skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are several things that contributed to the rise of the dominance of American tech industry. In no particular order:

* World War II. In WWII, the only country that had the means to meaningfully fund longer-term military research projects was the US; in other countries such as Germany and the UK, these projects were defunded or reduced in scope to let the money and resources be allocated to things that would help prevent the collapse of the country. Furthermore, the US was the only large country to escape significant infrastructure destruction, which would preoccupy most of the rest of the world for another decade or so.

* The development of a strong education and research system. This is in and of itself a more complex topic, but one thing I'd call out is that the American wealthy have had a stronger tradition of philanthropy than their European counterparts, and a lot of that philanthropy was geared towards making sure that the US was well-stocked with universities, libraries, museums, and the like.

* Clustering effects. Companies tend to want to be near other companies that do similar things--it's why there's a lot a tech companies in Silicon Valley, even if they could do their job equally well from Illinois. Early computer research ended up being in the US, so the computer technology clusters have ended up being very US-centric.

* Market size. The US has historically been the largest market for tech, and arguably still is for certain segments of the market. Europe has been (and generally remains) too fragmented to be a single market, China and India historically too poor, and the USSR hampered itself with internal controls. Furthermore, the size of the US market also means that it tends to be harder for foreign entrants to break into the market than it is for US entrants to break into foreign markets.

> Do you think another country will take its place?

Eventually, yes. On what time scale, I can't say.

> Will growing internet adoption lead to growing patterns of geographic decentralization in the industry?

No. The internet has not reversed the trend for businesses to cluster together, and I see no reason to expect that should change.

> Is it possible cryptocurrencies will cause a rise in an internet centered tech industry?

I don't see how they could...
Check out this sobering talk by Dr Sid Smith where he says the same thing wrt oils and fossil fuels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8
No, I don’t think micro transactions have a future - peer to peer or otherwise - but not for any technical reasons. Humans suffer from decision fatigue [1] wherein making decisions just wears you out and you don’t want to do it regardless of size. A decision requires a costly, difficult evaluation of worth regardless. That’s why even though buying shows one at a time on iTunes would likely save you money, you pay for Netflix - because you don’t want to decide to pay. Micropayments aren’t a limitation of the existing financial system, it’s just accounting. This is a limitation of human physiology. We could have it right now if people wanted it but they just... don’t.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue
I got a B in probability because I didn't write a proof of the central limit theorem on the allowed cheat sheet for the final exam. So of course it's the first thing I looked for on this one. It's not there.
I believe those are called subways, we had them in Europe in the late 19th century. /s
If you're wondering why the 3d cube doesn't quite look 3d, it's because the perspective transform hasn't been applied. Imagine taking a camera's view frustum (the rectangular "cone" from a camera's POV) and then re-forming the frustum and to be a unit square, while non-linearly squishing all of the geometry inside of the frustum as it turns into that square. The result would be that vertices of geometry further away from the camera would shrink towards the camera's vanishing point. Rendering this result would make geometry appear to be in perspective.
No, but one that's highly interactive and is constantly re-fetching/updating data does.
I wonder how long that can last before abuse kills the system. Some quotes from their page about KBFS [0]:

"The 250GB free accounts will stay free"

"we'll never run an ad-supported business"

"we're not trying to make money"

[0] https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs
Also, Sergey Brin (Google co-Founder).

His father's tale of anti-semitism in Russia is now quite famous.

https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-brin-anti-semitism-forced-...
Chrome beating Firefox in marketshare is not a technical problem, it's a marketing problem.

Google owns the largest digital advertising platform in the world and controls the most popular consumer OS, it's hard to beat that reach.
Do they also require HDCP for it to work?
But doesn't Firefox require that godawful add-on signing?
I recently found the scalars internal values, and discovered how many tabs I have open: 1,355.

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/14824223

(Yes, I'm an infovore.)

And performance (iMavc v.17 Retina) is usually accetable, at least initially. Somewhere between a few hours to days in, ahard kill becomes necessary.

But; On Android or Linux, both older machines, even with just a tab or two open, within recent weeks, performance has been abysmal. Several other options (console browsers, Dillo, Konqueror, Surf) are at least responsive for very light browsing.

I've wiped Chrome and Chromium from Mac and Linux. That's not possible on Android, and though I'd much prefer avoiding it, I'm typing this on Chrome/Android.

