skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’m in Austin, Texas. I’m 26, graduated with a BA in Sociology, and make $140,000 as an AWS Engineer.

There’s tons of money in engineering in the United States, but I would say it has come with a cost. The only reason so much money has been able to be plowed into software and hardware was because of financial products developed by Wall Street since the 1970’s. Obviously we’ve seen great results in software and hardware, but all the recent financial busts have shown there is no free lunch...
Didn't Rubinius deprecate their JIT due to a torrent of issues and bugs and have not yet replaced it? Or am I out of date?
> Cambridge Associates, a global investment firm based in Boston, tracked the performance of venture investments in 27,259 startups between 1990 and 2010. Its research reveals that the real percentage of venture-backed startups that fail—as defined by companies that provide a 1X return or less to investors—has not risen above 60% since 2001. Even amid the dotcom bust of 2000, the failure rate topped out at 79%.

I am wildly skeptical of these numbers, and could not find the actual study after a quick search on Google. It seems to ignore seed investments for starters, and many "exits" (acquihires) aren't public information, so how they quantify this is ambiguous.

If we consider a startup to begin when someone decides to quit their job and work on it full-time and a successful exit as a positive ROI to most investors in less than 10 years, I'd estimate the number as closer to 99% (most people never get any funding for their startups at all). Of course, I have no hard numbers to back that up.
Everyone over-extrapolates based on personal circumstances.

On one end you have guys like Paul Graham and Peter Thiel that truly believe in the startup way of life.

On the other end, you have people that quit their job at Google, posted a "Why I left Google to do a startup" article on medium, and then ended up regretting the decision years later.

Most people that start companies are either people that are unemployable and can't help themselves, or employable people that could do well in more traditional career paths. If you're in the employable group, I think it's important not to start a company for the sake of doing it because it's cool. The type of startup becomes really important. As an old man, would you regret not trying to solve this particular problem that you're passionate about? It's different for serial entrepreneurs / hustlers, who are always scheming for new ways of making money no matter what.
>Why didn’t he pay himseslf something around $10-35k per month as CEO?

I take you've never planned a startup budget before ;). Try running the numbers on how much it costs to run a startup with 5 employees for 3 years given $2m. You can't afford to pay the CEO $35k/month because you will run out of money far to quickly.
Yes. That was confusing.
Is Idris fully featured? It's better to compare two frameworks that have real production use in more complex apps to get an idea. Both Gin and Sinatra fit this description.

I haven't had a chance to use Bootsnap yet but it sounds really promising.
Perhaps it's a bit like traffic flow. Once you go beyond capacity, things slow down (productivity) but if you can offload some of the traffic load (to a low volume side street) the main highway becomes productive again.

That's to say, while not producing equally as high producers, the slackers do in a way help high producers produce in high volume by offloading some of the more interruptive tasks. Kind of like an executive needing an executive's assistant.
I get the impression it is believed that regulation can't really help anymore?

My general impression is that there is currently a quiet revolution happening in at least part of the industry because Temple Grandin wrote up a list of general standards for slaughter houses, like "cows should not be falling down," without specifying how to achieve those standards and then McDonald's adopted her standards. Since McDonald's is a major purchaser of beef, this is apparently having widespread impact, from what I gather.

It's only one piece of the puzzle, but it provides a potential model for progress based on something other than regulation.
I think there is some truth in what you are saying, but if that is true then people without jobs getting SNAP benefits would tend toward buying healthier food. That isn't the general trend I see in the people I've worked with. Most of them tended toward buying highly processed food and it wasn't because they didn't have time to prepare meals.

I did work with one family who was very concerned about eating healthy, but they would tend to buy the absolutely most expensive food they could find thinking it was healthier and then running out of food halfway through the month.

I'm not saying there aren't people who buy unhealthy food because they can't find healthy food, but I see a lot more people hampered by poor life skills leading too poor food choices than grocery store closing hours.
> far more children today struggle to manage their behavior [than in the past few decades].

What evidence does the book cite to support this premise?

Also, a plea: let's please answer this question before everybody posts their personal hot takes on children and parenting.
Almost 50% of Young Germans Want Crypto
You see it as people being suckers, I see it as not having time to fuck around with shady dealer tactics, Craiglist joyriders and tire kickers.

Sometimes you don't have 20h+ to dedicate to those shenanigans. In that case if CarMax comes within some Delta of KBB/etc I fail to see how that's "anti-consumer".

I've sold cars pretty much all different ways and found CarMax's proposition to be pretty reasonable.
> This version of Tiny Pascal was written in North Star BASIC. According to the articles, it implemented most of Pascal with some limitations:

> - the GOTO statement was missing

> - only integers and one-dimensional integer arrays were allowed for variable types

> - there was no “structured data type, pointer type, user defined type, and file type”

> - parameters were passed by value only

> On the other hand, Tiny Pascal did add some extensions to standard Pascal, such as else clauses in case statements.

