jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
If the conclusion of this is true, why aren't we seeing grand scale innovation and entrepreneurship from European countries that are most certainly very strong welfare states?

Why instead are we seeing massive amounts of unemployment?

There seems to be a delicate balance to strike to get this right. The fact of the matter is that in many European countries someone who is not working can enjoy the same standard of life as someone who is, except they don't have to get up in the morning to earn it.

Those benefiting from these states likely have very little incentive to rock their own boat of comfort by stepping out and taking on debt/risk for more of a reward. Especially when you throw high taxation into the mix, where that risk/reward ratio is further skewed because even if you do very well you'll end up paying the state a huge amount of tax, to then support the same welfare system.

In the US, on the other hand, you've a significantly less generous safety net and I would imagine the vast majority of those who fall into it from a more grand place - such as being securely in the middle class - would fight more to get out of it.

That's intuitive anyway.

Where the argument starts to fall apart is when you look at all the young tech entrepreneurs, whether it's hardware or software, or those starting up new media companies, or whatever, very few seem to come from the type of background where if they failed they'd end up on food stamps.

Are they better risk takers because they have a better, non-government provided safety net, perhaps? Which then goes on to conflict with the enhanced safety net available in Europe and the comparatively low level of innovation and entrepreneurship.

My conclusion would be that the government provided welfare is likely not a factor in determining innovation and entrepreneurship and that there's other, less obvious, factors at play.
At this point I don't think there's any way to determine that. Given the nature of the article, all comments are suspect. I like it - I think it's time for me to re-read Pale Fire.
Why not give every graduate a bursary for one year and see what happens. In the logic of VC's it will take only 1% to pay that back and more.
No offence, but it seems like an WYSIWYG editor for people that are already quite familiar with html?
Yes, I didn't either.
It seems your url is broken, or not accessible (?)
The fact that you included Chell as a voice choice (and 'generated' a null audio clip to boot) earns a chuckle. The quality of the voices across the board earns wide eyes and an eyebrow raise. Thanks for sharing this, it's remarkable work.
NVIDIA have this: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-binary-utilities/index.htm...

That doesn't operate on PTX but actual hardware binaries.
Oddly, they ship disassemblers, but not assemblers.
Remove this article, not relevant to this site and why he left OS X means nothing to anyone else or the hackers out here. I use both and love OS X, but does anyone care why?
I have primarily used Linux on the desktop, and then laptop, since 1995. It wasn't always painless. Still occasionally is not painless. But, neither is Mac OS X or Windows, and the Linux desktop/laptop experience is, by far, the best it's ever been. The pain just takes different shapes, and I've never seriously considered switching to Windows or Mac for my primary OS, though I've always had a Windows partition available to boot into and I've occasionally had a Hackintosh to play with.

When it comes down to it, the conveniences Linux gives me far overshadow the minor pains of having to Google hardware before I buy it to make sure there are drivers. Even on this front, I've almost completely stopped doing it...I've bought several pieces of hardware on a whim in the past few years without thinking, "Oh, wait, will this work?" then plugging it in and have it Just Work. No driver installation, no Googling for errors, just a working camera, sound card, MIDI controller, etc. The major hardware makers, like GPU and network vendors, are all on board. If you buy quality hardware, it is almost certainly gonna work with Linux (and all that old hardware that stopped working with Windows several years ago, due to no new drivers, is still working in modern Linux; this is true for me of two 24 bit audio interfaces, and a MIDI controller).

The command line experience of Linux is simply superior to the alternatives. Mac OS has bash, sure, but all the stuff is in the wrong place with crazy long paths, and all of the software is installed via ornery dysfunctional package bundles from Apple (or from an alternative source, like MacPorts or similar; I truly hate the package management situation on Mac OS X). The command line feels clumsy and bolted on, even though there's UNIX at the core of Mac OS X.

Actually, a huge part of it probably comes down to package management, for me. Package management is so bad on Windows and Mac OS X, and so good on Linux (yum and apt are just really excellent), that I feel a little dirty installing stuff on those platforms. Being able to choose from thousands of packages, especially developer packages, having all the Perl modules I use already packaged and easy to install, having all the Go and node stuff packaged up nicely and ready for tinkering, having a lot of the system built on Python and shell scripts with the source readily available, all of this stuff just adds up to a tinkerers dream.

