Tangentially related, for the chart related to american gdp embedded in this article, even though it claims to be on a logarithmic scale, that doesn't mean it doesn't have some sort of "banking to 45" applied.
Paradoxically (to me at times, perhaps to you) banking to 45 is supposed to make the chart more accurately read. It does so by more apparent to the viewer where the relevant inflection points are (in this case, the great depression really sticks out visually).
Theoretically, the great depression might not stick out as well if banking to 45 were not done (as I suspect may have been done here).
Whether or not it turns out to be the case here, I suppose lots of the other curious questions in the article have similar answers. When dealing with qualitative measures using qualitative measures, I think even ethical people can forge a system where emergent fudging arises.
I think we (the tech folk) need to sort of up our game in casual analysis from tools like excel (which in actuality relatively good) to something like www.anylogic.com. With systems dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics software I think we have a tool that can better elucidate this curious phenomenon where we notice questions whose data "feels a little funny" but may turn out to actually have a demonstrable excuse/justifiable explanation for looking so.
The chart is logarithmic - as such its overall slope can be selected by altering the base (aesthetically here to 45%) buts its curvature and smoothness is not manipulable.
Why are programming environments primitive? That’s worth a blog post-length reply, but I think it’s because coding is relatively silo’d and non-standardized (in languages, build systems, deployment schemes, and other tools). The impact of a single better tool is minimal because it could only address a tiny fraction of all developers. This is changing quickly, though, so I’m optimistic.
Acrually. For recently popular languages like javascript things are way better than say C or assembly. Resources, tools, debugging, etc.
I'm still wondering why we are forcing people to write assembly with short and rubbish opcode mnemonics when we are going to compile it anyway.
Even if you look at C vs Rust/Go we have made huge improvements. People don't need to write Makefiles anymore. Packages are easily sharable and re-usable. Security is by default. Etc.
Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how?
How about adding some sort of block based scripting language line Scratch or Snap. Make it more approachable and encourage experimentation
"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?"
Because relative prices (e.g. the ratio of the price of a 42" TV to the price of a cinema ticket) are constantly changing due to changes in technology and competitive dynamics.
Some things have gotten (and continue to get) much cheaper due to technological progress and economies of scale. So, relative to those, anything that hasn't benefited from the same trends looks like it's getting expensive (in real terms). And if that thing (e.g. undergraduate degrees in the US) has weird competitive dynamics (e.g. willingness to pay is driven by the availability of credit, and availability of credit is driven by sticker price, and sticker price is driven by willingness to pay), then that effect is even more pronounced.
Because we live in a very unequal society, things like education that offer a shred of economic security and maintenance of the middle class life are things that people will pay almost anything for.
Unfortunately, most of that effort is noisy but pointless zero-sum re-arranging of positions on the socio-economic ladder, the only beneficiaries being academics, textbook publishers, and campus property developers.
The solution: equality. Guarantee everybody a base level of economic security. From there, give people the freedom to pursue their real passions and interests, rather than waste their lives scrambling over the limited number of economically secure socio-economic positions our dysfunctional society currently offers.
This is very interesting and implies a kind of paradox. As some things become radically cheaper, it should leave us with more resources to spend on things that are difficult to make more efficient. But instead, it makes it appear as if they have become so expensive we can barely afford them anymore!
How is the Baumol effect relevant here? The posts you're replying to seem to be pointing out the perceptual increase in price in areas that haven't benefitted from cost reduction. To my (admittedly limited) understanding, that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Baumol effect.
On a more cynical perspective, capitalism is effective at extracting the most money from consumers. People will pay almost anything for the really essential things: health, housing, air, food and water. Education is essentially the only reproducible way to pay for all of the above.
Therefore, any sufficiently late stage capitalist society has extremely high costs for all of those areas: it's just the stuff people will pay the most for.
It basically means that you’re much more willing to pay a large price for a product you need and which has no substitute than for a commodity product. Which is why stunts like multiplying the price of a drug by 1000 regularly make the news.
Note that this is purely about price (ie the value you assign to the product) and has very little to do with its actual cost.
Furthermore, since you have no incentive to lower your price (indeed, you can hike it up any time you need to show more profits), well there’s no incentive to improve the underlying production process (ie lower costs) or improve the product. This goes IMO a long way in explaining the college and healthcare examples in the article.
Nope, I meant literally by 1000. I was thinking of Martin Shkreli but some googling shows he merely multiplied the price of the drug by 55 (although I think others have done worse since then)
> While a lot happened in the US during World War II, it's easy to forget how short the period in question was: American involvement lasted 3 years 8 months and 23 days.
How does this stack up against US involvement in other"good" wars, where the foe is the unambiguously bad?
I.e not a Vietnam style ideologically motivated confrontation.
A lot will depend on what you personally feel is "good" versus "ideologically motivated".
For example: the US was in World War I for 574 days (declared war on Germany on April 6 1917, and the war ended on November 11 1918), and entered the conflict with the Zimmerman telegram and German submarine attacks as its casus belli.
But the US had been aiding the Allied powers prior to that, and from the German perspective the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the resulting attempt to enlist Mexico to join the war against the US, was a defensive move to stem the flow of supplies from the neutral-but-obviously-biased US to Germany's existing opponents.
> Why can't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to see what they last were? Why isn't time-traveling debugging widely deployed? Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program? Why in the name of the good lord are REPLs still textual? Why can't I copy a URL to my editor to enable real-time collaboration with someone else? Why isn't my editor integrated with the terminal? Why doesn't autocomplete help me based on the adjacent problems others have solved?
I think all of these are possible already in VSCode/Atom, and especially true if you’re doing reactive UI programming for the web - time travelling, improved REPL, live debugging are all there. A very good spot to be in :)
C#/.NET 64 bit does this too but there were always limitations such as not being able to reload the code if method parameters were changed, closures were modified etc.
When I saw how C#/.net could do this I found myself annoyed because you could in theory do with with even C. There isn't any reason you couldn't monkey patch a new function in a running C program. At least for a pure function.
I used to work with a OG (with a pocket protector no less) who did this when debugging assembly by pasting op-codes using a debug monitor.
This is also true for VB6, add lines of code in real time and resume stepping through. Also you can hover your mouse on variables during debugging to see their contents.
> Why doesn't autocomplete help me based on the adjacent problems others have solved?
Doesn't the Facebook editor / autocompleter do that? I guess it's not available to anyone outside Facebook?
> Why can't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to see what they last were? Why isn't time-traveling debugging widely deployed? Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program?
print debugging is extremely versatile and the market has spoken that, apparently, nothing else has the same expressive power to overhead trade-off. I have a few theories: tool usability sucks (looking at you gdb), debugging and writing code are two different disciplines so if you can stay in the same modality (writing code) to do debugging it's one less thing that changes from under you, print debugging is versatile and can apply to everything from embedded to mobile to cloud to HPC. print debugging gets a lot of scorn but (if you want an appeal to authority) if you read "Coders at Work" no "famous" programmers use debuggers, they all use(d) print debugging.
From my direct, personal, experience, it goes something like this:
"Don't you want better tools?" I'll ask
"Of course!" the programmer replies (note sometimes this is a conversation with myself) "but I don't want to pay anything for it" they caveat.
"That's no problem," I reply, "as long as it will make your life better."
"Well, that sounds good, but I also don't want to have to learn anything new."
"That..."
"Also, it has to just work from day one, if it doesn't quite work as soon as I touch it, I'll swear off it forever and go talk badly about it on twitter and hacker news."
"Ah..."
"Also, it has to work with every use case I can think of. Multi-threaded, GUI, deployed to HPC clusters running RHEL6 and also Docker containers running CoreOS, and it should be able to help me be productive in either JavaScript or s390 assembler. Also it should take no time to set up, and start giving me answers straightaway."
"Hm..."
"You know what, the methods I already have already satisfy all of these requirements and as a bonus, I don't have to learn anything new in order to use them. I spend enough time learning new frameworks to write software, why would I spend more time learning frameworks to debug software?"
"Because you spend more time debugging software than writing software?"
"Honestly the process of debugging, and the process of writing, have become so intertwined in my thinking, that distinction between them seems arbitrary and pointless."
> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved?
> Books are great (unless you're Socrates). We now have magic ink. As an artifact for effecting the transmission of knowledge (rather than a source of entertainment), how can the book be improved? How can we help authors understand how well their work is doing in practice? (Which parts are readers confused by or stumbling over or skipping?) How can we follow shared annotations by the people we admire? Being limited in our years on the earth, how can we incentivize brevity? Is there any way to facilitate user-suggested improvements?
The great thing about books is that no matter how long they've been sitting around, it's easy to take one off the shelf and read it. The cultural infrastructure of written language has been around much longer (and been much more stable) than the computational infrastructure you'd need have your "magic ink" still work in 1000 years. At some point we need to start treating computers and software more seriously if we want to have things like this.
I love books, don't get me wrong, but they do age. This is especially true of books that are specialty related. Take a book from the 70s on computers, on medicine or psychology, on prehistory, on history, etc. They are all likely to be significantly outdated compared to their modern counterparts. There is much to be said for the modern way of information transference: it is always most up to date.
Whilst your core point about books aging is absolutely true I think thats mostly the mass market publications designed to ease entry than actual papers.
Similarly, anything writen about an implementation is short lived. The Idiots Guide to Windows 98 is less useful today than it was in 1998 and is getting less useful with time.
Lovelace, Babbage, Turing, McCarthy et al are still seminal. But these are academic papers that focus on what is possible to compute and how one might construct an implementation.
There are some interesting edge cases too. Is the Gang of Four Design Patterns still relevent? Its not embarassing, but its not as applicable as it used to be.
As an aside, what would be today's ideal intro to design patterns?
Now .. on topic ... I had a roomful of books collected from my youth. I cleaned out my room at my parents house some years ago ... and pretty much everything got chucked. The only books that I kept were seminal books like Knuth, Cormen, Gang of Four, TCP/IP series (v6 kinda makes them out-of-date too). All my MFC books ... java books .. pretty much all of it was out of date. I had an epiphany .. CS does not age well at all.
I no longer buy physical books ... I got a subscription to Safari and love it. Also consume tons of content on e-learning platforms. But .. I really miss real books.
My parents had bookshelves that filled walls that I built with my Dad before they moved. I, and most other people that visited the house, would spend a fair amount of time just looking at the books on the shelf. Comparing notes on what they'd read, and asking to borrow books. Looking at the books, and being reminded of the experience you had with them or wanted to have with them was a vitally important part of the process that I fear we've lost.
PDFs might still work - but will the storage devices they are on? There are good reasons to doubt this: tapes, CDs and DVDs age and degrade over time; plus devices to read them only last so long, and may not be produced anymore at some point. Classic "spinning" hard drives degrade, too; and even ignoring this, will there still be conputers supporting, say, SATA, in 50 years?
And then there is a trend to switch to onboard soldered flash in new devices which adds further problems.
Not saying this is impossible to overcome, but "PDF might still work" is at best solving a part of the problem, for only a part of all data (PDF is great - but only for some types of data) one might want to preserve.
Seems like roms for emulators are becoming kind of book like. As soon as a new platform reaches market relevance, there is a dash to make sure these old platforms are emulated.
However, rom files specifically (as opposed to executeables for retro computing platforms) seem to be distinctly less fickle in becoming reliably emulateable.
The reason is seemingly simple, the early rom files were essentially an operating system, having all the software required to boot the system included in what now looks like one file.
Not sure I follow the logic; don't physical books suffer from similar downsides? Books degrade and libraries burn down. Seems a lot like bitrot and file mirrors disappearing.
Those downsides only apply to the book or software itself. My point was about the stuff you need to have apart from the book/software in order to read it. You need a computer to run software; all you need to read a book is an understanding of the language. It does get harder and harder to understand books over time, but not at the same rate that computers are changing (and language tends to stay relatively simple, anyway, because people have to be able to learn it).
There are very few people who want to read many books that are 1000 years old. The few books that interest more people can be converted to newer formats, the few people that want to read all old books will have to use extra tools to do so.
That said, I am not a particular fan of books. They take a lot of physical space, are heavy and age. So as long as we stick to reasonable formats (e.g., text-based, non-binary), it should not be too hard for future generations to use our books.
Using DRM, on the other hand, might make things complicated.
The Bible and the Koran would easily be on the world's best seller lists if they weren't excluded by default.
You might argue - and I would agree - that this is not necessarily a good thing as far as content goes.
But the point is that putting something into writing snd giving it a tangible form on paper gives it an inherent stability and authority missing from digital media.
We tend of think of digital media as temporary, disposable, relatively low value simulacra of a Real Thing.
Digital media can be hacked, edited, deleted, and lost when the power goes off.
A copy of a book from hundreds or thousands of years ago is just going to sit there for some indefinite period. (Which actually depends on the quality of the paper - but in theory could be centuries.)
This is not about practical reproduction and storage technologies, it's about persistence and tangibility.
A book is a tangible object which has some independence from its surroundings. After printing, it's going to exist unless you destroy it. If you print many copies the contents are geographically distributed and it becomes very hard to destroy them all.
A file depends on complex infrastructure. If the power goes down, it's gone. If the file format becomes obsolete, it's gone. (This has actually happened to many video and audio formats.) If there's an EMP event, it's gone.
And it's not just a tangible difference, but a cultural. We have a fundamentally different relationship with digital data than we do with tangible objects, and this influences the value we place on their cultural payload.