I would imagine this to severely hamper creating efficient programs in the language, especially in those resource-limited days. What kind of programs were written in Tiny Pascal?
Wait a second, when did the discussion narrow to standardized test scores? I only read the article and did not follow through with sources, it seemed to imply “success” was measured more broadly, by their end socioeconomic status.
I'm just really, really tired of folks from Facebook and Google looking down on me. They keep saying that "everyone gets an Amazon offer" and that the "hiring bar is so low" while waving around their $100k signing bonuses or $200k total compensations with their perks that I'll never get.
Some, sure, but there was hardly an epidemic.
I'm a little skeptical about the costs complexity of an external program. You may not need to support all those C compilers, but at least you have the choice. And C is extremely mature and stable. If you're generating code, you probably don't need to use the latest not-so-well supported features; you may well be able to have C code that compiles on almost any compiler from the last 3 decades without too much trouble. And while there will be more configuration choices, it's not like raw LLVM has none.

If anything, I'd bet plain C is much simpler because it hasn't changed much, and is very unlikely to ever to anything very suprising on any future platform - which cannot be said of raw LLVM.

And of course shelling out is a a bit of a hassle, but hey; it's a well-trodden path on unix. It's not the fastest, greatest interop in the world, but it's good enough for a lot of things.

(and wow- terra sounds impressive!)
For some context, the "startup" in question appears to be an online woman's shoe website.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/shoes-of-prey

I would hope this Founder has more to share in retrospective explaining the true reasons for suicide, such as:

* The margins of an online retail shoe business are poor (typically single digit).

* The costs of carrying unsold inventory will bury a company in debt.

* Being the first to deliver a product online is not a sustainable competitive advantage.

* Amazon is crushing everyone in retail.
Since no one has said it directly; this article is about Intellectual Ventures, the patent troll firm that aggressively weaponized America's poorly written intellectual property law. http://www.intellectualventures.com/
> Can anyone think of any reasonably common stacks using LLVM as a JIT?

PostgreSQL - although i doubt that's the sort of thing you had in mind!
Yep. Same for me in boring old Jefferson Park. I’m looking forward to when my kids are old enough and I can just send them out of the house and play.
> The ancient Greeks seem to have been incredibly xenophobic and negatively disposed towards other peoples.

Such a blanket claim cannot stand, especially considering that the “ancient Greeks” were not a single population but scattered into a number of political entities and with different economies. There were insular Greeks and there were culturally tolerant Greeks. As examples of the latter, Herodotus repeatedly depicts Egypt as the font of all civilization and knowledge. The Greek colonies in Anatolia readily mixed with local populations and adopted much from the Persian Empire.
George Carlin joked about this 'child worship' years and years ago. :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0MKBdD2FGA
Buying a mattress is aggravating, but my experience has been rather different. Maybe I went to different types of stores, I don't know. I did notice that each store/chain seems to sell very similar mattresses that are somehow technically different models so you can't directly compare prices.

First mattress I bought had a sticker price of I think $850 plus tax. Ended up haggling and paying $550 cash (tax included) for the mattress with a cover included.

Second mattress I bought had a sticker price of around $2800. Haggled down to $900 after tax again with a cover included. It was significantly better than the first one.

Both were queen sized, included delivery and offered haul-off.
String trepanation
I'm honestly never sure how seriously to take those sorts of statistics. They tend to be based on participation in food programs, which doesn't tell you that much.

Deaths due to malnutrition are quite rare now, generally being confined to cases of abuse or niglect, while it used to be a normal cause of death.
Yeah, I had to keep rebasing on a rapidly changing branch a couple of years ago, and magit made it a lot less painful than it otherwise would have been.
I'm against following George R.R. Martin's lead, because I suspect it would cause different judges to sentence different punishments for similar trials given their own person aversion or attraction to killing. This would be equivalent of people being treated unequally by the law, which is against the equal protection clause of the fourteen amendment.
It's not that OP shouldn't be making money, it's that ads would be the wrong way to make money.
The HN crowd is not going to put up with huge ad banners when there are plenty of HN reader apps without them.
I'm fairly certain that the decision in Alice Corp v CLS Bank International put the nail in the coffin of Intellectual Ventures' business model. A large percentage of the patents in their portfolio[0] are of the abstract idea implemented on a computer variety. Since patents have a shelf life most of what they purchased will likely expire returning 0% on investment. This doesn't mean that patent trolling as a business is dead, but it certainly looks like it is not scalable which is frankly wonderful news.

