Just like the other brand cited in the original comment. He was pointing out what's different, and it's not the quality, it's the brand and ecosystem.

Those brands don't have the excellent Bluetooth connectivity. It's not the same quality.

It's not "the brand", it's his experience with the brand: he has a demonstrated trust in it based on his history with it.

If the alternative is a day spent comparison shopping and researching, then an overage of $200 is actually pretty reasonable, as opportunity costs go.

Great post !

It feels hard to get started on this subject, I'm always down to get more learning material.

While I'm only at the beginning and still has a lot to learn, to anyone interested in understanding zkSNARK, I heavily recommend reading Maksym Petkus's "Why and How zk-SNARK Works: Definitive Explanation". It's available for free on his website and goes through similar steps than this blog post to explain how it's all done.

That's interesting, GPT-3 can do classification too? Or did I misunderstood and you meant your engineers used classification to build a language model that didn't perform as well as GPT-3 (which is less surprising indeed) ?

GPT-3 can do classification. For example you can give it a prompt like "Hacker News is a website. Excel is a Windows program. Visual Studio is a Windows program. Safari is a Mac program. CPU-Z is", and even GPT2 will complete this with "a Windows program" (with GPT2 you need to try multiple times, discard useless results and average what's most common, but it works and is straight-forward to automate).

Is it needed to hold the patent to be profitable as a manufacturer ? If the research has been already paid out, I'd prefer healthy competition.

Just because they hold the patent doesn't mean they won't license it out. We're talking about the entire world here.

I know a lot of people, Americans in particular, are weary of 'big pharma' and for-profit healthcare. And Americans have good reason for that mistrust. But this isn't just an American issue.

Other governments such as the EU and India will force their hand if needed for the public good. As they've done countless times in the past. We just need to get this developed and manufactured as fast as possible.

And the linked article said the clash was between this pharmaceutical behemoth or a startup from the university. I'll take the behemoth now.

"The scientists’ small biotech company—a spinout partially funded by Oxford—was refusing to hand over intellectual-property rights. To outflank their bosses, the scientists asked a London investment banker to help explore other potential deals."

The patent protects from somebody simply copying the formula. Which is many orders of magnitude cheaper than doing research and development, especially on human subjects.

Why does that matter if the research and development costs were publicly funded?

Trials and regulatory approvals are a huge cost too.

If the government paid for all of that (including opportunity costs + a decent margin), then the government should have asked for the patent rights (or at least a commitment on pricing).

Has any serious journalist looked into exactly what the world governments paid for and exactly what the deals with the drug companies look like?

All I can find are biased opinion pieces devoid of actual information.

The FT had some coverage of this, but it wasn't massively in depth. The one thing I remember is that the AZ would be sold without profit until the end of the pandemic, which was contractually defined as June 2021.

Incidentally, if you want serious journalism, the FT is worth paying for.

Because they can and it will make them a ton of money.

The laws need to change.

But, for instance - public money is used to build roads, yet companies that build them make money in the process. There is no state-owned road building company. What's the difference here?

Public money pays for the roads. After the road is built, the road belongs to the public. Public money pays for the research. After the research finishes, the results should belong to the public, the same way as the road does.

The public can of course sell (i), charge (ii) or monetize in any other way.

(i) e.g. privatization of telephone networks

(ii) e.g. toll roads and bridges

That’s a faulty parallel. The road belongs to the public, while only the building is tendered to a private (in a presumably competitive market) to maximize quality and price ratio.

In this case the building is publicly funded for a profit AND the final result donated in “perpetuity” to make it a private TOLL road.

Double dip?

(I’m ok with subsidizing the research, and even negotiating a bulk manufacturing contract with an agreed margin... but a patent? Isn’t that bending too far?)

My village has their own road building and repairing department--mostly used for repairing. It's called the department of public works. We have our own utility company too. Both of those end up being cheaper than the having private companies do it.

You don't die if you can't afford to drive on the road. That's the difference.

But most places(at least around the EU) have already announced that the vaccine will be free - so there is no question about affordability?

The taxes still paid for it twice

In what way? Yes, the taxes paid for research, then taxes paid to purchase the product. But if everything was state owned top to bottom, the taxes would have had to fund research, then manufacturing, production and distribution. I wager the amount of money spent would have been exactly the same, so it's more like an accounting trick than an actual difference.

Its not about manufacturing costs. The companies continue to own the patents and after some period of time have every plan to start charging for use of it. This means they can get rich for decades off of the taxpayer-funded research. Meanwhile the governments have agreed to take on the risk by buying tens of millions of doses before they vaccines are even approved which means some of them will likely be waste due to either not getting approval or coming after more effective drugs.

