sheepleherd

you are correct to point out the "flaw" in what s/he said.

I don't know the actual answer (and it would be difficult to convince me that anybody has all the data either) but many people "experienced" with startups believe that so many more options come out worthless that cash is strictly better, better expected return at lower risk.

however, in the same way that the freakonomics guys explain people playing state lotteries even thought they are "not worth it": state lotteries (and startups) offer some of the few chances that most people have to actually get rich, so even though they don't pay off on average, they are "the only way" and "worth it" to some people. Not claiming that these people have clear ideas about either expected values or risks involved, but they have clear ideas that "it's the only way". For workers at many skill levels, they may have a sense that in their industry they won't be too much worse off in the long run so why not take a shot.

ponzi's are illegal, and not for being misleading, for having the financial structure of a "pyramid scheme". "disclosing" the structure makes it easier to prove that they fit what has been made illegal.

These things have changed dramatically in the last couple generations, in Europe and in the US, and Asia. I would caution you against thinking that things will stay as they are. Hell, I'd caution you against thinking things actually are the way they seem to be.

Yeah but the world is not a pretty place, at home we have monopolistic unicorns, and abroad we have unfair business practices... I'm not shedding any tears for Apple, screw'em.

Even if the US is a relatively "clean" place to do business today, when we were the up and coming upstart, we stole plenty of ideas from abroad, and even within: the whole reason synecdotal Hollywood is in literal Hollywood is, movie producers snuck out there from the East Coast so they could infringe on Edison's film patents and get away with it.

Relatively poorer economies are never going to sit by and let large foreign industries dominate their economies if they can do anything about it. And we shouldn't expect relatively poorer economies to have deeply embedded free market economists explaining the theory of comparative advantage to every populist politician.

actually, i would say yours is the narrow point, and it's also a POV whose reach you are looking to broaden. The negative aspect of your POV is that some of us get tired of hearing it over and over (and I'm not picking on you, just explaining the different attitude) Labelling our worldview negative is also a negativity.

My goal in reading hacker news is not helping contribute blasts of cold air in order to preserve every little snowflake; but every little snowflake is welcome, nay, invited even, to read sober analysis of what processes are really going on. That's real math, science, and engineering.

I had to laugh the other day when I saw an effort to promote STEAM. STEAM? It's STEM, but including the Arts! OMG. Did we leave anybody out?

thanks, that's very good.

quick critique (wanted to contribute to this conversation while it's active rather than delve deeply into LLVM for the rest of the day :) it's (naturally and understandably) written from the perspective of "this is how it is, if you want to connect with what we do here's what you need to do".

As a pedagogical tool (that is still a compiling tool) it could use an intro of more "here is what a lexer needs to do, here's how/why we chose to do it, here is why what is downstream belongs downstream, here is an example using a language syntax that is extremely simple" (C is not), "here is an alternative way you could try to do it", etc.

But definitely you point up a good way to start toward [mystic music] "my dream goal" in this example.

Again tho, I'm wishing that there were tools and "a way" that ALL projects could be managed this way, not just one great complier, but the several great compilers and editors, and all-the-types-of-things-people-keep-having-the-urge-to-reinvent

like you are saying "it's a problem", and like I'm saying "that's the problem I'd like to see solved"

as an example, what they teach us in school, and what large projects like NASA have do do, is to first agree on a specification for interfaces, then to write code to the interface, then iron out the kinks. Working on a project like that, and the bigger the project, soon we discover that there are many local wins if we can only change the interface that we agreed on because "we didn't know enough when we agreed" etc. etc.

As an example of what I'm saying (as a thought experiment solution) is that if a real live compiler project was written to clean specs (even if the specs came after the code), then there'd be a lexer, parser, etc. and for a little homebrew project like this one, you could write your own lexer from scratch, testing it all the while against the rest of a functioning compiler. Probably, you would not finish it because you would learn in a series of "aha" moments what "the hard parts" are, and how they are solved.

So you could abandon your own piece, but at the same time you would be now equipped to contribute to the real project.

Or you could move on to working on the parser... lather, rinse, repeat.

No need to tell me what all "the reasons that doesn't work is"... I know the reasons, and it's useful to identify the laundry list of them, but the part I'm interested in is the attitude that "hey, this is worth solving" and "hey, this could be solved..."

more detailed question please? I'm happy to discuss but I'm not sure whether you are looking for bottom up nitty gritty details or more top down grounded philosophizing.

the computer science / computer programming problem I'd like to see solved is, keeping projects "fresh" and open/accessible enough that people like this could feel like they were learning in an unencumbered way, and at the same time contributing something useful to an existing project, while at the same time pushing the capabilities of what available open source projects can provide.