I feel like I learn something new when I figure out problems on Linux; I feel like I'm being punished when I run into problems on Mac OS X or Windows, even if I get them solved. It's just such a different feeling. I'm sure for someone who isn't technically minded, the experience would be the same...an opaque system that isn't working right. But, for me, when I'm able to patch something and send it off to the maintainer, I feel happy and content. I feel frustration when I run into problems on Mac OS X or Windows. All systems of the size and complexity of a modern OS have problems, it's just a difference of how they get resolved that makes the difference.
It is raining acquisitions for YC. Truly a Merry Christmas for Paul, Jessica and the whole YC team!
Anyone out there who can tell if Google is a terrible place to work or is Facebook just a awesome place to work? I really don't get it.

I would love to know why people are leaving Google for Facebook. I really don't think it is because of the money.

Is just more interesting these days?
I've been a fan of your work for ages Collin, but your attitude needs adjustment.
I'll go ahead and publish the benches shortly.
This puzzle has had significant discussion recently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652127

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891212

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=834599
native english speakers - by which I mean USA, Canada and UK - know what libre means.

It's like the word "bazaar" - even if you say "baajaar", you will get most Indians to understand the meaning.

close to 90% asians will not even know the meaning of Libre even if you write it down.

Please understand, I am not debating the relative merit of using the word "open" as opposed to "libre" as a branding exercise - people just dont know what libre is.
Going off-topic, but what the hell. I grew up memorizing stats on the backs of baseball cards and playing sports video games, so I agree that knowing the numbers is as much a part of my understanding of the game as the actual rules.

What I enjoy about the English football writers I read, is they'll link sport with culture, history, and politics. An upcoming match preview can feel like a history lesson for an entire region. That's something you rarely find over here (though Hunter S. Thompson used to do a sports column for ESPN that covered all kinds of ground). I'd say most Americans get their sports news through highlight shows, but there's always been the tradition of "checking the box score" in the paper.

When soccer does hit mainstream news here, like during the World Cup, most of the conversations seem to be around "how can we fix the game?", ie. goal-line technology, etc. Maybe as a culture we like things that are more concrete, which leads to something like the current NFL, new rules every year so it takes 5 minutes for the officials to sort out a play.
Developing the backend and designing the front-end are essentially fixed costs, which amount to little more than the cost of printing a couple of paper issues of a fairly small publication.
I was just considering this question myself. I'm teaching programming to a friend with no experience at all. I finally settled on Lua, even though I don't know it myself. The syntax is clean, it's a compact language, and once she learns it she could use it in gaming, which she's into. My runner-up was Ruby. Python would be good too, though I think the significant whitespace is a distracting pitfall for absolute beginners.
i can't remember the author but there was a disucssion on usenet about comm. protocols years ago and someone said "it's not finished when there's nothing left to add, it's finished when there's nothing left to take away". To me, that's what simple means and i think it also equally applies to "fit for purpose". A perfect fit for purpose is an implementation with nothing left to take away. I feel like when you someone sees a perfect fit for purpose they would also think "this is really simple" whether it be an F-35 dashboard, nuclear reactor control room, or the controls on a lawn mower.

edit: after thinking about this for a few min. there's larger than normal holes in my point heh. However, i really like OPs point.
This makes me feel better for thinking that the way we write (standard Western) music impedes understanding of the way modern chromatic music sounds.

And for the same reasons, really. Putting together things like "Four Twenties" makes sense when you only count to a hundred, and less sense when you need to, say, express the speed of light or the size of an electron. I'm sure the musical system made a lot more sense with diatonic sounds, but once you add in accidentals, you're just retaining backwards compatibility because it used to work and the then-living people were familiar with it.
That's link [3] in my comment. That appears to be the new CUPS capabilities that Google has added to ChromeOS. Excited to try it out.
> What you call design theft I call commoditization.

Then you're factually wrong. Commoditization does not include design theft. If we're talking about handcrafted sunglasses and then someone else makes a machine-created alternative that looks different but has similar properties, that'd be more inline.

That said, defining designer goods as "commodities" is a hell of a stretch for that word. Assuming good faith, you're drawing a parallel. But if I were not very firmly and strenuously looking for a good faith explanation, I'd worry you're just using "an economics word" to make it sound like you have a theoretically backed argument.

> But commoditization is great for consumers and has been for centuries, and high-quality luxury goods are still available for those who care to spend more money on that sort of thing.

Considering actual commodities by the dictionary definition, this is true up to a point. But it doesn't really apply to finished goods.
What about the taxes? Post fees and taxes, it won’t be $1.7B
Am I paying for my number or not? If I am, then if they give it to somebody else while I’m still paying for it, that is breach of contract.
I use the Wenger Carbon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B001LA57ZQ

It's not the cheapest one but certainly not luxury. Has a nice padded slot for a laptop (I use a 15 inch laptop) and plenty of space for other stuff.

