These excuses just keep getting funnier. App developers: make sure you file your patents, or else its YOUR fault if Apple decides to participate in blatant 90s style Microsoft anticompetitive behavior.
There are enough swiping keyboards around now that it would be tricky to get any patent on it surely? Definitely seems like a dick move but "tech company copies good feature that isn't legally protected" is not exactly uncommon in this industry, if anything it's encouraged by most consumers
The parent commentor is not excusing Apple's behaviour, nor saying it was the developer's fault. They said the developer would be in a better position if they had a patent.
As someone who spends their time maintaining every aspect of my cars (oil, brakes, bearings, everything), Toyotas were by far the easiest, simplest, cheapest, most reliable and longest lasting. What a weak point to make about Tesla over Toyota.
My Model Y has 27,000 miles on it and all I’ve had to do is refill the wiper fluid. Toyotas are great cars. And you buy them from a repair shop. Think about that.
If we were to break up Facebook or Google, it would be of the granularity of YouTube or Instagram, which is actually what TikTok competes with. I cannot see how YouTube or Instagram could suffer or lose market share.
> The impact TikTok has had on the social media landscape is undeniable. This year, it is projected to reach 2.1 billion users, and its success hasn’t gone unnoticed by other key players, most notably Instagram. [1]
> in addition to gaining more users than Instagram, TikTok is also earning the attention of top power users. [2]
I am not exactly sure what you are trying to prove here. As far as I am concerned, Google and Facebook have not been broken up into pieces of YouTube and Instagram yet. How does this in any way demonstrate what would happen if we broke up big tech? Sounds like further evidence they need to be released from their mismanagement.
> I cannot see how YouTube or Instagram could suffer or lose market share.
The references I shared make it very clear that Instagram is losing market share. Not sure why those dots were difficult to connect.
Moving on to your next point:
> Sounds like further evidence they need to be released from their mismanagement.
It's interesting you said that. Obviously a lot of people are in favor of breaking up Facebook from Instagram, but my guess was that it was always for antitrust concerns. More recently, I started to sense that an additional flavor has entered this conversation recently, something like "Facebook and Instagram would be better products if they were run by independent companies." I think what people don't realize is how much effort went into building the world's most sophisticated ad targeting platform, and how convenient it was for Instagram to benefit from Facebook's resources. Not to mention the shared spam/adult/community moderation, shared hosting, etc, etc. Breaking up those apps into separate companies would definitely increase their cost of operation and would slow down their rate of development.
> The references I shared make it very clear that Instagram is losing market share. Not sure why those dots were difficult to connect.
I said that in the context of breaking up G/FB. Why isolate that sentence for no apparent reason? It was a very short comment.
> It's interesting you said that. Obviously a lot of people are in favor of breaking up Facebook from Instagram, but my guess was that it was always for antitrust concerns. More recently, I started to sense that an additional flavor has entered this conversation recently, something like "Facebook and Instagram would be better products if they were run by independent companies."
There is no additional flavor. Ask yourself why we bother about antitrust. It is to raise the level of competition. Do you believe innovation is best nurtured in a competitive environment? Literally, the title of the bill consists the words a "stronger online economy", for "innovation".
Pooling all your resources into ads targeting because you are comfortably sitting in a dominant position is exactly the problem. YouTube and Instagram with independent leadership would have the flexibility to focus on their market -- image/video media. That is why TikTok and Snapchat were able to catch Instagram with their pants down -- Facebook had no idea alternative forms media (and did not care) was possible and were simply focused on milking their existing platform. Better ads targeting does not bring in users, and market share is driven by users, not ads. Why does it matter if it increases their cost of operation and slows down their rate of development if the majority of their development is focused on ads targeting - an ineffective user growth strategy? The blame lies on nobody but Facebook or Google if their products have been losing marketshare in 2021.
Ok, I might finally understand you now. It appears you're agreeing with me that Instagram is losing market share, but you're adding the caveat that this wouldn't be the case if it operated as a stand-alone company. We're agreeing that as a stand-alone company it would take longer to develop features and it would cost it more money to do so, but your argument is that the features would have a better PMF.
The part we're disagreeing on is the root cause of the fact that Snapchat and Tik Tok managed to out-innovate Facebook (which is very similar to the root cause of what Facebook initially out-innovated Google). You're thinking that it's because Facebook was focused for too long on milking the platform, and I agree with that, but I don't think it's the root cause. The root cause in my opinion is that Facebook became a public company, and now it needs to chase quarterly results or the stock price will fall and its top talent will leave. The same thing happened with Google back in the day. If you were to spin off Instagram, it would still be a public company and it would still have the same boundary conditions on innovation that it has today - quarterly results.
In other words, my thesis is very simple - once a company goes public, you cannot expect it to be a leader in innovation anymore [1][2]. But don't cry for public companies - when one door closes, another one opens; public companies can very well continue to grow by acquiring innovation and market share, which is what happened with Facebook and countless other examples. But... M&A becomes easier when you have a balance sheet with a lot of zeroes on it. If you were to break up Facebook, the individual companies would have a smaller M&A budget, and that would weaken their sharpest weapon they have at this time.
