everything from passports to tickets, to body scan and luggage, was checked once, just once, and then you boarded the plane through at least two jet bridges (front and back on a normal plane). End of story. Those who wanted could show up an hour before, and they would get a small rebate and not have to wait in line, and those who wanted could show up 30 min before, and they would pay a little more and wait in line. And the plane should not wait for anyone who's not there 30 min before takeoff.

Could you board a standard narrowbody plane with 150-200 passengers in 30 minutes (if none of them opted for early boarding)? Two jet bridges, each with at least 2 security lines with scans/pad downs of passengers, a couple of luggage dumps with scans of luggage (I imagine it could largely be done automatically). A normal narrowbody plane with 150-200 seats means each line should handle 75-100 passengers in 30 minutes. That's around 3 passengers per minute or 20 sec per passenger. Should be possible. But I think many would opt to meet up shortly before and save a bit of money.

Same in the other end. You would pick up luggage directly at the plane, and have your passport checked immediately as you enter the terminal.

Much of the waiting in airports is because airports want passengers to mix up in the shopping mall before check-in and takeoff.