skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
completely anecdotal, but the reason from my perspective is that the system has been overwhelmingly rigged against being able to take economic risk.

I would have started my own business by now ... heck I'd probably have started and failed several by now if not for one thing. Well three:

1) you cannot afford prescription drugs in America unless you have good health insurance. At least in my state (Alabama), the federal health marketplace offers exactly one option from exactly one provider. It has a ridiculously high deductible and is (no shit) not accepted at nearly all doctor's offices in my town.

2) I cannot afford to lose my access to prescription medication and healthcare, because my wife has diabetes and I survived cancer a few years ago. We're in fine health now, but we DO have medical expenses ... things that should NOT be that expensive (yearly CT scans and insulin are hardly breaking technology), but have been SO inflated in price by a bogus, rigged third-party-payer system that we literally can't afford those things without "insurance".

3) I had kids early in life, and since my adult working career began, it has been an absolute baseline requirement that I be able to get them medical care and otherwise provide for them.

ok ... having kids early was my decision, and I'll accept that this decision limited my universe of personal options. Getting sick. Having a wife who got sick. These were not personal decisions. They are just things that happen to people.

Our system in America is designed to keep me at my desk, working for someone else, doing mostly meaningless work. Why? Because it'd be a complete nightmare for those at the top, if every last one of me out there in the workplace could afford to take a risk that might not work out.

There'd be a helluva lot more competition out there.

America is dying because of this. Not just our economy. But our society. The world would genuinely be a better place with the companies I would have started in it. And that is true for every other stymied inventor/would-be-entrepreneur in america.

There is always a downside to risk, and there is always a risk involved in starting a new Enterprise. But what we have right now is so far out of whack that taking even a minor risk, can straight up kill you or your kids for lack of access to proper medical care.
That line is taken out of context a lot - the Declaration of Independence does not try to assert that all humans are equal in ability, its main focus was to state that all humans have equal rights to their life, liberty and freedom to pursue happiness. That means that even if a human is weaker, or even disabled, he or she still has equal rights to a human who is in good health.
You hire a firm to download your app, watch an ad or make a purchase. The firms gets a bunch of people in a virtual sweat shop to do this. You lose some of the money to labor costs and fees. But you also make some of it back in "organics" because your app goes up the charts. There lots of companies that do this, but they dress up what they are doing as marketing.
This would be more credible coming from shareholders rather than employees.
Not to mention they also have dedicated entire mobile ecosystem and operating system as well as significant leverage even in other phone ecosystems
The entry of a new competitor could also cause both the incumbent monopolist and the challenger to fail, if the monopolist hasn't kept a deep enough war chest filled, for weathering such challenges.

But why keep a war chest, when you could use the same funds to greater effect by buying political protection and distributing the remainder to the owners?

While it is possible to effectively protect a monopoly without help, appropriating the machinery of the state where possible is much more efficient. As I mentioned previously, where the state cannot be used, the company could hire a gang to burn down competitor capital more cheaply than trying to duke it out in a fair fight on the open market.

If you're DeBeers, and someone opens a diamond mine that threatens your cartel in a place with little law enforcement, your carrot is a buyout offer, and your stick is murdering key personnel and destroying vital equipment using "security contractors". You don't need to lower prices, if you can make the new guy go bankrupt without ever bringing anything to market.
Farming is harsh and without subsidies even more farms would go bankrupt. Prices for goods are low, manufacturing cost is high, margins are ridiculously low. Add the fact that maintaining a farm is hard work, both physically and mentally.

I worked on an alp in the mountains for a month, doing everything from cleaning the stables, milking cows, herding them on steep mountainous terrain, cooking, feeding the sick animals. I had a 16h work day; all while earning almost nothing (I did it to know what it means to work in tough situations). My boss and his family hardly had anything left when the month ended.

I don't know how to fix this, but it's important.
Well the issue isn't the boom and bust. It is the new leverage that has been made over seas that has forced the American farmer more pressure. Knowing this the Federal Government made a huge multi-billion dollar safety net for the farmers and I am guessing it wasn't enough.

The thing is this won't cause one acre of farmland to go unused it just means other farmers will have larger farms.
NHS (Great Britain - state owned health provider) is on a track to reach 2mln employees.
How can you disentangle the people, the country, and the legacy of WWII? Without the war Japan today might be an unpleasant fascist totalitarian power ruling over most of Asia. It is hard to reconcile the Japan of today with imperial Japan and the war crimes in Korea, China, and the Philippines.
1) The problem is that not every company has the resources to maintain its own fork of the code base. Some of us are one man bands, work in quite small teams of less than 3 or 4 developers. This idea that people have the resources to maintain their own fork of the code is crazy.