[1] I interviewed at Facebook pre-IPO and met about a dozen of their top PM stakeholders back at the time, including the current CPO. As you would expect, the strength of that talent was just insanely good. Of those people, only Chris Cox is still there, but even he decided to leave for a while. At the end of the day, people are too motivated by money, and it hurts in two ways: those who have it are no longer working as hard, and those who don't have it can make more of it at pre-IPO companies.
[2] Google deserves a lot of praise for trying to escape that fate with with their efforts with X - Vaymo may or may not end up generating cash, but either way, my hat's off to them. Even so, X highlights another problem with innovation at a megacorp - unless your idea has a clear potential of being a 100 billion dollar company, it's not worth pursuing it since it won't make enough of a difference for someone with AdWords on their balance sheet. In contrast, there's plenty of VC to be raised as a startup seemingly trying to become a 1 billion dollar company and then eventually discovering that it can go further than that.
Not many people realize, but Longyearbyen is very accessible during the season. There is a fully operational airport only a few miles out that services multiple passenger flights in and out daily. I came by to visit a few years ago and the flight between OSL to LYR came around about 70 euros, albeit I think I had a student discount. I was more surprised there was not more tourist activity, given the novelty.
People need incentives, and being competitive in school-like activities provides them.
Universities have been moving away from evaluating candidates from raw academic or scholastic perspectives. For instance, removing standardized testing from the process. [1,2,3] This has raised concerns and considerable pushback from parents. It raises the uncertainty of admission, even if they raise a child to do everything right and mold them into the standard high achieving student.
Of course, not unwarranted concerns: how do we fairly evaluate a student's external achievements without picking favorites. There is no objective measure to solve that problem.
I was asking how to get kids to explore things where they might find something that sparks them to desire to spend time on "A Project of One's Own".
Competition in school or school-like activities is a fabricated incentive that doesn't have anything to do with kids doing what Paul is talking about with "A Project of One's Own". Chasing a GPA leads to a feedback loop akin to "keeping up with the Joneses" and basically the "plodding along" path in life.
Where do you find the balance between spending time maximizing your child's entry into a safe and secure future versus entertaining their passions? Not that being passionate about something and school-like activities are mutually exclusive anyway. Anyway, kids are far too young to decide what they want to do, so college is a good time and place for that already. Most students coming in to top universities come in undeclared.
Maybe Paul's kids have that privilege to go down that riskier alternative. For many others, its non existent and frankly, it is tone deaf.
As a (relatively new) father, I think about this a lot. The way I see it, when I was my kid's age, we used to have middle-class opportunities for A students, B students, C students and D students. Maybe A students went on to good universities and did really well, B students went to college or something but still lived a solid middle class life, C students maybe could do a little community college and still eek out a living, and D students got by with hard work and some assistance. There was a reasonable shot at a middle path for everyone. But now the middle class is disappearing, and society is very quickly bifurcating into two classes: "Well off" and "Crippling poverty/prison". The bar is higher and the stakes are higher now than when I was a kid. The world is now a brutal and competitive slug-fest for those shrinking number of top slots, and if my kid doesn't get one of them, she's doomed to a really tough life. Only the top-tier of the A students gets a crack at "well off" and the rest--will be left behind. There's no middle path anymore. There is a huge tidal wave of inequality coming, and I am willing to sacrifice to ensure my kid gets on one of the few boats left. She can figure out what she's passionate about once she's safely on the boat.
I actually learned this lesson playing World of Warcraft, a Massively Multiplayer Online game. You see in WoW there is a huge timesink of effort required to beat the game. We're talking thousands of hours of gameplay. It's a social game, and the more skilled the people that you are with, the quicker that comes. It's also an RPG, meaning that you need to do x to do x+1.
The playerbase therefore learns the most optimal way to do everything the fastest possible way, and they call that the meta. The meta is almost always monotonous and boring. It's a terrible way to play the game, but if it gets you to be playing with a cool group of people, people will bore themselves to death.
Another aspect of the meta is that being an RPG, you are just about forced to stick to one character. When a patch is added to the game and your character goes from the storngest to the weakest, your social status drops considerably. But no problem, because in a few months another patch might launch that switches the balance. The group of people that you deal with therefore need to treat you well when you are weak so that you will stay with them when you are strong.
The neat thing with WoW is it's 15 years old, there have been many many cycles, and all of the people driven to play this way have long since burned themselves out. We see numbers for what they are. We see the social status games.
The balance is to ignore the numbers and find the people. The people going to Stanford might just be on average better people than going to your local State University, but if you can find people to fill out your social circle within your State university that meet your criteria, do that. If you can sacrifice a little bit of effort to move yourself somewhere slightly better to get around better people, maybe that's worth it. But don't sacrifice everything for Moloch.
And the lesson you learn once you give up the numbers, that we all intuitively know anyway, is that you very quickly get BIGGER numbers than those chasing it. Capability comes from the feedback of learning and doing. When you do stuff for fun and feel pain when you mess up, you become motivated to learn, which gives you more opportunity to play. So there was actually no balance after-all, the dominant choice was always to play.
