You are watching a classic 21st century robbery in action, where lawyers are robbing corporations and employees under some pretense of magical justice.
Counting the downvotes on comments, HN has sharply taken a socialist turn and lawyers are the new superheroes saving people from Evil startups. In other news Bernie Sanders hates Uber despite using it nearly 100% of time.[1]
Yes, I completely agree. Travis Kalanick should have just watched and followed "I am just a bill"[1] video for instructions regarding changing labor law, prior to founding Uber.
"Fighting organizations" is a rhetorical device used by lawyers to fool general public and people like you.
The reality today is that there is a large lobby of litigators actively trying to keep any change in labour/Patent laws from happening. [1]
I own no shares of Uber Inc. and any other companies involved in these litigations. But the reality is that by framing this incorrectly as David (The attorney) vs Goliath (Uber et. al.) fight the article is just pushing your emotional buttons. At end of the day litigation is not going to magically create jobs out of thin air. Uber will eventually shift to autonomous cars or will go bankrupt or might end having chinese drive the cars via video conference. It's easy to blame Uber for the mess that is the employer provided insurance.
Its not the Uber which created that problem, its the legislative gridlock which is at fault. But its cooler these days to hate Uber for all that ills the hapless middle class in USA.
Discounting the tripe "You go girl" tone of the article, there is no divine law asserting that there ought to be only two forms of (W2/1099) employees. The labor laws should change in tune with evolution in technology. However given the current dysfunctional congress, and from experience with other Patent/Immigration laws this won't happen any time soon. Had it been about Patent/IP litigation and any other lawyer the tone of the article would be different.
This is parasitic legal rent seeking at its worst, let's call a spade a spade.
Here is an WSJ article that calls for change in labor laws.[1]
Thanks, most privacy activists conveniently forget this argument. In most cases, the absolute approach taken by most privacy activists ends up hurting Students/Patients/Customers etc. since Universities/Hospitals & Insurers/Companies cite privacy laws to escape from the burden of accountability. At the same time the entities are free to mine their own data under guise of "Performance enhancement".
Essentially stringent privacy laws often have adverse effect where activities that might be of public benefit Research on Rare diseases/Teacher Accountability/Class action lawsuits are curtailed.
"hey, that money in your bank account, we can just automatically take our taxes from it, because we're not really taking it from you, we're just taking it from the bank."
>> You are clearly not familiar with how IRS functions. IRS can and often times does automatically freeze bank accounts if they suspect tax evasion.[1]
The reality is that when it comes to user data the analogy is even weaker, since most user data is transactional in nature. Hence both parties can assert their rights. This is particularly of importance in medical data. Where there are no laws that assure patients of his ownership of his own data.[2]
In reality when it comes to information/data the ownership argument is on a shaky legal grounds. And in some cases data ownership might be counterproductive.
Yes Switzerland has by far highest number of foreigners because of its essentialy Xenophobic immigration system rather than anything else. Using that as an example to show how welcoming it is completely deluded. USA offers birthright citizenship and in near future will offer a path to millions of undocumented immigrants. While USA had its own problem it's light years ahead when it comes to countries like Switzerland, where kids whose parents have lived decades in the country and were born their have no path to citizenship.
As far as swiss banks are concerned the world is actually worse off because of corrupt wealth hidden in their accounts. If anything Americans should be happy that one cannot simply open a swiss bank account.
Yeah without US support of NATO there wouldn't be a Switzerland just nuked out mountains flying post WW 3 soviet flag. Or maybe they would fare better considering their sham pro-hitler neutral actions that saw millions of jews perish during holocaust.
Frankly I don't see why HN commenter are so pro tiny European countries which are almost always have sustained due to US military support and are choke full of nativist/racists (Check out white sheep kicking black sheep poster). Be thankful for generous US citizens spending to keep world safe otherwise Europe and Asia would wake up to the next World war within months.