"Reinventing the wheel" projects absolutely litter public source nodes; believe me, I know why people do it; but my dream is the dream of software that most of us have given up on, code reuse, "reentrancy", shared libraries, etc.

Maybe something like a "wikipedia of source code".

I'm not discounting the benefit of doing a project to learn about it; what I'm saying is, too bad it's not code that will be useful for anything else without a lot more work; and too bad work is going into something that is not reuseful-able.

the language was already in the founding documents. yes, with hindsight, more language could have been added; but what I'm saying is, the language that was there is perfectly clear; it's lawyers and their bullshit who create the need for more language that needs to be written by lawyers and guess what, when that language is ignored, another lawsuit, and more lawyer bullshit. What I'm saying is, the system as practiced is completely broken, and it is the fault of the people who maintain the system, and they are called lawyers.

thanks for asking what does "constitutional right to petition" have to do with this, by thinking about how to explain it I figured out what I meant overall. I meant it in the sense that "rights to petition" and "rights to vote" are so fundamental they flow into documents such as the Constitution rather than flowing from it.

Rights to petition are, in a sense, even more fundamental than the right to vote, because historically speaking many undemocratic systems have been sustained because they listen to petitions. The worst dictators are the ones who kill you for petitioning.

This lawsuit I'm talking about was about both rights to vote and rights to petition and the lawsuit asked for nothing but rights to vote. They were gauranteed by the legal documents, ignored by the board, and only a lawyer would twist the very clear wording to say something else, based on standards that do not actually exist; and only a judge who was an attorney would listen to such crap.

I can see that in a messier case you might see a reason for seemingly nonsensical procedures, but this was so clean that all the worthlessness of our legal system was exposed. And I chose the Declaration not the Constitution because it also lays out "or you lose your claim to authority" which is pretty much how I feel to.

| Gawker wasn't guilty of either libel or slander because they didn't publish anything about Hogan that was false.

...not to mention, Hogan's public persona and living he has earned has been by posing as a larger than life clownish character; I don't even see that he was harmed. Ask yourself, do you think less of Hogan now? (and not because it turns out that he has less impressive sounding real name)

I'd have more sympathy for a "normal" person.

they took a gamble and lost, that's business != good riddance

I think they wanted you to notice the design and the thinking lines. They didn't set out to invent the world's best chess player.

what would make it much better along those lines (are you listening designers?) would be if it drew its thinking lines on the board but under the pieces.

because I can't study the board while it's thinking (it obscures all the pieces) I can't quickly learn if its lines are interesting or not

it's like you are explaining how somebody can invent a new alphabet that is "evocative" so we should accept using it instead of the alphabet we already know.

or to put it another way, Staunton.

There is no answer, there is no law, no standard, no precedent, which any "unusually sophisticated" lawyer looking at it for a few minutes would realize. But instead of informing the "unusually sophisticated" court honestly "hey, I had this idea, but I researched it and it doesn't look like there is anything directly applicable" (you know, truth, whole truth, nothing but, and no standing by while the court is misled) lawyers get to raise a huge holy stink about it. After I pay for the huge holy stink, do I get an answer? nope. That means that it could come up again tomorrow and I'd have to pay for it again.

Lawyers have huge laundry lists of these ideas they get to spitball, except they get paid to do it, the more they spitball the more they get paid, and none of it has anything to do with the matter at hand, the legitimate grievance that the two sides have and are trying to resolve.

I just found it on more than one occasion to be unusually playground bullying rather than sophisticated. And on the same-ish topic as sophistication, lawyers like to couch things they say in the cloak of "truth and justice", like for instance, how many times have I heard that the right to petition is so sacrosanct that it's in our Declaration of Independence? Yet went you actually try to pursue a right to petition you are bogged down in lawyerly bullshit.

I was pointing out a thought process that I thought would work better and more rationally (it's the way parents adjudicate disputes, i.e. what's really at stake here, and yes, parents do get to legislate) rather than making an "official proposal".

But inasmuch as it was an official proposal, the proposition was not that the all costs would shift to one party; it was that if you lost the preliminary ruling on the main point you could decide if you wanted to spend money on further litigation or look for a settlement; in a more nuanced way, if the preliminary ruling was 80-20 culpability/damages conceivably the winner might also wish to litigate further. I wasn't shifting the legal costs, I was educating the decisions along the way.

