skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or, you know, this whole interpretation is misleading statistical BS, and as the caption says "Factors such as unpaid absenteeism, labor turnover, part-time work, and stoppages cause average weekly hours to be lower than scheduled hours of work for an establishment" -- and lowly paid part time work has replaced steady full time employment in many sectors.

(As for the per capital consumption, does it add mr. Gates with Joe Average? Even so I'm sure they will be an increase in Joe Average's consumption, but is that because Joe Average has more buying power than a worker in the 60s, or because they have to spend more to stay afloat, as everything's more expensive, and they don't have much cushion left in the bank?)
There's a Cadillac ad for US, where the narrator openly says that those Europeans enjoy their holidays, but an American works hard and gets to enjoy nice car cue cadillac car enters the scene. They openly ridicule the idea that Europeans can take a month of holiday per year. I do feel a bit sorry for that attitude.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8
Atleast they get paid relatively more than in the EU. In Japan you're expected to work mad hours (read 11-12 hrs) for what is barely above minimum wage in the US! Add to that Tokyo is hecka expensive.

I was quoted a salary of $ 30k for a deep learning position. Now that is third world.
The UK still allows private healthcare so those who really want to pay extra can do so. In several areas, for instance emergency medicine, there isn't a private offering and others the NHS has the centres of excellence available to all based on need.

While our emergency system is often at the point of creaking it at least isn't anywhere close to American levels of having to deal with what should be primary care problems. There's also the massively real hazard of what happens when you have a large proportion of the population who can't access basic healthcare, for instance a greatly increased communicable disease risk. Then there is the economic cost of people unable to work, or work as well, due to potentially treatable medical conditions or bankrupted by medical bills. On a purely economic basis there is a case for universal healthcare.
That's the standard subsidy for electric cars in the UK, I think. Similar to the one Tesla benefits from in the US.

And while only the very well off use taxis to travel regularly when they could use TfL, you'd be surprised at how many less well off people use them occasionally. Especially the elderly and disabled, due to the accessibility features of London taxis.
'Creche' isn't Hinglish. It's just not used much in the US.
Japanese company develops a solar cell with record-breaking efficiency
This reminds me of the time when I saw the C code required to display a window in Windows, with all the things we've come to expect from one (close "x", system menu and so on). At the time (Windows 95 I think) it was around 80 lines of code.

I was surprised because in Delphi 2 that was a File / New Form followed by a Show or something like that... I never even thought of the API calls required to do all that.
Salaries for professionals are markedly lower, we live in much smaller houses etc. I get the feeling that when you're winning at life in America...

If having more money and a bigger house is winning that's true, but many people don't see life that way. Being happy, having time to enjoy life with your friends, doing worthwhile and interesting things, raising your kids well, etc are also ways to win. In general if you talk to an older, wealthy person, they say those are things that should have done instead of working so much.
The ranking [0] is absolutely fascinating, and contains a lot of surprises.

Who knew that Mexicans work 500 hours a year more than the Japanese?

I wonder if the data is being skewed somehow, perhaps by different cultural norms around women working, or something like that?

If anyone can shed any light on this it would be really interesting.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#OECD_ranking
"How could anyone be stupid enough to fund Facebook. They'll never make money" - HN.

"VC's never fund anything but social media apps and advertising companies" -- HN.

"Yes of course SpaceX is going to make Musk money" -- HN.

"Funding a supersonic plane is a stupid idea" -- HN.

(And yes, also "$41M funding for color.com is stupid" --HN.)
I'm not sure how much subsistence farming has to do with a socio-political theory that primarily came out of 19th Century Europe/Russia and Modernity, but sure, if that's your critique I don't want to derail the thread into a discussion about what anarchism is/isn't
Now let's hope nobody gets ill.
In Holland, everyone takes off 4 - 6 weeks in the summer to travel the world. This is so different than Americans:

1) In the U.S. you can work for years at a company before getting more than 1 or 2 weeks paid vacation.

2) Most Americans don't travel much outside their own state or region, let alone country. Most don't even own passports.

3) Even when not on the job, either at night, on the weekends, or on vacation, Americans tend to stay attached to their job via email or phone.

It's true that American salaries can be a lot higher than European ones, especially for developers. But Americans also typically do a lot of side jobs or have households with 2 or more full-time jobs per family, 2 or more cars per family. So one has to ask if it is all worth it?
Please keep in mind that your costs of living are also different.