2) Two it creates fragmentation. Fragmentation creates defects and incompatibilities.

As I gotten older I pretty much realised that unless it is backed by a professional company I am not using it. There has been consistent stream of fiasco, drama and general unprofessional bullshit in the realm of open source I am quite happy I've mostly stuck to doing the majority of my work with .NET and SQL Server.
Thank you for sharing this; the world needs many more people who actually live and act on their ethical boundaries.
I think so. 39,000 in Stockholm.

http://www.stockholm.se/OmStockholm/Forvaltningar-och-bolag/
So taking your last 2 posts...

> Is there any physical law that demands [semantics for something that is the opposite of something else]? I think not.

Does this sound as absurd to you as it does to me?
Interestingly farm land prices are stable and rising slightly (in Iowa, 2017 numbers)

http://dreamdirt.com/blog/iowa-farm-land-land-values-up-2-in...
Ex-Farmer here who still rents out land to a current farmer.

The type and amount of data they have is startling. The issue is there are so many variables that are uncontrollable, or unpredictable in the time frame of a year or an entire growing season. These include weather and climate, and political climate across the world.

When a small-time farmer from my neck of the woods can sell directly to China, he has to worry about our politics and theirs, as well as the weather here, there, and at all stops between.

So, in other words, it's easier to predict what will be worth more, but no more easy to predict what will grow or what will sell well in 2 years or so. Add in soil conditions and requirements and costs, and you have a complicated picture.
> It's more difficult to start a business in an established field, as licensing laws have come to cover so much more of the landscape.

In my experience, it's been a problem with banks and small business loans being hard to obtain these days. Banks want a LOT of leverage, you have to already be doing pretty well.

Folks that are already pretty well-off aren't going to take the types of risks that create small businesses.
Institutions support social justice as long as its not too risky for them. It makes them look progressive. I'm afraid it's just good business tactics, instead of money they gain social wealth.
I'm not sure, but it seems an overly complex approach. If all you want is to execute an async function from a sync context, run and wait for it:

>>> import asyncio
>>> async def foo():
... return 'foo'
...
>>> bar = asyncio.run(asyncio.wait_for(foo(), timeout=15))
>>> print(bar)
foo
>>>
Definitely still scientific computing ("formula translator" after all). In particular it's still frequently used in the supercomputing/HPC space for large parallel numerical simulation codes.

The issue with optimizability in C is mostly solved by the C99 `restrict` keyword, but Fortran compilers are still very good for numerical work.
This article is just marketing, dishonest, and says nothing of substance.
they hold different views? (they were born in China? they are brainwashed : no they can't possibly hold different views)

It's futile to explain yourself to someone if the person will just declare you "brainwashed" if you don't agree with them
I've looked at the Pinebook but 6 hour battery life isn't enough for me.
similarly modern COBOL is different
Because America doesn't care about small businesses. John Oliver had a whole segment about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00wQYmvfhn4
To be fair, I omitted another thesis which on reflection actually seems more likely: a vilification of the victors qua victors. It seems that all else being equal, we will condemn one murderous conqeusting people while exculpating another, simply because the former triumphed over the latter.
Its nice to see so many opening in high level positions
>and chutzpa

A joke like that, read in Reader's Digest:

A candidate was called in to an office for an interview. Entering the room where the interview panel was awaiting him, he tripped on the door sill. Recovering and standing up, he said:

"Well, at least I fell into good company."

He got the job.
Dunno about you, but I have not found many "complexities" in the parts of AWS that people actually use that don't map pretty directly to using other cloud providers or running your own systems. I look at an AWS thing, go "oh, okay," and go about my day.

Learn fundamentals, apply fundamentals. It's pretty simple.
The MIT Media lab is operated by its researchers, not the MIT administration, and according to Wikipedia, is primarily funded through outside companies.
Yes, every article that describes progress and a good situation has an obligatory disclaimer that problems remain.

Articles describing problems do not generally have a recognition of progress made.

Recognizing that the world is a much better place than in previous centuries does not imply that everyone is in a good place, or that we have no improvements to make.

We've done great things! Now do better!
I wonder how far it goes. In the USA, there are universities that have very distinctive ethnic compositions: UC Irvine is very different from Howard is very different from BYU. Do they anonymize the university name as well? Perhaps translating it to "large research university" and "liberal arts college." Though probably you can get some signals from there as well.
So write all of your maths in terms of Planck values.
Business School Be Like
My understanding is things like armour were highly specialised and centralised. Not sure about the basic armour for archers and men, which would have been needed in more quantity.