>If the file format becomes obsolete, it's gone. (This has actually happened to many video and audio formats.)
Any examples of video or audio files that are currently impossible to watch/listen to because knowledge of the file format, and all software capable of playing it was lost? If such a thing has happened, there are probably people interested in reverse engineering the format.
There's no emulator that can run a Linear B parser. If a linear B dictionary ever existed, it was never mass produced. Linear B is older than the printing press, let alone the Internet. But now we do have those technologies, and "lots of copies makes stuff safe" is cheaper and easier than ever. I don't believe any mainstream digital format (i.e. popular enough to have a Wikipedia page) will be permanently lost unless there's a complete collapse of society, and then we'll have bigger problems to worry about.
I can pick up some writing on physical media -- an Akkadian clay tablet -- and read it (if I have the knowledge) despite it being thousands of years old.
Things like laserdiscs, I can probably still buy equipment to read, but it's substantially different as I need the technology to read it.
Microfiche is quite good in this respect, you can easily read it even without the specific tech it was made for (using a magnifier, or projecting the image with a simple light source.
I wonder if you could make a crystal where, like a hologram, you can rotate the crystal a minute amount in order to project a different page (an idea I saw decades ago had a digital clock style projection from a crystal, used asa sundial -- pretty sure it was theoretical).
That way the information is relatively easy to discover, and with a simple light source you can get info out if it.
In the modern world, a physical book is nothing more than a mere printout of a PDF file or a photocopy of an old edition. People print web pages all the time, but nobody in their right mind would think much about these printouts, let alone philosophize about their tangibility, endurance etc.
On the other hand, old books, with their high-quality paper, binding and letter-press print do seem have some kind of personality...
This isn't for everybody, but I would say Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), where words are sequentially presented in place to the reader, which has significantly changed the way I read.
I wrote my own implementation of RSVP, which has eBook reader support, and now it is absolutely my preferred method of reading, and I read at 1000WPM. Though normal books are still enjoyable, they feel tedious and slow.
(It needs some help being updated for recent versions of Android, please let me know if you'd like to be involved! It has a new back-end API in place already and it just needs a few simple updates.)
This is a poor implementation of RSVP, as each word is being presented at the same speed. Longer words should be given longer presentation times, as should words with punctuation marks. The presentation of the words is also centered rather than aligned, which requires a saccade for each word, which defeats the whole point. It's also a difficult text to start out with, with no context.
Even still, I didn't have a problem reading and recalling this text, though I wouldn't recommended it for a beginner.
> The presentation of the words is also centered rather than aligned, which requires a saccade for each word, which defeats the whole point.
Does it actually require a saccade?
Testing with a quick and dirty command line RSVP program I have, my speed and comprehension seem about the same with either centered or left aligned. But I'm mostly testing with fiction written for the average adult. The words are usually short enough that they are within the field of good visual acuity no matter where withing them the focus is.
I've not done a comparison using text with a lot of long word.
I made a similar app (iOS) which varies the display time by word length, punctuation, and each word's place in a list of the 100 most common words (under the assumption that common words contain less information, thus take less effort to read). To be honest, I'm not sure it works any better than one running at a constant speed. There seems to be a surprising lack of research in this area.
Reading this way is a skill which needs a small up front investment, but the pay off is immense. The trick is to not try, just relax and pay attention and let the words speak to you as if they are being narrated to you inside your head.
Because there are no constant micro-interruptions from page scrolling, ads, or even from your eyes own saccades, I find that my attention to the text is much, much better, and I need to stop to ponder something I can just tap the screen to pause it.
I also find that I am far, far more likely to finish an article/paper/chapter via Glance than via my browser. These days it's pretty rare that I'll actually finish an article online, but with Glance I'll almost always read the entire thing from start to finish.
I really, really recommend this skill, especially if you have a lot of time to kill on a mass-transit commute, or if you just want to read more.
Where I think this could be really useful is status messages. When a status message on some fixed layout display is too wide, the solution is often to have it scroll horizontally back and forth automatically, which can be very hard to read.
I think it would be more readable to put it in an area big enough for the longest word, and then RSVP through the message repeatedly.
If anyone wants a simple way to play around with RSVP, here's a little quick and dirty command line reader I wrote a long time ago to play with this: https://pastebin.com/zfq2eW4n
Put it in reader.cpp and compile with:
$ c++ reader.cpp
To use:
$ ./a.out N < text
where N is the number of milliseconds delay between words. It will then do the RSVP thing. It should compile with no problem on Mac or Linux.
If a word (which is really just a string of non-whitespace surround by white space) ends with a period or comma, the delay is doubled for that word.
There's a commented out check that sets a minimum line length. If you compile that check it can put more than one word on a line to make the line at least a minimum length.
PS: this aligns the words on their centers. To change it to left aligning them change where it sets the variable "pad" to use a small integer instead of basing it on the length of the word. If it is the same for all words, it becomes an indent for left alignment instead of a pad for centering.
This is really awesome. I think I played with your source a few years ago, trying to adapt it to work with Google Cardboard. My initial attempt failed, because my eyes would lose focus during each word transition. I decided I'd need to add a lightly textured background, which would be shown all the time, and which would fix the distance my eyes were focusing, and then lay the text on top of that. IIRC I gave up because I realised the 'right' way to do this was to use the Cardboard SDK, but that would mean also writing something to render the text into pixels (as the SDK only supported graphics).
BTW - The Google Play link in the repo doesn't work for me, and I don't see Glance in F-Droid. What's the easiest way for non-developers to get the APK?
>> > What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved?
First, what's the purpose of books ?
There's entertainment of course. But let's focus on books that teach. Their purpose is to let you access some knowledge, in a deep way.
On the other hand, computer systems are starting to fill that role, and the level of depth they can achieve is growing - on a good day, with the right query, Google may give you access to Amazing content, content that may help you connect different concepts - based on your past searches - just like your brain does.
Another option is if it was easy for a book author to package her knowledge in a smart chatbot or maybe an expert system, and we will have hundreds of such advisors advising us, or just interactively chatting with us,correcting our mistakes, that would be an interesting replacement to the book.
I have thought about the difficulties of long-term storage for a while, and have come to the conclusion that digital mediums are inherently a poor choice for archiving and preserving data:
As I note in the essay, there are some technologies that work better than others for preservation, but digital's biggest weaknesses are inherent, I think.
Until a different unpowered human-readable medium is proven over a longer period of more careless storage conditions, looks like a third edition if appropriate.
If it hasn't been printed it hasn't really been published as thoroughly as it could be, and if it hasn't been bound then it's not yet a real book. Up until recent decades the survival of unique knowledge was largely dependent on the number of copies printed and distributed, so popularity has had undue importance.
But don't let earlier editions become lost or woe on you.
This is something I noticed too. And it can't be just blamed to "inflation" of the US GDP. Almost any other country I checked does have fluctuations. Goes through booms and bust. China has gone through an exponential rise but slowed down and seems like it broke the pattern recently.
The US is the only country so far that has been going decades through a constant rate of change. And you can't blame that on inflation since inflation is neither constant; or it would mean that the GDP is constant (and inflation is increasing it). The GDP being constant would be weird too.
So is the US the singularity? Is the US dollar affecting the US GDP; and does it being the reserve currency of the world changes the landscape of the US economy?
Maybe there's a problem analogous to "clustering" in opinion polls.
I presume every now and again econometrics people have to tweak the way they measure GDP.
Maybe if someone proposes a plausible tweak and it results in a surprisingly high or low figure their idea gets ignored, while it might be taken seriously if it ended up moving the figure towards the historical average.
A larger economy is more diversified, diversity will create a regression to the mean. And sheer scale creates momentum -- it takes a lot to accelerate and a lot to decelerate.
Less diversified economies show wider swings. Australia rode on the sheep's back for most of a century, these days the country's fortunes closely track the prices of coal and iron ore.
Still, from indicators like number of public companies, market capitalisation and so forth, the USA's economy is growing less diverse at the moment.
In this case the GDP of the US would have been either constant or linear. In both cases making it different from the rest of the countries which experience booms and bust whilst having inflation.
I really like this format. Asking questions without answering them, this causes the reader to think a lot more than the usual blog post. I also look forward to gaining more insight from the HN comments.
The easy answer for the "Two Sigma" problem is that you... don't try to reproduce it on a large scale by finding some other method.
You provide individual, one-on-one full time tutoring to each student, if that is the analytically best method. It's worth it, since educational spending is close to the most effective public spending imaginable - something in the $3-$5 return per dollar spent, which you'd be hard pressed to find any other available investment that can do that consistently.
This also does away with some substantial percent of the overhead of maintaining separate public schools, assuming that this tutoring occurs in either the tutor's home or the child's home.
>You provide individual, one-on-one full time tutoring to each student
So, at a modest 2 hours of instruction per day, and assuming people spend on average 12 years in education and 48 years in the workforce, you need at minimum for 1/16th of your adults to be teachers. Not 1/16th to be employed in education but just teachers and just for this education scheme. Today it's about 1/40th (in the us) and that includes post-secondary and administration, logistics etc. so you're scaling up the education sector by 3x or 4x AND you need to find something to do with the kids for the other 5-6 hours when their parents are working.
>It's worth it, since educational spending is close to the most effective public spending imaginable - something in the $3-$5 return per dollar spent
Marginal ROI does not work that way. Even assuming you get that return on what you're spending now, that doesn't mean the marginal dollar invested in education is getting that return nor that you can scale up the amount you spend and continue getting that return.
Closer to 1/3rd of the working population as teachers, actually, by my numbers. Current spending is $13k/yr per student, I'd bump that comfortably up 4x to $52k per year. That's about one full time teacher per student.
As for marginal ROI, if the effects are as dramatic as the stated research implies, it'd be more than worth it. It would be a larger increase than the entire implementation of formal secondary and tertiary education system combined, which cost a lot more than K-8. I don't think you can overstate how large the demonstrated effect size was. Think "industrial revolution" or "invention of the printing press".
Essentially you'd be spending an extra 3x the amount we currently spend to get... 5x? 10x? better outcomes. Results from those studies were equivalent to making the current best students in the country suddenly the very lowest tier of educational attainment - top 1% suddenly becomes the minimum standard. Think Rhodes scholars being "the new special ed kids", or the new "functionally illiterate must-pass graduates".
(This is all assuming that the research was accurate, and the magnitude of difference is really that large. I'd want to see a lot of follow up.)
Isn't this close to what students could/should be spending doing homework, reading or doing some projects together with their parents - effectively one-on-one tutoring for every single one of them?
I suspect that US education spending is so high compared to other developed countries because it has to compensate for lack of social support elsewhere in society. The #1 factor in student success is parental involvement. Instead of buying iPads for low-income schools, what's needed is stable 35-40/hr week jobs that you can live on for low-income parents so that they can spend evenings with their family.
> individual, one-on-one full time tutoring to each student
Isn't this the promise of the various platforms? I'm talking about Canvas, Moodle, WebWork-type programs. In principle, they can have everyone in the room working at their own level, and only moving up when the system says they are ready.
Not that, as far as I know, those platforms are now being leveraged that way.
Not at all. There are huge differences: trades/subjects of tutelage aren't foreordained or narrowly restricted; much more
choice exists on the part of the student and teacher ('compulsory' education now is not the same as compulsory education then--the ply-your-trade-or-starve situation is not present int he same way); teachers can leverage much more effective tools (books! Simulations!) to convey concepts quicker than a 'watch me, then do as I do' apprenticeship; teachers do not typically occupy a simultaneous position of educator authority and parent/elder authority ... the list goes on.
I remember when I was 18, back in 1998, installing a specially licensed copy of this thing called "Visual C++" and doing just that, i.e the thing they call 'debugging'.
As I understand his point, it's about not having to pause the program. This seems like actually a quite useful feature, and probably not that hard to implement in say, visual studio (possibly requiring a manual trigger for efficiency). So the question is, why has it not happened in 20 years. Why are debuggers at basically the same level of sophistication as 20 years ago, when there's seemingly a lot of low hanging fruit. I think he have a point, and adding to that, how come so many environments aren't even up to par with the state 20 years ago. Many people doesn't even use a prober debugger, deferring to printf debugging and at most command line GDB in exceptional cases, due to bad environment support.
With VS and .NET you can pause the program, inspect variables, change variables, execute arbitrary code using a REPL, change threads, view memory usage, edit code and continue the program (if properly configured), debug into framework libraries and even third party libraries with a bit of hackery. You used to be able to debug JS - not sure if you can still do this as I haven't tried for ages since the Chrome debugger is pretty good.
You can also use the same tools to debug a crash dump although often a lot of info is lost, but it can be useful.
Admittedly nothing much has changed in years and it would be good to see more.
One thing I would like to see is a time travelling debugger akin to what is provided with Elm, but Elm apps have state concentrated in one place so it is easier to implement there than for a .NET program probably.
Outside of .NET I am not sure of the quality of debugging tools. Jetbrains created something pretty good for Ruby which I used once, it was quite nice. But I am sure there are languages without much support and it would be frustrating to use them.
Haskell is an interesting example because you don't often need to debug, because of the purity you would more likely run additional unit tests / property-based tests on the functions to find the problem. Having said that I've only made small Haskell apps, nothing in the day job.
> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how?
I think that most end-user applications now have APIs that allow you to manipulate the data. For example, Salesforce, Lever, Excel, etc. all have APIs for reading and writing data. Allowing end users to build custom UIs on top of those APIs seems like a simpler problem.
