skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The mindset in SV is to fail fast - yes, with all the consequences for the investors. That's why investing in startups is a high risk investment. And that's also why the cautious way of doing business in Europe doesn't help with the startup economy. Being too cautious prevents from taking high risks.

I interviewed several times with startups proud of not having any funding behind. Very nice. Still, my question is... Who cares? The main difference is that in the USA money is constantly being invested, there is a lot of debt but that's the way to innovate. In Europe on the other hand, if you fail, or if you make debts you better hide yourself.
I would humbly submit that your sample size is too small. Even just the Rocket Internet output is a pretty good indicator of the size and diversity of successful startups tsrgetting the German market specifically (and thus with no incentive to move out to the US).
I use https://www.one-tab.com/ to backup bookmarks then i export the urls and save it as a text file in a designated folder for bookmarks.

Its a lot easier for me to query the txt files for whatever bookmark i want.
Well arguably it would be even worse than.

I think it's save to say that the relative amount of money lost is more important than the absolute money lost for most people
I am working for startup in Norway that has seen extreme growth in just 2 years. We are in the chatbot/virtual assistance space and our biggest competitors are big multi-billions US companies.

When it comes to european languages, we are at least an order of magnitude better in understanding natural language and delivery speed(from start to production) than these big companies. But oh boy how many times EU companies pick one of these big players over us and fail. Today we have a range of HUGE clients, half of them who has even failed with a competitor. We have a really good story to sell. Still it is impossible to convince 1 of 2 companies to go with us first. They really want to fail hard before giving us a chance. I just can't understand why it is like this. The trust in US companies with a strong name over decades is really huge here in EU.
Cornell Food Researcher Wansink's Downfall Raises Larger Questions for Science
Now we have a loading indicator and an animated image for the user to watch the progress as they need that.
> Why can't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to see what they last were? Why isn't time-traveling debugging widely deployed? Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program? Why in the name of the good lord are REPLs still textual? Why can't I copy a URL to my editor to enable real-time collaboration with someone else? Why isn't my editor integrated with the terminal? Why doesn't autocomplete help me based on the adjacent problems others have solved?

I think all of these are possible already in VSCode/Atom, and especially true if you’re doing reactive UI programming for the web - time travelling, improved REPL, live debugging are all there. A very good spot to be in :)
>Usually when I go around in Eastern Europe I have an easier way trying to speak German than English.

Everyone who knows English has already left. I'm not sure how much it's worth to other people but for me knowing English has been a ~x50 income multiplier.
Design is for people.
Works (for me) on mobile and I used it frequently in last couple of months. Firefox for android with ddg set as default search engine.
> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved?

> Books are great (unless you're Socrates). We now have magic ink. As an artifact for effecting the transmission of knowledge (rather than a source of entertainment), how can the book be improved? How can we help authors understand how well their work is doing in practice? (Which parts are readers confused by or stumbling over or skipping?) How can we follow shared annotations by the people we admire? Being limited in our years on the earth, how can we incentivize brevity? Is there any way to facilitate user-suggested improvements?

The great thing about books is that no matter how long they've been sitting around, it's easy to take one off the shelf and read it. The cultural infrastructure of written language has been around much longer (and been much more stable) than the computational infrastructure you'd need have your "magic ink" still work in 1000 years. At some point we need to start treating computers and software more seriously if we want to have things like this.
> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

This is something I noticed too. And it can't be just blamed to "inflation" of the US GDP. Almost any other country I checked does have fluctuations. Goes through booms and bust. China has gone through an exponential rise but slowed down and seems like it broke the pattern recently.

The US is the only country so far that has been going decades through a constant rate of change. And you can't blame that on inflation since inflation is neither constant; or it would mean that the GDP is constant (and inflation is increasing it). The GDP being constant would be weird too.

So is the US the singularity? Is the US dollar affecting the US GDP; and does it being the reserve currency of the world changes the landscape of the US economy?
it is not a problem. marriage will need stable economical base. most time, the money from both family will go into fund the couple's life, as deposit for an apartment, purchase of a car or some sort. I would recommend that do not go into marriage without a stable finance. The social system in western countries of course are different, people don't have to worry about these issues.
Thank you, don’t know how I spaced that.
The data in a python dict disappears when you turn your computer off. The data in UnQLite doesn't disappear.
Very few startups are based on a novel big idea. It's the execution that counts. Dropbox, Google, Amazon, Facebook.. none of those were novel ideas.
...didn't really get a foot on the ground in Germany twenty years ago.
By "execution" you mean a wasp nest of POs, PMs, MBAs, friends'-friends and lawyers standing over and yelling at engineers and developers imported from Eastern Europe and India?
I like Phabricator, it doesn't offer as much combustibility as Jira but the options it does have are good for software development workflows. Plus it is open source which is always a bonus

https://phacility.com/phabricator/
> But how do we get a sufficient replacement rate in systems and institutions that aren't naturally subject to extinction processes?