Archery seems to have required a properly national effort, thanks to the escalation of military in the Hundred Years War. Levies on Lords and the peasantry in shires to provide men, wood, feathers, heads and what not. The assembly was, as I understand it, at least mostly centralised. There were levies to collect goose wing feathers from every goose to fill huge orders. I've no idea if Northern shires got off lightly thanks to distance. :)

Ultimately there was a Keeper of the King's Arrows who was responsible for just managing it all and bringing in adequate stocks. Similar for bows.

Earlier it wouldn't have needed that scale of effort, or management. I thought most came from the shires with the men going to the King, and was often quite variable as a result.
If I was a business I would avoid low hanging fruits in favor or more risky ventures that are perhaps less likely to succeed or yield profit. Businesses are in the business of business, not in the business of tacking hard problems just to spite the rest of the world. I think the image of Google being this almighty good intentioned soul is over blown because at the end of the day they answer to share holders, they profit of advertisement and the rest of it is ice cream that goes on their advertisement cake. I love google for the services they provide me but I also am not naive that a business is going got be a business first and a good hearted soul last.
I skimmed the list and there's at least one well-know name on the list, Matthew Garrett.
The chicken-and-egg thing also applies to GPUs btw., Nvidia & PGI have supported GPU computing on Fortran for ~8 years, since the early days of CUDA.
They were doing that in The Netherlands? Idiots. Time to cancel my membership.
Granted I skimmed through it, but I could see no mention in that summary of organically maintained lawns. It does mention the English roots, but those were maintained by gardeners for upper class estates.

Lawns are historically grazed fields. That's organically maintained I guess, but no one has a lawn like that today, not even in England.
Azure prices are public, unless they've funneled you through a CSP (which Microsoft loves doing)--at which point pricing is a black-box nightmare with even worse support than Azure has by default.
Maybe universities. My mechanical engineering program taught fortran and had beowulf clusters running what was (presumably) fortran.
That's irrelevant. The point is that the enterprise is a centralized authority so it can trivially codify its business rules into a centralized system; nothing is gained by using a blockchain. Tracking, audits, and tamper resistance is already possible without a blockchain.
How do you know that Americans are unusually price conscious?
How firms are keeping recency bias at bay
FORTRAN is definitely still used all over the place in scientific computing... If you go to a CS department that does some engineering work and work on numerical you might have to write some.
>the simplest solution always seemed to be to remove their ability to apply any of their biases

Bias will exist regardless of which information you present, the most you can hope for is shifting and limiting the types of bias that come into play to eliminate useless or harmful bias. Even if you grant anonymity to the applicant, recruiters can still be biased against or in favor of the school somebody went to, what they studied, the organizations they were involved in, etc.
The US Department of Defense is literally the biggest employer in the world.

38,000 for a capital city in a country with real health care, public schools and developed public services is not that much.
my uneducated thought as a transplant to the midwest -

the need for farming hasn't dropped, it's the desire/ability/money to do it that is. Small farmers are going away and corporate farming is taking over.
This comment is referencing Be Right Back, a Black Mirror episode featuring this exact idea as a premise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
The best part about an 'at will' relationship is you are free to leave at anytime
To be fair, the hiring signal you can get from a description of 25 years of experience is probably comparable to the signal you can get from a description of the most recent 5 or maybe 10 years of experience.
They have listened to the people. Systemd has selected as a result of a poll [0].

[0] https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/2013/05/27/systemd-sur...
> Fortran is still a thing

> completely different

Sound like a contradiction to me...
Moore's law originally stated that the number of transistors per IC would double every 18 months. For a long time this was a remarkably accurate empirical law, but it has slowed down dramatically in the last decade or so.

As an individual example: in 1998, Intel's top-of-the-line CPU was the Pentium II with about 8 million transistors. In 2008, they released the Core 2 Extreme QX9770, with about 820 million transistors; this is a 100-fold increase in 10 years, which is almost exactly what Moore's law predicts.

Fast-forward another decade to 2018, and Intel's highest-end Xeon chips have something like 7 billion transistors, which is less than a 10-fold improvement in the same timeframe.

