Hacker News Reader

Comment by edm0nd | Hacker News Reader

Likely waiting on stolen metaverse R&D from American companies given to them from the Chinese government. That's the entire Chinese nation-state backed hackers MO. Steal R&D from Fortune 500 companies to then give it to private Chinese businesses to further the Chinese economy. Why waste your own time/money/resources on R&D when you can just steal it. Same with IP and IP laws.

- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-hackers-took-trillions-...

- https://fortune.com/2021/04/21/suspected-chinese-hackers-tar...

- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/china-technolo...

View on HN

I don't blame them tbh. On a whole species level, why are we inventing the wheel hundreds of separate times just to satisfy pedantic legalese? Any alien observing earth would think we are idiots and clearly nothing to be worried about because we do stuff like this, in the name of profits usually, instead of just sharing ideas openly with each other.

Actually it's pretty smart to reward the inventive ones and punish the freeloaders, or else there'd be a rush to become a freeloader and stop the hard work of inventing - leading to species-wide collapse.

The reward of a novel invention is enough to keep it going. Look at science. All ideas are published and shared and you don't have this freeloader issue, because the rewards follow innovation even when those innovations are pubically shared. Also take a look at your own work. Chances are you are freeloading on someone else's ideas with everything you do, and there are huge chunks of process that you are only able to do because someone decided to make those ideas freely available to other people.

But science has a big system of distributing money up front to people to do the work of innovating. There is no such system in place to fund people developing innovative products that require significant up front investment.

Also the "product" of science innovation is the actual innovation and being first to publish. An equivalent freeloader problem would not be someone copying the idea/papers after they are released. It would be spying inside the laboratory, copying the ideas and releasing competing papers before the actual researcher releases their own. If that was happening, I am sure you would object.

What have these rewards truly given us?

The open/free scientific communities are responsible for most tangible benefit - meanwhile, those reaping the biggest rewards give us... planned obsolescence

I understand the sentiment and even agree to an extent, but the reality is things are abused and wasted as well - to a shocking degree, in pursuit of 'mine'

False. Tangible benefits are frightfully hard to bring about. Nobody does that for free. Newton came up woth calculus, shared it for free, and transformed the world.

But all tangible benefits arising from that involved a lot of people, a lot of work, and a lot of risk. Planned obsolescence, bad as it may be, is a non-issue in the bigger picture.

Within the context of this comment thread ("freeloaders" copying the R&D of the "inventive ones"), it seems like the opposite is true for global innovation: inventive ones are being punished by freeloaders copying their work and being able to offer it for a lower price, due to not having to recoup R&D costs/investments (among other factors).

In a way you can also explain it as standing in the shoulders of giants. Get the stuff that was already done shared out of the way and encourage more to be built on top.

The current system only seems to accomplish that goal if you are focused on the inventiveness of lawyers.

How do you think humans should incentivize R&D without allowing for those who successfully deployed R&D to protect their ability to reap the fruits of their efforts? I’m sympathetic and am very interested in the idea of the government creating public goods out of intellectual property on a national level (ie instead of rewarding copyrights/parents the government would buy out the creator and make it free for citizens to do what they’d like), but that could work because the government has sovereignty over its territory - how do you prevent international free riding on R&D?

For the research part (figuring out something previously impossible)? No need to incentivise, the kick of figuring it out is enough to motivate people, just provide UBI so the nerds can tinker.

For the development/application part? Let people race to figure out the best way to deploy things before someone else does, the way the swiss and Germans and Chinese did in the free for all time. I've heard competition be called something that incentivises people to find edges that aren't easily copied, and trade secrets can still exist

> For the research part (figuring out something previously impossible)? No need to incentivise, the kick of figuring it out is enough to motivate people, just provide UBI so the nerds can tinker.

I think this is only true to a certain extent. We have reached a point where a lot of new innovation and invention is only possible with a truly tremendous amount of financial investment. No amount of tinkering in your garage is going to bring about the next advancement in EUV lithography. You need an entity with a lot of capital and a strong incentive to bring many of these things about. That can come from either the private sector or the government, but it cannot realistically be pulled out of thin air.