[0]: http://patents.intven.com/finder
People have been growing food in California for a long, long time though.
> The result is, like the other poster says, a huge number of papers that claim to have solved really hard problems, which of course remain far from solved; in other words, so much useless noise.

Could the answer be holding these papers to a stricter standard during peer review?
Crystal is far less compatible with Ruby than that. Simple methods/classes are valid but everything after that is completely different.
Sorry if this sounds old fashioned and traditional, but shouldn’t universities primarily focus on the quality of their education? I’m not exactly keen on my tax dollars going to make schools better for parties and hooking up. Tinder exists, if early twenty somethings want to hook up why are they spending $30K and up of loans and parent’s savings on it? Heaven forbid they go to class and study for midterms instead of fucking around at a frat...
The key factor is work for a company where software is the product, not a cost center. Silicon Valley is full of those: startups, and big companies. Europe not so much.

Using older terms: IT doesn't pay, SWE does.

I have also done some math to compare US and Europe pay, and if you max out at $150K, which seems a lot by European standards, you actually are very similar to European compensation. Why? College for your average two kids, plus retirement. In Europe, it's included. In the US, you save for it from your high salary.
Yes, I agree with this. We use Sinatra + Sequel, but run our code using JRuby mostly because we're sharing some scala libs with other teams. In any case for us, performance has not been a problem (~20k req/min with one node). I'm really looking forward to ruby 3x3 :)
Yes, accidents happen. But this is precisely the type of thinking that got us where we are today. Millions of kids playing in the forest and a few get hurt so we keep them inside now.
This is meaningless article.

I think this is common sense that when you are starting business, you have to adjust your life style to that. Suddenly, you won't be getting regular hefty paycheck from Google and have to rely on your business income. If the income is not able to sustain your current life style, you have to adjust otherwise you will burn through your cash. That is reasonable in the short term, but should ring a bell if it takes more than 1 year to be able to live from your startup salary.

On the top of that, you have to adjust the company to the "startup" budget as well. I have seen so many people go nuts with hiring, benefits and useless spending after getting large seed or series A.
Very true. Businesses like this feel "greedy" to me, in that they are not particularly inventive or novel, but appealing in the financial sense that the market is big. Greedy companies fail.
Since we're doing anecdotes I have exactly the opposite experience. Nearby parks are full of kids, mixed ages, playing lightly supervised, making up their own games.

But so goes anecdotal evidence. Anyone know if the book cites evidence supporting the premise that kids these days are "worse behaved"?
And online banks like N26 complain in turn that Germany has the most expensive ATM fees in Europe. It sounds like a bullshit argument given that operational costs for an ATM are mostly fixed.
As a counterpoint, I grew up in a relatively poor neighborhood, in a rented home. Was part of a huge community of kids who all played together unsupervised, especially all summer long. In the school yard, downtown, down by the river, in the park, we ranged pretty far as we got older. Once you had a bike there were unsupervised day trips to wooded areas where we played a poor-man's predecessor to paintball using slingshots and pilfered grapes.

From my limited experience, home ownership is not a requirement for free-range children.
As a father of three elementary school kiddos, here's my anecdotal-evidenced perspective:

I see a lot of other children who are experiencing a simultaneous excess and deficit of parental authority. Their parents rarely or never correct behavior that is disrespectful, self centered, or too demanding. From my point of view, they should be saying "No" much more often - firmly and respectfully.

At the same time, the kids are forced into endless regulated, supervised activities and given little or no free time. Or what free time they have is spent on YouTube. Seems to result in kids who are rude, fragile, and ignorant of normal human interaction.
> To be clear, my startup is still very much alive and, apparently, well. I left the company over a year ago. I might get a return in the future...

This kind of takes the bite out of his argument.
I also find it odd that these freaky methods are used ... if anything they seem more cruel and unusual than other alternatives.
Well, my computer runs a bunch of software written by random volunteers so personally I'm not that worried about it. I personally prefer that to the available alternatives. Yes it would be great to have monitoring (of all the dns services) and I'm not sure if anyone does that, but considering the perpetual tran wreck that is DNSSEC it doesn't really alter anything as all dns is vulnerable.

With https, whoever you end up contacting needs to cough up a valid certificate for the domain in the url. I run https everywhere to try to get that protection as often as possible. In practice there are still ways that dns tricks can cause trouble but they are not as bad as you might think and browsers are slowly pushing an https only web (I hear Chrome will soon start marking all http sites as "insecure" rather than https sites as secure). ssh has its own authentication method and I do try to verify new hosts via another secure chanel.