In the EU you don't pay as much for the same services as in the US, especially healthcare.

I'm not sure about Japan but it could be the same thing there.
Just... no[1]. For most of the example settings either environment variables, a secure service, or enough environment variables to connect to a service, or other environment pki in place for such communications.

Stop putting your settings in config files for service applications... if it's something that runs on a desktop, sure. If it's a server app, don't do it.

[1] https://12factor.net/
> lower quality of healthcare

No. US does not have better health care indicators than other countries with similar development levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality_o...

> increased government spending

Maybe... But you will spend much less overall on healthcare, so it'll be a net positive for normal working Americans.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.PCAP?year_high_de...

> increased chances of corruption

Countries with better healthcare than the US also have less corruption perception. I'm not suggesting public healthcare causes that, but it certainly does not cause the opposite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

> creating a moral hazard of not working to earn what is consumed

Moral hazard "occurs when one person takes more risks because someone else bears the cost of those risks". How does this affect healthcare?

We know that a lot of diseases have a strong genetic factor, so moral hazard isn't an issue there.

Of course, behavior is also an important factor. But working insured Americans are already subject to moral hazard (since they're on a group policy, their disproportionate costs are already supported by others). Medicare and Medicaid recipients are also already subject to moral hazard.

So moral hazard will be created for uninsured people and people on an individual policy, for behavior induced health problems. If that's a deal-breaker for you, you should be against federally funded healthcare.
Exactly.

But this is not fun, and being the next level requirements elicitator is not a prestigious career goal. Authoring a new javascript framework is.
Here in the UK houses are tiny compared to the USA, but it's really just because there's far less available land to build on. The entire UK is about half the size of California.
You're correct about the benefits, but wrong about the downsides.

The bikes lock to themselves, and they explain in the article that they are already using a behavior system to reward people for good behavior and punishing users who abuse the system.

(although this doesn't prevent sanitation workers from creating bike piles to clear walkways and footpaths where the bikes are often discarded)

The second biggest problem, as the article mentions, is the fact that with bikes scattered everywhere and no real organizational system, that all of the bikes fall into disrepair and the majority are not properly maintained.
The theory is that you are selecting yourself to do things you like, which you just happen to do at the highest level.

This was fine in America for a long time, but

1) As colleges degenerate from being an intellectual addition, to a pre requisite for jobs well paying or not

2) several classes of jobs disappear, especially those which could be done by common sense and training

It results in posers. People who are high functioning, cynical and clear about what it takes to live a decent life.

I probably point it out a lot on HN and other places - but you see this in action in India and China (and other developing nations).

Very few people actually are interested in doing math or math derived work all the time, but if they don't society and the jobs market will be unmerciful.

So they pretend. They hate it, assume everyone else is pretending, and go through the basic motions required to get to the other side.

These are the people who are badly affected by the whole process. The ones who would not have been happy becoming engineers, lawyers or olympiads.

But that's the game, and people will always play it.
I personally find macros and metaprogramminv nicer and more powerful than Template Haskell. I like the regularity of all the syntax too.
Sure. The point is that this isn't a particularly significant "first" (as the original headline claimed), it's an incremental advance in tunnelling technology. If James Brindley had been able to build Harecastle to Mersey Flat dimensions, he would have done. But tunnels have steadily got broader, deeper, longer and air-draft-ier since Harecastle and Malpas. There was no sudden moment when someone invented and built the ship tunnel.

(Incidentally, the "general definition" you cite is one used by the US Naval Institute, but not universally recognised. As the former editor of a monthly news-stand boating magazine it's certainly not one I've ever used. In the UK, for example, you can legally define your small boat as a ship by signing up to the Small Ships Register.)
Eric at Annotary
It's that attitude that is the problem though. Poorer American's generally don't want change to help them because they believe it's only a matter of time until they are 'really winning'. Taking your two points: would a larger house and higher salary make significant improvements to your quality of life or will it provide short term satisfaction of having nicer/bigger/more expensive possessions?
The hardest thing for me to explain to my American family, as someone living in the EU, is that a tax or burden that is evenly distributed has near 0 negative impact on collective productivity.

A society where everyone is missing one leg will still function and be largely productive, up until they have to compete with a society where everyone has two legs. That leg is something like health care, maternaty leave, vacation, VAT, higher taxes. In the USA policy indicates that they'd rather give up their literal leg, than risk being #2.
> working hours have no significant upward trend. [...] More people simply don't work.