I use it both for carrying my laptop and I can also fit enough clothes for a week-long vacation.
> while all the people who helped him grow have dire consequences both financial and personal.

That's definitely a glass half empty way to look at this;

On the other hand, with 20/20 hindsight, knowing it was selling space it rented for a $.80 for $1 of cost, knowing that this hype meant and in a low unemployment time means that these were effectively a jobs program, with above average market salaries, funded by Softbank (and the Saudis).

Also a jobs program for any companies that would have paid $1/$1 of office space but saved the discount.

And, from a being laid off perspective; while it's not fun to have a job end at someone else's discretion, if you worked at WeWork and the August headlines weren't a hint to get the resume ready, I'm not sure what else might; Effectively, 4+ months of notice combined with now actual severance.

The downstream effects of this are probably worse from a capitalism / worker piece; As WeWork reduces leasing office space, buildings or service companies will likely pocket the contract termination fees while reducing jobs/hours of contract staff -- who, unlike wework employees, were closer to minimum wage, may not even have benefits, and definitely won't get severance.
You might want to look into Coalton as statically typed, functional language on top of Common Lisp:
https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton

That said, Common Lisp while dynamically typed, is also strongly typed. Many type errors are prevented at runtime. Also you can declare types and have some limited form of static type checking in SBCL.
Schools are a major vehicle for a federal program that provides assistance to poor children:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_School_Lunch_Act

(followed by a similar program for breakfast, and then summer camps)
If we are to be concerned about 12kbps, just wait until my next article when I describe how much UDP traffic is blasted out by non-deterministic game networking models ;)
Well, high DPI support isn't something to rave about on Windows, although that may be for similar reasons (WinForms vs WPF vs whatever)
Here is a wikipedia link about hypothetical types of biochemistry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi...
Seems like a fantastic way to get someone to pass the bill on their drinking. Who knows if this will help any of their customers?
This is sad but true. A lot of people go into PhDs at 22 thinking they're intellectually invincible. They've gotten A's their entire life, never had any kind of serious setback, and fail to process the fact, when they hear PhD programs' abysmal job placement numbers, that those numbers will apply to them. This is even worse in the humanities, where the numbers are closer to 1-in-5 than 1-in-2. People who have been in the top 10% for their whole life fail to apprehend that all their classmates have been in the top 10% forever as well, and that they're counting on luck more than anything else.

Five years in, the more successful PhDs have moved on or are at least in the process of finishing up, but about half of the students are long past burned out but will still be around for 2-5 years. Most careers encourage the less successful people to leave or fire them (which seems harsh, but it's less harsh than wasting peoples' time) but academia doesn't, or to whatever extent that it does, people don't get the hint. The result is that you have a lot of people who reach 29-31 when they finish their PhDs, and because they took too long they can't get great post-docs, and it's downhill from there.

I think graduate school is a great way to learn a lot for people who have the ambition and ability, but the problem with it, from a career perspective, is that it's regressive rather than progressive for a lot of people. What I mean is that I'd rather be a first-year graduate student than a bottom-half investment banker, for sure, but the people in the "real world", even if they take some lumps early on, have already moved on, learned from a mix of success and failure (in most cases) and had a chance to establish themselves by 29-30. The less successful half of the graduate students haven't had this opportunity; they start out as graduate students at elite departments and, 7 years later, they're "wraiths" with nothing to show for their time. It's a really broken and unfair system. They should be given the hint much earlier (like after 1-2 years) so they can move on and do something where they have a better shot at success.
Hello. There are O'Reilly people listening here. Can you be specific about titles and the problems with them? The Art of SEO and couchDB are two mentioned. What else?

Thanks.
the best part is the centrifugal force.
That is very clean. I like the way you embrace git and integrate deeply with its features. I will have to copy some of that :-)
As a datum - I have a flag link. PG has previously mentioned an "Excessive flagger" test - I wonder if you tripped it.
.. recommendations of where to look for engineering talent.

I wrote this comment on the India specific HN version that has some suggestions on how to go about finding a good offshore development firm - http://hackerstreet.in/item?id=1058. It could be of some use to you.
The author seems a bit too proud of Facebook. (Actually, it creeps me out whenever someone blogs passionately in defense of a product.) Maybe abstainers just don't want to deal with it? I know several people like that. They don't think they're better than anyone, they're just content to let it pass them by.
> Note: I've never met Stallman.

I have, and he is one of the kindest, smartest, most reasonable people I have ever met. He's also funny and brutally honest.

I asked him (this was about 6 years ago at a LUG) if Microsoft had ever attempted to intimidate him, whether through lawsuits or other means, whether subtle or overt.

