skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We’ve had an environment that encourages investment, welcomes immigrants, rewards risk-taking, hard work [2], and radical thinking, and minimizes impediments to doing new things.

I think a major reason the middle class was able to live a fairly cushy lifestyle without doing much real work was some combination of:

- A massive supply of overseas slave labor, coupled with a complete lack of environmental regulations both domestically and abroad.

- Being able to tax people overseas by deflating the dollar.

- Heavy investment in infrastructure.

- A large population boom.

In other words about 20% sound policy, and 80% finding ways to steal money from other people and future generations. Since we're no longer investing in infrastructure or doing much in the way sound policy, and we're also losing our ability to steal money from others, I don't really see how the U.S. is going to sustain itself regardless of hard work, innovative thinking, immigration policies, etc.
the US's government is finally becoming too burdensome to do business under. The taxation of American business is one of the larger handicaps they operate under.

however the biggest issue facing the US is this message that excelling isn't to aspired too, acceptance of who you are and who someone else is is all that matters. It is a self defeating mindset. Don't worry if you fail, you had no choice, you just can't do better. Here let us take care of you....

With regards to China, what percentage of their population is experiencing this boon? I was always under the impression (don't know the truth) that quite a bit of their population really doesn't matter to their economic output.
This trend is nothing new, and is one of the main reasons that video CPMs for digital media are as high as they are. Sites like Youtube can bring a wealth of targeting data to the table, and Google is obviously very good at making that as accurate as possible. It is one of the main reasons behind their big push to get you logged-in whenever you use a Google service, device, browser, app, etc. A single GUID to link behavior across everything. One ring to rule them all so speak ;)
But thats kind of the problem.

I mean we all love large salaries but it's a symptom of something more fundamental namely that there are a lot of people who work hard but don't have the skills the market need and don't have the means to re-educate themselves.

It's not like everyone is getting more, it's that there is a divide where some gets more and a lot gets less.

Thats what this is all about. It's no ones fault but it has nothing to do with who works hard or not.
> Please don't be condescending when you don't know the basic terminology for the topic being discussed especially when the info is a Google search away.

The only people using "TDEE" are sketchy fitness websites. There is no wikipedia article on the term, and no legitimate medical or scientific sources.

Some studies have used the abbreviation TEE but even then saying BMR would have been clearer and is a well recognised medical term/abbreviation.

The first thing I did was Google TDEE, the first half dozen results are small gyms, or tiny fitness calculators. If you want people not to question your terminology then use more standard terminology.

> My question do you have research/evidence that disputes this?

Do you have evidence that all of weight loss can be boiled down to "just self-control more?" There have been literally hundreds of studies spanning at least 40 years, few if any have found that the key to fighting addictions is just to "self-control more" otherwise we wouldn't have tons of alcoholics, drug addicts, obese people, and so on...

Maybe you should go work at a drug rehab clinic some time. Just keep saying to people "just learn to self control!" and see how far that gets you...

> In my opinion as long as the truth is that being overweight is cause be eating more food than you need to "fatty has no self control" holds true.

And your opinion ignores 40 years of psychological research into addiction. Congratulations to you.
You make a good argument, and I'd only add that during an uptick in the tech sector, it becomes easier to get funding and so a series of effects flow from there. More people get funding, and more of it, and the risk profile and spread changes - probably to include more players that have less chance of success.

For my anecdotal experience I can say I have friends in 2015 who are working for good salary at funded startups that have quite literally no idea what mission or product they are making right now, whereas in 2010 my friends were mostly contributing sweat equity in return for actual equity.
Considering this downvoting-because-I-don't-like-being-wrong ... maybe just benchmark it yourself.

If you have time for making stuff up and downvoting, then you surely have time to run some benchmarks.
Regarding exceptionalism, I had a course in law school taught by Justice Scalia. His first words were, "I believe in American exceptionalism and if you don't, you can find the door." His intentions were to provoke us and he was baiting a brave law student to disagree with him.

Required reading for the course included De Tocqueville's - Democracy in America - as to "leave it to a Frenchman to explain America to Americans." In summary, it was a hell of a course!
I'm a molecular engineer working on a well-funded, stealth biotech project. We're building the world's first biological server farm. It's going to be a massive, fully automated research facility that manipulates, moves, mixes, and analyzes millions of batches of cells and molecules everyday.

It'll have the effective throughput capacity of taking everyone on earth, giving them a pipette, and having them do molecular biology by hand. But it'll be accessible from the comfort of a laptop. Biology will become a programming discipline.