Retool (https://tryretool.com) is a fast way of building UIs on top of data. And so if there are APIs for reading and writing data from “end-user applications”, Retool lets you build custom UIs and workflows on top of them quickly.
I think this is an interesting problem, and I’m not sure what the right solution is. If anybody else has ideas, feel free to email me — I’d love to learn! I’m david@. :)
Total cost of ownership for malleable software is higher than for something you pay someone else to specialize in modifying, and businesses have gradually learned this. They increasingly realize that software shouldn't be their core business, especially if it's applicable to more than just their own industry. So this is just the normal tinkering -> specialization dynamic seen in most new technologies.
Not everything useful has APIs. The most frustrating example in my life is WhatsApp. It is positively horrible. On IOS? Only way to backup your chats is iCloud. On Android .. only backup option is google drive. On an ipad without a cell phone (low income seniors who cannot afford cell plans) .. go away. It is sad and messed up how much of a locked in kingdom we have in software today. It has NEVER been this bad.
> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?
I recently read Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and suspect the answer lies in there. The examples Patrick lists are all service industries driven by labour costs. This probably influences the following two questions too (project delays and GDP).
I'm not sure what aspect of construction you are in, but there is an amazing amount of inefficiency. For example, a friend of mine was working on the Tappan Zee bridge project several years ago. Union job, very good salary, benefits. He was working the night shift, making an added bonus night differential. However, there was a noise regulation in place where no work could be done after a certain hour, so for 6 hours a night this extremely well paid union construction crew was sitting around collecting very good money + night differential for doing absolutely nothing. Now his job is very real, and it requires skill, but for the purposes of argument, this was a "bullshit job" that went on for weeks and weeks and added literally millions of dollars to the cost of the job in which absolutely no work was done.
Inflation, regulation/globalism, corrupt system, wait, don’t, up to us all, good question, good question, remove politics, no, books, papers, don’t try, no, false laziness.
> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? Emacs, Smalltalk, Genera, and VBA embody a vision of malleable end-user computing: if the application doesn't do what you want, it's easy to tweak or augment it to suit your purposes. Today, however, end-user software increasingly operates behind bulletproof glass. This is especially true in the growth areas: mobile and web apps.
I'll pick this one: end users back then (emacs/vba/smalltalk era) are the power users of today. Today's end users are a new kind of users.
Will voice recognition at home coupled with AI allow people to start "programming".
Currently home automation systems through something like Alexa are only listening to direct commands. Interesting follow-up functionality:
* The capability for introspection. Alexa, who is home? Alexa, why are the lights on? Alexa, why are the lights not on? Especially the latter means advanced reasoning capabilities.
* You preferably also want to adjust the behavior by voice. Alexa, when I enter the room I want the lights to go on. Alexa, the lights only need to turn on when it's dark outside.
Recently I got a request from a person who works a lot with blind people. A system that allows them to query the state of the environment is very valuable to them as well.
It's a different take on being "truly programmable", but I think the different modality makes it an interesting one.
Huh this is an interesting thought. I've been reading On Lisp off and on lately and perhaps similar ideas of building both top down and bottom up apply to voice tools like Alexa where we create chainable series of commands to do a wider variety of tasks.
And today, many systems automatically personalize themselves for us, in very complex way. If the machine learning senses what i want to do(like in Google Search's personalization, which for most people it's probably better than advanced keywords), why do i need to bother with programming ?
Definitely. My company requires the use of standard Windows applications - no apps on mobile devices - that have fairly intuitive interfaces for me (a late 30's former software developer), and while they have quirks, I get around them decently enough.
Many of my younger employees have never owned a computer. Literally. They use mobile for everything and only used the computer labs to do word processing and the like in college, or had work computers. And they are incredibly inefficient and basically useless when they encounter these applications for the first time; it is a huge training cost that I didn't expect going into it.
But it makes sense, of course. My industry doesn't make applications for today's end users, it makes them for the people that suffered through the DOS/Windows 3.1/Novell Networking era, because most of their consumers are 30-50 years old in academia or large business.
This split is happening in more than just my industry; it's happening in a lot of others due to the fast pace of mobile adoption and abandonment of the traditional PC. The real fear is that my employees are no better at using mobile devices than I am; in theory they should be, but in reality they're just technologically far worse than anyone else who had to grow up using complex systems. I have long-term fears about what this will do to the population; many people have long assumed that generations continue to get smarter and more tech-savvy, but I have found this to be very, very false in my limited experience.
> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm?
Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more or less simultaneously.
With that said, a commonly stated reason for why Sweden in general has such a high prevalence of tech startups comes from a bunch of fortuitious decisions in the 90s and 00s. In 1998 Sweden's government started a program that allowed employers to sell their employees computers under a tax free scheme (the so called Hem-PC-reformen https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hem-PC-reformen). This was extremely popular, and led almost every Swedish home to get an often extremely overpowered personal computer. Thus, practically everyone who was a kid in 1998-2006 (the rebate was cancelled in 2006) grew up with a computer. This gave Sweden a huge advantage compared to other countries in the early Internet revolution.
Sweden has also invested heavily in building a fiber network, you have access to gigabit Internet even in some extremely rural areas.
Another thing is that Sweden doesn't have the tradition of dubbing movies. That means kids will be exposed to English from an early age. This leads to Swedish tech companies not being afraid of hiring talent globally and generally use English as their business language.
Finally, out of the 5 examples posted, one is Mojang, which is clearly an outlier. I'm not saying what Notch accomplished wasn't extremely impressive, but it was essentially a one-man operation, and probably shouldn't be held as an example of a trend.
I previously read someone's take on this in relation to people feeling secure enough to take risks here (not just in Stockholm but Sweden as a whole I guess). While notch's success may be an outlier, the process of trying to do your own thing isn't here. I'm not sure when in his development Notch left King, but in general there are quite a few people here who just try to go their own way (sometimes completely outside of their previous industry even). It helps when you don't have to live in fear of being completely penniless should you fail, I think.
Purely anecdotally, I am not part of a startup, but do a lot of hobby work in coffee shops around Stockholm. I'm always seeing/hearing people in local cafes discussing some new startup or project they are getting off the ground. I've also seen first hand many people get maybe a year or two of funding and start up their own game studios, for example. Of course not all of them end up being successful, but many people feel secure/comfortable enough to try. I think the volume of these attempts and people trying to do something new also helps drive up the number of "hits" overall, to be added to these kinds of lists.
But that safety net doesn't extend to startup founders does it? AFAIR In Norway, you need to have worked in a company as a regular employee for at least one or two years before you can claim unemployment benefits. Health insurance is always there, and so is basic social benefits (but the unemployment one is the only you can live on).
I think the social safety net is definitely a part of it, yes. But after working for a couple years at different startups in Stockholm I can say that another big factor is that most Swedish founders are either rich themselves, or their parents are, or they are very well connected. They don’t see themselves this way of course, they think they are building everything from scratch, but this does tend to be the case from my experience.
I think it is becoming more common. In the early days it seems like there were more of a mix between rich drop outs and poor enthusiasts. Today, especially with the housing market, it seems like there are a lot more 'fake' companies. It used to be that if you came from a wealth family and didn't know what to do you started a public relations, event or media company to pretend that you were doing something. Today that is a "technology startup". Most of which are second or third tier companies in the sense of global reach. While much of the success of Swedish startups come from ending up being first tier companies. Maybe part of that was that Sweden sort of experienced the dot com bubble, which meant that there was less room for phonies for a while.
Good observations! You forgot one major thing. This goes for all of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The winter is horribly dark and boring. (Unless you're super rich). Therefore most turn inwards, staying indoors, thinking deeply at problems, spending endless afternoons and nights on things. Be it software development, game development, car tuning, car engine work, engineering, knitting or just reading loads of books.
I found this to be almost impossible to achieve when I moved from Norway to Australia. There I was outside hanging out with friends or just doing stuff on the beach or whatever. The deep focus was harder to achieve. Quality of life was insanely better there, yet somehow I missed the possibility to sit down and be productive in some narrow topic.
I can't stand it. Feels like staring at a light bulb. The only thing that makes it passable for me is Night Mode in F.lux on OSX. Nothing else works. I keep a Mid-2012 MacBook Pro around just so I can have a computer I can actually use in a dark room.
Even then it's not ideal. The lowest brightness setting still isn't low enough.
In my twenties I could happily destroy my circadian rhythm and sit in front of a screen til 4-5 in the morning. At 35 that shit's gotten real old.
Hmmm interesting observation about the long dark winters. Edinburgh similarly has a disproportionately successful tech industry (it's the same latitude as Moscow) and Estonia has also done very well in tech (for many other reasons but that might be a contributing factor).
As someone who has worked with teams from Israel, I'd like to hear more about this if you have good sources.
In my experience, it's been the opposite. They like to play office politics, focus on keeping work off their plate, and they're not really team players.
I may just have a bad sample of Israel tech workers, though.
I have also experienced this - in addition, rampant nationalism is an issue when dealing with Israeli companies, in my experience (5 different customers, similar problems..)
Where I think Israeli tech startups get most of their mojo, is desperation. Their culture involves so much struggle and effort .. and I think the reaction to it at a personal level, results in the laziness, non-team-playing, political problems.
1. Israelis basically have no choice. If you want to make a good income, working hard in a technology startup(we have very few big tech companies) is one of the very few good options.
2. The army: at a very young age,a decent percentage of Israelis who join the army lead, in high value, high risk situations. That creates a sense of responsibility and strong ambition at a relatively early age.
The army is also a place where a lot of new tech is being developed , so people get exposure, and often in roles of major responsibility.
3. The Jewish people have lived among other people, in very hostile conditions, often forced to do banking(loans) and commerce at times when most people did agriculture. That forces a certain entrepreneurial spirit, and possibly higher intelligence(also witnessed by the higher rate of genetic illnesses in Ashkenazi Jews). That, plus a culture that always focused on learning(religiously).
Obviously this discussion is a minefield. But there is some merit in asserting some relations there. In The Netherlands, Iranian and Afghani immigrants are often of a more privileged descent than Moroccan and Turkish immigrants, because of the reason of their migration. Moroccans and Turks generally migrated for manual labor, where Irani and Afghans usually fled religious oppression.
Of course this does not mean Dutch Iranians are smarter than Dutch Moroccans, but it could mean there might be more smart/entrepreneurial Iranians than Moroccans in The Netherlands.
These statistics might die out very quickly though, for example Turks are often already second or third generation, so many have been born in the privilege of The Netherlands.
Perhaps similarly, the second world war cost us a huge percentage of Jewish people, being privileged has meant having a larger chance of survival through moving to less dangerous countries (like the U.S.).
It doesn't mean Jewish people are smarter, it might mean though that you could find a bit more smart Jews in their population. Of course the second world war has already been a long time, so the effect might already be gone.
The problem is that people (Jews and non-Jews, Israelis and non-Israelis) really believe and expect it.
I'm probably average intelligence, but I've had it expressed to me by people who hardly know me that they expect that I'm brilliant or something because I'm an Ashkanazi Jew. Its one of those stigmas that get attached to any race, such as Russians drinking Vodka or Argentinians eating meat. I'm sure that there are sober Russians, vegetarians in Argentina, and there's me!
It's not about nationality: Ashkenazi Jews in general -- Israeli or not -- tend to be smarter. ~20% of Nobel prize winners are Jews compared to less than 1% of the global population. So either there's a Jewish conspiracy (which some people believe...) or Jews tend to be smarter.
Some people would say that this is cultural. I doubt it -- I think it's genetic. Intelligence is a physical attribute determined by genes, just like every other physical attribute. It's really no different from the observation that Kenyans and Ethiopians win most marathons.
In general, we should expect different traits to be exhibited at different frequencies by different populations that were reproductively isolated in the past. This doesn't mean prejudice is okay. Not all Jews are smart, and not all Kenyans are going to win marathons. We can acknowledge these correlations without behaving in a prejudiced way toward individuals.
Most people would rather not talk about this. And that's certainly my rule of thumb for in-person conversations. But, hey, we're on the internet.
> It's really no different from the observation that Kenyans and Ethiopians win most marathons.
But don't most Kenyan and Ethiopian marathon winners also grow up in Kenya or Ethiopia? I.e. how do we discount at very least environmental factors (including, for instance, diet), even if you doubt cultural ones?
> But don't most Kenyan and Ethiopian marathon winners also grow up in Kenya or Ethiopia?
No. There is a hugely disproportionate number of Americans and British of Somali, Kenyan, and Ethiopian origin who excel in world class distance running (Adbirahman, Farah, and many more, including a big new wave of Somali American after).
Interesting. That still wouldn't completely rule out environmental/cultural factors though, including diet and so on (e.g. maybe eating teff is good for long-distance runners).
> So either there's a Jewish conspiracy (which some people believe...) or Jews tend to be smarter.
You're assuming that intelligence is the determining factor in winning a Nobel prize, which seems spurious at best. Work ethic and training, particularly early in life seem, to me, like they'd be better predictors. I'd posit that Jewish culture is better at nurturing intelligence before I'd conclude that there's some ethnic superiority going on.
You used the term "ethnic superiority". That's you making a value judgement about intelligence. It has absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote. Personally, I don't think intelligence is a good proxy for "value of a human being".
While there isn't a bullet-proof case, there is quite a bit of evidence for an ethnicity-intelligence correlation.
You left off a key word when you took the term "ethnic superiority" out of context. I prefaced it with the word "some" to indicate that I was considering only a single dimension, intelligence. I said nothing about "value of being a human being," so don't put words in my mouth.
The only value judgement I was making is that higher intelligence is superior to lower intelligence and that Nobel prizes is an extremely poor proxy for intelligence.
I guess you've heard of The Bell Curve and the related controversy (check Sam Harris podcast with Charles Murray)?
Fwiw I don't think you're necessarily wrong about intelligence but from what I remember The Gene (Siddhartha Mukherjee) does have a few passages contradicting this theory. Also by questioning the validity of IQ tests.
Could it also not be that jews are just more motivated to get in to STEM fields and perform well, for cultural reasons or otherwise?
Similarly, Malcolm Gladwell mentions a theory about why "Asians are smarter" which according to him may be related to hard and smart work leading to bigger rice harvests, and other factors (see here https://www.cs.unh.edu/~sbhatia/outliers/outliers.pdf).
While I have zero interest in the cultural implications and all the moral panics surrounding these issues, I don't think intelligence being mostly down to genetics is a proven fact. I find it gets extremely complicated very quickly.
Genes are hugely influenced by their environmental (cultural) triggers and those should not be ignored.
> 2. The army: at a very young age,a decent percentage of Israelis who join the army lead, in high value, high risk situations. That creates a sense of responsibility and strong ambition at a relatively early age.
Summed up in one word - discipline. The glamorous myth of startups is just that, a myth. Some outliers go from zero to hero overnight, but most require slogging away day in and day out. Motivation can only last so long, and after it's gone all you have left is discipline. Military writings both current and historic routinely speak of discipline being the single most important aspect of achieving a goal.
Jews were forced into banking, because they were forbidden to do agriculture or cattle back in Europe. Banking was considered dirty, so Christians didn't want to do it. Jews did what they were allowed - banking, philosophy, medicine, science - and they became masters of the craft.
I thought it was also about usury not being allowed (for Christians, Jews, or Muslims) intrareligiously but only extrareligiously, i.e. Jews could loan money to Christians, but Christians couldn't loan money to Christians.
Yes. That's the usual story indeed. I'm not sure where the concept that banking was 'dirty' came from - I suspect that's mixing up banking with lending. Lending at interest was subject to religious prohibition for all but Jews who interpreted the Torah in a way that forbade lending only to other Jews. Thus Jewish people were not "forced" into banking because they were banned from agriculture (lol, how would that even work?) but rather, became bankers by default because it was highly profitable and others wouldn't do it for religious reasons.
This is the main reason for the ancient historical stereotypes linking Judaism and money/wealth/power/etc. And why names like Goldstein (gold stone) are considered Jewish names.
I heard that a lot of times from mostly uneducated people. All nations have equal level of intelligence. The difference might be access to education, environment, common wealth, and social inequality.
This seems like a dogmatic response rather than a reasoned one. All other aspects of human beings vary by region to some degree, why would intellectual be an exception?
Edit: I would argue to the contrary, that there is a appreciable difference in average IQ between some countries which expresses itself among other things in GDP and quality of life. Perhaps the nature of this difference is based on things like nutrition, environment quality, pre-natal screening and care, so improvements in all these things will decrease the gap. If it happens that after all of that there is still a certain gap , who cares? As long as the citizens live in peace and relative prosperity.
Winter is not horribly dark and boring in Scandinavia unless you are super rich. It’s equally dark and boring for everyone. And virtually everybody in Scandinavia can afford to travel south to sunnier places for a few weeks, if that’s what they want.
I’d say proficiency in English and quite wealthy populations is what matters.
Finnish travel agencies offer a week long trip to Canary islands for €500, you don't need to be rich to save for that once a year. Most cities have spas too.
I believe to have read somewhere that this is also the reason why so many Russians (and people born in the USSR) are great mathematicians and chess players. Math and Chess are both indoor activities and also absolutely unpolitical, which is a huge plus in an authoritarian regime.
>>Math and Chess are both indoor activities and also absolutely unpolitical, which is a huge plus in an authoritarian regime.
The history of chess is definitely very political, especially inside the Soviet Union. It was seen as the proxy for intelligence, and if Soviet players were better than Americans, it was their way of demonstrating superiority in yet another domain.
> Good observations! You forgot one major thing. This goes for all of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The winter is horribly dark and boring. (Unless you're super rich). Therefore most turn inwards, staying indoors, thinking deeply at problems, spending endless afternoons and nights on things. Be it software development, game development, car tuning, car engine work, engineering, knitting or just reading loads of books.
Wonder if that's also a factor in the prevalence of tech/programmers/hackers in Russia. Don't think there's a startup scene there, but there definitely seems to be more technology experts coming from the area in general.
One of the vanishingly few things the Soviets did right was to emphasize STEM education. This seems to have stuck in Russia. And I’ve heard the same was true across the eastern bloc.
As an anecdote, a lot of programmers and heavy gamers I knew in high school lived on remote islands and took a water taxi over to ours for school. They couldn't do after school activities without sleeping over at someone's place. Their islands had even less to do on them than ours.
Soft forms of isolation certainly seem to lead to solitary activities.
I don't think it is that relevant. You can be happy in Sweden and miserable in Malta. They funny thing is that people tend to say the same thing about SV, but because of the nice weather. Not to say that dark afternoon can't be special, but it is generally everything else (like having something relevant to work on) that makes it so. And that doesn't necessarily lose its value if it is sunny instead.
On the other hand, here on the other side of the Atlantic ... Silicon Valley is not only at a temperate latitude but also downwind (jetstreamwise) of an ocean; placing it in the middle of one of our continent's few bastions of reliably non-shitty weather. And there isn't much tech-related stuff happening on the north coast of Alaska or the northern regions of Canada, either.
So I daresay there's more to this than just the Arctic Circle.
Because when Silicon Valley established its dominance, access to computing resources, digital networks, tech talent, and venture capital were by far the crucial factors. All those things were much rarer back then, and startups more costly, especially to get off the ground. Given today’s low costs and ubiquitous computing and internet access — and the trends in this direction even 20 years ago - it makes sense other, softer factors can now come into play.
Seattle's weather is hardly boring. And there is plenty of software going on here, is Facebook, Google, Apple, Unreal, Unity, Oculus, really that boring?
The other major thing (and I would argue more important than the others) is Sweden's wealth and social safety net.
Wealth is one of the most important factors for someone to found a startup. You aren't going out and starting a company if you have to work 80 plus hours a week to live.
Just look at the clueless opinions of so many tech founders about how "you shouldn't pay yourself a salary at first after you take investment money". Oh really? So we should just buy groceries and pay rent from the trust fund mommy and daddy gave us?
I agree with your first 2 paragraphs, but the third is being overly simplistic (or potentially just not understanding the trade-off at play).
The scenario is that (roughly) 90% of the hypergrowth-style startups which raise a first round will fail to achieve enough momentum to successfully raise a second. And due to the business model choices they've committed to, failing to raise at that point is equivalent to going out of business. A first raise is often too small to be able to do everything they'd like, so they suggest decide that it's in their best interest (long term) to forgo a salary where possible, in order to buy a few extra months of progress before you're forced to start shopping for investment again.
Of course, folks give advice based on their own experience, but it doesn't always generalise to folks in different situations, which is potentially why that would seem like silly advice in (what I assume is) your scenario.
You are completely missing his third point. For people without wealth (or a social safety-net which provides you the resources you need to survive), it isn't optional to work for free. You have to eat and have a roof over your head, which means taking a salary if you are working full-time on your startup. Its not a strategic decision.
I must have poorly explained. The strategic decision happens earlier, when you decide which idea to commit to. Certain ideas are both a) incapable of generating early profits and b) dependent on reaching uncertain milestones to unlock the next stage of crucial funding.
So if you don't have the personal finances to deal with that situation, then you make a different decision further upstream, in the past, by choosing to work on an idea which has either easier funding targets (allowing an early salary), or which can generate early profits (allowing an early salary), or which has lower development requirements (allowing you to work on it alongside another paying job).
The decision is about idea selection, where I agree with you. "If you need the money, then pick an idea which allows you to pay yourself quickly." But if you've chosen to play a different game (typical hypergrowth VC stuff), and you want to maximise your odds of winning at that particular game, then it's generally ideal to buy yourself more months business runway instead of more months of personal runway.
Perhaps still not clear, and I know it's an emotionally loaded topic, but hopefully that makes sense.
I think you make my point. Which is that unless you have some wealth already, family wealth or otherwise, your options for a startup are much more limited than those who do not have money.
The point is that you shouldn't take a regular market salary. Software people can live on way less than what the market currently offers so if you pay yourself the competitive rate you're burning a lot of your runway pointlessly.
This is a plausible story, but that doesn't mean it's true. Anecdotally I felt more productive living in a warmer place than when living in Scandinavia. I think it completely depends on your situation and an actual study is needed to prove it one way or the other.
I also recall Jared Diamond debunking this as a theory for why "the west" got ahead in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel.
I think Stockholm does have more startups than the rest of Sweden, though, so there is probably more to it. The article understates the size of Stockholm a bit though. As measured by urban area it’s a city of 2.5 million.
Not only that, but within a one hour drive are Västerås and Uppsala, big cities in Sweden's scale.
The former hosts ABB and has tons of robotics related research, the latter has one of the major universities. The startup scene is smaller in Västerås than in Uppsala though.
Uppsala produced Klarna and Skype, Västerås produced Pingdom, to name some.
I remember that in the late 90ies/early 2000 that swedes or scandinavians always had these super low ping internet connections. Combine that with a long winter and you have a lot of tech experienced youngsters that spend a lot of time on projects (in this case gaming). They did (and still do) extremely way in esports in relation to the size of the population.
I think it can be hard for people to appreciate the differences because the truly different things are those one takes for granted. To not make this too long I will go directly to what I think has made the difference:
A relatively egalitarian society with a lot of trust between people and towards the government has made progress relatively effortless. When people don't feel the need to guard their own position because they might end up getting screwed there often isn't any good reason to be against development.
A relatively large amount of excess time, security and knowledge that enable people to something else. Startups are ultimately about harnessing excess potential. If all the value are capture by some other industry or the housing market there won't be much left over for startups.
Various cultural factors enabled by those things. Like being able to be independent (with the help of the government). Not being afraid to leave value on the table. An overall sort of generous, or at least non-petty, society.
If you look at factors like these, you can actually draw a lot of parallels to somewhere like SV compared to the rest of the world. SV is to at least some degree a recreation of academic life at its best. Which is the area of US society that would be most similar to Sweden.
Most of the things you mention also apply to The Netherlands, except for possibly the tax-free computer scheme (not sure about that one). As far as I can tell we're not really all that note-worthy startup-wise. Assuming that's true, any ideas what might be the differentiating factor?
From what I understand, both Holland and Sweden are culturally similar enough that I can't immediately think of other factors that make 'us' more hostile to startups.
It may just be me, but I have a feeling that Dutch startups have a tendency to focus on the Netherlands first, and either don’t feel the need to go global or just fail to do so.
Also, compensation. The Netherlands has a lot of good people, but they’ll leave for greener pastures.
> It may just be me, but I have a feeling that Dutch startups have a tendency to focus on the Netherlands first, and either don’t feel the need to go global or just fail to do so.
That leaves the more interesting question: why is The Netherlands different from Sweden in this regard? My impression was that The Netherlands, if anything, is more internationally-focused.
> Also, compensation. The Netherlands has a lot of good people, but they’ll leave for greener pastures.
Does Sweden pay better, taking into account cost of living? And if so, why?
That's an interesting question, especially taking into account that I know of and worked with many computer scientists from Holland, but not from from Sweden. You would think that Holland would have the expertise to form many startups.
Obviously, there is the business side in addition to the computer science side. I don't know much about that with respect to Holland.
But one possibility is that Dutch computer scientists tend to leave Holland to work. That explains why I know of so many as an American? (e.g. I worked with Guido van Rossum and Werner Vogels advised my master's project)
That is a hard one. They only thing I could come up with off the top of my head is that Sweden a bit more consensus oriented, which could be quite good for creating commercial successes. Like for example I would say that the Netherlands has a stronger electronic music scene, but the big names are still a bit less commercial than Avicii and Swedish House Mafia. Maybe that is because between the Netherlands and its neighboring countries you have a pretty big market. While for Sweden it is Sweden and then the world.
Interesting. Generally, in conversations I've had before, the consensus-don't-stand-out aspect of Dutch (and perhaps moreso Swedish) culture is considered a bad environment for startups.
I don't think our electronic music scene is less commercial though.
The Netherlands also had rebate for personal computers, called the "PC privé plan" (Private PC plan), where bosses could give their employees tax-free computers with a maximum of about 2300 euros at the start, which was cut to 1500 euros near the end of measure. This lasted from 1997 until 2004.
Also, Sweden was the first European country that was connected to the U.S. Internet, or more specifically to NSFNET [1][2]. This was because the adoption of TCP/IP protocols for wide area networks came earlier in Sweden than in other parts of Europe, for various serendipitous reasons. A funny anecdote is that Switzerland could have beat Sweden to be connected first, but they were delayed because they had to renumber all their networks at CERN that were already using TCP/IP.
Initially it was just non-commercial Internet for academic institutions, but lots of students were exposed to the technology and the infrastructure early on.
> As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more or less simultaneously.
Without disputing the technical correctness, Spotify's Göteborg office was literally a single desk at a shared office for the first three years of its existence.
It's interesting the quite possibly the most important condition didn't get mentioned.
Sweden's social safety net is among the strongest in the world. If the floor on failure is that you still have access to food, housing and healthcare then quitting a full-time job to start a company becomes much more possible.
More people starting companies, more attempts at big targets, more outlier successes.
One other reason is that taxation of income gets extremly high (60 %) when the salary rises above ~$7000/month. This makes people feel that it is impossible to get rich by working for someone else in Sweden, which in turn pushes productive people into startups.
That could only apply to founders who can sell parts of their company, surely. Employee number 1 would still face the same tax ceiling, and you need employees to build a company. The ratio of founders:employees will still be tiny even in Sweden.
> Another thing is that Sweden doesn't have the tradition of dubbing movies
Here in Belgium, in the Flemish part of the country we don't dub movies but in the French part we do. The levels of English are massively different, not sure if this is the main reason.
Not to be critical, but I pose this question in response:
Why do billionaires so often love to muse about interesting things outside of their field, get attention and praise for their thoughts, and then publicly allocate only tiny portions of their wealth and time to these projects so ineffectually while passing down the majority of their wealth to disinterested heirs?
e.g. Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Edgar Prince, Steve Jobs, Richard DeVos, Bill Ackman, Mark Zuckerberg, Ken Griffin.
You're flat out wrong in your premise that it's a tax dodge, and it's very easy to demonstrate. Neither of those links support a claim about tax evasion in any regard.
There's no special tax benefit to what they set up. There are only structural benefits, in that the LLC can give to political campaigns and make private investments (neither of which are tax deductible). It also enables Zuckerberg to continue to directly control the Facebook stock while it's held by the LLC.
Any shares sold by the LLC generates a tax event as it would with an individual. You know the best way to avoid taxes like that? To keep the stock to yourself and not sell it at all.
The only tax deductions the LLC can take are identical to what an individual can take, the money must have gone to a 501c charity to generate a tax deduction. Nothing is gained in regards to avoiding taxes.
The first link openly admits it doesn't benefit Zuckerberg to use it as a means of tax avoidance (much less tax evasion, which is a crime that you're claiming is being committed). He'd be just as well off to directly donate the stock to a charity instead, as the ideal example given lists the LLC doing exactly that instead.
Any potential tax deductions accrued are saturated instantly, as they're limited to a fraction of the LLC's income in a given year and the total value of the deductions expire after five years (ie any charitable tax deduction carries forward for a maximum of five years and may only deduct against a maximum of 50% of your income in a year). There's nothing special about this deduction with the LLC, an individual gets the same arrangement. Again, there's no special angle.
Gates for example once gave a very large single year donation to his foundation, back in 2000. He saw very little tax benefit, because it saturated his ability to deduct a hundred times over.
The second link - an angry personal blog post - has the title calling it a fake charity. The first paragraph opens by insulting Zuckerberg's marriage. The second paragraph opens by insulting the Zuckerbergs love of their daughter. You can throw that one out as being biased immediately.
This absolutely has to be Mark Zuckerberg. Nobody else could get this mad.
The dishonesty is in the description of the event by Zuckerberg and the media. It was covered as "Zuckerberg donates $45 billion to charity," but he effectively donated it to himself.
It’s a good question, but there are counter-examples too (Bill Gates, arguably Elon Musk) and I’d argue that these get more attention and praise — so on the whole things may not be too badly out of kilter.
Isn't that kind of unfair? Lots of us non-billionaires love to muse about interesting questions outside of our narrow specialties -- we do it every day here on HN. But when it's time to get some work done, we return to our specialties where our time and effort can make the most impact.
You list examples but don’t cite any references to prove that these people didn’t make substantial philanthropic contributions. Nor do you cite counter-examples like those other commenters have mentioned.
Andrew Carnegie, the richest person of his era, donated 90% of his wealth to philanthropic causes, most notably to local libraries, universities and scientific reasearch. He implored his fellow wealthy people to to the same, believing the only worthwhile purpose for accumulating wealth was to reinvest it in improving society. The Rockefellers seemed to do the same, as have many others since.
In Patrick’s case, his company is still in growth phase and his wealth is mostly on paper, so he’s not able to give much time or money. I’m sure he will when his company’s success becomes more assured and he can spare the time and money. His friend, YC President Sam Altman, has donated $10M of his own money to YC Research to help find answers to hard questions he cares about, which I think is a lot for him (I was surprised to learn he even had that amount to spare as his own company wasn’t a huge success).
> Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? ...
one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance.
When I tutored, I found students often had some misunderstanding, somewhere. So my task was to listen, to find that misunderstanding, so I could correct it. This "teaching" is listening, more than talking.
The idea is they are lost, but to know what direction they need, I first must know where they are.
To correct misunderstanding without this guidance can be very difficult, and might only happen serendipitiously, years later... assuming they continue with study. Which an unidentified misunderstanding can prevent.
Recently, I'm seeing the other side, while self-learning some maths. I can see how much one-on-one tutoring would help clear up misunderstandings. Instead, I'm using the strategy of insisting on starting from the basics, chasing down each detail as much as I can, using online resources, and working out proofs for myself. Each step is a journey in itself...
Luckily, I have enough skill, confidence, motivation and time. By working it out myself, I think I'm also gaining a depth of understanding I could not get from a tutor's guidance.
But it sure would be a lot more efficient!
[ PS I haven't yet read the two pdf's in the question ]
I think the One-on-One Tutoring things is something the AI current movement could make a difference. Everybody seems to be obsessed with building really cool stuff, but our teaching system is quite obsolete and could get better by adding smart systems.
That said I must to add, that I am referring to teaching humans who are 12 years and older (IMHO young kids require physical interaction if you want to avoid psychological conditions).
I am working to solve this by creating a conversation bot based interface that can make personalized learning viable. If you are interested for updates you can sign up here: https://tinyletter.com/primerlabs/
P.S: I was supposed launch a month back. But a lot of rewrites made it difficult. For now, I can say I will be launching soon.
I agree, generally; however, I believe the lownhanging fruit is in assistive tools for teachers.
The commenter above made a good point about the value of removing barriers to learning as a primary asset of a good teacher. People tend to focus on content knowledge/curriculum as the mark of good teaching, but removing barriers is the real, difficult work. Tools that assist the instructor in understanding their students’, their students’ knowledge, and their learning behaviors would be valuable. Don’t focus on content delivery. Focus on making in-class assessment more frequent and trustable. Focus on tools that assist an instructor understand thirty students as they might understand five.
I tend to believe in some of Stephen Krashen's notions of language acquisition. Specifically that there is a difference between learning (being able to remember and repeat something) and acquisition (being able to use it fluently). Also that acquisition comes from comprehension. I also believe that language acquisition is no different than any the acquisition of any other skill. Many people don't agree with these ideas, but I'm laying it out as my assumptions before I start :-)
With that in mind, one of the interesting findings in language acquisition studies is that when free reading (reading things for pleasure), it takes 95% comprehension of the text in order to acquire new grammar and vocabulary in context (quite a bit higher than most people imagine -- which is one of the reason people advance a lot more slowly than they might otherwise).
With that, just like your experience, the key to teaching is to ensure that the student comprehends at least 95% of what you are saying. The only way to ensure this is by constantly testing their comprehension with a two way dialog. Once a very high level of comprehension is reached, and once enough repetition happens to remember the thing, you will acquire the knowledge.
It is incredibly difficult to do this unless you are teaching 1:1. There is a special technique called "circling" that you can use to teach language to a larger number of students and it worked extremely well for me. I still can't effectively do it for more than about 10 or 15 though. If you think in a 45 minute class, if I have 15 students, then each student gets 3 minutes of my time. It's not actually surprising that classes of 30 or 40 basically impossible.
Quick note: I'm no longer teaching, in case it is unclear from the above.
There are other ways of making sure the student understood the concept. Recently I played the game 'The Witness'. The whole game is about learning new puzzle rules, and yet there is not a single dialog within the game or even text explaining those rules.
I am not saying that their technique is the most efficient (e.g., adding hints would undoubtedly increase the efficiency, but also ruin the game experience), just that there are other methods of making sure a student understands a concept. You don't necessarily need the one-on-one conversations. Those conversations are mostly useful to round up incomplete teaching material (again, I am not saying that creating perfect teaching material is easy).
While I like your way of thinking, I don't think the argument applies. The game itself doesn't possess any kind of AI and is somewhat static, more like a sudoku book: There are lots of puzzles, but you know it when you have solved one.
The one-on-one tutor idea is that you have a master who sees the mistakes the student makes and gives him an exercise to target precisely the misconception the student might have in his head.
The Witness, on the other hand, doesn't possess such intelligence. Instead, it is a carefully crafted series of puzzles which slowly broaden the possible moves. Most of the time every next puzzle requires you to learn a new part of the rules. Sometimes you assumed that part anyway, and the puzzles are easy. But sometimes you have to find out that misconception in your head and replace it with something correct which makes the puzzle harder.
So one concept includes an intelligent observer while the other is more like a perfected text book.
Any good sources you recommend for learning Chinese on YouTube? I’m just getting started with HelloChinese and Fluent Forever - watching video seems too deep for now.
That's interesting. I'm definitely interested to understand what you are doing. Are you watching Chinese videos or Chinese language instruction videos? Are you able to use the language fluently?
I find it hard to maintain motivation and attention if I'm not getting at least ~30%. This applies to both movies and real-life conversations in another language. And, now I think about it, it also applies to English-language materials that require specific technical background, e.g. academic papers.
> Recently, I'm seeing the other side, while self-learning some maths. I can see how much one-on-one tutoring would help clear up misunderstandings. Instead, I'm using the strategy of insisting on starting from the basics, chasing down each detail as much as I can, using online resources, and working out proofs for myself. Each step is a journey in itself...
I did this for a while and gave up the self-learning aspect and went to university to study math part-time. I have the utmost respect for anyone who has the patience to push through it on their own. Some things I can learn on my own but higher maths I couldn't--at least with any degree of efficiency.
Tutoring is often the only time that a student will sit down for a dedicated amount of time and study without distractions. As much as I want to believe in my own value as a tutor (and I do think there is some value), I will admit that a fair portion of the benefit is just having someone force the student to study.
I think listening is also valuable because verbalizing a problem often brings up misconceptions or helps internalizing the idea and thus leads to a solution, maybe with a nudge in the right direction if that's expected in a dialog, thus not going the full way.
I had that experience sometimes when preparing a question to ask on-line. Sometimes it becomes clear when trying to see it from the other direction of the listener, or researching the problem space to phrase the question properly yields unexpected results.
As I understand it, Patrick and Sam are friends. You don’t think they’re discussing these and other hard questions socially?
Also, Sam founded YC Research and donated $10M of his own money into it to find answers to hard questions about AI, UBI, medicine/health and other big challenges. He also toured the country interviewing Trump voters to find answers to questions about what was underlying the political climate that led to the election result.
What makes you think YC’s leadership think they have all the answers? At least in Sam’s case, the evidence seems to point to the opposite.
For what it’s worth I think there are other questions that are more important and potentially valuable to society than Patrick’s or the ones YCR is currently working on, but that’s just from my own experience and contemplation, and I don’t criticise people whose own journeys have not pointed them to these issues/ideas yet. I commend anyone making serious efforts to understand and solve the biggest issues they can identify with their own experiences and best efforts.
I read Sams posts whenever they come out and they strike me as someone who has good intentions, little experience and who believes that they are able to see what is good for the world. I read Patricks writings as someone who is genuinely curious about the world and who by thinking about problems reaches points where he does not have all the answers but is able to at least phrase the problems coherently enough that future solutions might be defined.
The difference in style is tremendous, and no statement on their friendship or private discussions was implied or intended. To me it is the difference between 'smart' and 'wise'. You can be very smart and still not be very wise (though it is hard to be wise and not smart).
As far as the evidence is concerned, that we can agree on, the 'changing the world for the better' mantra has outlived its usefulness and should for transparency's sake simply be replaced by the one thing that matters: money.
Watsi is still from the PG days, the UBI experiment is so broken it is embarrassing, the 'hard questions about AI' have been raised since Asimov's days and do not - to me at least, feel free to differ - move the needle at all.
> Part of the problem with blogs is that they're less rewarding than Facebook and Twitter: your post may perhaps get some thoughtful responses but it doesn't get immediate likes.
To me, this is not a problem. People should not be rewarded with instant dopamine for low-effort actions. [0] The reward for publishing on a blog is in the responses you receive from readers and not from a counter incremented by a click or pageview.
I rarely see more than shallow insight on Twitter/Facebook, as posts have a short visibility lifetime and replies longer than a sentence are collapsed. By contrast, blogs (not like Medium or Stack Exchange) will often receive deep, thoughtful replies months or years after they are published. There's no "algorithm" to please when you're writing a blog; your post will stay there until your domain name expires.
If you are having issues finding worthwhile blogs to read, ask people around you for suggestions. Not everything needs to be indexed by software.
> And part of the problem is, of course, that writing a good post is much harder than writing a witty tweet.
Where is the problem here? Thermodynamics and information theory tell us that a valuable long-form post ought to be more difficult to write by several orders (of orders) of magnitude. Yes -- it would be wonderful if we could all spit out fascinating 17-page theses every week or two, but that just isn't compatible with our biology. On the other hand, publishing 17 pithy tweets in a week is pretty easy, and people will probably give you plenty of attention for it.
> It seems that the returns to entrepreneurialism in cities remain high: Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, and others, have improved the lives of millions of people and appear much more contingent than inevitable.
I’m interested in this as a bald assertion. Have they improved the lives of millions of people? I wasn’t aware of that. Can someone give me a quick before and after?
I was also curious about this. There are high levels of disparity in all three of those places. Hong Kong has both some of the most expensive property in the world and people living in cage homes.
Admission criteria would seem to be a critical consideration and the further from the mainstream that the experiments extend, the more unlikely it would be expected to be scalable beyond very strict criteria.
Houston comes to mind as a purpose-built city founded on undeveloped land for the primary purpose of entrepreneurship which has grown larger than average by maintaining that approach more so than average. As an example there has never been a zoning ordinance, that kind of regulatory obstacle would be seen as an experiment in cutailing prosperity, certainly not normal. A failed experiment at that after observation of long-term effects in other municipalities. Even though in most other municipalities the removal of zoning would be thought of as an experiment too risky for them to even consider.
In the mature real-world example of Houston it is also painfully obvious the benefit that could have been obtained with a little well-intended admission criteria. Besides, when's the last time you heard someone say "Hey, it's a free country" any more anyway.
> How do we help more experimental cities get started?
You've got to find someone who wants to subdivide their ranch, and then get settlers to move there like anyone else. Incentives might help speed things up, and you've got to figure that the more restrictive the admission criteria, the more people will want to apply.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 348 ms ] threadhttp://vis.stanford.edu/papers/banking
Paradoxically (to me at times, perhaps to you) banking to 45 is supposed to make the chart more accurately read. It does so by more apparent to the viewer where the relevant inflection points are (in this case, the great depression really sticks out visually).
Theoretically, the great depression might not stick out as well if banking to 45 were not done (as I suspect may have been done here).
Whether or not it turns out to be the case here, I suppose lots of the other curious questions in the article have similar answers. When dealing with qualitative measures using qualitative measures, I think even ethical people can forge a system where emergent fudging arises.
I think we (the tech folk) need to sort of up our game in casual analysis from tools like excel (which in actuality relatively good) to something like www.anylogic.com. With systems dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics software I think we have a tool that can better elucidate this curious phenomenon where we notice questions whose data "feels a little funny" but may turn out to actually have a demonstrable excuse/justifiable explanation for looking so.
We are working on making programming environments less primitive. Here is our master plan: https://about.sourcegraph.com/plan/.
I'm still wondering why we are forcing people to write assembly with short and rubbish opcode mnemonics when we are going to compile it anyway.
Even if you look at C vs Rust/Go we have made huge improvements. People don't need to write Makefiles anymore. Packages are easily sharable and re-usable. Security is by default. Etc.
Because relative prices (e.g. the ratio of the price of a 42" TV to the price of a cinema ticket) are constantly changing due to changes in technology and competitive dynamics.
Some things have gotten (and continue to get) much cheaper due to technological progress and economies of scale. So, relative to those, anything that hasn't benefited from the same trends looks like it's getting expensive (in real terms). And if that thing (e.g. undergraduate degrees in the US) has weird competitive dynamics (e.g. willingness to pay is driven by the availability of credit, and availability of credit is driven by sticker price, and sticker price is driven by willingness to pay), then that effect is even more pronounced.
Unfortunately, most of that effort is noisy but pointless zero-sum re-arranging of positions on the socio-economic ladder, the only beneficiaries being academics, textbook publishers, and campus property developers.
The solution: equality. Guarantee everybody a base level of economic security. From there, give people the freedom to pursue their real passions and interests, rather than waste their lives scrambling over the limited number of economically secure socio-economic positions our dysfunctional society currently offers.
Does this fallacy have a name?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
Therefore, any sufficiently late stage capitalist society has extremely high costs for all of those areas: it's just the stuff people will pay the most for.
Don't quote me on this.
It basically means that you’re much more willing to pay a large price for a product you need and which has no substitute than for a commodity product. Which is why stunts like multiplying the price of a drug by 1000 regularly make the news.
Note that this is purely about price (ie the value you assign to the product) and has very little to do with its actual cost.
Furthermore, since you have no incentive to lower your price (indeed, you can hike it up any time you need to show more profits), well there’s no incentive to improve the underlying production process (ie lower costs) or improve the product. This goes IMO a long way in explaining the college and healthcare examples in the article.
Did you mean by 11 (1000% increase)? One of my pet peeves with using percentages.
How does this stack up against US involvement in other"good" wars, where the foe is the unambiguously bad?
I.e not a Vietnam style ideologically motivated confrontation.
For example: the US was in World War I for 574 days (declared war on Germany on April 6 1917, and the war ended on November 11 1918), and entered the conflict with the Zimmerman telegram and German submarine attacks as its casus belli.
But the US had been aiding the Allied powers prior to that, and from the German perspective the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the resulting attempt to enlist Mexico to join the war against the US, was a defensive move to stem the flow of supplies from the neutral-but-obviously-biased US to Germany's existing opponents.
I think all of these are possible already in VSCode/Atom, and especially true if you’re doing reactive UI programming for the web - time travelling, improved REPL, live debugging are all there. A very good spot to be in :)
This was/is true in C# for 32 bit programs. Being able to code with live data is really productive. Live unit testing also would be a big win.
I used to work with a OG (with a pocket protector no less) who did this when debugging assembly by pasting op-codes using a debug monitor.
I do this in Erlang all the time. It's one of the most fun parts about the whole system.
Doesn't the Facebook editor / autocompleter do that? I guess it's not available to anyone outside Facebook?
> Why can't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to see what they last were? Why isn't time-traveling debugging widely deployed? Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program?
print debugging is extremely versatile and the market has spoken that, apparently, nothing else has the same expressive power to overhead trade-off. I have a few theories: tool usability sucks (looking at you gdb), debugging and writing code are two different disciplines so if you can stay in the same modality (writing code) to do debugging it's one less thing that changes from under you, print debugging is versatile and can apply to everything from embedded to mobile to cloud to HPC. print debugging gets a lot of scorn but (if you want an appeal to authority) if you read "Coders at Work" no "famous" programmers use debuggers, they all use(d) print debugging.
The market has spoken, programmers want free stuff, and they’re happy doing it the old fashioned way.
Except for those who aren’t content:
[Insert videos from Bret Victor here]
https://vimeo.com/36579366
Lighttable is another attempt that comes to mind:
http://www.chris-granger.com/lighttable/
"Don't you want better tools?" I'll ask
"Of course!" the programmer replies (note sometimes this is a conversation with myself) "but I don't want to pay anything for it" they caveat.
"That's no problem," I reply, "as long as it will make your life better."
"Well, that sounds good, but I also don't want to have to learn anything new."
"That..."
"Also, it has to just work from day one, if it doesn't quite work as soon as I touch it, I'll swear off it forever and go talk badly about it on twitter and hacker news."
"Ah..."
"Also, it has to work with every use case I can think of. Multi-threaded, GUI, deployed to HPC clusters running RHEL6 and also Docker containers running CoreOS, and it should be able to help me be productive in either JavaScript or s390 assembler. Also it should take no time to set up, and start giving me answers straightaway."
"Hm..."
"You know what, the methods I already have already satisfy all of these requirements and as a bonus, I don't have to learn anything new in order to use them. I spend enough time learning new frameworks to write software, why would I spend more time learning frameworks to debug software?"
"Because you spend more time debugging software than writing software?"
"Honestly the process of debugging, and the process of writing, have become so intertwined in my thinking, that distinction between them seems arbitrary and pointless."
"Thanks for your time."
> Books are great (unless you're Socrates). We now have magic ink. As an artifact for effecting the transmission of knowledge (rather than a source of entertainment), how can the book be improved? How can we help authors understand how well their work is doing in practice? (Which parts are readers confused by or stumbling over or skipping?) How can we follow shared annotations by the people we admire? Being limited in our years on the earth, how can we incentivize brevity? Is there any way to facilitate user-suggested improvements?
The great thing about books is that no matter how long they've been sitting around, it's easy to take one off the shelf and read it. The cultural infrastructure of written language has been around much longer (and been much more stable) than the computational infrastructure you'd need have your "magic ink" still work in 1000 years. At some point we need to start treating computers and software more seriously if we want to have things like this.
Similarly, anything writen about an implementation is short lived. The Idiots Guide to Windows 98 is less useful today than it was in 1998 and is getting less useful with time.
Lovelace, Babbage, Turing, McCarthy et al are still seminal. But these are academic papers that focus on what is possible to compute and how one might construct an implementation.
There are some interesting edge cases too. Is the Gang of Four Design Patterns still relevent? Its not embarassing, but its not as applicable as it used to be.
Now .. on topic ... I had a roomful of books collected from my youth. I cleaned out my room at my parents house some years ago ... and pretty much everything got chucked. The only books that I kept were seminal books like Knuth, Cormen, Gang of Four, TCP/IP series (v6 kinda makes them out-of-date too). All my MFC books ... java books .. pretty much all of it was out of date. I had an epiphany .. CS does not age well at all.
I no longer buy physical books ... I got a subscription to Safari and love it. Also consume tons of content on e-learning platforms. But .. I really miss real books.
My parents had bookshelves that filled walls that I built with my Dad before they moved. I, and most other people that visited the house, would spend a fair amount of time just looking at the books on the shelf. Comparing notes on what they'd read, and asking to borrow books. Looking at the books, and being reminded of the experience you had with them or wanted to have with them was a vitally important part of the process that I fear we've lost.
Fun fact: HN's been around for 10% of a century. That makes Arc one of the longer-lived programming languages.
Re: the ability to take books off the shelf and read it, Library Genesis has made a lot of progress in that area. http://libgen.io/
And then there is a trend to switch to onboard soldered flash in new devices which adds further problems.
Not saying this is impossible to overcome, but "PDF might still work" is at best solving a part of the problem, for only a part of all data (PDF is great - but only for some types of data) one might want to preserve.
However, rom files specifically (as opposed to executeables for retro computing platforms) seem to be distinctly less fickle in becoming reliably emulateable.
The reason is seemingly simple, the early rom files were essentially an operating system, having all the software required to boot the system included in what now looks like one file.
That said, I am not a particular fan of books. They take a lot of physical space, are heavy and age. So as long as we stick to reasonable formats (e.g., text-based, non-binary), it should not be too hard for future generations to use our books.
Using DRM, on the other hand, might make things complicated.
That's their loss. There are very few people who want to learn math too.
You might argue - and I would agree - that this is not necessarily a good thing as far as content goes.
But the point is that putting something into writing snd giving it a tangible form on paper gives it an inherent stability and authority missing from digital media.
We tend of think of digital media as temporary, disposable, relatively low value simulacra of a Real Thing.
Digital media can be hacked, edited, deleted, and lost when the power goes off.
A copy of a book from hundreds or thousands of years ago is just going to sit there for some indefinite period. (Which actually depends on the quality of the paper - but in theory could be centuries.)
This is not about practical reproduction and storage technologies, it's about persistence and tangibility.
A book is a tangible object which has some independence from its surroundings. After printing, it's going to exist unless you destroy it. If you print many copies the contents are geographically distributed and it becomes very hard to destroy them all.
A file depends on complex infrastructure. If the power goes down, it's gone. If the file format becomes obsolete, it's gone. (This has actually happened to many video and audio formats.) If there's an EMP event, it's gone.
And it's not just a tangible difference, but a cultural. We have a fundamentally different relationship with digital data than we do with tangible objects, and this influences the value we place on their cultural payload.
Any examples of video or audio files that are currently impossible to watch/listen to because knowledge of the file format, and all software capable of playing it was lost? If such a thing has happened, there are probably people interested in reverse engineering the format.
Then I think about Linear B, and I rest again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B
Things like laserdiscs, I can probably still buy equipment to read, but it's substantially different as I need the technology to read it.
Microfiche is quite good in this respect, you can easily read it even without the specific tech it was made for (using a magnifier, or projecting the image with a simple light source.
I wonder if you could make a crystal where, like a hologram, you can rotate the crystal a minute amount in order to project a different page (an idea I saw decades ago had a digital clock style projection from a crystal, used asa sundial -- pretty sure it was theoretical).
That way the information is relatively easy to discover, and with a simple light source you can get info out if it.
On the other hand, old books, with their high-quality paper, binding and letter-press print do seem have some kind of personality...
I wrote my own implementation of RSVP, which has eBook reader support, and now it is absolutely my preferred method of reading, and I read at 1000WPM. Though normal books are still enjoyable, they feel tedious and slow.
The project is here:
https://github.com/GlanceApps/Glance-Android
(It needs some help being updated for recent versions of Android, please let me know if you'd like to be involved! It has a new back-end API in place already and it just needs a few simple updates.)
https://youtu.be/7i9fZvWyLfI?t=1m41s
I wouldn't recall a thing at this speed, nor at 600 which is shown just prior to the time stamp above.
This is a poor implementation of RSVP, as each word is being presented at the same speed. Longer words should be given longer presentation times, as should words with punctuation marks. The presentation of the words is also centered rather than aligned, which requires a saccade for each word, which defeats the whole point. It's also a difficult text to start out with, with no context.