(The question of why I've got so many tabs open, or how to manage/adjudicate them, is ... a longer post. TL;DR: tab management user state management, workflow, and ergonomics all suck.
And Chrome is far worse about this than Firefox.)
On number 2, America also got a lot of cutting edge tech (jet engines, nuclear tech, crypto, radar) handed to them for free by the British because America had the capacity to do something with them. This was a huge boost for American industry post war.
The eco system thing is one, the second is: Geopolitics, which plays a big role in that, I mean with the huge US influence the Silicon Valley companies can be global trendsetters, think of the FCC standing in the global,telecom sector.US allies could not ban UBER although they hate it, but they have to play the American (open market) rules. There were many superior products by non-American companies, Creative Technology got the first portable audio player, years ahead of Apple, yet they underestimated the value of the American market and spearheaded MP3 with total disregard for copyright issues (Napster days), Russian companies produce good stuff-Kaspersky et al- but they do not have the full "Eco system".
Nope, not sarcastic. Apple specifically notes that they designed their Watch product to have value to people after they reach their goals, not just during the trek towards the goal. I consider their statements to indicate that they apply the same considerations to "weight targets" – gain/loss, followed by maintenance – as they would to any other health target, such as those they measure with Activity rings today.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/24/16926350/apple-watch-seri...

“The idea that small behavior changes can actually add up to something great is a real core philosophy of the activity app,” says Blahnik [director of fitness and health at Apple]. “Partially because what we find is that’s going to correct everybody. If you’re a beginner, and you’re not very fit, small changes are what you need to do. But it turns out that if you’re really fit, small changes are all you have left. So, it ends up being something that actually works for everybody.”
I like the idea of this, but I'm not sure that "cheat sheet" is the best term for it, given that it weighs in at quite a few pages (191 physical).
Well, I find this to be great news! Now I have a great way to convince my non tech friends to switch to Firefox. "It lets you install a thing so you don't see ads anymore, unlike Chrome where you have to pay for it"
This has been around for years and is nothing related to Google's new automatic removal of certain location data.

This article is informative, but it is nothing new.
I've heard this argument many times but it never rang true to me. Here is why:

Every nation has gone true adversity and many had bounced off in a matter of years.

The US economy has been dominating (measured by % of world GDP) since long before WW2. Ref: https://infogram.com/share-of-world-gdp-throughout-history-1...

Also worth noting is that the US has faced its own headwinds including a civil war just a few decades before its ascent to global domination.
I've recently moved all my podcast subcriptions to google podcast and now I am sad that I can't find this one there.
Thank you - this led to some interesting background. I could definitely have used MOR during bitwise regex (Glushkov NFA) implementation.
Does this include "Chromium" browsers as well like Vivaldi?
Especially with this type of content! I don't even dare try.
It's a problem because it's not part of the social contract of AP federation.
I still find myself using the old how I met your mother one - Let's go out for a sandwich!
Deliverability is pretty trivial to prove, and if they knew enough to get something in your inbox they probably already knew enough to be confident of that anyway. With regard to wget: 15 vulnerability’s in the last 20 years for such a highly used peace of software doesn’t scare me that much, and I can easily run it from a sandboxed container or vm since I’m using those all the time anyway. And if I don’t want to confirm deliverability, since I’m a web developer and I have a brain, I realise they probably included a unique token to know I’m the one that clicked the link, so I’ll leave that token off the request.

Look the problem with this kind of attitude is people take security less seriously when security experts go overboard. It’s classic boy who cried wolf. If you want people to take security seriously it starts with honest conversations where you treat people like adults and don’t immediately go to hyperbole.
The problem with that is that other people won't accept it - because you are being paid twice.

Once with the output of other people who are using up their finite lives working for output from you, and once self consuming your own time.

Unsurprisingly those working resent this, as they'd rather have Friday off than work an extra day to produce output for people who are producing nothing for them in return.

The workers then agitate to have the income removed from those not contributing. Which is why every basic income 'experiment' in history has failed.

Once you look at it in real terms, the fallacy of composition shows itself. You can't expect others to give up hours of their lives for you if you don't demonstrably give up hours of your life for them in return.

Hence why you have a Job Guarantee (and frankly most of the private sector nonsense jobs out there). It is a public demonstration to those working the machines, that actually produce the output we need, that you are trying to give up hours in solidarity with them.

Then they won't feel they are being ripped off by working past Tuesday.

"that could have very low marginal value to the employer anyway"

It's the job of the employer to extract value. If they can't then they don't get paid. Capitalists only get paid if they transform labour hours into labour services effectively. If they can't, they go bust.

However the labour hours still need to be sold, because that is what keeps the labourer alive. You must give up hours of your life, if you expect others to do the same for you.

