thomasdullien's comments

Cool, updated the profile.

(The reason Google has an office here is because Urs Hölzle studied at ETH at knew people here.)

FWIW: I am a 2nd-time entrepreneur. I bootstrapped a company in Germany from 2004-2011, and sold it to Google then. As part of that I moved to Switzerland. I started another company in early 2018 in Zurich, believing the hype about it being a good place to do business.

I won't go into details publicly, but: If your market and your potential acquirers are primarily in the US, and you think your startup will have a long-term focus in the US, avoid incorporating in Zurich. Go to London, Berlin, Paris, pretty much anywhere but Zurich. If you absolutely have to incorporate in Switzerland, move yourself to a startup-friendly Canton such as Zug. Do not incorporate in Zurich, and do not open an office in Zurich.

My experiences have been resoundingly negative, and I am not the only one - founders just avoid talking about the negative experiences for fear of causing more problems.

If your market will be primarily Switzerland and the immediate neighbors, starting here is likely fine (albeit you will get better price/performance on engineering in neighboring countries).

Feel free to reach out in private.

Man, thank you for writing the last paragraph. I looked at Rust, I quite like the language, I think it gets a million things right and is a substantial improvement over existing languages, but ... every time I point out that Rust does not magically solve all security problems, I need to spend two days dealing with people with less security expertise than me yelling at me that I am wrong and rewriting the world in Rust will deliver enlightenment. That particular fringe of the Rust community almost turned me away from the language.

So reading your last paragraph makes me feel welcome as someone that says "Rust is great - but rewriting everything in Rust will not solve security". Thanks. <3

Yeah, the (ro)BDD comparison really is missing; those would be the default data structure I'd reach for for such a problem.

s/cherry picking/showing an example with interesting properties that is different from France/g

So this is actually where the discussion should go: What properties does the Swiss wealth tax have (particularly in the wider taxation system) that the French wealth tax did not have?

What is needed for a wealth tax to have no negative effects? What about income and capital gains tax at the same time? Etc. etc.

I am not trying to make an argument pro wealth taxes, I am trying to make an argument against shallow and non-empirical arguments.

Perhaps notable: Switzerland has a wealth tax (of up to 0.3%), and there is zero evidence that this has any deterrent effect on wealthy people settling in Switzerland or startups being created in Switzerland.

Other features of the tax system more than offset the 0.3% wealth tax.

Personally, I am a bit disappointed by the lack of depth of the discourse: Wealth taxes and their effect have been studied quite a bit in economics literature, and there are various peer-reviewed papers that attempt to measure the effects, but the Silicon Valley crowd is strangely avoidant of examining evidence or explaining their opposition with real-world data. It's all 101ism and polemics.

See also https://twitter.com/halvarflake/status/1295283922117566464?s... - I tried to ask @rabois for the source of a claim, and got crickets in return.

I'd like to see a more nuanced and thorough discussion, to be honest. Perhaps that's a bit much to ask.

There are also cultural factors about how you present your work. GC Rota wrote about the mathematics culture in the 50's that European and US researchers worked similar amounts, but the Europeans took great care to present an image of working less than they actually did, and the US researchers often presented an image of working more than they did.

My experiences of working both in the US and in Europe (Germany and Switzerland) was that the number of hours worked in the US was higher, but the intensity of work was lower: There was more office chitchat, more goofing around, more "watercooler/coffee talk", and so forth. There is also an extreme culture of "presenteeism" in the US that starts in highschool (where being physically present is much more important than being attentive in any form).

When speaking about "competitiveness", what measures aside from current account balance and share of global exports is better suited?

Not to be snarky, but you can't do any reading in economics about competitiveness and not encounter the current account balance (which is exports - imports): https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6701/trade/importance-of-...

The "reduces their ability to compete"-argument does not hold water considering the data, though. One useful measure of a countries competitiveness is the size of their exports (because it implies that there is a lot of foreign demand for the products from that country), or in their "exports-to-population" ratio.