Even still, I didn't have a problem reading and recalling this text, though I wouldn't recommended it for a beginner.
Does it actually require a saccade?
Testing with a quick and dirty command line RSVP program I have, my speed and comprehension seem about the same with either centered or left aligned. But I'm mostly testing with fiction written for the average adult. The words are usually short enough that they are within the field of good visual acuity no matter where withing them the focus is.
I've not done a comparison using text with a lot of long word.
(https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zipf/id1366685837?mt=8 if you're interested.)
Reading this way is a skill which needs a small up front investment, but the pay off is immense. The trick is to not try, just relax and pay attention and let the words speak to you as if they are being narrated to you inside your head.
Because there are no constant micro-interruptions from page scrolling, ads, or even from your eyes own saccades, I find that my attention to the text is much, much better, and I need to stop to ponder something I can just tap the screen to pause it.
I also find that I am far, far more likely to finish an article/paper/chapter via Glance than via my browser. These days it's pretty rare that I'll actually finish an article online, but with Glance I'll almost always read the entire thing from start to finish.
I really, really recommend this skill, especially if you have a lot of time to kill on a mass-transit commute, or if you just want to read more.
I think it would be more readable to put it in an area big enough for the longest word, and then RSVP through the message repeatedly.
If anyone wants a simple way to play around with RSVP, here's a little quick and dirty command line reader I wrote a long time ago to play with this: https://pastebin.com/zfq2eW4n
Put it in reader.cpp and compile with:
To use: where N is the number of milliseconds delay between words. It will then do the RSVP thing. It should compile with no problem on Mac or Linux.If a word (which is really just a string of non-whitespace surround by white space) ends with a period or comma, the delay is doubled for that word.
There's a commented out check that sets a minimum line length. If you compile that check it can put more than one word on a line to make the line at least a minimum length.
PS: this aligns the words on their centers. To change it to left aligning them change where it sets the variable "pad" to use a small integer instead of basing it on the length of the word. If it is the same for all words, it becomes an indent for left alignment instead of a pad for centering.
BTW - The Google Play link in the repo doesn't work for me, and I don't see Glance in F-Droid. What's the easiest way for non-developers to get the APK?
First, what's the purpose of books ?
There's entertainment of course. But let's focus on books that teach. Their purpose is to let you access some knowledge, in a deep way.
On the other hand, computer systems are starting to fill that role, and the level of depth they can achieve is growing - on a good day, with the right query, Google may give you access to Amazing content, content that may help you connect different concepts - based on your past searches - just like your brain does.
Another option is if it was easy for a book author to package her knowledge in a smart chatbot or maybe an expert system, and we will have hundreds of such advisors advising us, or just interactively chatting with us,correcting our mistakes, that would be an interesting replacement to the book.
http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html
As one of the more recent additions to that essay shows, I'm not the only one with that opinion:
https://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/millennium/m6/...
As I note in the essay, there are some technologies that work better than others for preservation, but digital's biggest weaknesses are inherent, I think.
The second edition.
And how could books be improved?
Until a different unpowered human-readable medium is proven over a longer period of more careless storage conditions, looks like a third edition if appropriate.
If it hasn't been printed it hasn't really been published as thoroughly as it could be, and if it hasn't been bound then it's not yet a real book. Up until recent decades the survival of unique knowledge was largely dependent on the number of copies printed and distributed, so popularity has had undue importance.
But don't let earlier editions become lost or woe on you.
This is something I noticed too. And it can't be just blamed to "inflation" of the US GDP. Almost any other country I checked does have fluctuations. Goes through booms and bust. China has gone through an exponential rise but slowed down and seems like it broke the pattern recently.
The US is the only country so far that has been going decades through a constant rate of change. And you can't blame that on inflation since inflation is neither constant; or it would mean that the GDP is constant (and inflation is increasing it). The GDP being constant would be weird too.
So is the US the singularity? Is the US dollar affecting the US GDP; and does it being the reserve currency of the world changes the landscape of the US economy?
I presume every now and again econometrics people have to tweak the way they measure GDP.
Maybe if someone proposes a plausible tweak and it results in a surprisingly high or low figure their idea gets ignored, while it might be taken seriously if it ended up moving the figure towards the historical average.
Less diversified economies show wider swings. Australia rode on the sheep's back for most of a century, these days the country's fortunes closely track the prices of coal and iron ore.
Still, from indicators like number of public companies, market capitalisation and so forth, the USA's economy is growing less diverse at the moment.
And part of the trend is simply population growth. Per capita trends are slightly less nice: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=lpcR
(Note that different scales are used for the real and nominal figures in the charts above.)
Over a slightly longer period: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=lpdg
The rate of growth is clearly decelerating.
I think he s talking about boomers
You provide individual, one-on-one full time tutoring to each student, if that is the analytically best method. It's worth it, since educational spending is close to the most effective public spending imaginable - something in the $3-$5 return per dollar spent, which you'd be hard pressed to find any other available investment that can do that consistently.
This also does away with some substantial percent of the overhead of maintaining separate public schools, assuming that this tutoring occurs in either the tutor's home or the child's home.
So, at a modest 2 hours of instruction per day, and assuming people spend on average 12 years in education and 48 years in the workforce, you need at minimum for 1/16th of your adults to be teachers. Not 1/16th to be employed in education but just teachers and just for this education scheme. Today it's about 1/40th (in the us) and that includes post-secondary and administration, logistics etc. so you're scaling up the education sector by 3x or 4x AND you need to find something to do with the kids for the other 5-6 hours when their parents are working.
>It's worth it, since educational spending is close to the most effective public spending imaginable - something in the $3-$5 return per dollar spent
Marginal ROI does not work that way. Even assuming you get that return on what you're spending now, that doesn't mean the marginal dollar invested in education is getting that return nor that you can scale up the amount you spend and continue getting that return.
As for marginal ROI, if the effects are as dramatic as the stated research implies, it'd be more than worth it. It would be a larger increase than the entire implementation of formal secondary and tertiary education system combined, which cost a lot more than K-8. I don't think you can overstate how large the demonstrated effect size was. Think "industrial revolution" or "invention of the printing press".
Essentially you'd be spending an extra 3x the amount we currently spend to get... 5x? 10x? better outcomes. Results from those studies were equivalent to making the current best students in the country suddenly the very lowest tier of educational attainment - top 1% suddenly becomes the minimum standard. Think Rhodes scholars being "the new special ed kids", or the new "functionally illiterate must-pass graduates".
(This is all assuming that the research was accurate, and the magnitude of difference is really that large. I'd want to see a lot of follow up.)
Isn't this close to what students could/should be spending doing homework, reading or doing some projects together with their parents - effectively one-on-one tutoring for every single one of them?
I suspect that US education spending is so high compared to other developed countries because it has to compensate for lack of social support elsewhere in society. The #1 factor in student success is parental involvement. Instead of buying iPads for low-income schools, what's needed is stable 35-40/hr week jobs that you can live on for low-income parents so that they can spend evenings with their family.
Isn't this the promise of the various platforms? I'm talking about Canvas, Moodle, WebWork-type programs. In principle, they can have everyone in the room working at their own level, and only moving up when the system says they are ready.
Not that, as far as I know, those platforms are now being leveraged that way.
What the actual fuck am I witnessing.
You can also use the same tools to debug a crash dump although often a lot of info is lost, but it can be useful.
Admittedly nothing much has changed in years and it would be good to see more.
One thing I would like to see is a time travelling debugger akin to what is provided with Elm, but Elm apps have state concentrated in one place so it is easier to implement there than for a .NET program probably.
Outside of .NET I am not sure of the quality of debugging tools. Jetbrains created something pretty good for Ruby which I used once, it was quite nice. But I am sure there are languages without much support and it would be frustrating to use them.
Haskell is an interesting example because you don't often need to debug, because of the purity you would more likely run additional unit tests / property-based tests on the functions to find the problem. Having said that I've only made small Haskell apps, nothing in the day job.
> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how?
I think that most end-user applications now have APIs that allow you to manipulate the data. For example, Salesforce, Lever, Excel, etc. all have APIs for reading and writing data. Allowing end users to build custom UIs on top of those APIs seems like a simpler problem.
Retool (https://tryretool.com) is a fast way of building UIs on top of data. And so if there are APIs for reading and writing data from “end-user applications”, Retool lets you build custom UIs and workflows on top of them quickly.
I think this is an interesting problem, and I’m not sure what the right solution is. If anybody else has ideas, feel free to email me — I’d love to learn! I’m david@. :)
I recently read Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and suspect the answer lies in there. The examples Patrick lists are all service industries driven by labour costs. This probably influences the following two questions too (project delays and GDP).
However only 50% of the house price comes from the construction industry, I have another comment suggesting part of why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18040633
Inflation, regulation/globalism, corrupt system, wait, don’t, up to us all, good question, good question, remove politics, no, books, papers, don’t try, no, false laziness.
I think adding all the features the author is requesting and have it work seamlessly is much much harder than be seems to realize.
I'll pick this one: end users back then (emacs/vba/smalltalk era) are the power users of today. Today's end users are a new kind of users.
Will voice recognition at home coupled with AI allow people to start "programming".
Currently home automation systems through something like Alexa are only listening to direct commands. Interesting follow-up functionality:
* The capability for introspection. Alexa, who is home? Alexa, why are the lights on? Alexa, why are the lights not on? Especially the latter means advanced reasoning capabilities.
* You preferably also want to adjust the behavior by voice. Alexa, when I enter the room I want the lights to go on. Alexa, the lights only need to turn on when it's dark outside.
I had one student working on this problem: https://crownstone.rocks/attachments/thesis/nannewielinga.pd...
Recently I got a request from a person who works a lot with blind people. A system that allows them to query the state of the environment is very valuable to them as well.
It's a different take on being "truly programmable", but I think the different modality makes it an interesting one.
And today, many systems automatically personalize themselves for us, in very complex way. If the machine learning senses what i want to do(like in Google Search's personalization, which for most people it's probably better than advanced keywords), why do i need to bother with programming ?
Many of my younger employees have never owned a computer. Literally. They use mobile for everything and only used the computer labs to do word processing and the like in college, or had work computers. And they are incredibly inefficient and basically useless when they encounter these applications for the first time; it is a huge training cost that I didn't expect going into it.
But it makes sense, of course. My industry doesn't make applications for today's end users, it makes them for the people that suffered through the DOS/Windows 3.1/Novell Networking era, because most of their consumers are 30-50 years old in academia or large business.
This split is happening in more than just my industry; it's happening in a lot of others due to the fast pace of mobile adoption and abandonment of the traditional PC. The real fear is that my employees are no better at using mobile devices than I am; in theory they should be, but in reality they're just technologically far worse than anyone else who had to grow up using complex systems. I have long-term fears about what this will do to the population; many people have long assumed that generations continue to get smarter and more tech-savvy, but I have found this to be very, very false in my limited experience.
Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more or less simultaneously.
With that said, a commonly stated reason for why Sweden in general has such a high prevalence of tech startups comes from a bunch of fortuitious decisions in the 90s and 00s. In 1998 Sweden's government started a program that allowed employers to sell their employees computers under a tax free scheme (the so called Hem-PC-reformen https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hem-PC-reformen). This was extremely popular, and led almost every Swedish home to get an often extremely overpowered personal computer. Thus, practically everyone who was a kid in 1998-2006 (the rebate was cancelled in 2006) grew up with a computer. This gave Sweden a huge advantage compared to other countries in the early Internet revolution.
Sweden has also invested heavily in building a fiber network, you have access to gigabit Internet even in some extremely rural areas.
Another thing is that Sweden doesn't have the tradition of dubbing movies. That means kids will be exposed to English from an early age. This leads to Swedish tech companies not being afraid of hiring talent globally and generally use English as their business language.
Finally, out of the 5 examples posted, one is Mojang, which is clearly an outlier. I'm not saying what Notch accomplished wasn't extremely impressive, but it was essentially a one-man operation, and probably shouldn't be held as an example of a trend.
Purely anecdotally, I am not part of a startup, but do a lot of hobby work in coffee shops around Stockholm. I'm always seeing/hearing people in local cafes discussing some new startup or project they are getting off the ground. I've also seen first hand many people get maybe a year or two of funding and start up their own game studios, for example. Of course not all of them end up being successful, but many people feel secure/comfortable enough to try. I think the volume of these attempts and people trying to do something new also helps drive up the number of "hits" overall, to be added to these kinds of lists.
I found this to be almost impossible to achieve when I moved from Norway to Australia. There I was outside hanging out with friends or just doing stuff on the beach or whatever. The deep focus was harder to achieve. Quality of life was insanely better there, yet somehow I missed the possibility to sit down and be productive in some narrow topic.
> yet somehow I missed the possibility to sit down and be productive in some narrow topic.
Do you mean that you preferred the life you led in Australia to the one in Norway? If not, how do you mean that quality of life was insanely better?
> Do you mean that you preferred the life you led in Australia to the one in Denmark?
Calling a Norwegian a Dane is about as popular as saying a Canadian is from USA or calling an American British I guess ;-)
(Seems I've offended someone else though, but I have no idea why.)
That's enough implying in my books.
(Besides, if we're to play this game, I never said that _you_ "implied they didn't prefer it". I just asked, "why wouldn't they prefer it").
Even then it's not ideal. The lowest brightness setting still isn't low enough.
In my twenties I could happily destroy my circadian rhythm and sit in front of a screen til 4-5 in the morning. At 35 that shit's gotten real old.