I think he s talking about boomers
heh ive used the phone camera trick heaps of times coming onto a site that has had a dodgy splicer who doesnt follow color standards to figure out which pair I was lighting up...quick and dirty but faster than pulling out the full tesy kit in a pinch
This is brilliant. Gonna see if there’s an equivalent for Apple Watch, and if not, write it myself.
Elon Musk and Tesla are still facing:

- A DOJ criminal enquiry into the same 420 tweet

- A whistleblower suit about misrepresentation of its rate of vehicle and battery production

- Another whistleblower suit about covering up a large theft and a narcotics ring

- A class action over racism

- Complaints about union busting

- A defamation suit over pedo accusations

- Investor class actions over the Musk family bailout acquisition of Solar City

And probably lots more that we don’t yet know about.

That so many people in tech are holding this stock and are even proud of the company is shocking to me. Sustainability can only be pushed forward with sustainable finances and the Tesla balance sheet is a horror show.

Tesla will file for bankruptcy protection in 2019.
To predict the future all you need is a rain gauge and a little imagination. Unfortunately the people who stand to gain the most by denying reality ... gain the most.

In addition, the map of western watersheds is amazing. I would love to see the other one the article mentions.

edit: couldn't find that, but did find Powell's 1878 report https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf.
So - instead of doing a little work on your part you are forcing others (in most cases people that you DO WANT to communicate with) to jump through the hoops so they can communicate with your? In most likely event they will give up on the attempt and marketoids will simply find a way to circumvent the protection.

Again - you make it seem like it's gigantic work to keep your inbox tidy. Last time I had to click unsubscribe was months ago and it happens like 1-2 times a year - is that too much work?
> Compared to the USA? Lol, you have no clue. The standard for a software engineer in SV is to take drugs to work 12 hours a day 6 days a week

Completely false, the standard is more like 35 hour work weeks with "work from home" one day a week. Judging from the fact that you know how people work in Berlin I'm going to guess you have no personal experience with SV work culture and have only read some horror stories that are not at all representative of what work is like for the average software engineer in SV.
A lot will depend on what you personally feel is "good" versus "ideologically motivated".

For example: the US was in World War I for 574 days (declared war on Germany on April 6 1917, and the war ended on November 11 1918), and entered the conflict with the Zimmerman telegram and German submarine attacks as its casus belli.

But the US had been aiding the Allied powers prior to that, and from the German perspective the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the resulting attempt to enlist Mexico to join the war against the US, was a defensive move to stem the flow of supplies from the neutral-but-obviously-biased US to Germany's existing opponents.
I really like this format. Asking questions without answering them, this causes the reader to think a lot more than the usual blog post. I also look forward to gaining more insight from the HN comments.
The easy answer for the "Two Sigma" problem is that you... don't try to reproduce it on a large scale by finding some other method.

You provide individual, one-on-one full time tutoring to each student, if that is the analytically best method. It's worth it, since educational spending is close to the most effective public spending imaginable - something in the $3-$5 return per dollar spent, which you'd be hard pressed to find any other available investment that can do that consistently.

This also does away with some substantial percent of the overhead of maintaining separate public schools, assuming that this tutoring occurs in either the tutor's home or the child's home.
Quora Gaffer
Maybe alando which was basically a blatant copy of ebay and quickly acquired by ebay? But this was a long time ago.

German PayPal? Not that I know of. The banks are helplessly trying now after many years but they aren't even able to match what PayPal provides let alone being innovative.
Doing all this surveillance working for SV companies definitely pays better than doing it for an alphabet agency. SV will never just give up their data for free.
From the guidelines: "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. "

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
MikroTik has a similarly-priced weird alternative in the 953GS-5HnT-RP: SIM slots, 3 Gigabit ports, 2 SFP cages, 3x3 MIMO. No PoE out tho.

Looking at one of these for an external garage where the existing conduit from the house has the electrical supply in it already; don’t want to dig a new trench or work out how to shield cat5/6
OMV transforms plastic waste into crude oil
I have to disagree. We don’t do tech startup like in the US or China. Yes, we do have a lot of great B2B industrial startups. But ask yourself this questions: as a developers where would you want to work? In the US that’s easy to answer, Google, MS, Apple, amazon. Where do you want to work in Germany? Which tech company provides the opportunity to earn a lot of money while working on really interesting topics at a large scale? That’s one reason the big US companies have offices here, to attract the talent.
This is less uncommon than people like to admit. I've seen, and in some cased directly involved with, code written by an inexperienced (giving benefit of doubt here) developer whose position was replaced twice over, that runs critical systems on big-money (but not life-threatening) equipment and business systems. No documentation, no tests, even one that relies on a known platform bug to never be fixed (not kidding). Nobody knows how it works, and there is no time go go through it and clean it up (business decision).