Speaking of not trusting companies, I am reminded that at one point I noticed that CentryLink seems to be intercepting all dns traffic no matter the intended destination, so without either a secure connection past the ISP or maybe a nonstandard port it may not matter what dns server you try to use. Hopefully all ISPs that do this do the horrible redirect of invalid domains thing so attempting an http connection to an invalid domain might show if this is the case (I found it trying some of the nonstandard domains that OpenNIC resolves).
Pasta Containing Barley (1–3)Beta-D-Glucan Increases Cardioprotection
(author of the above quote) I'll add that shorter compile times is the gift that keeps on giving. It's easy to underrate the importance of shorter build-test cycles.
You can do that in Ocaml too, let open Foo in expr.
>Doing _anything_ to reduce this improves performance dramatically

It does if you ignore the overhead of JIT compilation itself. However, my understanding is that writing a JIT implementation that performs better than a good interpreter is surprisingly difficult. You have to have a lot of complicated logic for tracking hotspots and using JIT judiciously in short-running scripts.
Thats like saying weight loss is common sense and theres no need to talk about diabetes.

Also building muscle and weightlifting is common sense and thus theres no need to talk about growing old.

And finding the right spouse is common sense and theres no need to talk about divorce.
From a point of view of a creator who's had there work copied for someone else's profit,
I created some music for cats. It was a bit of fun really, you wouldn't like it, but your cat might,
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKWUX7aMnlEK3edghsEnS...

anyway, occasionally my music is copied and monetised on other youtube channels without me knowing.
While this annoys me, YouTubes approach to this is very good,
If I report this copyright infringement, YouTube allows me to enter an agreement with the copyright infringer for shared revenue or other.
I balance this multi tiered approach as very good, since this other channel may be getting better views than me, and the cost of marketing is so high, and this other user is effectively endorsing my brand and creating awareness for me, and to waiver their violation, I can enter a shared revenue agreement with them. This is a win/win for me as I get another opportunity to profit, and my music is shared in more places than just the places I manage to manually put it myself or pay someone to.
I've studied for 4 years. I've only become marginally better. I still can't understand a lot of the hards and mediums.
That may have changed quite a bit in the decades since the original study.
Pasta Could Help Save Your Life, Says New Study
Corporate support or not, Rust seems to be a better contender for the crown of the sane successor to C++.

D might have been an important evolutionary step, possibly showing what does not work well for the niche it was trying to fill.
>Marshmallows represent different value for kids with different background.

Or kids with different tastes. I liked candy and cookies as much as any other kid, I suppose, but I never much cared for marshmallows. For me to leave one sit there would not have required much strength of will.

I wonder why they didn't ask each kid what their absolute favorite candy or sweet treat in the world was, and use that for the test instead.
The reason is that you are more comfortable or efficient in the new language, but want to access legacy.

Having to recreate everything for scratch is a massive effort, however gradually refactoring an application and having access to huge amounts of third-party libs is an enabler. (while all those libs will use non-idiomatic patterns, so it has to be contained)
If it isn't falsifiable, then it isn't scientific.

I'm cribbing that from reading the Wikipedia page on Logical Positivism, specifically the criticism of positivism by Popper.
Not adult toys. I am involved with a startup creating a biodegradeable, recyclable / reuseable TPE, filed provisional patent 2 wks. ago.
...how do you know what I'm going through so well? How do I learn to cope with this? Have you figured anything out yet?
> Can anyone think of any reasonably common stacks using LLVM as a JIT?

We just added LLVM based JIT to PostgreSQL. Don't think we have quite the same issues as JITing generic interpreted languages though, because the planner gives us much more information about the likely cost of executing a query. So the need for a super-fast baseline JIT isn't as big.

> But that doesn't mean you can't use a conventional compiler stack like LLVM as a JIT and get excellent code - it' just going to take its own sweet time doing so.

I think that's partially due to people using the expensive default pipeline when using optimization. A lot of those either don't make sense for the source language, or not for the first JIT foreground JIT pass.

The biggest issue I have with LLVM wrt around JITing is that it's error handling isn't really good enough. It's fine to just fatal error if you're in a AOT compiler world, but that's much less acceptable inside a database. There's moves to make at least parts of LLVM exception safe, but ...
Jack, my comment was not against Erlang or Elixir, but SOME of these comments here.

People start comparing different languages in different areas and use cases and instead of discussing about the main subject, keep saying oh no my language is more popular or that language is written in C so C is the best...
You really can't compare the wages without taking the location and health/social insurance into account. Cost of living is a huge factor. For example here in Slovakia making 3000 month netto (after paying all the taxes, health and social insurance) will get you a great life. You can afford a nice flat or house. You would have to make 3-4x that money to live at least on the same standard in the US in California.
The Psychology of Money
> As a user, I'm _not_ pleased that the law has devoided me of a choice to participate with businesses under a previously acceptable business model, and without any input/say on my part

Which business model do you think is killed by GDPR? Can you point to the bit of GDPR that you think causes that change?