If value cannot be extracted, then it gets transferred from capitalists who have failed to do their job properly.
Underperforming is not about making mistakes. It is consistently being unable to learn and adapt. It is being unable to mesh with the rest of the team. It is feeling like "I wish I had not hired this person".
Encyclopedia Britannica has a decent introduction [1]. There are a number of books that cover the early development of nations, but the name of the book that dealt with waterways in depth escapes me at the moment. Possibly something by Marvin Harris or Jared Diamond?

[1] https://www.britannica.com/place/Mississippi-River/History-a...
Which nation? Not mine. And that's the problem, now we're having foreign morality imposed upon a populace (where it is entirely legal) based upon the preferences of another nation (or really the whims of this particular corporation).

You could say "just use another app store", but that's really not a viable option. When a company's store policies becomes a limiting factor for your (fully legal and ethical) personal choices,I think we have a problem.
By that logic your question should have been " Why is the US the center of this/a tech industry" :)
Very unlikely, as the concentrations would be quite minute. Nick Lane expands on this in "The Vital Question" book.
Before anyone feels bad about this: the extension will, by default, not click on non-tracking ads.

I've used it for over a year (also on $XXXX estimated cost figures on 3 different devices) with several thousands of ads clicked. My ad vault contains everything from porn, electronics, job boards, ads in languages I do not understand, gambling, gaming, and all sorts of crap I have zero interest in. I pretty much never see ads while surfing the net, and when I do then it's the ads that would also slip through uBlock Origin and other ad blocking extensions.
>Isn't this the way the world has worked since the dawn of the first civilizations?

Not really, for most of humanity's history people could barely even figure out what happened on the other side of the mountain or the sea.

The extreme degree of globalisation that carries these policies and attitudes across the globe is pretty new. It wasn't even the case in the 60s or 70s say. It's predominantly online markets that are dominated by individual companies, control used to be significantly more national.
> This surprises me because (i) it's often suggested you need more than one term sheet to have a decent negotiating position, and (ii) a YC-backed company should be better placed than most to get multiple, so if they're not getting them, then who is?

It's pretty hard to get more than one because every deal is on its own timeline (you didn't meet all the prospective investors on the same day, and each has its own internal timeline modulated by people being around and internal process). If you're really hot (and this is easier in later rounds where your A investor(s) can whip up interest) perhaps you'll get lucky, but most deals aren't, even really good ones. In fact being "hot" in your A round might be a negative predictor (I don't know) just as most child prodigies flame out. FWIW, most of my financing have been multi-TS deals and none of them have been round A.

Also when someone issues a TS (see below) you can try to run around and use it to speed someone else up. That's hard, because the person who gave it to you will pressure you to sign immediately lest the deal explode.

However you do have useful negotiating strengths even when you have only one TS. It's hard to issue one: every firm is unique but often you have to get all or most of your partners to agree; typically you only do one or two companies a year and the firm as a whole few, so nobody wants to write a TS and then not get the deal: they persuaded their partners that this is the one!. So you can push back on egregious terms, and propose alternatives to things you'd prefer were too different. If you push too much they can walk away (and then the partner will tell their partners "wow, we dodged a bullet; that CEO would have been an asshole to deal with". But don't let it get to that point.

Another way that I've done for my last two projects was write the terms ourselves and issue our own term sheet. You're already implicitly doing this as you discuss what you're looking for before getting terms from an investor so why not simply propose a deal up front? Later stages are practically that way already as the earlier rounds will have constrained various things. This works if your team already have track records of investors making money.
I want to make what I hope is not an offensive inquiry. As a native (American) English speaker, both of your uses of the word "since" look wrong to me. In my reading, the first one should be "for" and the second should be "until". This is not the first time I've come across jarring uses of "since" online. What I'm wondering is: What is your background? Are you also a native English speaker from a different region? If so, what region? If not, what is your native language and is the English "since" deceptively similar to a word in it?

To try to make it less likely that this comment makes you feel bad, I will close by making the (true) statement that I found your comment to be interesting and insightful and your usages of "since" didn't hurt my comprehension at all, they just sounded weird.
US companies give much higher pay than Europe and China.

A beyond-average elementary programmer gets $40K/yr in China with 9-9-6 life. But the same person in the United States may get $120K or even more with a 9-6-5 life.

So many Chinese programmers are moving to the US for higher pay.
> They have way larger concerns than worrying about this.

And this is the problem with large corporations.

If the industry was more competitive they wouldn't be able to turn away money.
Counting efficiently at scale using HyperLogLog
https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/geopolitics-united-st...
The “workspace” and “blackbox script” features in Chrome devTools are real paradigm shifters and a huge productivity boost for me when developing/debugging in JS/TS or SCSS/CSS. With Workspaces, most changes to source files are reflected immediately without reloading (no LiveReload-type tooling is needed).