EDIT: that said, I think it's a real stretch to go from "the slowdown of Moore's law" to a sweeping claim about innovation in general being more difficult. There are a ridiculous number of different fields in which someone could start a business; relatively few of them are dependent on enormous, ever-increasing amounts of computational power.
Also, Americans are used to paying subsidized, artificially low prices for agricultural products. I don't think many of us realize the actual cost of food production.
I saw a serious mention of blockchain recently as a possible solution to the problem of contaminated produce. The snake oil salesmen will always come up with creative new ideas.
Also note the "blockchain trilemma": at the moment you can have decentralised and secure systems that don't scale (e.g. Bitcoin), or you can have scalable and secure systems which aren't decentralised (e.g. all the "private permissioned blockchain" solutions which don't actually need to use a blockchain).
Begs the question: What will 5G frequencies do to insects, birds and other animals?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5834628/
There are always dissenters. I guarantee that plenty of people in Mesoamerican society did not agree with the conquesting and violent ways of the Aztec Empire.
Washington, DC, reports 36 thousand FTE for this fiscal year.
I've been to a talk about the new Lufthansa CI in Frankfurt a few weeks ago and asked this very question — why move away from Helvetica? The answer was, first, Helvetica's readability on screen is apparently not very good, and second, Lufthansa had to pay massive licensing fees in order to use Helvetica.
Well sure. You'll notice that this award is being given out for a socially acceptable and academically approved form of disobedience that does not actually require disobeying anything.

Aaron broke the academic status quo and generated bad press. That's pretty unacceptable in the quest to make the world a better place for an organization that is primarily about image.
PragerU is a right-wing channel that Youtube is constantly suppressing by removing videos or demonetizing them. The content is about on-par with what you might hear on a politically slanted news show. It doesn't make sense that Youtube would expend trust capital to harass such an uninteresting channel.
Of course, there are non religious social activities.

But none that are so completely unforced where you can just show up once a week for no reason and be welcomed. Or so it seems from the outside.
Point 4: the new people come in with knowledge of the walk out, which can cause all kinds of secondary reactions. If this goes through every new google employee will have something to think about during the HR feel good antics.
Lyrebird (https://lyrebird.ai/) is trying to the voice imitation component.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_van
Current audits don't see information that connects a ballot to a voter.
I'm 46, and people my age talk about leaving off earlier experience, so as not to look too old. I condensed my earlier experience (the first 10 years) into a couple sentences describing the roles--not to look younger, but because with an average stint of 2.5 years, there are just too many jobs to list.

Other steps people my age take are to stop listing dates--either select dates like university graduation, or--in extreme cases--all employment dates.

Keep in mind that there are different biases at different screening points along the way. The manager with the open position may want someone older and more experienced, but the people recruiting, screening, and filtering the candidates may be biased or simply not familiar with the value of experience that doesn't match today's buzzwords.
Examples of differentiation:

- Signal end-to-end encryption

- Discord game integration

- Slack history keeping

- Skype ability to make phone calls

- Snapchat self destroying pictures

You may not see any use in any of these but some people do.

And some reasons why these aren't standardized:

- it is hard to do without some form of centralization (ex: history keeping)

- some services cost money (ex: phone calls)

- some goals are contradictory (ex: end-to-end encryption and searchable histories)

- owning a popular messaging network is simply too appealing
examples please
As other people mentioned before, the name is misleading. This project's analogy is closer to a linker than a compiler collection. Is this emitting any compiled code at all or just bundling functions? What is the roadmap for this project?
Honestly the writing has been on the walls for quite some time now. I’ve argued this with a few applications to YC. Farming in America is about to have a hard pivot. I definitely see it going from large-scale, monocultural enterprises to small-scale, mostly independent, polycultural, bio-intensive, sustainable farms. (Sorry for all the buzzwords, not sure of a better all-encompassing term)

If you’re looking for something to invest in it’d be AgTech with a focus on these new farmers as users.
Censorship in the EU is generally intended to protect individuals

I seem to recall that anything about Nazis is censored in France. I believe selling Nazi stuff on eBay is forbidden, for example.

But I haven't heard about this in a long time, so this may not still be true.
This really doesn't look like the FORTRAN77 code I once wrote. Looks like a regular modern language.
No kidding?!?!

https://www.cnet.com/news/google-files-for-unusual-2-7-billi...

http://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/

It's almost like the writing was on the wall but no one saw it...
Perchance to Scheme (2016)
Brief history of lawns for anyone interested.

http://www.thegameoffew.com/blog/2017/9/17/what-front-lawns-...
And Fortran is still probably faster than if it used C in most cases of R's use of Fortan. http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/faster_than_C.html

There is just a ton of well written Fortran for number crunching and there is zero reasons to not use them. You wouldn't gain speed and you would loss the decades of stability these Fortan scripts have given the scientific community.

I am guessing all of us old timers remember the pain of Fortran in the past.
If Google makes enough money from China, they would have as much leverage against China as China has against it. The resulting social unrest caused by a major search engine disappearing in China would far exceed any benefit they would get from censoring other countries. In my opinion, it's much more dangerous to allow Chinese tech companies to have a free monopoly without any resistance.
Did an average American have higher buying power in 1930? In 1900?
My bad, when they were new I was told it wouldn't work on regular devices. Still, it's just another bluetooth headset then.