We have an IMMEDIATE need for talented Python coders for short-term, on-site contract work. If the mission inspires you and you'd like to hear more, please email Kent Kemmish biokemmishtree at gmail.
Interesting idea. Chrome has this too.
You met a person who burned more calories than they consumed, and yet didn't lose weight?
Nice idea, but then the money grabbing corporates will just use the "freely submitted user data" to shaft the rest of us by jacking up the price of any simpler / less-smart products. Unfortunately telling 'them' why they lost a sale is unlikely to help 'us' in the long run.
Getting in isn't the same thing as a successful exit. The lottery is more about which of those YC folks wind up with a Dropbox rather than a Leaky.
Part of that is the fact that many R packages are actually predominantly written in C++, C, Java, etc..., so they show up in Github searches as being written in a language other than R...
You can't have endless impressive growth. Once you're developed its going to hit a reasonable cap. China is still developing. You can't compare the most mature economy to one of least developed. The move from back-breaking farm labor all day to manufacturing is MASSIVE growth. The problem with Western democracies is that we moved past that stage over 100 years ago. Now we're in a service based economy. That just doesn't have that wonderful growth curve.

As many democratic and liberal nations have discovered, its a fool's errand to chase growth on that curve and, as you said, the wealth and stability of north Europe is a tempting target to emulate. With recent moves towards proper socialization like Obamacare and focusing on tax cuts for the middle class and raising the minimum wage, I feel like we're on the path to those economies and have long stepped off the path of just beating down workers for tiny gains as we fight the laws of diminishing returns. How much workers unrest does the CCP violently take down per year to keep people in line? How many secret police arrests?

These pro-China pieces are mystifying to me. Geeks always seem to worship autocrats and dictators for whatever reason. I guess they like the idea of a centralized control by elites, but that simply doesn't scale well and it invites corruption and other inefficiencies much faster than a more open political process. I'd rather live in the poorest Western nation than in China or Russia. Its crazy that we're actually seeing their system as superior to ours. Only on HN would this drivel be voted so highly. INTJ social and moral blindness is in full effect here.

I look forward to the scandinaviation of all things. I believe its the best path humanity has.
Two disparate observations:

1. US GDP per capita is still almost 8x that of China: $53,042 US vs. $6,807 China (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD). While there are other ways to measure this (such as the PPP Sam cites), the magnitude of difference remains large. So even if China's economy in the aggregate is larger than the US's, the US is still much richer per capita.

2. As China grows richer, I expect the US will too. In modern inter-connected economies with few trade barriers growth in one generally benefits the other too. One example would be as one country's citizens gain greater purchasing power, they become bigger consumers of the other country's goods and services.
You're right. Kevin Poulsen was stopped and searched by cops at least once, possibly several times IIRC, and found to be carrying a lockpick set. It definitely can make things a lot worse because typically when a cop sees that, it triggers a lot of presumptions.
Yes, it's pretty annoying that the language detection can't be overridden.

About half of the repos that I'm dealing with are mis-detected (usually as CSS or HTML due to included documentation).
A History of London's Pirate Radio
I think it's important to make a distinction between working hard for work's sake and working hard because you really believe in what you're doing. The concept of hard work that most people who frown upon it in the US have is likely the former and I would tend to agree with them. Mindlessly doing menial tasks but putting in "18 hour days" is not something to be admired.

That being said, a culture that encourages people to dedicate a lot of time to a company, a cause, or an idea if they like it or believe in it is certainly worth fostering. If this is the kind of hard work that Sam talks about as being looked down upon in the US, then that is indeed troubling and we should try to correct that perception.
While products that can only be purchased with dollars are in demand there will always be commensurate demand for those dollars.

Demand for iPhones supports the dollar in the same way, though in a less directly obvious manner.
Even a lottery is not a lottery by that account; statistics professor Joan R. Ginther won four multi-million dollar jackpots in Texas because he found a "pattern" in the lottery numbers, just like how very clever people find patterns in our world and hit the market as a "startup". So generalizing the advice to everyone: "hey! start/join a startup" is bad. Only the smart and well-connected Stanford kids have a realistic chance of getting a return. The rest of us should work hard, just not in starry-eyed startup happenings.
How does the viable viewing angle of a repurposed monitor compare to a TV?
I don't understand why Altman doesn't address the underlying arguments against "hard work". The modern workers movement was about receiving more of the profit from business. He seems to want workers to take the pay cut while still providing the same incentives to capital investment.
Ask HN: Would you pay $5 / month to Never deal with your cable company again?
Lately, the blogosphere has been blowing up with user horror stories with big cable companies like Comcast. But what if someone eliminated this pain? What if you paid, say $5-$10 extra per month on top of your bill to a 3rd party company, but it meant that, for any cable related matter at all, you would call up a super friendly, super helpful team member, and then they would go deal with all the cable company BS for you? A "cable company middle man", so to speak.
Just a thought, but have considered allowing an individual to start writing without an account? Then you might just set a delayed notification to encourage the user to register to save their work.

