511–520 of 528 posts
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If you know more than someone else, that's great, and if you want to share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn, so much the better. But please be careful to do it without putting others down, no matter how ignorant they are or you feel they are.
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If you know more than someone else, that's great, and if you want to share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn, so much the better. But please be careful to do it without putting others down, no matter how ignorant they are or you feel they are.
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If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Edit: the other commenter was also breaking the rules, of course. I've responded to that user elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45595217.
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> it was such a a huge loss seeing those corporate labs disappear. A loss for whom? Society? Of course, and that's exactly why they don't happen anymore -- because while they were a boon for society they were a terrible bet for the company. And when a company has a choice between doing good for their bottom line or doing good for society, 100% of the time they choose their bottom line. I mean, look at the legacy of X…
This implies Xerox got no return on their research, and simply let Apple take their research, which isn't true. Rather, it was part of the investment deal they made with Apple [1]: > Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly a…
What I said was that it worked out a lot better for Jobs than it did Xerox, not that they didn't get anything. It certainly didn't work out how they'd hoped. And that hasn't gone unnoticed by would-be funders of future Xerox PARCs.
> Xerox's lack of capitalisation was a problem of their own making, not something inherent about investing in basic research.
I dunno, to me it feels like the people who are good at doing and investing in basic research are not the same kind of people who are good at building and investing in applications. Yes you can present a counterfactual where if only Xerox had Jobs' vision and execution everything could have been different... but chalking it up to just "they could have done it better and been successful" misses the fact that they were doing the best they could with the smartest people they could find, and still couldn't capitalize.
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> it was such a a huge loss seeing those corporate labs disappear. A loss for whom? Society? Of course, and that's exactly why they don't happen anymore -- because while they were a boon for society they were a terrible bet for the company. And when a company has a choice between doing good for their bottom line or doing good for society, 100% of the time they choose their bottom line. I mean, look at the legacy of X…
Yeah, no, the ROI on Xerox Parc was excellent for Xerox, because of the technology they _did_ successfully commercialize on their own: the laser printer. It helped Xerox to $8 billion in revenue in 1984, a level Apple didn't beat until 2006. Even Microsoft didn't beat Xerox in revenue until the year 2000, where Xerox had $19 billion in revenue. Apple didn't reach that level until 2010. So you could say that it took t…
So what you're saying here is that the best thing to come out of PARC for Xerox was an incremental improvement to their existing product line that could have been proposed by a typical R&D team.
Again, not a great selling point for the ROI of PARC from Xerox's perspective.
Your article strongly consonated with the ideas I often try to communicate to those around me. I wish there were more open discussion about biases related to PhD qualifications and the growing influence of venture-capital-style practices in science. Many researchers dedicate themselves to exploring new and uncertain areas of knowledge, yet their work is sometimes undervalued by hiring managers and industrial professi…
> I personally know HRs who consider the "PhD" tag in a CV a red flag. Which should only tell us what a cancer HR departments are. Filtering someone from talking to the hiring department, for the crime of doing a PhD, and telling others about it - to me this sounds more likely like someone getting a kick out of wielding the bit of power they have over others than a useful contribution to society.
It is bewildering to me that HR is responsible for hiring anyone outside the HR department.
There's something odd in this argument. If you come at it from a Canadian perspective Canada seriously spent on neural network computer science when almost no one else did (many in AI considered the entire thing discredited and impossible), now the (financial) gains from that are almost entirely in a foreign country. The US science establishment was all about buying and utilizing Russian rocket engines until he-that-…
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Yeah if you go check almost any major scientific breakthrough of the past century it usually starts with "some guy was working in a corporate lab with an unlimited budget". We're stagnating as a species a lot more, but at least the shareholders got a payout for their hard work of doing literally nothing. Rent seeking at its worst.
Silly argument. Everything in gravitational physics goes back to Newton? Who cares about Convex Optimization if you do not undertand gravity? Math goes back to Euclid and the Greeks? Mankind has consistently built upon existing knowledge. "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. (Newton)" IMHO, what we are seeing is the US was generating 50% of the world's GDP at the end of World War II.…
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high temperature superconducting would cause a big leap. cheap energy would also help. cheap compute-in-the-walls. machines doing all the dangerous jobs.
Cheap energy is possible now with solar. There is a reason why it hasn't been done yet. Nobody has a need for it. Remember, you may think it would be nice to have an electric car you can charge for microcents a mile, but most people dgaf about putting gas in their car. Machines doing dangerous jobs also is a thing these days. High temperature superconducting can potentially be useful in a few applications that involv…
that doesn't sound like a very good way to improve human life on Earth.
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Dumb maybe question: Why couldn’t the companies with excess profits just pay they employees more in salaries?
Companies are controlled by shareholders who appoint the board who appoint the CEO. If the CEO decides to pay employees more, the board will change him because shareholder put money to get money out, not to give to employees. Companies can give "shares" to employees, which means excess profits can be made dividends out of which employees "touch a bit". If you would have your own company (privately own and full contro…
also boards rarely change CEOs for paying employees well, they change CEOs if the company is not growing
labor's share of income usually falls during periods of growing output and rises otherwise (but apparently tech booms/bubbles are an exception, check the graph -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_share#/media/File:FRED_g... )
an unexpected but welcome change is that real wages of low-income workers increased too during the recent years, but the historic trend obviously shows the enormous disparity (check figure C 1979-2019)
https://www.epi.org/publication/strong-wage-growth-for-low-w...
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and for interesting context let's not forget that during this time a lot of immigrants started to work
https://cis.org/Report/ForeignBorn-Number-and-Share-US-Popul...
and for context on the context, the size of the active population also increased - so fewer people age out of the workforce than how many started working
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/active-population...
