Comment Re:Yay Economics (Score 1) 190
The second item uses the correct verb form ("are") according to the rules here in the UK.
I did not think of that!
The second item uses the correct verb form ("are") according to the rules here in the UK.
I did not think of that!
OTOH, if only one company is doing some particular heinous action, then a law against that action is not wrong just because it targets that company. Parts of this law look like they're trying to apply that principle.
No they are not. Not true.
You can read the full text of the ban right here: https://leg.mt.gov/bills/2023/...
The title of the bill is "AN ACT BANNING TIKTOK IN MONTANA".
Opening sentence of Section 1: "Tiktok may not operate within the territorial jurisdiction of Montana"
In this document, nowhere does it acknowledge that many other companies meet this same criteria. Nowhere does it suggest that such penalties might be applied to those other companies. Not even other subsidiaries of ByteDance. It is a law directed at only one specific company, identified by name.
> think of it this way: next time you come up with a great idea, go to your boss and say, "i've got a great idea: i'd like 10% of the company in voting shares, because it will increase company profits by at least 20% year-on-year".
What happens if my idea decreases the company profits by 20%? Will I incur a huge personal debt?
What if my idea produces 0% change in profits, but by pursuing it, the company foregoes great riches that would have otherwise come from adopting my coworker's idea instead?
Weird -- it's almost as if business economics is somehow more complicated than elementary school arithmetic...
This "open letter" was published using a throwaway Medium account called "@EmployeesOfMicrosoft." There is zero evidence that any actual Microsoft employees were involved. You don't write an open petition to your CEO, and then forget to include the list of names! Employees at companies like Microsoft and Google regularly question their company's direction without fear of repercussions, or need for anonymity.
Any random troll could have produced this "open letter," and there are reasonable motives why they might do that.
It's simpleminded to assume "Thank you" *caused* the result. People who say thank you probably write more politely in general throughout their communications.
Unless the experiment controlled for this (e.g. by asking participants to add/remove "thank you" after having already composed their email), there is no implication that saying "thank you" will give you the same result.
It might be a good idea, but this study doesn't demonstrate that in any scientific way.
This is a valid question. I skimmed the actual study, but I don't have time right now to dig through the jargon and see how much these results are likely to be due to confirmation bias.
How would that happen exactly? The results are calculated using an SVM classifier algorithm, not a human "interpreting" the results. Basically they train the classifier on 50 sessions, and then test in on maybe 7 sessions. Each session involves asking the person 20 questions.
Here's the actual study. Does someone who knows more about these sorts of measurements want to sort out whether or not there were adequate procedural constraints to prevent confirmation bias?
The most likely bias in this scenario would be sampling bias, not conformation bias. It would include mistakes like this: - Testing a bunch of different subjects, but only counting the favorable ones as your sample set (i.e. "he didn't have ESP") - Doing a bunch of trials, but eliminating the ones with unfavorable outcomes (i.e. "the equipment wasn't working right that time") - Choosing to stop the trials at the point where a favorable result is obtained (i.e. after the random walk went where you wanted) The Discussion session seems to address these concerns:
Four patients in CLIS communicated with frontocentral cortical oxygenation-based BCI with an above-chance-level correct response rate over 70% during a period of several weeks. The performance of the binary SVM classifier across all the patients, except a few training sessions of patient B, was above chance level. None of the sessions were eliminated in the analysis, and only very few sessions had to be interrupted because of life-saving measures such as sucking saliva; thus, no bias for selecting âoesuccessfulâ sessions incriminates the results.
So the main question is really just about the sample size itself. 20 questions x 4 people x around 5 sessions = 400 coin tosses. Is that enough to get excited about 70%? In pure mathematics, yes, but experiments can be corrupted in all sorts of ways. (What if the research assistant simply talked louder when he was saying a "true" question?) It would be great at least to see the results replicated by other groups.
Apparently Intel patented their fix on Oct 31, 2013... the exact same day that Nexus 5 shipped in the US:
https://www.google.com/patents...
Glad to see the industry came together to protect consumers!
Well said!
+1
Snap circuits are neat - but I'm not a huge fan. They are generally fairly very "high level, complex" building blocks. Even most of the definitions of what the pins (of the modules) do aren't described, nor referenced in any instructional way.
I agree 100%. I had exactly the same disappointment when my son started playing with Snap Circuits. It doesn't really try to teach any concepts, and the manual is is written like a boring lab textbook ("OBJECTIVE: To show how a resistor and LED are wired to emit light") and not at all geared towards creativity or exploration.
Those terms seem perfectly reasonable to me. If you want to cling to your patents, don't use their code. We could do with a few less patents in the world.
Agreed, but if I understand correctly this is not the actual legal effect of those the terms. When they say "any [...] other action alleging [...] indirect [...] infringement to any patent [...] against any party relating to the software" the trigger is ridiculously broad. Even saying something bad about Facebook because *they* sued *you* could qualify.
Before this was introduced, the ReactJS library originally was licensed under Apache 2.0 which includes a "your license is terminated if you bring a patent lawsuit against us" clause, but the same lawyers are totally fine with Apache 2.0. Facebook is doing something different here.
A friend of mine works at a company where the lawyers reviewed Facebook's "open source" licensing terms (surreptitiously buried in a text file entitled "Additional Grant of Patent Rights") and concluded that it isn't safe. They issued a company-wide order that all projects must immediately remove any Facebook open source with these license terms. The terms basically allow Facebook to unilaterally terminate the open source license if you take "any action" against their patent claims. The exact wording is:
"The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, if you (or any of your subsidiaries, corporate affiliates or agents) initiate directly or indirectly, or take a direct financial interest in, any Patent Assertion: (i) against Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, (ii) against any party if such Patent Assertion arises in whole or in part from any software, technology, product or service of Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, or (iii) against any party relating to the Software."
...
A "Patent Assertion" is any lawsuit or other action alleging direct, indirect,
or contributory infringement or inducement to infringe any patent, including a
cross-claim or counterclaim.
In this thread, a Google employee says that their lawyers came to the same conclusion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
If so, why would Facebook do this? Why isn't it more widely discussed?
For a small-to-medium team that has easy access to a centralized server, choosing Subversion instead of Git could save you a TON of time. In my experience, Git has a constant overhead of messed up merges, "brown bag" discussions to educate new devs about various gotchas, and ongoing debates about the right usage strategy (merging versus rebasing, branch management, how to keep histories from growing too large, etc).
By contrast, I've also worked at several different companies that used Subversion, and basically you just show new devs how to sync and commit, and they figure out the rest themselves. The reason is that having a single always-up-to-date master is an order of magnitude simpler than Git's model of working-copy/branch/master on your local PC and then also branch/master on a remote PC and push/pull/fetch/merge between them.
With Subversion you still have to manage branches sometimes, but there is typically a maintainer person who handles that. Whereas the model of Git is that every dev is doing merge algebra from day 1.
It is much harder to find a job than to keep one.