Firefox has yet to release either of those features, as far as I know. I’ll switch dev browsers as soon as they do.
I did not mean you're being sarcastic. I mean you bought into the Apple PR a bit heavily and it's humorous.

I mean this in the most respectful way possible.
The social network is called Mastodon, it's one client that's named Tootdon. There are several others to choose from if the name offends you.

It's also important to realise that Twitter is a business and Mastodon is more of a communal property. It's not trying to compete with Twitter in the sense of grabbing all the users; it's offering an alternative for people who value other aspects of social media than those that Twitter wants to sell.
Ask HN: Which languages support numeric type parameters?
With the advent of deep learning, the problem of ensuring matrix dimensions match became pretty common. The only language I am aware about that does it is C++.

So I am curious, which other languages already have support for this feature at the compile or lint time?
That's meaningless. The Earth coalesced from supernova remnants, which included organic compounds, but that doesn't imply living organisms.
> in common browsing scenarios.

Part of the point of an adblocker is to protect you in uncommon browsing scenarios. This is almost like saying that a malware list is bloated because some of the hashes its storing are uncommonly downloaded. Having as close to full coverage as possible is important.

It also opens up an attack vector for advertisers that they absolutely will exploit. With unlimited rules, there's no reason for ad networks not to use a few domains and serve their ads from a few sources. With a hard limit, there's a strong incentive for networks to collectively try and flood the lists with tons of different domains until we run out of room to include all of them.

> the possibility of tweaking the 30k limit.

This has been the number one complaint about the proposal from day one. If at this point the Chrome team still hasn't decided to tweak the limit, I just don't see how there's not gonna be any new argument past this point that anyone can make to convince them.
an excellent link!
OK. How should we - I - go about this differently?

Adults are perfectly capable of believing that their expertise extends further than it actually does and taking risks they do not fully understand or appreciate. I see it daily in the developers I work with. I have worked with more than one developer brimming with confidence in their ability to tackle areas beyond their expertise, who will try to engineer on-the-fly around any shortcomings pointed out in their approach (this is unrealistic, in real attacks adversaries don't give you friendly feedback iteratively).

I'm plenty willing to listen and take on board feedback here. What attitude should I take? How do I convince responsible adults, in a constructive and serious way, that they are not equipped to entertain their curiosity in this arena and should not try? How should I communicate to you, and to hundreds of developers at once, this message without going overboard or crying wolf?

It's one thing to play with malware and phishing at home, on your own hardware, on your own network, and with your own data. That's all your own risk to assume as you like. It's quite another to do so with company hardware, network, and data. That's not your risk to run and not your risk decisions to make. If you can advise me on how to communicate this to engineers who honestly and earnestly believe in their ability to safely handle things well beyond their expertise, I am absolutely all ears.
You have it the wrong way around.

As a customer I want an exchange so that the tokens I buy have some liquidity, at least in theory. You're not going to be listed on an exchange initially and those exchanges that do list smaller tokens tend to be sketchy.

As an entrepreneur, you figure out how your use-case benefits from tokens. For example, let's say you provide a product/service. You can sell tokens that can be redeemed for the product/service to investors at a "wholesale price".

There's no need for tokens to go "to the moon", just to serve as a medium of exchange and ideally provide some margin to you and/or your investors. You could also offer a company ownership structure for tokens, but now you're in securities regulation territory, which nobody wants to deal with right now, at least at the moment.

Of course a lot of crypto projects are garbage, just like most businesses fail and wipe out investor money in the process. The hype surrounding crypto certainly has massively underpriced risk, but the same could be said about stock like Tesla, Lyft or Uber.
Really? That's odd -- I see pages 1-212 (213+ are missing).
Aren't most proofs of the CLT pretty extensive?
Thank you (and sibling for the example), I was not aware of that. I did check SA out, but missed this somehow, so I'm using psycopg2 directly now... But if I gain portability to other DBs for low effort, then I'm all for it. Thanks!
While I don't have this problem, what I really would like is a way to collapse back to parent. Often, I'm knee deep in a thread and forget what started it. I have to scroll up, keeping a mental pin at the left margin to see when I get back to the parent.
I seem to recall that the Safari content blocking API is like the proposed Chromium API, but that doesn't alarm people because
a) Apple is less of an ad company than Google, so less of a perceived conflict of interest
b) Google is perceived to break stuff that is already working
c) Safari/Webkit aren't dominant outside of iOS where they're mandatory
"cheat ream" ?