skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article has some interesting things to say, and paints a useful picture of California's politics.

But, I think one of its flaws is that it lumps Tech and Entertainment/Media into the same category. These industries are somewhat different.

For example, tech employment can be relatively robust for people in San Francisco and the Valley at the same time as Southern California's entertainment production workers are losing their jobs to other US states which offer relatively large tax incentives to production companies and studios.

And, I think, as a point of comparison, it's interesting that, in recent years, the California legislature handed the entertainment industry a large boost in tax credits for productions it kept in state (as opposed to competitors like Louisiana and Georgia).

And that's an important difference. I haven't seen the legislature giving, say, Yahoo, a special tax holiday if it can just get its act together and stop laying off people. And the state government's reaction to Uber has not been particularly friendly either. I see some antagonism to Tech in state and local government. And the Tech industry is still viewed as a monstrously fat tax cow by the government.

Still, the article's portrait of California as a "bifurcated" economy has some truth. The state contains a huge number of poor and middle class people who do not directly benefit from "Software Valley's" jobs machine. (The main thing they receive from it is some government services paid for by taxes on that machine's workers.)
The massive amount of great tooling and debugging for React is a strength not a weakness.

If people are overwhelmed by React I feel it is likely because:

1. they haven't yet grokked the implications of how re-rendering every single time changes how they have to store the state of their app. (von neumman)

2. related to that, the choice of how to store that state and dispatch to a backend is not baked into React

3. it is harder to build an app up slowly because you have to have a rough idea of what the structure of your app state looks like ahead of time.

So, you're forced to actually know more about your UI, UX, and design before you implement it. It takes longer to implement but once it is done, it's done and easy to improve upon - it's not fragile.

For hacking something together it might not be the way to go. But for a well thought out implementation of an app which interacts a lot with it's backend, I think it's the only way to go now.

I also feel like people will be missing the React wave at their peril. We're on the verge of being able to cleanly abstract out an applications delivery mechanism whether its native, mobile, or web. That is because of things like React and ReactNative and it's immutable render-every-time approach.
Hah! I know that smiling naked skinny-dipping couple. They certainly epitomize the natural high of being out in nature.
If you're not a front end developer, then why is it a technical exercise to learn all this stuff? Personally, I don't want to learn things that will be obsolete in a few years.

I also rebuilt my website as a technical exercise, but I'm doing it in raw HTML, CSS, and JS. Literally with vim and shell scripts to build it.

I know it can meet the requirements of a personal website, and many other kinds of sites. It probably takes a little longer, but I know it's going to work in 5 years, and I will know how to maintain it.

And I will have more foundational knowledge. Things have changed a lot with HTML and CSS. I learned how to use HTML5 onHashChange. And I did my own "CSS reset" without using any libraries. I wrote my own table sorter with raw DOM manipulation.

I think you need this knowledge to help you use the framework correctly anyway.
It is a common, romantic view of how science works - but it is only compatible with reality on a 30-50 year timescale, and probably only because of survivor bias.

The science of Dan Shchetman, J. Robin Warren, Barbara McClintock and many others spoke for itself, and for a long time "science" essentially didn't listen. I put "science" in quotes because "science" doesn't speak or listen - scientists do - and the scientists shunned those luminaries (eventually to recognize them with one of the highest honours - the Nobel Prize).

Warren had to use himself as a test subject for others to notice. Shechtman was a cast out for years (and then it turned out that he wasn't the first to notice 5-fold symmetry - he was just the only one for a long time to insist it's real; the other "scientists" who noticed it cared too much about their status, rather than the science). McClintock was shunned by her peers and essentially lost her job -- though evidence for how badly she was treated by "science" for her radical ideas (now mainstream and assumed true) is being whitewashed.

I keep wondering how much progress we have lost because "scientists" (unlike "science") does care how much you've raised, how much you've published, and who your friends are.

> anyone wanting to actually change the world in healthcare ... Science speaks for itself

The belief that modern healthcare is nothing but the application of science is also romantic and misguided. In the US, healthcare is a business and not even a free-market one. It is informed by science, most definitely. But e.g. no doctor will recommend the single most effective treatment for type 2 diabetes early in the disease[0] (calorie restriction whether directly, by direct fasting or intermittent fasting). In fact, it turns out that the American Diabetic Association recommendations are the everything but science, and possibly the worst you could do.

[0] - http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/may/12/type-2-d..., see http://www.ncl.ac.uk/magres/research/diabetes/reversal.htm for references
> My idea has already been put to the test and proven correct: the US is the most innovative country in the software area. And has been for decades.