So here's to play. Here's to WoW. A gigantic waste of time that has taught me many of lives most important lessons.
> being competitive in school-like activities provides them
To an extent. I keep wondering, wouldn't it be better if schools/universities were structured as PvE challenges, not PvP ones? Trying to elicit a culture of collaboration, instead of pitting students against each other?
I may be strongly biased, because I hate competition outside of games[0], and competitive incentives generally make me stop caring.
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[0] - Particularly, games in which points are fake and only matter for brief status rewards and after-play joking.
If I was a Professor teaching the same class to two different sections, it would be really neat to give the entire winning section extra credit based on the difference between the average values of the two sections. This would encourage group study and would ultimately lead to students helping their other classmates out. And since teaching is the best way to learn, everyone would do better.
Maybe you don't even need two sections. Just split the class into two teams? Has this been tried anywhere?
That's still a "student vs. student" mindset, just one that incorporates a form of collective punishment, which is against the Geneva convention. It's an absolutely atrocious idea.
The problem is that, if both teams are randomly selected, then they should be expected to have equal underlying performance, and the only thing your grades are measuring is noise. It is unfair when one winds up with a team that happens to contain outlier students through sheer luck of the draw.
The law of large numbers would smooth these kinds of things out, but a single semester is not a very long time, and we don't want classes to have large numbers of students.
Collaboration and competition are not mutually exclusive. Competition does not always result in self-determination. For instance, people mentor others because they might learn something new themselves or grow their network. Thus, you can enjoy collaborating with others while doing so because of your competitive ambitions.
It's the question of who are you competing with, and how hard. That's why I mentioned PvE and PvP games. I find a fair competition against a (widely understood) environment fine. I dislike competing against my fellow players.
As an example: our class at the university was somewhat unique in that, unlike most other departments/subjects, our scholarships were thresholded only by grade average. So, where students in other classes were competing against each other to reach the few top spots that paid money, in our class, we all helped each other out. Helping another student didn't jeopardize your chances at the scholarship, and it felt nice when the person you helped got the scholarship too. We were playing a PvE game - competing against the grading system. Even though ultimate rewards were given based on individual performance, there was no downside to cooperation.
I am not sure I agree. The topic of intellectual property and trade secrets in software, or if IP laws should even apply, is probably another discussion entirely. However, there's no reason to trivialize it to cutthroat copy and pasted code. If Radon was a state actor, I am unsure HN would be responding the same way here.
Obviously, knowledge learned from mistakes or design discussions from one's time at another company is no issue. The intern seemed to have worked on a project very limited in scope to the overall product (package management). It is quite possible the bells and whistles that Replit's CEO is claiming that is copied are taken from design documents made by someone else - which is not at all learnings from working around a particular domain. In my opinion, this might actually be problematic. I don't think Radon was being malicious here, but you might also want to consider that Radon is a fresh graduate and might not have fully considered the implications of where it is acceptable for him to draw designs from.
I would have been willing to buy that if Amjad wasn’t clearly being a major ass here. He basically prejudiced me to take Radon’s side, regardless of the merits of the argument.
Yeah, I think Amjad would be fully justified in saying “Hey, I’m not comfortable with this. I don’t think keeping that website up is worth throwing away a strong reference from the CEO of a highly funded company - do you?”.
A reference/relationship like that is worth a lot more than a project that is a little sketchy. No matter what happens, I think the intern has taken a net loss from this whole fiasco.
Its not a good way to settle disagreements by making threats as you outline here. I think your suggestion is as bad a way of handling this as the original way. Why not react positively, re-state your intent to hire the intern, say that this is indeed interesting for the company - and because of that - could you please make it not public (against a bonus) and maybe keep working on it inside repl.it.
I'll concede that it's a fuzzy line at times. But nothing I've heard so far here strikes me as justifying a belief that this case falls into "obviously theft of some kind of IP" category. OTOH, I'm biased as I am not generally a fan of the idea of "IP" in general, so there's that...
Yea, we may never know. If Replit just went ahead and filed a lawsuit and presented their case in front of an actual court, that would shed light on the legitimacy of their claims. Some posters has offered to help pay for his defense. Optics would still be pretty bad since no intern should go through that. But a little better since there would be a lot less doubt.
Unfortunately, they must now face the court of public opinion, which has not had the best track record lately.
No, lets be honest, this did not "change" for the reasons you listed. Mainboards are all manufactured in China. Right to repair advocates are not looking for manufacturing processes, silicon designs or calibration procedures. All of which suppliers in China already have and YOU, the owner of the product, do not. China is probably already way ahead than anybody else in that area.
It is a misleading conflation, a complete dishonest lie, by opponents of right to repair. They always say "I support right to repair" then add "concerns" that absolutely do not apply. Right to repair folks aren't trying to replicate the microchip here. They are trying to replace a blown capacitor or a damaged resistor. They want to understand which parts are needed so they can execute the job properly. How power cycles through a board is not a magical trade secret.
Electrical failure is relatively rare, but resistors are just as susceptible to mechanical and liquid damage, which is probably a more common failure than electrical degradation. Or a failure could cascade from another component and pop the resistor too.