Just curious: Do those graphics take into account the people that don't work as 0h? or has the working hours not gone up among those who do work?

> Looks like that protestant work ethic/capitalism/etc is working pretty well for us.

Judging by economic growth and consumption, may be. And those might be good metrics.

But are you happier for it? Are you enjoying the rewards of your hard work?

Not trying to imply you aren't, by the way. And I say "you" because I'm a westerner, but not from the anglosaxon sphere and I don't see quite the same work ethic around me, although not too different either.
> Salaries for professionals are markedly lower, we live in much smaller houses etc.

This is an age old debate, and it's very hard to compare one vast continent to another. Regional differences between US cities and European cities are at least as large or larger than the difference between the avereages of US and European salaries/living standards etc. The difference between central manhattan and rural Apalachia is just like the difference between the fancy parts of Stockholm and rural eastern Europe. There is just no comparison in Salaries, Life expectancy etc.

When it comes to those of us that are "winning", the difference is there, especially for some professions like doctors who can basically make a killing in the US but not in Europe. That is probably to do with that it's an economic risk/investment to get the MD in the US, whereas in Europe it's normally free. When you are a finished doctor you aren't entitled to a fancy car - we just paid your MD so you better get to work and be thankful ;)

To make a fair comparison between me (a software dev) and a comparable person in the US (in a similar metro area of ~1M people) you'd have to make a pretty tricky calculation involving costs of healthcare, childcare, money saved for retirement, pensions etc. On the bottom line I think the US person would make a bit more money, but on the other hand would have a worse work/life balance.
>"In other words, high-performance code should ideally run so fast that any further improvement in the code would be pointless.

And then define pointless, to make a quantified decision on optimization you should use a performance model. Common model is the roofline model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofline_model
The article is almost about how the rainforests - long considered natural wonders of the world - are actually pretty heavily "engineered".

There is no doubt in my mind that, if we actually tried, we could make "batter" forests than "nature". More diversity, more vibrancy, more overall life.

A more local excellent example is the evidence that native north americans would do periodic burns, with many varied benefits for the different ecosystems that underwent such engineering.
Average home size in the UK is less than half that of the US: http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/how-big-is-a-house

US @ 77 sq meters per capita vs UK @ 33 sq meters per capita.
Talking of the Atari ST, there was an excellent example of this colour-switching in an ST software utility called Photochrome, which could use overscan effects, multiple palette switches per line, plus the colour switching technique in this article to greatly increase the number of perceived colours. It's the best example of this colour switching technique I've seen with barely any noticeable flicker (on a CRT-TV anyway). Seeing what was effectively a 'true colour' image coming from a machine that's only supposed to be capable of 16 indexed colours was a very impressive feat.
Yeah, the crucial observation here being, that in a civilized society, this should not be the only choice you're presented with.
Comparing Git trees in Go
No, he isn't. He said the advertisers should decide what they spend money on, so Google doesn't have to care about what other people might consider offensive (i.e. 'flipping the bird to censorship')
Well yeah at least you're not working more than physically sane. But you still don't get any vacations and the like. You don't even have sick days! I mean proper sick days where you're paid and they aren't counted against some imaginary limit of how sick a person can be.
Not sure of the point of the hot.proxy.js, webpack-dev-server already has a proxy option.
Unique and interesting ! pay and make friends !
Tokyo's definitely cheaper than the bay area or NYC, but it's still not exactly cheap. The median monthly rent is low, but you have to figure that the median apartment is tiny by American standards.
This is all just speculation. We don't know anything. But it's possible that there was a difference in opinion about what sort of user to target.

Courting power users used to be much more popular than it is today. It seems that today all large tech companies target IT professionals and consumers with a completely separate set of offerings. There's very little in between any more. On the consumer side they go for ultimate scale because nothing else moves the needle for them.

It wouldn't surprise me if Apple had decided to deprecate everything that isn't accessible to all consumers, which would have frustrated someone who has worked for decades to let power users automate tasks in ways that the average consumer never would.