That doesn't prove your idea correct; it's likely the case we're innovative despite patents, not because of them, because developers largely ignore them and just code whatever they want anyway.

> The scenario you are proposing is unrealistic because that's not how the system works.

The system doesn't work, that's rather the point; the entire software industry, which you're going on about, largely ignores them, or collects them as weapons of defense against other companies.
Show HN: Silli – Change your friends phones background image
While I am certainly worried about the growing movement towards universal safe spaces, it's also important to realize that Europe has pretty consistently had laxer free speech protections than the United States. Nowhere in Europe is it considered an absolute right in the way it is for the states.
Beautiful work, Ryan. I love your combination of artistry and science.
"His proposal would make it illegal to go onto websites that glorify the Islamic State or support its recruitment, or to distribute links to such sites. He would impose graduated penalties, starting with a warning letter, then fines or prison for repeat offenders, to convey that “looking at ISIS-related websites, like looking at websites that display child pornography, is strictly forbidden.”"

Christ, what an asshole.
From a financial standpoint, this is poor advice. Reserves and equipment represent real options, giving big-oil the right,but not the obligation, to extract in the future. Even if these costs cannot be recouped at the current market price, this has value because of oil's volatility (just like stock options with exercise prices above current prices). The fall in oil price (and expected future prices) reduces the quantity of profitable real options, but plausibly not to zero.
The Founders could not have imagined the internet, so I'm not sure how the 1st Amendment even applies to it.

/sarc
How come losing money is an improvement?
I think most people agree that an idea can be dangerous. As I understand it, the first amendment exists because we believe that this danger is outweighed by the dangers of censorship and the benefits of the marketplace of ideas.
Contaminants don't have to be alive to confuse results. Also many contaminants we're talking about were never alive in the first place.
Honest question: what kinds of things are you doing with React/Angular that you can't do with jQuery? (I'm not a front end developer -- though I do write significant amounts of raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).

Is it really higher productivity, or is it just keeping up with the latest fashion?

I feel like the vast majority of websites don't need more than a little JavaScript -- exceptions being Google Maps, Google Docs and spreadsheets, etc.

AirBNB is listed here -- honest question: do they really need a lot of JS? I mean mainly it's showing a lot of pictures and providing good navigation and search. Am I missing something? It's basically like eBay in 2000 except prettier, and that was done without a lot of JS.

https://github.com/facebook/react/wiki/Sites-Using-React

Asana might be a good candidate for a real "app" that needs the complexity.

Why is Wired on there? I think news sites are the worst offenders in terms of using unneeded JavaScript.
> You're making a tough claim here.. You're not just saying that the system can be improved but you're saying that software patents are holding back innovation. How would you go about proving that?

That's not a tough claim that needs proven, it's an obvious observable fact to every programmer in the industry. We can't write software without violating tons of patents these days, idiotic patents issued by ignorant people who don't understand the absurdity of the claims being made. Patent trolls, of which we are overflowing with, hold back innovation and they are a direct byproduct of an obviously broken badly designed patent system.

> I prefer to stick to a more reasonable claim: the system is not broken, it has a few flaws, such as those that enable the existence of non-practicing entities.

It's broken.
Most of the patents files for software are by big companies. Most innovations come from startups, academics, and volunteers in FOSS. Most of it was protected by copyright law with money recouped in licensing and acquisitions.

Now try to understand why innovation existed outside patent motivations. Then look up what big companies do with all those patents. Only then will you see the real effect of the patent system.
I was thinking to put React.js in my adopt circle, but I spent a couple of days setting up the Node.js gulp-vinyl-browserify-babelify nonsense, and it really is a witch's brew of configuration hocus pocus. Its compelling to know that React is backed by Facebook, but React is simply verbose and comes with too much stuff packed into one package.

Whats the alternative? Thanks to hacker news i bookmarked vuejs.org and finally got a chance to come back to it. I made a couple of pages with vue.js, and I think there is a lot less stuff to do. There's no JSX. Your HTML peppered with vue.js directives is your templating language. There's no server side rendering, but that may be a good thing in the end. Fewer dependencies, less learning curve, less ecosystem to swallow in a single gulp. I hired a fresh grad from the Philippines, and he was able to pick it up and run with it immediately. I've only been using vuejs over Christmas, but I'm looking forward to seeing what else it can do. I'll post a small PHP-backed CRUD app if people are interested.
Look in that data and tell me how many companies are hiring. These companies are treading water. They are furlough-ing people, laying people off, getting bought by bigger companies looking for a bargain, etc, etc, etc.
On the "bad old days:"

I think it is important to ask ourselves which of the problems the author is talking about are uniquely "new." For example, PTSD has always been a thing, but our awareness of it has changed. In the past, people with PTSD weren't necessarily thought of as sick even if they were clearly unable to function.