He paused for a second, and then simply said, "No. No intimidation of any kind."

This man is just an honest, straightforward Socratic kind of guy, not a point-scoring spin-meister.

I for one am overjoyed that he's remained a principled shaggy uber-hacker, resisting the never-ending suggestions that he become a palatable, bridge-building difference-splitter serving up a friendlier, diluted version of his message. Screw everything about that.
> The rise in net calories consumed per capita is pretty much entirely explains the observed variation.

True but I would be more specific than that. Basically we have two major trends going on:

1. Calories in per capita are falling slower than calories out per capita. For traditional, hand-tool-based farming, it required a lot of calories. Even animal-powered farming required a lot more than is required today. It's a bloody lot of hard manual work as my British friends would say. When one talks about net calories, one has to recognize that a hundred years ago people had to eat a lot more than today.

2. More reliance on high tech foods (HCFS, hydrogenated oils, etc, but also see frozen dinners, often which are loaded by excess corn sugar and oil). These are far from ideal dietary-wise.

These combine to mean fewer micronutrients, and an excess of macronutrients. But the lack of hard physical labor as the normal way of life is a major part of things.
Sell it at a fair price in ways that don't pre-assume your audience wants to break the law, and you generally make out pretty good.

Completely ignoring the legal aspect for a moment, the thing about respect for rights is a two way street. Most of the media companies out there have literally none for their audience. DRM rootkits, draconian terms, absurd prices, the lot. Why should I have the slightest bit of respect for someone that has no respect for me?
My wife was briefly a teacher on an Indian reservation. There were few jobs on the reservation and many of the kids' parents were unemployed, and even the ones that were rarely were in a position that required any education. That's a huge demotivator for kids--why sacrifice for education when you can't see in front of your face that education might yield any benefits? Then there was, of course, the social ills associated with poverty, which distracted kids from school: alcoholism, drug abuse, crime, domestic violence, and sexual abuse.

I'm personally enormously skeptical of the idea that education is a solution to poverty,[1] at a large scale. There is a game theory problem in play. The fact is that it's unlikely that education will lift an individual inner city kid "out of the hood." A relatively excellent outcome for diligence and hard work would be going into debt to attend a third rate college, for the privilege of fighting for a low-paying service job. So it's totally rational for kids to be more preoccupied with whether joining the right gang will keep them from getting harassed on the way home from school.

But if everyone worked hard and got educated, what might happen is that economic opportunities could be created "in the hood." That's the prisoners dilemma--the individually rational decision to devalue diligence and education leads to a globally worse outcome. This is where culture comes in. You see this with poor immigrant communities. They have little capital, but have cultural mores that create an incentive for education and hard work. A kid might not leave the neighborhood through education, but he'll get social standing in the community, among authority figures and peers. When everyone has that incentive, that creates economic opportunities within the neighborhood. After all, there are neighborhoods in Bangladesh far poorer on an objective scale than the worst ghettos of Chicago, that nonetheless have bustling local economies.

[1] Poverty is, of course, relative. But I'm not talking about utopia, but just about raising the plight of the poor here in the U.S. up to that of some places in Western Europe.
Most of the things you do for a user are not blocking, that's the whole point of node. Instead of blocking, almost everything is done with asynchronous callbacks.
I enjoyed the article. As ever, there are tradeoffs and your milage will vary using different approaches.

This doesn't seem like an entirely fair comparison:

"It seems to me that all three of these options are sub-optimal as opposed to writing the piece of code once and making it available throughout the monolithic application."

There's a different scenario that could have played out with how to share a library between different services. You could have written the bulk of your application in the same language, like a monolithic application but split into several services. In that case you could create a library for your tax calculations and use it freely within your services.

For me, I split my application into a small number of services and, as much as possible, split things out into libraries to make reuse simple (more libraries, thiner applications).

Sometimes I use different languages, but when I do, I consider very carefully whether the (rather large) tradeoff that presents will be worth it in the long run for what I'm getting in the short term.

A question: when people talk about microservices, how small are they talking?
A current example of faceted search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8834611
A comment so accurate it makes me sad :C

There isn't much one can do though as favoring convenience over not-so-obvious benefits of (abstract, for them) freedom seems to stem from the very human nature...

I used to think RMS' ideas were a bit far fetched, but with each such revelation that comes to light in the form of post on some relatively unknown blog those ideas seem more and more appropriate.
It is plausible that it was the TSA's "VIPR".

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/10/vipr-a10.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/tsa-expands-duties-beyo...

(Side note, who the hell comes up with these names, and why hasn't somebody with some experience with marketing and PR talked to them?)