georgebarnett

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
1,336
Submissions
304
Member since
Oct 26
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
What sort of positive effect would you expect?

What do you think is wrong with people over 60?

Comment · 2 years ago
Again I disagree on cost. I just had a look again at what it costs to buy a company off the shelf in the UK (last place I did that). It’s about £299 and another £50 a year. Theres probably some other small change fees in there.

I completely agree on risk though and it highlights the core of the argument - building a business is time consuming and risky in a way that being an employee is not.

That’s one reason why business owners are able to capture more profit. They took more risk and placed themselves into a situation where their earnings are not bounded by a single contract.

Everybody has free will and could start a business but not everybody is capable due to skill, capacity, circumstance, etc.

Therein lies the irony. None of the people whining loudest will start a company because it’s risky and fraught with danger but they want all the spoils of ownership and responsibility.

Comment · 2 years ago
If the worker in Shanghai had similar economic freedom and rights to workers in the west have then this would not be an issue.

Instead, useful idiots everywhere are proposing to add restrictions to the parts of the system working well.

Comment · 2 years ago
This is a rediculous assertion.

To begin, you know nothing of the circumstances of millions of people. Certainly not enough to make sweeping statements.

In 2023, there were 5.5 MILLION new businesses started in the USA. Do those people all have generational wealth? of course not.

The reality is it’s easy to start a business but very hard to succeed.

Comment · 2 years ago
Your overly abstract language has no value here.

Profit is not surplus value created by worker - that’s a 4 year olds understanding and negates all the other components of the system of which labour is only one.

We have tried “choosing” various “arrangements” (or more correctly, competing economic systems) and evidence points to capitalism being the correct approach to maximise liberty, growth and progress.

Comment · 2 years ago
Take it from the workers?

Are you suggesting that workers do not have employment contracts where they agreed to trade labour for wages at a fixed price?

Workers always have the choice to take the risk of starting their own company for higher potential earnings.

Comment · 2 years ago
What I'm wrangling with is this:

I agree that a particular sequence of words is copyrightable.

What I'm struggling with is that facts _about_ that corpus of text are not copyrightable. A simple fact could be that the word "bar" is the 5th word. The 6th word is "jazz". Etc.

A model is trained from these "facts" across many source documents. It is thus itself a derived 'fact' given a set of training inputs and parameters, so then how could _that_ then be copyrighted?

Put another way - there's the origin text and then.. is it turtles all the way down and none of it can be copyrighted because its all math and calculations derived from that?

Comment · 2 years ago
Maybe I've got the completely wrong end of the stick here, but why isn't an AI model treated as a fact, given it's essentially a factual summary of the most likely bit sequences to occur given an input sequence?
Comment · 2 years ago
NFS scales and operates incredibly well however it has constraints.

Like any tool, it has its appropriate uses.

Why would you exclude a useful tool from your arsenal because of perceived downsides that are easy to hide from the layer above with appropriate system design?

Comment · 3 years ago
Perhaps we are speaking about different concepts. I was referring to the pace layered architecture.
Comment · 3 years ago
Collaboration tools are some way from being systems of record and there is substantial difference between competitors. Generic chat apps are not yet useful enough (despite years of development) for most companies - IRC failing to win is evidence of this and so is the fact that companies aren’t switching en masse to run their infrastructure on whatever is the OSS flavour of the day. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen some day, but that day won’t be soon.

When coupled with the fact that there are still a huge number of companies which haven’t yet converted to using these tools and purchasing the market leader for a premium makes total sense.

With regards to component supply - companies that are producing unique chips are worth plenty, where as those that are making COTS components aren’t.

Comment · 3 years ago
I disagree - tech _is_ software and it’s so ubiquitous that it’s essentially invisible.
Comment · 3 years ago
With all industries are converting to software and every person on the planet moving towards owning a smartphone it surprises me that there’s an ongoing narrative that tech is collapsing.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton