skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>You mention that DDT programs were stopped prematurely because of bad data. However, how much did the FUD against DDT contribute to governments feeling pressure to stop DDT use, and then finding/not scrutinizing data that suggested they could stop?

In Sri Lanka in particular, it was always scheduled to stop in 1963. The question is whether they might have re-started it earlier had it not been for the publication of Silent Spring the year before (n.b. Rachel Carson never called for DDT to be banned and only thought that indiscriminate use of any pesticide needed to be carefully considered). I'm not sure, maybe? But I doubt that this would affect Sri Lankan government policy towards a disease that had killed so many people.

This: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/... is a good timeline of the Sri Lankan programme. A few things are apparent:

-The policy of indoor residual spraying (with DDT) works very well and knocks malaria way down.

-Discontinuation of the spraying programme was after a few years of very low (reported) cases.

-After the '67 outbreak, DDT IRS immediately restarted and was subsequently replaced by malathion IRS. DDT also discolours walls so there is a higher tolerance of alternatives, especially as case rates fall and people's memory of losing children to malaria starts to fade.

Sri Lanka was only able to finally complete eradication after the end of the war with the LTTE and is sufficiently connected to India that the "eradication" has to be consider provisional.

We can also look at the experience in South Africa. They stopped using DDT in 1996 and banned its use domestically, P. funestus re-emerged from neighbouring countries with a resistance to pyrethroids but not to DDT. This might seem like a case where the worry over DDT was harmful to human health even where it could usefully have been used but South Africa immediately unbanned it and deployed it in an indoor spraying campaign so I think it's actually an example of effective regulatory flexibility.
Technology has changed things. Amazon generates twice as much revenue per employee as Walmart.

So the bottom line is Tech can sell a hell of lot more of china's stuff per American worker than old retail.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16610/nvidia-unveils-grace-a-... Seems to be a better article on the same topic with more context and nuance, not to mention accurate.
No.

"He was kind, attentive, and has a loving core. In simple language, he patiently explained to my son, then around 12, about the virtues of the GNU/Linux operating system"

https://whoisylvia.medium.com/richard-stallman-has-been-vili...

He doesn't deem "having children" as some sort of special accomplishment though, which might rub some parents the wrong way.
It seems to me that the discourse was very deliberately focused on the Epstein-related comments by people who felt that'd be a good way to achieve the outcome they wanted. It's undoubtedly true that RMS is often rude and offensive, but this has long been widely known and publicly discussed, so a pressure campaign on those grounds would almost certainly have flopped.
>So it's not 2020 that's the anomaly here, but 1982. The real question is why so few people had gotten rich from starting companies in 1982...a wave of consolidation was sweeping through the American economy

Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Bloomberg, etc were all started in the late 70's/ early 80's. Their founders are the richest people in the world.

Seems like the question he's asking, though, is why weren't they obscenely wealthy after only 5 years, but that requires a different thesis than PG's.

Every time I read one of PG's posts, it seems like he's working from a narrative that he's trying to conform facts to.
I don't know about other cities but this is becoming very common in Detroit where there are multiple grow operations.

https://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/2016/10/growing_opportuni...
I think he means he's the tech equivalent. As in, "he was near many historical events, but not the focus or beneficiary of them"
It can have some perks as other comments have mentioned.

One thing I want to mention is that there needs to be a high level of trust for it to work well.

If they don't trust you enough it will be hell. For example they will not understand why it took you so long to do X and Y. They may think you are being lazy, they may think you are exploiting their lack of technical knowledge.

Then they get uncomfortable and try to find out the "truth" for themselves with the help of their cousins and google. They will google "how long does it take to make a front-end?" and wonder why it's taking you so long when Random Jimmy on the internet says 5 days max to "make a front-end".

You'll be treated like a distrusted dodgy mechanic.

They may also annoy you with things to the effect of "My nephew said we must use MongoDB" and so on.

They need to trust you and get out of your way.
Get out of your way means that they don't try to play some "I love Apps! I'm kinda technical" role with you.
They also need to accept to live with your judgement calls and technical decisions while you work together.
I think if you move to an area of high salaries (and, usually, high cost of living), such as Silicon Valley, Manhattan, Seattle, or some European job markets (e.g. Zurich), you probably can achieve a mid-career salary/compensation of $200K or so (significantly more if you are good, or went to a prestigious school, but I think $200K is eventually achievable for any decent engineer). Alternatively, you can create your own online application, which will be in very high demand, and will not have good analogues. You can also consider opening your own SaaS company as https://audext.com/.
>In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources, or doing real estate deals. Is that really better than a world in which the richest people get rich by starting tech companies

I'm not sure. I feel like the tech companies are just valued where they are currently based on "extracting natural resources" from willing investors and our privacy and sense of well-being. We need another downturn like in 2000 before we know what is worth what. Internet companies were worth a lot in 2000 too. Turns out a lot of those valuations were bunk.

US venture capital funding at 2000 levels again-
http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/11443.jpeg
>If that weren't the case, the top 100 would still likely be dominated by heirs.

Do you believe that because you think that heirs are likely to hold their wealth in cash, bonds or in other assets that haven't been "artificially pushed higher by lower interest rates?"

It seems to me that if wealth of any kind is invested well, it's likely to generate exactly those same higher returns; the source of the wealth is kinda irrelevant, no?
Average as far as SV goes is closer to 1.1-1.6% btw. If there’s no prop 13 equivalent in TX though, that could really help keep home prices in check along with high property tax (and maybe incentivize changing the land use along with getting people out of large homes they’re not using anymore).
Exactly. UV sterilizers are sunlight simulators. Per Wikipedia, without our atmosphere blocking a lot of the sun's UV, there'd be little or no life on land.
Which is reasonableto assume if she was a trap so that Epstein could get blackmail material. RMS argued she would present herself as older than 17 and seduce her targets.

What is most unclear to me in that whole kermuffle is that this strongly seems to be a hypothetical. She only said that she was instructed to target Minsky, but not that she did have sex with Minsky (or he with her.)
I somewhere else read the claim that Minsky was accompanied with his wife, so he couldn't have slept with her even if he wanted to.
Not to mention the support is pretty slow to respond and rarely respond adequately.

At my current client we started with their cloud and in a few months deployed our own in Kubernetes using the official operator.

It's a lot cheaper and gives us fewer headaches this way.
As far as I understand, the idea is that the extra dimension is everywhere, but only has a tiny bit of wiggle room, and once you get to the end of it you come back from the other side, like a circle.

It's not an object in space, it's a direction that all objects can move in. If you're standing somewhere, you can move N/S, E/W, and jump up/down. The extra dimension is another direction particles can move in, except when they do they stay in the same place, and their momentum in that non-direction works out to be the same energy as electric charge.

More of a magic trick than anything else.
Automated green farms - https://www.optimal.ag
I'd agree - I have seen a lot of wealthy family children completely underperform relative to this bar. I'd say it's the exception and far from the norm that wealthy families to produce exceptional children.

Exception to the statement being wealth taken from your countries people through corruption (like Putin, Jinping etc).
How People Find Fulfillment Now

The post we actually need. I want to know about innovations in this space. Who has a disruptive way to bring fulfillment to lives at scale, using blockchain or whatever other buzzwords you need to attract investment. Because that's what's actually worth investing in. If you're starting a company to get rich, you're missing out on life.
I expected more from a site called VideoCardz.
you are right but will those harvesting the value be individuals or corporations. Gone are those days when u can build a billion dollar company over a weekend, and i suspect the trend towards increasing technological complexity will continue, at some point any field where advances are to be made will be untouchable except by very few individuals with highly specialized knowledge and corporations.
Because it's an interesting topic in a well-known publication that fits the charter of Hacker News.
The really fun part is doing this :)...

Evaluate the expression:

const x = {value: 0};
console.log(x);
console.log({x});
x.value = 1;

You get this:

{value: 0}
{x: {…}}

Expand the first arrow of the `x:`:

v {x: {…}}
> x: {value: 1}

Now evaluate:

x.value = 3

Then expand the second arrow:

v {x: {…}}
> x:
value: 3

Now if you unexpand the arrow, you get 1, but if you expand it you get 3 =)... (Well at least in chrome)
I really like this method but unfortunately most debuggers print objects with keys in alphabetical order so there’s no way to get the keys you care about most at the top. Is there a way to rectify this?
What do you mean by "static analysis"? Is there something like a compilation step outside of running go to do this analysis and code-generation?
> But at the moment at least, there is definitely something they share in common that distinguishes them. What retailer starts AWS? What car maker is run by someone who also has a rocket company?

If you went back a century and tried to figure out who would be running both a car company and a rocket company, the answer would almost certainly be the guy running Standard Oil.

And abstracting "AWS" a bit, if you went back a century and looked for a company that was both a giant logistics business as well as a giant provider of stuff you need to run a business, you'd find Andrew Carnegie, who owned the trains that ran on railroads as well as the factories that built the steel for the railroads.

Amazon and Tesla and SpaceX are "tech" companies in the sense that they make effective use of new technologies just as US Steel and Standard Oil did. But history does not remember those as tech companies; history remembers them as industrial consolidations, as vertically-integrated conglomerates, as trusts.

I think you need a little more data than 1982 to make this comparison meaningful. I suspect there was a time during the last century in which trusts were much harder to build, when there was effective competition, and where the economy was working well for everyone, and during that time, the people with unnatural amounts of wealth only had it because it was previously accumulated and made available to them as an inheritance. I suspect we are now back to the economic/political conditions that made trusts and robber barons possible.
FWIW, I thought Google had pouched all of Nuance's key technical staff years ago.
I'm not aware of that reversal. In the jargon I'm used to for drug advocacy, "decriminalization" refers to removing criminal penalties for possession. It may still be illegal, but it is a civil offense (think traffic ticket) rather than a criminal one. "Legalization" refers to making it entirely illegal; there are no fines or criminal penalties for possession.
> Then he's unfit for a leadership role, plain and simple.

I can't actually argue with your reasoning here. Although my personal take is that he deserves an additional attempt... I can also see why one wouldn't be willing to give him that role again.
This might sound like a nit, but I'd call it habit-forming, not addictive. I watched friends go from obsessed with Facebook when it launched to mostly using it for sharing family photos, and this is at a time when there was a focus on user engagement. It just seems like people lost interest too easily for it to be actual addiction.
In regards to your follow-up question, I've been using Cloudflare Pages for a month or so now. I found that it was by default faster than Netlify, and that adding a Page Rule to cache everything made things even a bit faster.

My guess is that by default it's not fully cached at all of their edge nodes, and by adding an aggressive Page Rule, the edge nodes can actually cache my site (which is very small and simple).
This was their strategy since always or since they achieved monopoly in PC OS market which ensured them huge profits which they used to acquire competitors or to break into some industry or niche. They would push acquired product or service to millions of Windows users meaning they had huge distribution channel and scale potential.

Microsoft's first acquisition was in 1987 of Forethought Inc. or developers of what is now Microsoft PowerPoint and they bought them for only $14m. Today PowerPoint as a product and as a brand is worth billions.
I mean, I've had a mattress in an office before, and the implication was I for a time lived in the office. No sex happened there, just poor work-life balance.

A lot of the complaints against RMS seem like ableist assumptions about intent to me.

Some of his behaviours are clearly problematic, but so is piling on someone this way.

Frankly a lot of these attacks tells me more about the lack of empathy shown by the attackers.
Rich != Wealth

I think where PG and others are conflating two topics is being Rich vs being Wealthy.

You can certainly become Rich working at FAANG (top 1% earner + appreciating stock ... and it's way less risky than other jobs).

Where you can become Wealthy starting your own company (super high risk, most likely won't even become "rich" doing it, but you have the potential to create limitless wealth)

EDIT:

If you're going to downvote, can you at least comment why you disagree ... so that we can have a productive conversation to hear a differing opinion.
I'm specifically talking about the new Conformer model, available in early access as of ten days ago. What you tried was likely the previous (circa 2018) model, which is much less accurate than Conformer.

This is a demo of Conformer in Talon: https://twitter.com/lunixbochs/status/1378159234861264896
It's absolutely price gouging. I'm not going to rant about this for the 100th time, but at least I'm in good company [0]. Do the math on the cost you pay if you saturate 1gbps for a month vs. the cost you pay for 1gbps IP transit at basically any colocation provider.

Really this is the secret sauce of the cloud. Create new abstraction layers where you can charge for logical separation on a physical basis. First VMs, then containers, then serverless... Would be cool if somebody did it with bandwidth (looking at you, Cloudflare). Why can't I buy an elastically sized pipe? Why do I need to pay for the stuff I put through it instead of reserving a size for the time I'll need it?

[0] https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1371252709836263425
It’s probably rich man guilt, plus some attempt at rationalization through cherry picked facts and data.. Also why I think bill gates >>> pg
The same thing could just as well happen with a monopoly, though. Look at ISPs injecting ads and fiddling with DNS, for example. There's very little competition in the US ISP market, but plenty of players are still eagerly seeking bottoms.
These late period Paul Graham essays are so wildly out of touch. It's like he hasn't had a conversation with a normal person in 15 years. He seems obsessed with pointing out that it's slightly easier to get rich now, while ignoring the fact that it's drastically easier to become poor.
Yeah living in SF (or just the bay area) is pretty key.

AirBnB, Uber, Tesla, FB, SnapChat (LA based, but a lot of friends moved there to join friends from the peninsula and knew about it because of being here/near Stanford), Lyft, Snowflake, Stripe, eventually Robinhood, Roblox, Palantir, etc.

I'm not saying luck isn't a factor - but the equation changes dramatically when you're in the bay area. A lot of people I know have been through exit events of some sort, many clear $1-5M via that (which is about enough to buy a house if you're closer to the $3-5M side). Fewer clear $20M+.

That said, you could also have just worked at a FAANG and probably have saved $1-2M if you just stayed there over the last ten years (and obviously if you were at FB pre IPO in 2012). There's also a lot of opportunity to grow in that environment which can lead to higher incomes (particularly at a place like Netflix that just pays a lot up front).