Yeah, but we were talking about incentives not about finding capital. Nerds are perfectly capable of writing proposals, budgets, etc. if they have the time, and if there is not need to feed constituents and make a profit of the results, it can be done cheaply and under budget. You might still want to spend time optimising this, but the incentives are there already and need not to be set (provide public goods, have fun doing it)

> trade secrets can still exist

How can trade secrets exist if we are “just sharing ideas openly with each other”?

A lot of government funded R&D e.g. from the NIH or NSF has stipulations actually that say the data and results be made publicly available so that other researchers may benefit. At the end of the day we have to decide where our values lie. Do they lie with individualized benefit? Then we allow people to have protection legally so they may individually profit off of that technology using a perverted market condition (them having the sole rights of distribution for a period of time). If we value the collective whole, then we would share these ideas with others who would benefit from them and further them still, like we do medical research. You have to decide where your moralities lie.

I'd just make the individuals involved rich with a lump-sum payment ($10m, say) and a lot of good press. Then make it public domain.

What if they spent $20m to create the innovation? Who judges when an innovation is appropriate to convert in the manner? What happens to the innovations that aren't deemed worthy of conversion?

Profits matter, though! We need them to pay people to do the research and development, which people will not do for nothing - our dependence on food and shelter makes this necessary. If an American firm absorbs all the costs, but gains none of the benefit, it will not survive as long, meaning the research will also disappear alongside it.

China, on the other hand, can spend those funds elsewhere while also poaching the work of the American firm, which would put them at a great competitive advantage.

Profits aren't necessary for R&D, that's just one model where R&D is funded by consumers through direct purchases. Another model is where R&D is simply funded through taxation and grants. That is the model that medical research is often funded through, and it works well because it allows researchers around the world to help our species overcome disease.

How do you deal with an international free rider problem? If the word collectively agreed to fund research then I would love for all results to be released publicly, but how do you stop countries from free riding off of the R&D from other countries? From a game theoretic perspective it seems that countries who are fully self interested (putting aside notions of fairness/ethics, which I wish would be enough to lead to desirable outcomes but is unfortunately not the case) would clearly choose to just free ride off of the developments of other nations, and reap the fruits of reward while spending that money elsewhere (potentially in ways that could end up hurting the researching country, like the free rider spending it on their military).

Totally good point! Though, that is also quite restrictive. Some of the biggest innovations which change society the most are incredibly weird, out of left field innovations that a governmental or grant program would most likely not fund - just because the nascent idea is too crazy.

You get a lot of money funding weird ideas in VC firms, where the incentive structure (of profit) makes it possible to fund a tonne of ideas, where it is expected that most of the ideas will fail.

This still has the free rider problem at a nation state level. Let's say China invests 100 billion a year in innovation, and makes it all open. France then comes along and says "I don't need to bother with spending on innovation, I'll just use China's legwork, and spend my billion on out marketing china". China would eventually run out of cash for research.

Copying is a great source of innovation and industrial development. Take German engineering ('Made in Germany' was a label originally intended to make the German copycats more visible in England, from where the processes were copied, but that sort of backfired in hindsight), the Swiss watch and pharma industries (based on French patents that were practically unenforceable in Switzerland at the time)...

Once you have a process up and running, it's almost human instinct to try and improve it. If you start by copying the latest stuff, chances are you'll find a few new tweaks.

That depends, look at the Soviet Union, they bought Fiat 124 assembly line and they produced the car with just minor tweaks until 2010 (lada 2105). They made the great Lada Niva and produced also unchanged until 2010.

Improving thing is not a given and not in every culture. It is a trait of the western culture for sure, but not necessarily shared in the world.

And all that Silicon Valley is doing is funding young 20 somethings for the next social groupcrap over and over and over. It's not exactly like Silicon Valley is being innovative.

TikTok is just making Silicon Valley mad because they finally met a bigger VC (the Chinese government) running their own playbook and they can't beat it.

The mere thought of Facebook codebase being usable anywhere else but by Facebook is silly. If someone gave somebody a dump of Google's monolith were to even begin looking?

You need the engineers too. There is no Bond-like blueprint to steal.

Tbh I find this comment hilarious given the story we are commenting on. In this case, it is Meta/Instagram that is trying to copy TikTok, and yet still can't pull off as good a recommendation algorithm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com