A while ago, there would be no ailing grandma "type" as described in the article because whatever diseases they were seeing the doctor for would kill them too quickly. What I'm getting at is that the issues he discusses were just as relevant and prevalent in olden times, but in olden times you also had to worry about being hung for witchcraft or starving to death because food stamps weren't invented yet.

We have to remember that "most people today have it pretty good" is a comparative statement, and there were times when everyone was a creationist.
> gulp-vinyl-browserify-babelify nonsense

Use Webpack. It replaces the need for all of these and does a much better job.
This article apparently presumes that the US "owns" the Internet and that laws passed here apply to people in other countries...

As much as I despise Daesh, this is not the right way to do things.
Did the article ever get to why Columbia House failed? I gave up due to the obnoxious ad load (eleven external sites according to Ghostery), and that obnoxious Timescapes moving ad (which reloaded from the beginning with every text scroll, which means every 1-3 paragraphs) slowed it down to the point of being unreadable.
> (I say "my" because I'm sure my stack is different than yours in one way or another)

I think that's the problem. For a beginner what is their stack? It's a wild west of 'this months hip library' and for a beginner it's unintelligible.
This is something I have observed about every language/framework front end combo I have ever used and I have done it long enough to go all the way back to Qt 3 and even before. There is no terse way to describe a UI. Period. C++ or Java I understand they are typed languages with an avowed aim of giving the programmer fine grained control over the program. Objective C may have become popular more recently but it too is an older typed language. The unbrevity of JavaScript is inexcusable and it extends to every UI framework it offers. Tooling is no way to try and ease the problem.
> It's a wild west of 'this months hip library' and for a beginner it's unintelligible.

What's wrong with the "just pick one" approach??
After 300+ lines of config spread over 3 files.
In this one they're both possessive... so to avoid looking unprofessional it would be:

friends' phones' background images

And on the web site, photos is not possessive, so it would be spelled: photos
> The idea of the lone genius inventor is no longer true

The age of the lone genius has long since passed.
I think people try to get started with react and they jump to the boilerplates that are 'production ready'. Those boilerplates include routers, frameworks to bind routers to state, frameworks for server-side rendering, some new ES7 syntactic sugar, a bleeding edge module bundler like Webpack...the list goes on. They may or may not be a great combination of frameworks, but each has their own learning overhead.

So people confuse learning react or learning redux with learning how to use every single framework shipped in the common react boilerplates. It can take weeks of studying or learning enough about those frameworks to understand how they all work.

React itself is moving along at a healthy pace. Popular frameworks around react change about every week which causes this fatigue that OP speaks of. The most important thing IMO is learning the core concepts behind react, flux, redux, react-router, and worry about product client/server rendering and module bundling later.
Angular choses TS (well it's optional but so is jsx).

This is also my no.1 pain point with typescript - they focus on the typechecking part only - you want new JS features ? Use custom js transpilers, polyfills, etc. This means setting up custom typings, build system, module loader, etc.

JS land is just a huge mess to put it nicely because of th inherent problem with browser portability but its made much worse by the low barrier to entry community full of noise. I wish Dart had a better JS interop and faster compiler, in theory it solves all of my JS pains (excellent std lib, sane semantics, default package manager, modules from start, etc.) - in practice it produces big js files, compiling takes forever once you include frameworks, talking to JS is c ffi level of tedious (from what I understand they are working on improving it but its still non trivial with a significant performance overhead)
Very well written article with a lot of food for thought. Musk is thinking along the lines of colonizing Mars to save the human race. This is visionary thinking; maybe realistic, maybe not, but visionary.

The Americans have a great love of adventure that extends to space travel, but we are also an impatient people who want Buck Rogers and the 25th Century to happen tomorrow and not in 450 years.

Unfortunately, Vietnam and the Great Society and post-Vietnam stagflation of the 1970s put an end to our brief push out of the gravity well. Trillions of dollars were earmarked for other purposes, pushing Nasa and its quaint, difficult-to-understand projects to the back burner.