There potentially is something to be gained from more "loser pays" legal fees, but I was not making that proposal.

In my cases, I felt that the court spent time on issues that were not only minor, but the court left them unopined. This just encourages laywers to keep doing it, it earns them more money.

For example, and since you are an attorney I'll let you research this rather than give you the answer, does a signature on a shareholder petition under corporate by-laws require the word "certify" to be a valid signature? How much should be spent determining the answer to that? Seems pretty cut and dried to me, whether it is or is not required it's hardly breaking new legal ground. What's the answer? (and no weaseling out by saying "it depends". If you want to say "it depends", you need to finish the sentence, on what, and in that case the answer is what.)

Negative PR is used; unfortunately, it's used on the judge to turn the judge against the other side. It comes so thick and fast the judges get sick of it... yet, they are influenced by it, and they bluster but issue no pain to the offenders. And don't try it if you are not a lawyer, lawyers in court are a protected class.

ha ha, good one! :)

but my personal peeve is actually a little different: regardless of whether I'm part of a unique group or it works this way for everybody, the different parts of my brain remember the prank differently and at different rates of speed, so even after the prank is revealed/resolved, the part of my brain that flinches keeps remembering the lie, not the truth. Like, my gf recently April fools' pranked me that my favorite restaurant was going to close soon. Now, every time I pass the place or think of it it, I immediately think "and I've got to go there soon before it closes" even though immediately after that I think "oh, no, that was a prank" I still have the surge of emotion. In terms of the prank, I get it, my reaction was funny. But in terms of time wasted, it's worse because it's Attention Deficit time, and I know I continue to find it sooo irritating well beyond the momentary pleasure she got out of it.

| We do not have equal access to our judicial system in the United States. If you have money, you have the power...

Your POV that money distorts and helps determine winners, while seeming so prima facie obvious, does not come close to getting to the real problem. I know this because I have money and I've spent well over a million dollars on attorneys in the last decade and I got very little in the way of ... not justice, very little in the way of consideration of the core legal questions in each case; in fact, I don't even know how the interesting core legal questions would have been resolved, the courts completely dodged them; and along the way, I saw a vast amount of phony posturing, amplification of minor details, and outright lying and manipulation of the legal system, mostly by attorneys; and the judges eat it up, because they too are attorneys. (and BTW, when a judge sees an unsophisticated indigent defendant, they actually do bend over backward to help them, say a confused tenant who does not pay rent is most usually given many many more chances.)

To put it into the context of this guy's patent rant: my point would be, there is a question as to whether this patent is valid or not, and whether it covers this particular issue or not. The "right/just" answer would be found more quickly and more cheaply and more rationally if the judge would simply decide that first in a non-binding way, like "from what I know so far, here's the way this is tilted". Then after that, if the losers wanted to spend money to present a stronger case they could, and the judge could say "warmer...warmer... colder". Then after all that, if you want to try to change the thing on a technicality like "yeah but you didn't serve the notice the right way", then the court would hear that.

The way courts decide things is to completely front-load all these arcane minor points, and it has the effect of squeezing the shit out of the litigants to force them to settle. "You think you have a legal dispute that's worth this much? I'll give you dispute resolution that costs more and much of your life. Now do you want to settle? Don't test me, as a judge I'm a former attorney, we win at this game. Now do you want to settle?"

oh the rich rich irony of your comment here, you silencer of dissenting opinions you.

first of all, oh come off it, when I said everybody else, I meant "everybody else here on HN who is downvoting me and not balanced by upvoters in my corner, and since anybody can upvote and only a small faction can downvote, we are talking a serious tilt". (In a microcosm of the larger gerrymander debate, your studied obtuseness on this issue is forcing me to spill a lot of words to explain a notion that should be obvious to you, but I apparently am the only one amongst you and me who is thinking about that.)

But to your point(less), considering the world population, I've looked, I've googled the gerrymander topic hard; and I've tried to engage the wikipedia "talk" community in hopes of finding birds of a feather, people actively interested in the issue. (You give it a try, I am the only one saying it... Oh wait, it's much easier for you to avoid learning anything and just to drop a tart comment.)

I am certain that many others (still a tiny minority of the planet) have noticed that when you draw district boundaries that you must inherently advantage some and disadvantage others; a subset of those notice more sophisticated political things about it, and a tiny subset probably notice that it is a deeper d(N-color geographic map projection onto a hyperdimensional Venn diagram problem)/dt.