If you check https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/exports you can see that Germany exports about EUR 112bn worth of goods per month, on a population of about 83 million, about EUR 1350 per head. For comparison:

Canada exports about 49bn CAD per month, on a population of 38m, for approximately 1297 CAD per head.

The US exports about 208bn USD per month, on a population of 327m, for approximately 638 USD per head.

If anything, the big weakness of the German economy is not that it is not competitive enough, the big weakness of the German economy is a lack of domestic consumption due to not much of the money actually reaching workers pockets; this is a result of a fairly aggressive wage stagnation that set in in the 2000s.

While I am also walking down memory lane -- writing recursive SoftICE macros so that one could make SoftICE single-step 50k times and write the log to a file.

For those that like the history of the Cracking scene - there was a set of binary-patching SoftICE extensions called "nticedump" and "icedump". They were pretty nuts, too - one reverse engineer got annoyed by his music playback stopping when he was in SoftICE, so he hacked an MP3 player into the SoftICE driver.

http://n8on.free.fr/hackzines/bhz/7/crackingbeginner3.txt

There was also in-SoftICE tetris.

I used SoftICE extensively from 96-00'-ish ... to the extent that as a teenager I had single-step dreams and dreams where I tried to hit CTRL-D.

Perhaps this is a stupid question, and someone please enlighten me - but would not the vast majority of JVM deployments be on either CentOS or Debian-derived base images with good support for an OpenJDK package?

I thought that the main differences between OpenJDK and Oracle java was the nicer font rendering and some Swing-ish stuff, is there a good comparison as to why people even use the Oracle Java?

Given that the last layer of a NN is a logistic regression, they are in fact well-calibrated probabilities under the assumption disjoint classes.

The issue at hand is training them on overlapping classes :-)

I will shut up now, sorry for nitpicking.

Given the intense regulatory pressure (especially in the EU) that Google is finding itself under, this is unsurprising. The TPP would greatly help in easing 3 strategic concerns, which are:

1) Data protection regulation that would severely impact Google.

Google is kinda caught in the crossfire here. The EU is upset at the US intelligence community (Post-Snowden), and wishes to have some assurance of protection for their citizen's communication. The USG does not see why it should do this, and the data protection regulation is the EU's way of saying: If we can't get you to cooperate by being friendly, we will have to pass legislation that will hurt US companies; they can then perhaps pay lobbyists to change your mind. So it is not really Googles fault, but they are caught in the middle.

2) Anti-Trust considerations.

Google is extremely dominant in the European market, much more so than in the US. See #3. The momentum for an Antitrust case in the EU is high.

3) Industrial policy considerations.

Right now, the EU does not have an "Internet powerhouse"; there simply are no modern Internet giants in the EU. Interestingly, both China and Russia have "inadvertently" created local giants (mostly by censorship, which has had the strange side-effect of being equivalent to import tariffs, but for Internet services -- e.g. an accidental protectionist measure that allowed local competition to emerge). Some voices have been heard in recent months that advocate that the only way the EU won't get entirely left behind is industrial policy toward creating an internet giant. This could even mean blocking US-based giants for a while.

If TPP passes, Google will have a very powerful tool to wield against these three concerns. It is entirely rational of them to support it.

The EU under their new data protection regulation:

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/The-implications-for-s...

You may wish to try both single- and double-sided hammering. If you hit the right row size it is significantly more effective:

https://github.com/google/rowhammer-test/blob/master/double_...

Single-sided or double-sided hammering?

Remember that there is a github repo with code you can use to test your specific Hardware. Why not run it & post results?

Seconded. In theory, a manager could veto a 20% project, but I have never heard of it happen.

I personally think "managerial approval" is just for 3 things:

1) If someone decides to do something wrong/illegal as 20% project, the manager should've caught this (so this 'approval' is really a 'we reserve the right to blame the manager if things go wrong') ;) 2) People probably want their 20% project (and progress therewith) to be factored into their perf, as such, their managers need to know about it. 3) So that people don't pick clearly fraudulent 20% projects (such as 'my 20% project is to stay at home and watch TV')