Socialized risk and privatized profits. A capitalist's dream.

To go back to your highway analogy, its as if the government contracted for the entire interstate highway system to be built and then let various private companies charge a perpetual toll to use the roads in addition to the money they made for building it.

Its not an accounting trick, its a perpetual royalty on the taxpayer's expense if the drug works (and a profit even if their drug never passes Phase 3 clinical trials).

> If the research has been already paid out

Of course they could have done that, if gitlab had at least given a prior warning...

Some of the screenshot show them even trying to get a temporary account with support just to get what they've been locked out of to make a backup.

Actually I'd argue the example you provided is normal, as long as you authorise a particular encoding where every number n you're looking for is encoded as a string of n zeros.

It's then trivial to see that every number you can think of is encoded in there, and therefore any data, piece of music or movie that ever existed.

(I'm not sure we're allowed to fiddle with the encoding, but since we allow ourselves to represent a piece of music into a number, we're already talking about encoding anyway, so it doesn't seem like cheating to me...)

Normality of a number is with respect to number bases, so your trick with encoding is invalid. Otherwise, every computable number could be considered normal - take an algorithm for generating of it, supply a random string (this is the encoding), disregard the random string, and you have a perfectly valid normal representation of your number. So it is cheating.

I agree that normality is a specific formalized concept, but you could always require that an encoding function like this is injective.

Encoding doesn't count. Normality is a very specific mathematical concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

Also, 1.01001000100001... is a good example of a number that is both irrational and transcendental but not normal.

Definitely going to give it a shot.

The way I study math usually (actually not usually, because it's not very pracrical, but the most productive way I found) is by locking myself in a classroom, laying all my notes spread on different tables, and using the chalkboard as a temporary playground to redo demonstrations and exercises, and sometimes explore ideas on my own.

Theorems and objects end up having a literal spacial position in the room, and I have to move around to study. It feels like being a craft man in his workshop.

It's fun, really. It got me excited to study maths.

But I need a room for it, and I can only get one if I come super early, before class starts, to get 3 or 4 hours of productivity.

Maybe a virtual one like that can work. It's really appealing.

> Maybe a virtual one like that can work.

That to me sounds like a key thing. This app looks neat and probably will work for some, but I think it will only fully click for me if I ever would get a VR equivalent of it where I can have a full embodied experience of walking around. It's one more reason why I really hope Dynamicland will "escape" out of its experimental lab setting

In current VR technology that's going to be hard and annoying:

> Text is tough in VR. It’s hard to read, given the resolution of today’s HMDs and it’s hard to write, since you’re typically blind in a headset and it’s annoying to be tied to a keyboard at a desk when you’d rather walk and move around in VR. I tolerate these problems with RiftSketch by making the text in the editor extremely large. I can only see 20 lines of code at a time in VR whereas my physical desktop has a 4K monitor where I’m usually looking at 140 lines of code per file with several files open side-by-side. (https://uploadvr.com/riftsketch/)

And that isn't even trying to give you a pen & paper experience. (<- something I'd also like to have.)

That's why I mentioned Dynamicland: it kind of inverts VR by projecting onto real-world objects. It might be a way to bypass these issues

If he got his games in a bundle as he stated, and the bundle do no longer exist,, he could resell these games at a price closer to the standalone price, usually higher

This will guarantee the death of those bundles. It will give a few hundred dollars in profit to whoever bothers to collect on the resale arbitrage and change the sellers landscape for a decade or more.

I used to make money doing this by buying games from the humble bundle, waiting for the price to go up on G2A, then reselling them

Stadia sales pitch

Jumped in when we were joining groups starting with 'S', and now we're already at 'E'. Really satisfying.

Given that my account got a connection attempt from Sweden, I guess that's where the archivist live. Hopefully he will have a nice morning tomorrow thanks to the community.

I started joining groups a few hours ago and now have 43. The first group I joined started with U. Then there were some with T, some with S, and I'm at R now.

I'd rather we archive large or relevant groups first instead of going alphabetically and having to join groups with just 1 post.

It's going alphabetically through the group's people have nominated, and once that's done, it'll go by group member count.

Apparently now that they have gotten through the Fandom groups, and are working through the groups that were requested to be archived, they are ranked in order of number of members. So they are working on progressively smaller groups.

Are you going in reverse alphabetical order, or what?

I have read on the other hn thread that this is the case