I've even stated in writing on one system that I refuse to receive "emergency" calls on holidays, weekends, or nights to fix a particular system if it ever goes down at that time. Management refusal to plan ahead or heed warnings does not constitute an emergency on my part.
Because we live in a very unequal society, things like education that offer a shred of economic security and maintenance of the middle class life are things that people will pay almost anything for.

Unfortunately, most of that effort is noisy but pointless zero-sum re-arranging of positions on the socio-economic ladder, the only beneficiaries being academics, textbook publishers, and campus property developers.

The solution: equality. Guarantee everybody a base level of economic security. From there, give people the freedom to pursue their real passions and interests, rather than waste their lives scrambling over the limited number of economically secure socio-economic positions our dysfunctional society currently offers.
Well, maybe this is a fully-fleshed out vision:

https://qbix.com/blog/2018/08/28/vision-for-a-new-truly-dece...
Why Nobel prizes fail 21st-century science
Yeah, and than you have to pass a panel deciding whether your "idea" is innovative enough. It reminded me more of a game of buzzword bingo than a viable investment procedure. As your not allowed to incorporate before enter EXIST it is just a waste of time. Not to mention that it all depends on how well you are connected at your university, and if government funds are available.
I love books, don't get me wrong, but they do age. This is especially true of books that are specialty related. Take a book from the 70s on computers, on medicine or psychology, on prehistory, on history, etc. They are all likely to be significantly outdated compared to their modern counterparts. There is much to be said for the modern way of information transference: it is always most up to date.
The majority had stopped at (right before) WPF it seems

> In fact, at a recent conference I was at with a large group of C# consultants. When the audience was polled on which desktop UIs their clients were using, the vast majority were WinForms, a small group was WPF, and almost no one was UWP

https://iamtimcorey.com/ask-tim-is-winforms-dead/

And many did long before WinForms

> Less than a year ago, a manager asked me if I could write a library for a client that would allow VB6 to access a RESTful API.

https://blog.submain.com/death-winforms-greatly-exaggerated/
China’s marriage rate plummets
This is well written article. It does not wander into irrelevancies. I learned lots of new things. It had fun anecdotes. It was short.

Regarding the "set number of heartbeats", David Scott mentions it while they were training for Gemini in "Two Sides of the Moon". Neil had a physically less demanding role in the mission and chose to train less hard. Great book, recommended.
It's not much money but absolutely sufficient to cover expenses and focus on building your startup. It paid 2500 € / month in income per person back in the day, and until recently the money was considered tax-free (as a scholarship) so it corresponded to a gross salary of about 50.000 € (without social security or retirement of course, so subtract 300 € per month for that). Now it's no longer considered tax-free but they increased the amount a bit in response, I'd say you will get 2.000 € in net income per month if you have a PhD (people with a Master or Bachelor degree get 500 € or 1000 € less, respectively). It's still not a tech salary but a living wage, and actually similar to what many people in non-tech jobs earn working full-time.

On top of that the program pays about 50k (?) for additional expenses, which you can use to e.g. rent an office, hire freelancers or cover legal costs.

For comparision, YC gives you 150k for a team of usually 2-3 people, and living expenses in SV are way higher than in Germany. So I wouldn't consider it a "bad joke" personally. Also, while the tutoring is not as good as YC some universities (especially TU Munich / LMU Munich and TU Berlin) provide really excellent mentoring, so I'd say overall it is a great program.

I'm just bummed out that nothing comparable exists for people with longer industry/work experience.
Microsoft killing off the old Skype client… for real this time
> like actually being successful

lets be honest, there is a huge amount of SV startups that bleed CV money like there is no tomorrow. not to mention the ones that failed.
The main thing for me is that the themes have not been updated for 7 years, and they only work by applying a background image now.
In Germany most start-ups are self-funded with maximum personal risk. That means that you only fail once, after that you'll never be able to recover from bankruptcy only to do your next thing. As Germans are not known to be risk taking folks it's understandable why there are slim chances for the next Silicon Valley in Germany. It's all about risk and risk taking. Tweak those parameters economy-wise, then we talk about bold entrepreneurship.
No one says you have to. I consider myself a Musk fan, and I share most, but not all, of his values (at least of those I know of). I do in particular share his vision about space and energy.
> Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program?