Seemingly like a "trial run", except it's free, and I think a user might feel way more inclined to register after they've used the platform for the first time.

As an example, although I'm not a writer per se, I find my best ideas come to me in periods of rapid succession, and if I don't write them down, well, you know the rest. I could imagine having a platform like this as a bookmark, but the "barrier" that is a login screen might pose as an additional mental barriers. Just a thought.
So peter theil talks about building monopolies which are a union of different markets. How do you identify different metrics in such cases?
I disagree. I think he is talking about the general 'anti-workaholic' attitude. I see it all the time and have personally been called out for wanting to work too much. I don't know enough about China's culture, but I know in America it is looked down upon to work non stop even if it is just for a few years of a person's life.
That isn't relevant in this context as the library linked couldn't be integrated into JavaScript.
Exactly. I did oDesk work at 20$ an hour, approached a number of expat entrepreneurs/business people, and eventually started working at Converse Asia Pacific as an agency manager. The opportunities are pretty rich if you know how to find them.
"Also, most startups I'm aware of, at least in the bay area, pay large salaries at this point."

... which is all soaked up by real estate hyperinflation.
Clearly sama is preparing for a career in politics, because this is the standard canard of politicians everywhere. If we don't work harder, more efficiently, we'll be overtaken by country X, and be destitute.

It's a well known economic axiom, that long-term economic health of a country is directly proportional to productivity. It is not in any way true that its affected by the productivity of another country. Both countries can prosper, there's no zero-sum game here.
Isn't that what http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Events/#keys-codevalues is for?

Hmm, caniuse doesn't seem to have it, I'll have to look for info.

Edit: ah, and looks like Fx38 will be the very first to have it.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1126673
Nice explanation. I'm still wondering about something. Assume that I have one big data model (the main state). I build my virtual DOM from the main state. The states from all the sub-components are derived from this main state. Now, something in the main-state is changed, but the change should affect only a single sub-component in the tree. How does React know that only that sub-component needs to be re-rendered?

I guess that it is still necessary to call setState on the sub-component, but I suspect that the logic to figure out which component needs to be re-rendered can become quite ugly, and prone to errors. Are they not addressing this issue, or am I overlooking something?
> if he released a respectable game tomorrow, it would sell.

If it's already made, sure. But if he needs funds to finish it and tries crowdfunding, this may bite him pretty hard.
It's obvious, women are better than men at certain things, such as running companies. That's what we're all trying to say here isn't it? Oh, wait, we want EQUALITY for both sexes. Well, then in that case why differentiate one sex as potentially better than the other? Why create that competition?
They've also started to block Gmail and seriously block most VPNs. A good number of expats are looking into leaving recently because of the recent restrictions.
Ya, that's not a lottery either. I'm not saying luck isn't involved. It certainly helps. But if you think that's all that matters you're crazy.
Can't reply to your latest comment.

Umm I never made a claim, you did and I asked you to back it up. You haven't even tried to do this instead you got defensive and launched personal attacks. So I'll take that as no you have no evidence to support your opinion. What evidence is there that being overweight is not an issue of regulating (this is the self control part) your caloric intake?
If there is a crime near you involving a break-in and you are found to be carrying lockpicks, you will instantly be considered the #1 suspect.
Maybe so but I thought the lottery wasn't getting into YC but working for a start up that becomes successful. In that sense it's very much like a lottery: you have a tiny probability of succeeding, but if you succeed you get an extremely large sum of money.

I'm not entirely sure it's like a lottery in terms of the expected value being negative though (if you consider the opportunity cost as a negative).
If you enjoyed watching, it might be an ASMR effect.
The knee jerk for me, is the absence of regulatory control of industry standards that make US based companies grow for the benefit of the US economy. As far as being 2nd to China on overall economic power, that's just find in my book. We aren't racing for space here. It's the ethical challenges that present themselves by OTHER countries that provide hot beds for US business. I can just lean back on the banana republics of Latin America, as an example of economic explosion on the backs of others through brutality and instability of regional nations partners. From observation, if I'm not wrong, China has done exactly this to advance it's own economy via Africa endeavors. Am I wrong?
I don't mean to eye-roll, but Sam on economics tends to be, well, meh. The thing I always remind people when they say that China will take over the world is that everyone said the same thing about Japan in the 1980s (remember the movie/novel Rising Sun?). What happened?

