pslam (u/pslam) - Readit News

pslam commented on IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties seekingalpha.com/news/355... · Posted by u/hhs

brenden2 · 6 years ago

The whole US patent system needs to either be scrapped or rebuilt. The purpose it was originally intended to be used for doesn't make sense in a world where most new technology is just software, and software is incredibly easy to copy and duplicate. Getting a software patent is mostly a matter of sneaking past the people at the USPTO, and making sure you're the first to file. These patent factories could just write code to generate patents all day (maybe start using PyTorch?).

pslam · 6 years ago

> The purpose it was originally intended to be used for doesn't make sense in a world where most new technology is just software, and software is incredibly easy to copy and duplicate.

The very first patent was to duplicate an existing process (the loom) and have a monopoly to produce it.

I keep hearing this argument from patent proponents, but patents have never in their history been ostensibly for good.

pslam commented on USB, Java take center stage at Comdex (1996) sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworld... · Posted by u/ecliptik

ChuckMcM · 6 years ago

USB really pissed me off when it appeared. As I saw it at the time we already had a "universal serial bus" it was called "Ethernet" and there were plenty of 'ethertypes' undefined so you could easily make a USB ethertype and define a packet structure that was exactly analogous to what USB defined. You already had cheap transceivers (10BaseT at the time) and you could switch or ignore those packets if you cared to. You could share devices between machines and you could put as many as you wanted on a single "port" until you started running out of bandwidth on the port or ran into latency issues (thinking you would keep that network separate from the IP network for that reason).

Everyone had drivers for ethernet, adding a second port for "peripherals" and even changing the form factor of the plug would have been ok and cheap.

Of course that wouldn't give Intel a monopoly (they owned the USB patents and rights) and it would allow people to innovate without joining the USB alliance (and pay tithes by doing so to Intel).

Writing this I realize it still irritates me. :-)

pslam · 6 years ago

I am absolutely with you on this. I still think USB is an abomination, and the most modern incarnations only get worse — USB3 being essentially PCIe signaling but messed up because the USB committee got involved. They must ruin everything with their touch.

10/100 ethernet over a different cable and connector type would have worked out pretty nicely.

pslam commented on I2C in a Nutshell interrupt.memfault.com/bl... · Posted by u/fra

esmi · 6 years ago

Say you’ve asked an I2C ROM for a block read. After the first byte something, also on the bus, asserts an interrupt via a side band GPIO. I can’t read the something until the block read finishes.

pslam · 6 years ago

The specific case I was thinking of was the host suffering an incident where it is not possible or practical for its software to know where it left off.

For example, you get a kernel panic, or soft-reset for some reason. When you recover, you now have a bus in an unknown state, possibly mid-transaction, and if you pick the wrong order in which to bring the bus back to idle, you might wedge it or accidentally cause a side-effect (e.g overwrite a byte in an EEPROM).

pslam commented on I2C in a Nutshell interrupt.memfault.com/bl... · Posted by u/fra

Ives · 6 years ago

I really don't like I2C. Yes, in principle it's pretty simple, but if you consider NACKS, slaves holding SCK low, what happens if your master resets while the slave is trying to send a 0 bit (hint: power cycle!), etc, it's so easy for the peripheral to get stuck.

SPI is much easier to write correctly, and pretty much only has the extra wire (usually not a problem) and the phase polarity issues as a negative point.

pslam · 6 years ago

Same. I really dislike I2C, but it's universal and it's been around for decades, and it's hard to avoid designs without it. I2C keeps causing these additional issues which the article doesn't touch on:

* No way to safely bring the bus back to idle from mid-transaction. By "safely" I mean not accidentally transmit an extra byte which could e.g overwrite EEPROM memory. There is no combination of transitioning the 2-wire bus from an arbitrary state back to idle which works in the general case. If it's important, you end up adding a dedicated reset wire.

* No safe, universal way to bring the bus from tristate, or low, to pulled-up. There are designs where this ends up being necessary. You end up with a spurious transaction, which may wedge the bus, or having to add a reset wire or buffer.

* The protocol is extremely hostile to devices with non-zero latency response. It's designed as a simple "Address this register and then immediately read out a byte in the next clock cycle". Works great for trivial devices, but for anything more complex it ends up needing a bank of register acting as a "proxy" to access the higher latency side of the chip. At this point I2C is an awesomely bad choice, but people keep doing this, because it's so universal.

pslam commented on Heliogen’s new tech could unlock renewable energy for industrial manufacturing techcrunch.com/2019/11/19... · Posted by u/redm

themaninthedark · 6 years ago

From what I read on the site here and on a Guardian article it looks like it is a modified Solar tower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#Solar...

I don't see where AI comes in at all.

pslam · 6 years ago

The AI comes in as a way to make rich venture capitalists, sorry I mean philanthropists, part with their money.

pslam commented on Bill Gates Objects to Elizabeth Warren’s Wealth Tax, and She Offers to Explain nytimes.com/2019/11/07/us... · Posted by u/mitchbob

maneesh · 6 years ago

Here's a thought experiment: You're a HN reader. You have had ideas to build a startup that can help the world solve a problem.