As I said, all pure speculation for our entertainment :-)
It becomes obvious when you know closed form expression for Fibonacci numbers as a sum of powers of phi (which I'm sure Tao is aware of). I was taught that in high school. The only reason this wouldn't be obvious to Tao is if he was working on much harder problems for so long that he forgot the basic stuff.
> wages will progressively become worse

Given that history - especially recent history - has shown the opposite trend, I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Cost of living, for the same sized apartment, in Tokyo is more that San Francisco by my calculations.
IMO your missing the point - people wanting to pay for things legally does not somehow negate the existence of HDCP strippers and the pointlessness of DRM.
This is a rather old post, should have a (2015) in the title and unfortunately doesn't have much interesting information in itself.
> This is the more artisanal version of that

So, it's in a paper wrapper bag with vintage font that displays a feel-good message? (Note: I'm susceptible to these kinds of marketing gags, but feel dirty when I buy something that turns out to be mediocre stuff.)
You can use Rice's theorem[1], which is a generalized version of the Halting problem.

I don't believe this proves that programming can't be automated, though. Humans too aren't able to prove completely that what they write is correct, it doesn't stop them from making programs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem
I recommend reading: http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html

Inequality is the result of people earning different amounts, such being compensated in proportion to the value they generate - rather than everyone earning the same irrespective of that.

Inequality is the result of reaping the rewards of your own work: someone is more effective, so they earn more. Why is it bad? How can any market economy even function without it?

If an author writes a really good book, then it will sell and they'll make a lot of money. They earn a lot more than the author who writes bad, unpopular books. That's an example of income inequality.

A great comedian will draw large crowds and his shows will fetch a high price. That's an example of inequality too. What's wrong with that? How will anything work if it were otherwise?

Inequality is arguably not the right economic easure to care about for social issues. Imagine every human in year 7000 is rich enough to own entire planets, but the super wealthy own 100 planets. Who cares? Why is that a problem? If your concern is about a particular class, then you should look at their standard of living and progress in it over time, not compare against how much someone else has.
Most 11 Design Tips for Beautiful Presentation Ever Seen
Fiverr’s Entrepreneurial Populism and a 3-Days Workweek
An '84 Computer Chronicles episode fully dedicated to programming
Per comments from the article earlier today/yesterday, it was because a feature wasn't supported in safari/mac, and didn't have the regression in the fallback methods for caching, so they let it be for non-windows. They've since updated the method, and the next release should have it in place.

Also, not everything is detectable via feature detection, there are bugs specific to browser classes/oses/versions that require useragent parsing/sniffing to target.
The new focus on the 'automation push' is for political reasons and not for any other real concerns. Ask yourself what changes in society are being agitated for the most? What is being put forward for the solution to the automation push?

It is not very different than the political handling of man-made global warming. The solution is for affluent nations like the US to reduce its standard of living and cede more control to international bodies. We can debate the merits of the science all we want, but the solution put forward promotes a pre-determined political agenda.

We're seeing the same type of thing starting now with the talk of the automation crunch. Ideas like UBI are declared the solution and a shift to greater reliance on government because we will all soon be unable to have good enough jobs to look after ourselves.
Never had an issue, but the AirPods are an awesome upgrade. You might want to try them out.
> They themselves tend to be pretty understanding of the whole anti-DRM thing and contribute to FOSS technology more than most companies, but they cooperate with DRM content because that actually is the difference between them being in business and not.

Is it really though ? I mean ... their content still get pirated. Everybody's content gets pirated, yet most of them are still in business.
That's the benefit of travel isn't it, these same friends we visited had come over to the UK 2 years prior for the first time and that experience adjusted a lot of their pre-concieved ideas about the British in a positive way.

If American's were enabled to take the time to see the world a bit more they would be less reliant on media stereotypes to understand it and might question their lot a bit more often but perhaps that's not in the interests of the people who run America.
Assessing the Habitability of the TRAPPIST-1 System Using a 3D Climate Model
Tokyo isn't all that expensive unless you're trying to live in luxury and a fair percentage of that 11-12 hrs would be spent appearing busy, CYA, napping or waiting for your boss to leave so you can go home. Speaking from experience the Japanese work ethic is as much about show as it is about actual hard work. It's a brutal culture behind a facade of politeness.
They're not bad at it, they simply choose not to.
As a RPI engineering grad myself, we had a business school?

Slight joking aside, I do wish that while i was there, I knew more about these services.
What on earth is a minimap good for? There are lots of useful way to jump to a given file variable or definition
Then again Boeing had the benefit of already having most of the expertise in house from building planes for decades. I'm sure if I started a company I would need a lot more than $30B to develop 787.