But that notion does not filter out. The concept of a "gerrymander" is very dear to the hearts of relatively sophisticated people (unsophisticated people don't know the word). I imagine it's not taught properly in political science curricula.

My claim is, there is no way to draw legislative districts that is not a gerrymander (unless you adopt the non-standard definition that a gerrymander is any drawing that is not geometrically compact/convex)

The original Gerrymander political cartoon: it was a clever rhetorical point, I'm in favor of cleverness and rhetorical flourish.

Further noticing that all districting is political, ideological, or doomed to be rejected by an outraged populatce, I don't know how clever that is, but I can't find anybody other than me who has noticed it and stands up and says it.

The situation with supposed gerrymandering is more subtle than you give it credit for, and you therefore are either hopelessly naive about voting constituencies, or you would soon see on inspection that your "impartial system" would utterly fail.

To try to forge a simple example to illustrate it to you (and yes, this is spoonfeeding to an HN audience who refuses to do the work themselves when downvoting is so much simpler): people interact with their neighbors and they squabble with their neighbors and there are many more factions on a myriad of issues than even a multiparty system can allow for. But neighbors unite over many issues, like "we don't want a sewage treatment plant here", or "we need more parking".

If you have a "system" that does not give local people a loud voice on local issues, your system will be overturned in favor of one that does. For instance, the American Revolution and the Brexit are the same basic issue: people far away should not be deciding our local affairs.

So now that your system's been overturned, we have a system of local districts... but local districts are filled with people who do not agree on all issues...

It's all gerrymandering, there is no such thing as not gerrymandering, including in the mathematically degenerate cases of Athenian (or New England town meeting) democracies. Factorial of 0 has to be 1, because...because... "gerrymander"

False. My "most parent" comment attracted downvotes well before any of my other comments. I went to edit it to improve it but I think downvotes turn off the edit button or something (not much time had transpired). So what exactly did you find objectionable about my tone there? My guess is I "Socratically" challenged the firmly held beliefs of pinheads that they are politically and intellectually sophisticated when they are simply not; you should not defend the mob.

In terms of your suggestion about not drawing district lines at all, I can (seriously) see no merit to it at all. That could be because while you could have made an actual argument for your point, instead you simply stated it as I did in my post... I guess according to your comment calculus I should accuse you of not following the tone that we prefer and downvote you?

cute turn of phrase :)

however, I feel you are so convinced you are right that you are not looking at the actual issue and you intellectually impoverish yourself as a result. Gerrymander is an accusation you hurl at opponents in the majority who don't do what you want (like calling them uncivil even if they have not been, eh!?). However, when your party is in you do the same thing... not because you are a hypocrite (like the hypocritical games played over Supreme Court nominations) but because there is no way to draw redistricting boundaries that is actually fair; many factions will be disadvantaged by aggregating votes in districts, there is no way to avoid it.

Instead of downvoting me more, google a supposed gerrymander map and try it on a city you know, you'll see that you'll be making political choices that you favor. You might be "fair" in your mind because you consider yourself an independent so you will favor neither Democrats nor Republicans, but instead your gerrymander will favor some other metrics that you prefer.

You might even go so far as try to create a very evenly divided legislature that will have difficulty passing any laws, and you'll look at me and say "see, I did it"... then immediately after that I'll have to listen to your unsophisticated drivel about how gridlock is destroying our country and if only everybody was "civil" like you, beautiful compromises would emerge.

if you scour the discussion history of the wikipedia page you will find my comments many months ago disputing that the article implies that there is some "fair" way to draw districts without laying out what that way should be.

I contend that the system we use, the gerrymandering system, is the most defensible, it's democratic. Don't like it, vote for somebody else.

You (and everybody else) don't understand what I mean because you haven't thought about it as much as I have.

By what principle do you think districts should be drawn--they must be redrawn due to shifting population--so do you intend to draw exaggerated patterns to spread out minority opinions, or to clump them together? Or are you suggesting that you flip coins topologically? What if flipping coins results in a salamander of some sort, you want to use soap films to find the minimum enclosing surfaces? "Mathematically neutral" methods of drawing districts will result in some parts of the country randomly enhancing minority opinions while other parts of the country will randomly diffuse them, with results that will lead partisans to complain bitterly.

My point is, there IS NO RIGHT ANSWER. There is only your preference.

pranks that surprise people, ok.

pranks that waste somebody's time, not ok.

I never want my time wasted, and I know that I can be fooled, there is no real challenge to wasting my time.