So you create it. You decide to fundraise, and that capital will help you succeed. You pay yourself a salary of $100,000/year, and put everything else into the company.

You raise $4 MM in a seed round, valuing your company at $20MM.

10-months later, your company is doubling growth YoY again, has a solid SAAS model, and low churn. You decide to raise again.

This time, you raise some more money for your company, and you're now valued at 70MM.

About a year later, you're growing just as fast -- but you see a new competitor is entering the ranks. It's time to scale even faster. So you go and raise again. In a fantastic series-B round, spread across TechCrunch and HN, you raise again, at a $200 MM valuation.

As the sole founder, you now own 50% of the company -- making you worth $100MM. Your salary has remained constant at $100,000/year though.

And then the wealth tax hits.

The new wealth tax says you're responsible to pay an annual tax of 2% on all assets over $50MM. Starting this year.

Which means that you, as a private founder with no liquid assets, are now responsible for $50MM * 2% = $1MM in taxes this year.

Even though your liquid income is $100,000, and you have barely that much in your bank account -- you need to come up with $1,000,000 in liquid cash this year. And since your valuation probably won't go down, it'll be at least that much, every year, for the rest of your life, until you shutter the company.

So you go and try to liquidate your shares. But unfortunately, it's not a public company --- and it's not that easy finding private secondary-market buyers willing to buy the half of the founder's entire stake.

So what do you do now?

As far as I can tell, this is how the wealth tax would work for startup founders.

pslam · 6 years ago

If you cannot find a buyer who will take a cut of a $50MM valuation, then the company is in fact worthless. Liquidity is no barrier to this — there are plenty of financial instruments available to do this transaction, even if you can't actually transfer the asset itself. Taking on debt, for example.

Yes, it sucks, but forgive me if I don't shed a tear for someone who has to find a way to pay taxes on their $50M of assets. They absolutely do have options which aren't terrible.

If a "wealth tax" did pass, then expect countless startups who specialize in handling the arbitrage of this.

pslam commented on Update on AB5 uber.com/newsroom/ab5-upd... · Posted by u/dawhizkid

pslam · 6 years ago

Uber's defense fails The Duck Test. They are describing a job, people doing a job, people paying for a job, and people taking a cut of the profits. They just don't use those words.

I suspect if/when this gets to a higher court, the whole thing will come crashing down, because to allow Uber's weaselly redefinition of common terms, would be to allow other classes of employment to similarly become unprotected.

pslam commented on Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets nytimes.com/2019/08/27/te... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

uuilly · 6 years ago

I used to work for Anthony at 510 systems. He tried to hire me for Otto as well. Watching this whole thing unfold from, obscure story in 2011 to the Waymo Vs. Uber trial to federal charges and national news is rather surreal. Anthony is one of the most creative, energetic thinkers I've ever encountered. If he stopped taking shortcuts he'd probably be the next Jobs or Musk.

pslam · 6 years ago

I have no idea about this guy, but in my experience, people like this always seem to be pleasant, creative types on the outside. Every now and then in conversation they hold weird viewpoints you just can't reconcile with their projected image, and wonder if you've misjudged them.

They usually turn out to have an underlying wonky or absent moral compass, and abusive personality traits.

The outward image is a confidence trick, and that's how they got where they are.

pslam commented on Attorney general: Americans should accept security risks of encryption backdoors techcrunch.com/2019/07/23... · Posted by u/pseudolus

LinuxBender · 6 years ago

This will be a taboo and unpopular option. My theory is that these discussions are theater. More often than not people store and access their data from their cell phones. Between CarrierIQ and OTA updates/access, there is no such things as end-to-end encryption on a cell phone. People get really upset when I bring this up. I suspect it is a matter of denial and not providing links to public documents, which will never exist. I would suggest that very few people have the patience to implement proper OpSec with their own data.

You don't even need "backdoors" in encryption. Existing lawful-intercept on Slack, Discord, Facebook, Google and all the wireless carriers will net just about anything you could ever want to know.

pslam · 6 years ago

> Between CarrierIQ and OTA updates/access, there is no such things as end-to-end encryption on a cell phone.

I don't think you understand what end-to-end means.

pslam commented on The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan jeffgeerling.com/blog/201... · Posted by u/geerlingguy

cyanoacry · 6 years ago

> There is no evidence the heat dissipated will impact lifespan.

I have to nitpick at this a little bit as a professional EE who works in high-reliability electronics. Wearout rates absolutely do depend on temperature (and thus heat), and thus the chips used here will have a shorter lifetime than those with active cooling. Now, whether that lifetime will be long enough for the common user is another question (maybe it's 1 million hours of life that get reduced to 100,000 hours, so not normally noticable).

pslam · 6 years ago

Yes, wearout rate definitely depends on temperature, but without reference to any actual data, this is what I mean by "no evidence".

Is it reducing 10 year lifespan to 9 years? 9.99 years? 5 years? Was it 50 year lifespan? It's pointless conjecture.