Doing a non-bay area startup seems riskier to me than working at a FAANG. If you live in the bay area for a bit - it's easier to learn which startups are likely to succeed.

There's a reason YC moved from Boston.
If you're not using any of the AWS services, that might be true but then you're also leaving a lot of potential on the table.

If you're "cloud-agnostic" and could migrate away from AWS in the blink of an eye then you're paying for an overpriced VM offering and should probably migrate to a cheaper hosting provider immediately.
Hydrogen cars and autonomous delivery.
no earlier
Not sure what your requirements are, but maybe try Parallels? Worked super well for me, enough for me to be able to do .NET development in it.
Foundations of Information
Accounts that act poorly, usually do so in multiple ways. Banning accounts for bad behavior will likely curb other undetectable bad behavior.

HN is a bit unique. I suspect it is less influenced by bad behavior because it is small enough to fly under the radar.
The majority of rich people being tech entrepreneurs does not imply that being a tech entrepreneur will make you rich. It is entirely possible to start a company and not make any money. In fact, greater ease of starting a business would increase the number of companies, thus the amount of competition would also increase and therefore the odds that any individual company makes large profits is smaller.
> Of course the Gini coefficient is increasing. With more people starting more valuable companies, how could it not be?

The conclusion in the last 2 sentences feels like a non-sequitur. The article forms a cogent idea of how we're back in the age of startups like we were 100+ years ago - and then ends in "yes this is why we have inequality".

Inequality is a lot more complicated concept than "people are starting tech companies and theyre highly valued". A lot of it has to do with government policy, education, etc...
That sounds like circular logic.
Well water is fantastic. I can notice the difference city to city and have since switched to certain types of bottled water. Making ice cubes with bottled water makes drinks taste differently.
Same here. IPFS seems to have been lumped into the whole "crypto" scene because of filecoin. In my opinion, IPFS is much more interesting and potentially beneficial to individual freedom than crypto. The problem is the only people really talking about it are people focused on crypto, also forcing dapp conversations to focus on quick money vs. long term usability/functionality. I don't hold the money conversations against anyone...just not interested in that side of it. More interested in the preservation of knowledge long term and how/if that gets built. IPFS seems to be an interesting potential step towards those goals.
Data visualization book with Creative Commons license
Twitter to set up its first African presence in Ghana
yeah having lived in both cities, I think the likelihood of success in the bay area is going to be higher than in boston for sure.
Sloppy thinking too.

> But at the moment at least, there is definitely something they share in common that distinguishes them. What retailer starts AWS? What car maker is run by someone who also has a rocket company?

So your justification for how you're classify Amazon is something the company does (good) but your justification for how you're classifying Tesla is other things the CEO owns? Very sloppy, Paul. Very lazy.
Fees are borderline insane if you are a small volume trader.

If you’re in the US there is a regulated prediction market set to launch soon.
Just how bad at finances are you and people around you if 150k just really isn't that much?

That literally places you amongst the richest 1%. Not metaphorically, literally.

A couple of years worth of saving is enough to give you passive income to never need to work again for food or shelter.
Get out of your bubble. There's a whole world outside of Bay Area/NYC, where $150-200k/y is still a batshit crazy amount of money and $1M can last you happily ever after, even with kids. Accumulating $1-2M NW is totally within reach for most employees at US FAANGs after a decade or so of work.
He is saying you are more likely to become a Billionaire by starting a company than by joining a FAANG as an employee. Now that is a 1:1000000 event instead of a 1:5000000 event like it may have been in the past. I will forgive you if you still think it is unlikely.

Most people's goal isn't (and shouldn't be) $1B. If your goal is a more reasonable $5M then joining an existing company is still your best bet. I am going to plan my own like around the MEDIAN result which makes startup stock $0, and the salary wins.
They are also building high rise residential building in the city center including numerous 50+ story residential skyscrapers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_A...
https://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/tromp.c
So why did they think they had any leverage?
> Edit: fellas I asked a question downvotes aren’t necessary

Hacker News has by far the weirdest downvote patterns of any forum I've used. I wouldn't pay much mind.
>Having parents who are able to lend / invest / gift modest sums of money is yet another step up the ladder.

>All the way up to having parents with business / political contacts in the industry you are trying to move into.

Well that and understanding how to leverage those contacts. I have people in my social circle that could serve as contacts, but the idea of asking for that makes me extremely uncomfortable. And if I somehow forced myself to do it, it would still end up in a "what now" situation because it's not really clear what next steps are. I think the kind of people who know how to operate in those circles have a skillset that's not taught in a CS/EE curriculum.
Would it be worse? A big part of what companies like FB and Google do is get people "hooked" (A good book on this very topic) on sharing that data. In effect willingly revealing more and more data about themselves. If it were simply being sold I don't think people would divulge as much information.