Thanks for this beautiful comment. I especially liked this part "Keep splitting the housing into smaller and smaller units, make the renters share housing, constantly increase prices at more than the rate of inflation"
This has been my exact experience in Manhattan, where a 3 Bed apartment got converted into 5 Bed. After we refused to pay additional rent. Interestingly in Mumbai my apartment building (a Co-op where we own) decided to demolish / rebuild and reduce the playground associated with the building. This allowed us to raze the 6 storey building built in 1960 into a 12 storied one. As a result, we now have an apartment in the same co-op with equivalent sq. footage and were paid additional money plus rent while the building was being rebuilt. Since it was a Co-op we could shop around for a developer who offered us the best deal. The current building will at least sustain till another 50 years. I have never found this happening in US. Since either the building did not have enough free space to expand upon adjacent to them or restriction on height increase.
I think majority of these articles are being written by developers who always assumed that Apple would never move away from Objective C. By introducing Swift Apple has now directly threatened their unique skill set. In my opinion Apple recognized the threat from React Native / Cordova / RoboVM and had long term vision to introduce a new programming language that would allow Python/C++/Java developers to easily develop for iOS.
If you are interested in getting into Swift programming, don't let these article fool you into getting discouraged. This article is simply spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
In some cases, you can patent a major application for that algorithm and then license that patent. From what I know Larry and Sergey patented PageRank for Web Search. My advisor has patent on a Graph Cuts algorithm for image segmentation, which is licensed by Cornell. If you have a fast matrix multiplication algorithm e.g. for use in Fully Connected layers for Neural Nets. You can patent that application. When FB hired people from NYU to work on deep learning, the acquisition involved getting a fast fourier transform optimized version of convolutional layers. Not sure how big of a component it was.
Deep Neural Networks involve Convolution and Matrix Multiplication operations which have a well defined hard upper bound in terms of speed wrt number of cores, GPUs (~thousands of processors) are in thus indispensable achieving a faster performance. There are newer interesting approaches such as reducing multiplication operations which might improve inference/forward speed even further. http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.03009
Performing inference with deep learning modes is computationally costly as well. Its a reason why NVidia has two streams of business, Tesla / Titan / upcoming Volta GPUs to train models and Tegra boards to enable near real time inference.
That's a ridiculous headline to derive from analysis of published article with title "The spreading of misinformation online".
Sure the idea that Facebook makes us dumber might have some truth in it. But it cannot be fairly evaluated unless one proves that the alternative Network Television or Grandma email forwards were not making us even more dumber before Facebook rose to prominence.
Paraphrasing Sussman-Minsky story [1], just because you rely on judgement does not means there is no algorithm, it's just that you don't know what the algorithm is. In a country like China with rampant corruption, Algorithms are a welcome relief. Schneier having never faced any kind of corruption at individual level completely ignores this giant problem. While the exact details of the algorithm might be debatable, yet having an algorithm as opposed to corrupt bureaucrats making arbitrary decisions is a welcome step.
[1] "So Sussman began working on a program. Not long after, this odd-looking bald guy came over. Sussman figured the guy was going to boot him out, but instead the man sat down, asking, "Hey, what are you doing?" Sussman talked over his program with the man, Marvin Minsky. At one point in the discussion, Sussman told Minsky that he was using a certain randomizing technique in his program because he didn't want the machine to have any preconceived notions. Minsky said, "Well, it has them, it's just that you don't know what they are." It was the most profound thing Gerry Sussman had ever heard. And Minsky continued, telling him that the world is built a certain way, and the most important thing we can do with the world is avoid randomness, and figure out ways by which things can be planned. Wisdom like this has its effect on seventeen-year-old freshmen, and from then on Sussman was hooked."
Counting the downvotes on comments, HN has sharply taken a socialist turn and lawyers are the new superheroes saving people from Evil startups. In other news Bernie Sanders hates Uber despite using it nearly 100% of time.[1]
[1] http://thehill.com/policy/technology/250480-bernie-sanders-s...