Post-Apollo, Nasa limped along with the Space Shuttle and the I.S.S., but the Shuttle is dead and the I.S.S. will eventually lose its political support. Now we can't even fly our astronauts to the I.S.S. without Russian assistance. What kind of commitment to human space flight does that demonstrate?

So, it's refreshing to see a smart visionary like Elon Musk actually walk the walk. If he says he's going to put a greenhouse full of plants on Mars by 2030, I believe him. This is a project that Nasa could have, and should have, done long since.

But since the country no longer supports this kind of public effort, at least we can place our hopes in private efforts to accomplish the same thing. Many of the 15th-16th Century explorers of the New World were privately funded, after all.

Probably in the end, it will be public-private partnerships that get us into space for good; the country will decide that it wants people to be in space, and firms like SpaceX will become contractors to Nasa like the rocket companies of old. But the difference will be that these newer companies are space-capable on their own, can launch their own craft from their own pads and bypass Nasa completely. Perhaps Nasa will then be more of a research organization, doing the deep space probes and basic research that private firms can't justify.
>And, I think, as a point of comparison, it's interesting that, in recent years, the California legislature handed the entertainment industry a large boost in tax credits for productions it kept in state (as opposed to competitors like Louisiana and Georgia).

What I always wonder is how Silicon Valley can have such an utterly monstrous cost of living problem, exacerbated by public policies that explicitly favor landowners and incumbent residents over scrappy young arrivals with new ideas and small budgets, and the tech industry doesn't just move somewhere cheaper out of sheer self-interest.
They are different, but Apple still exercises a high degree of control over what's in the App Store. There's no porn. They restrict the programming languages you can use, and AFAIK you can't make certain types of programming environments.

You could argue that they are nibbling around the edges, and "most stuff you want" is in the App Store. But I still see it as a huge amount of control.

They also seem to auto-complete what's typed into the Safari address bar, which heavily influences the sites you visit. And they choose the default search provider. Defaults matter.

My thesis doesn't really rest on profit from advertising vs. devices. I agree that they are different, but I'm just saying that these companies have a lot of power in the abstract sense. True, some of that power could be more exchangeable for political power. Maybe Facebook and Google are more powerful politically than Apple, just because they deal more directly with information.
If he's right about innovation part, most of the innovation in the mobile space should come from patent-loving groups instead of companies selling phones, companies selling apps, academics, or FOSS volunteers. Currently, most innovation is from non-patent side.

If he's right about motivation, we should see all kinds of innovation in the mobile space with goal of licensing or selling resulting patents. That group is such a small percentage of overall activity in that sector so as to be nearly non-existent.

So, we have motivation for innovation (i.e. sell stuff) plus tons of innovators without people relying on patents or filing lots of them. The patent system isn't helping here. However, suits like Apple vs Samsung, Oracle vs Google, and so on show patent holders do use it to try to eliminate competition and ensure stagnation for profits. So, we have no provable need for patent system for innovation, proof that innovation happens anyway, and proof patents are used to remove competition in a way that harms consumers. Whether fully or not, his model of patent system = innovation boost is tested enough to reject it for mobile software. Similar arguments apply to software in general.
Just use Elm instead of Javascript + Frameworks

Simple, Fast, Reactive, Functional

http://elm-lang.org
Do you have a citation for this? I'd love to share it with a friend of mine who is afraid of being a victim of terrorism in the US.
go read http://www.amazon.com/How-Fail-Almost-Everything-Still/dp/15...

This is a book written by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, he has failed at more things than you can imagine.
You are unique, divine. So hang in there. Start off with eating right and exercise to get increase your energy. Then follow your curiosity. You will be surprised what you are capable of.
Take a course on Coursera, it could be anything. Then build upon that to propel forward.
Hm, I found that one of the strengths of React is that it's so easy to sidestep a lot of the complexity of it, if you're not building a true SPA. We use React to add some interactivity to our forms and dashboards, so we only need to use state & props. No Flux/Redux/etc backends, and not much messing around with webpack & co.
"Replace this garbage with this other newer garbage."
This CA collapsing aquifer problem is exactly what I was talking about here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10790058
> I think this is a fundamental property of capitalism

What precisely is "this"?

> Some of the best selling products in the world, like Coca-Cola, are themselves creating the the problem they purport to solve.

I can't imagine what problem you're referring to. Are you saying Coca-Cola creates thirst?

> This has fueled economic growth while making us generally more vulnerable

How do you measure that? By any measure I'm aware of we are vastly better off than the people of 1915.
Exploring the QNX shadowed password hash formats