This was/is true in C# for 32 bit programs. Being able to code with live data is really productive. Live unit testing also would be a big win.
> Why can't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to see what they last were?

What the actual fuck am I witnessing.
Exactly, I've worked in 3 companies in Germany that you might call startups without venture capital. I think it is also a cultural issue, with investors and founders alike. Its like, a small company with an independent revenue stream and a small but reliable customer base is worth more than artificially (VC-)inflated companies, that might make it... one day... maybe.
Acrually. For recently popular languages like javascript things are way better than say C or assembly. Resources, tools, debugging, etc.

I'm still wondering why we are forcing people to write assembly with short and rubbish opcode mnemonics when we are going to compile it anyway.

Even if you look at C vs Rust/Go we have made huge improvements. People don't need to write Makefiles anymore. Packages are easily sharable and re-usable. Security is by default. Etc.
Coffee is free in the same way Facebook and Google services are free.

Honestly I would expect more services like this to come out, given how successful Facebook and Google managed to become.
It seems like PDFs might still work in a hundred years. Just like zip files.

Fun fact: HN's been around for 10% of a century. That makes Arc one of the longer-lived programming languages.

Re: the ability to take books off the shelf and read it, Library Genesis has made a lot of progress in that area. http://libgen.io/
But they won’t find Musk when watching Iron Man or Avengers.

To find him in film they have to watch the Greatest Showman.
(I work at Retool, and Patrick is an investor.)

> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how?

I think that most end-user applications now have APIs that allow you to manipulate the data. For example, Salesforce, Lever, Excel, etc. all have APIs for reading and writing data. Allowing end users to build custom UIs on top of those APIs seems like a simpler problem.

Retool (https://tryretool.com) is a fast way of building UIs on top of data. And so if there are APIs for reading and writing data from “end-user applications”, Retool lets you build custom UIs and workflows on top of them quickly.

I think this is an interesting problem, and I’m not sure what the right solution is. If anybody else has ideas, feel free to email me — I’d love to learn! I’m david@. :)
Endeit Capital and Capnamic should be on your list, as well as Project-A ventures and Partech.
Facebook was not an original idea either.
No https redirect on signup or login. That worries me.
“In the US that’s easy to answer, Google, MS, Apple, amazon. ”

That’s a dangerous thing though to push as a one-stop solution I think. There is huge advantages to work for one of these companies, but the drawbacks are also there, and they’re definitely not made for everyone
From the perspective of the website ff tracking protection is the same as an adblock user.
I think they are just distinguishing both cases because most ff users don't know that they are using an ad blocker.
I'm not sure what "butt-in-seat" means, unless you're working interactively in real time with a team, or doing customer support. Otherwise, what matters is billable time. That is, time when you're actively on-task, and not on HN or whatever. A reasonable practice is tracking 10-15 minute intervals.

Then limit that to a rolling average of 40 hours per week, or whatever you like, and can negotiate with your employer.

I've mostly worked as a consultant, so there's been no limit, other than however close to 24 hours per day that I can handle. And sometimes, with rush jobs from multiple clients, I've just about maxed. But in that case, I've discounted work time, especially for clients who weren't pushing as hard.
Could you send a PR?
Consider, for a moment, you have a great idea and a couple of friends to start a company. You have no money. Is 100k to give it a shot "suicide"? Of course not. If you're at the right time in your life, this is an excellent opportunity. Not everywhere has $4k/mo rents and $10 coffees.
> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?

I recently read Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and suspect the answer lies in there. The examples Patrick lists are all service industries driven by labour costs. This probably influences the following two questions too (project delays and GDP).
I‘ve worked at a major company that is more or less controlled by Rocket and my direct neighbor was the Germany-CEO of one of their successfuller ventures, so I think I have a rather good picture of Rocket. However, I think they have not met expectations. They have not become huge, and are just doing okay, what I consider as a failure, given their goals.
“Never been down” is an outright lie.
Very early on (10 - 15 years ago), we used swarms across 14 data centers to rapidly distribute the ‘hottest’ video files to all the video servers’ local disk caches.

Many companies back then tried to startup based on business model of doing this via end users as you suggest. It was mostly sunk by users’ pretty reasonable opinion they didn’t want to donate their upload bandwidth on their metered plan.
But you’re still not there and cannot be there when they actually read the ballot...
Interesting. Could there be a more privacy-friendly protocol involving cryptography? The Zcash cryptocurrency managed to hide transactions with zero knowledge proofs for example. It also reminds me of some cryptocurrency who asks other nodes about a bloomfilter of data, allowing them to receive what they want but more stuff to hide the real request.