Well, the mercantilist economic toolkit has an endgame. Neither Sam nor I knows when it's going to let them down, but building an entire economy on cheap labor and radical amounts of investment is hard to sustain. Eventually you need things like domestic demand and that requires wages, which short-circuits the export machine. Japan got caught in that trap, and China will eventually too.
One major point often overlooked in this discussion is, that nobody trusts the Chinese government. In foreign policy, China has to pay dearly for very little trust/support in return. Therefore I don't see the dollar getting dethroned any time soon.

I also don't believe that China is getting risk management right. Corruption in government and industry, extreme growth rates and untrackable webs of debts will sooner or later stop Chinese growth unless it transforms into a much more liberal or democratic form of government.

For China, it's still a long way to the top.
Did anybody take the bait?
It sounds like we need a new metric. Something like "military purchasing power parity" (MPPP). A conversion factor C would be determined for each country based on how expensive it is to locally produce tanks, aircraft, etc., train and maintain troops, etc. Then their nominal GDP would be multiplied by C to get MPPP GDP.

For example, just looking at troops, if it costs $100,000 per year in overhead-included costs to maintain one US soldier but only $10,000 to maintain a Chinese soldier, then that would help their MPPP. Large defense contractors with cost-plus contracts would influence the US's MPPP, but so would corruption in China.

An even better metric might be WMPPP (wartime military purchasing power parity), which is probably the real metric that counts and determines which country is a superpower. This is what the MPPP would be in wartime. For example, the US spends a lot on troops and equipment in peacetime, but in wartime it could operate much more efficiently. See World War II.

Another interesting metric would be how quickly a country could ramp up its military production within 1-2 years assuming a major war broke out, because a war against another superpower probably wouldn't last very long.
> Well it's been rolled out for a while now. Can't he switch now?

Not sure if the annual open enrollment periods are nationally synchronized or differ per state, but Covered California (California ACA Exchange) currently has an open enrollment period (ending 2/15.)
congratulations on your sexism
Ask HN: Business Justifications for Open-Source
So, I'm currently looking to justify an open-source development model for good chunks of our codebase at our startup (in addition to a more flexible IP policy, but that's only somewhat related).

I'm curious how others have justified this from a business perspective.

Current arguments for:

* Having open-source helps developers' careers if they decide to move on (they can talk about what they did)
* Open-source helps those building on your company's product (because they can file better bug reports)
* Open-source helps everyone by reducing the number of wheels that need to be reinvented
* Open-source is the "Right Thing To Do" if you heavily use other open-source projects in your product.
* Having an open-source policy helps attracts higher quality developers
* Having open-source increases the chances of being acquihired
* Having open-source may change the way the market behaves about a new category of product and encourage adoption
* Having open-source encourages customers who may be scared of proprietary/black-box solutions

Current arguments against:

* Older, larger market players may take advantage of open-source to put us out of business
* Newer players in the market may get a jump-start on the tech problems given our open-source

Neutral observations:

* If we're making 3rd-party integration easy and documenting everything, it's almost open-source anyways (can always just clone the HTTP APIs and so forth, and build from that spec)
* Heavy market regulation and compliance requirements discourage free-for-all development

~

I'd love feedback, especially picking apart the pros.

If you've ever actually seen any of the cons happen, I'd also love to hear about it.

I can't help but notice that Datastax, Red Hat, Docker, Canonical, and many other vendors don't seem to have any problems publishing all their source and still keeping a profit based off of services and the hard business stuff.
What's interesting is that it's very common for wealthy Chinese to invest in / move their families and their money into the States. Just look at places like Seattle, where around one-third of all $1+ homes are purchased by foreign Chinese, and according to this NYT article, three-quarters of their purchases are all cash. *

* http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/business/in-suburban-seatt...
Well, you may think that standards are too high, but on the flipside, yes: the expectation that you are able to deal with such a suite of tools is also out there. Maybe this reflects on the quality of the stack more than anything else - on the other hand, .Net and C# development is pitched as a reason to not have to know any of those things, too.
My father always taught me - keys and wallet every time you leave the house. And keep it in your pants pockets, since you never* leave those.

For my future children I will say the same, plus phone. But maybe it will be one physical thing at that time.

*Relative speaking, comparing to jacket let say.
Yep! I was actually planning to drop the discount today (since it was originally a pre-order discount), but figured I'd extend it by a day or two for the release.

I know where you're coming from, though -- I've seen a bunch of scammy countdowns too, and those "only 17 copies left (of this book I can make infinite copies of)!" on other sites :-)