In my experience, it's been the opposite. They like to play office politics, focus on keeping work off their plate, and they're not really team players.
I may just have a bad sample of Israel tech workers, though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start-up_Nation
Where I think Israeli tech startups get most of their mojo, is desperation. Their culture involves so much struggle and effort .. and I think the reaction to it at a personal level, results in the laziness, non-team-playing, political problems.
1. Israelis basically have no choice. If you want to make a good income, working hard in a technology startup(we have very few big tech companies) is one of the very few good options.
2. The army: at a very young age,a decent percentage of Israelis who join the army lead, in high value, high risk situations. That creates a sense of responsibility and strong ambition at a relatively early age.
The army is also a place where a lot of new tech is being developed , so people get exposure, and often in roles of major responsibility.
3. The Jewish people have lived among other people, in very hostile conditions, often forced to do banking(loans) and commerce at times when most people did agriculture. That forces a certain entrepreneurial spirit, and possibly higher intelligence(also witnessed by the higher rate of genetic illnesses in Ashkenazi Jews). That, plus a culture that always focused on learning(religiously).
Interesting what would happen if this is said about any other country
Of course this does not mean Dutch Iranians are smarter than Dutch Moroccans, but it could mean there might be more smart/entrepreneurial Iranians than Moroccans in The Netherlands.
These statistics might die out very quickly though, for example Turks are often already second or third generation, so many have been born in the privilege of The Netherlands.
Perhaps similarly, the second world war cost us a huge percentage of Jewish people, being privileged has meant having a larger chance of survival through moving to less dangerous countries (like the U.S.).
It doesn't mean Jewish people are smarter, it might mean though that you could find a bit more smart Jews in their population. Of course the second world war has already been a long time, so the effect might already be gone.
I'm probably average intelligence, but I've had it expressed to me by people who hardly know me that they expect that I'm brilliant or something because I'm an Ashkanazi Jew. Its one of those stigmas that get attached to any race, such as Russians drinking Vodka or Argentinians eating meat. I'm sure that there are sober Russians, vegetarians in Argentina, and there's me!
Some people would say that this is cultural. I doubt it -- I think it's genetic. Intelligence is a physical attribute determined by genes, just like every other physical attribute. It's really no different from the observation that Kenyans and Ethiopians win most marathons.
In general, we should expect different traits to be exhibited at different frequencies by different populations that were reproductively isolated in the past. This doesn't mean prejudice is okay. Not all Jews are smart, and not all Kenyans are going to win marathons. We can acknowledge these correlations without behaving in a prejudiced way toward individuals.
Most people would rather not talk about this. And that's certainly my rule of thumb for in-person conversations. But, hey, we're on the internet.
But don't most Kenyan and Ethiopian marathon winners also grow up in Kenya or Ethiopia? I.e. how do we discount at very least environmental factors (including, for instance, diet), even if you doubt cultural ones?
No. There is a hugely disproportionate number of Americans and British of Somali, Kenyan, and Ethiopian origin who excel in world class distance running (Adbirahman, Farah, and many more, including a big new wave of Somali American after).
You're assuming that intelligence is the determining factor in winning a Nobel prize, which seems spurious at best. Work ethic and training, particularly early in life seem, to me, like they'd be better predictors. I'd posit that Jewish culture is better at nurturing intelligence before I'd conclude that there's some ethnic superiority going on.
While there isn't a bullet-proof case, there is quite a bit of evidence for an ethnicity-intelligence correlation.
The only value judgement I was making is that higher intelligence is superior to lower intelligence and that Nobel prizes is an extremely poor proxy for intelligence.
Fwiw I don't think you're necessarily wrong about intelligence but from what I remember The Gene (Siddhartha Mukherjee) does have a few passages contradicting this theory. Also by questioning the validity of IQ tests.
Could it also not be that jews are just more motivated to get in to STEM fields and perform well, for cultural reasons or otherwise?
Similarly, Malcolm Gladwell mentions a theory about why "Asians are smarter" which according to him may be related to hard and smart work leading to bigger rice harvests, and other factors (see here https://www.cs.unh.edu/~sbhatia/outliers/outliers.pdf).
While I have zero interest in the cultural implications and all the moral panics surrounding these issues, I don't think intelligence being mostly down to genetics is a proven fact. I find it gets extremely complicated very quickly.
Genes are hugely influenced by their environmental (cultural) triggers and those should not be ignored.
Summed up in one word - discipline. The glamorous myth of startups is just that, a myth. Some outliers go from zero to hero overnight, but most require slogging away day in and day out. Motivation can only last so long, and after it's gone all you have left is discipline. Military writings both current and historic routinely speak of discipline being the single most important aspect of achieving a goal.
This is the main reason for the ancient historical stereotypes linking Judaism and money/wealth/power/etc. And why names like Goldstein (gold stone) are considered Jewish names.
I heard that a lot of times from mostly uneducated people. All nations have equal level of intelligence. The difference might be access to education, environment, common wealth, and social inequality.
Just like height. If you raise a Pygmy in a rich European environment, he will reach standard European height.
More seriously though, I'm really tired of people somehow believing that evolution only works from the neck down.
All breeds of dogs have equal level of intelligence.
Neither of the above are true so how does one arrive at the conclusion that humans are the only exception in nature?
Edit: I would argue to the contrary, that there is a appreciable difference in average IQ between some countries which expresses itself among other things in GDP and quality of life. Perhaps the nature of this difference is based on things like nutrition, environment quality, pre-natal screening and care, so improvements in all these things will decrease the gap. If it happens that after all of that there is still a certain gap , who cares? As long as the citizens live in peace and relative prosperity.
How do you know this?
This is also true for the U.S. itself; Silicon Valley is largely a creation of Pentagon investment (see: DARPA).
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2018/03/unders...
I’d say proficiency in English and quite wealthy populations is what matters.
The history of chess is definitely very political, especially inside the Soviet Union. It was seen as the proxy for intelligence, and if Soviet players were better than Americans, it was their way of demonstrating superiority in yet another domain.
Wonder if that's also a factor in the prevalence of tech/programmers/hackers in Russia. Don't think there's a startup scene there, but there definitely seems to be more technology experts coming from the area in general.
Soft forms of isolation certainly seem to lead to solitary activities.
So I daresay there's more to this than just the Arctic Circle.
Just because of sun? Did you try UV?
Wealth is one of the most important factors for someone to found a startup. You aren't going out and starting a company if you have to work 80 plus hours a week to live.
Just look at the clueless opinions of so many tech founders about how "you shouldn't pay yourself a salary at first after you take investment money". Oh really? So we should just buy groceries and pay rent from the trust fund mommy and daddy gave us?
The scenario is that (roughly) 90% of the hypergrowth-style startups which raise a first round will fail to achieve enough momentum to successfully raise a second. And due to the business model choices they've committed to, failing to raise at that point is equivalent to going out of business. A first raise is often too small to be able to do everything they'd like, so they suggest decide that it's in their best interest (long term) to forgo a salary where possible, in order to buy a few extra months of progress before you're forced to start shopping for investment again.
Of course, folks give advice based on their own experience, but it doesn't always generalise to folks in different situations, which is potentially why that would seem like silly advice in (what I assume is) your scenario.
(minor edits toward the end for clarification)
So if you don't have the personal finances to deal with that situation, then you make a different decision further upstream, in the past, by choosing to work on an idea which has either easier funding targets (allowing an early salary), or which can generate early profits (allowing an early salary), or which has lower development requirements (allowing you to work on it alongside another paying job).
The decision is about idea selection, where I agree with you. "If you need the money, then pick an idea which allows you to pay yourself quickly." But if you've chosen to play a different game (typical hypergrowth VC stuff), and you want to maximise your odds of winning at that particular game, then it's generally ideal to buy yourself more months business runway instead of more months of personal runway.
Perhaps still not clear, and I know it's an emotionally loaded topic, but hopefully that makes sense.
I also recall Jared Diamond debunking this as a theory for why "the west" got ahead in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel.
(disclaimer: I am an American and don't know what I'm talking about. I have visited Norway but it was summer.)
The former hosts ABB and has tons of robotics related research, the latter has one of the major universities. The startup scene is smaller in Västerås than in Uppsala though.
Uppsala produced Klarna and Skype, Västerås produced Pingdom, to name some.
A relatively egalitarian society with a lot of trust between people and towards the government has made progress relatively effortless. When people don't feel the need to guard their own position because they might end up getting screwed there often isn't any good reason to be against development.
A relatively large amount of excess time, security and knowledge that enable people to something else. Startups are ultimately about harnessing excess potential. If all the value are capture by some other industry or the housing market there won't be much left over for startups.
Various cultural factors enabled by those things. Like being able to be independent (with the help of the government). Not being afraid to leave value on the table. An overall sort of generous, or at least non-petty, society.
If you look at factors like these, you can actually draw a lot of parallels to somewhere like SV compared to the rest of the world. SV is to at least some degree a recreation of academic life at its best. Which is the area of US society that would be most similar to Sweden.
I’m not sure this is too applicable to SV, lol, nor academic life in the US.
From what I understand, both Holland and Sweden are culturally similar enough that I can't immediately think of other factors that make 'us' more hostile to startups.
Also, compensation. The Netherlands has a lot of good people, but they’ll leave for greener pastures.
That leaves the more interesting question: why is The Netherlands different from Sweden in this regard? My impression was that The Netherlands, if anything, is more internationally-focused.
> Also, compensation. The Netherlands has a lot of good people, but they’ll leave for greener pastures.
Does Sweden pay better, taking into account cost of living? And if so, why?
(not disagreeing, btw, just more questions)
Obviously, there is the business side in addition to the computer science side. I don't know much about that with respect to Holland.
But one possibility is that Dutch computer scientists tend to leave Holland to work. That explains why I know of so many as an American? (e.g. I worked with Guido van Rossum and Werner Vogels advised my master's project)
I don't think our electronic music scene is less commercial though.
Initially it was just non-commercial Internet for academic institutions, but lots of students were exposed to the technology and the infrastructure early on.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet_in_Swe...
[2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History
Without disputing the technical correctness, Spotify's Göteborg office was literally a single desk at a shared office for the first three years of its existence.
Sweden's social safety net is among the strongest in the world. If the floor on failure is that you still have access to food, housing and healthcare then quitting a full-time job to start a company becomes much more possible.
More people starting companies, more attempts at big targets, more outlier successes.
Here in Belgium, in the Flemish part of the country we don't dub movies but in the French part we do. The levels of English are massively different, not sure if this is the main reason.
Why do billionaires so often love to muse about interesting things outside of their field, get attention and praise for their thoughts, and then publicly allocate only tiny portions of their wealth and time to these projects so ineffectually while passing down the majority of their wealth to disinterested heirs?
e.g. Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Edgar Prince, Steve Jobs, Richard DeVos, Bill Ackman, Mark Zuckerberg, Ken Griffin.
Just because they are asking questions does not automatically mean they have the passion to solve the other problems.
I dont know about others but isnt Zuckerberg donating majority of the wealth?
As an "I control everything anyway", tax evasion scheme.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mar...
https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2015/12/03/is-the-new-zucker...
There's no special tax benefit to what they set up. There are only structural benefits, in that the LLC can give to political campaigns and make private investments (neither of which are tax deductible). It also enables Zuckerberg to continue to directly control the Facebook stock while it's held by the LLC.
Any shares sold by the LLC generates a tax event as it would with an individual. You know the best way to avoid taxes like that? To keep the stock to yourself and not sell it at all.
The only tax deductions the LLC can take are identical to what an individual can take, the money must have gone to a 501c charity to generate a tax deduction. Nothing is gained in regards to avoiding taxes.
The first link openly admits it doesn't benefit Zuckerberg to use it as a means of tax avoidance (much less tax evasion, which is a crime that you're claiming is being committed). He'd be just as well off to directly donate the stock to a charity instead, as the ideal example given lists the LLC doing exactly that instead.
Any potential tax deductions accrued are saturated instantly, as they're limited to a fraction of the LLC's income in a given year and the total value of the deductions expire after five years (ie any charitable tax deduction carries forward for a maximum of five years and may only deduct against a maximum of 50% of your income in a year). There's nothing special about this deduction with the LLC, an individual gets the same arrangement. Again, there's no special angle.
Gates for example once gave a very large single year donation to his foundation, back in 2000. He saw very little tax benefit, because it saturated his ability to deduct a hundred times over.
The second link - an angry personal blog post - has the title calling it a fake charity. The first paragraph opens by insulting Zuckerberg's marriage. The second paragraph opens by insulting the Zuckerbergs love of their daughter. You can throw that one out as being biased immediately.
The dishonesty is in the description of the event by Zuckerberg and the media. It was covered as "Zuckerberg donates $45 billion to charity," but he effectively donated it to himself.
Andrew Carnegie, the richest person of his era, donated 90% of his wealth to philanthropic causes, most notably to local libraries, universities and scientific reasearch. He implored his fellow wealthy people to to the same, believing the only worthwhile purpose for accumulating wealth was to reinvest it in improving society. The Rockefellers seemed to do the same, as have many others since.
In Patrick’s case, his company is still in growth phase and his wealth is mostly on paper, so he’s not able to give much time or money. I’m sure he will when his company’s success becomes more assured and he can spare the time and money. His friend, YC President Sam Altman, has donated $10M of his own money to YC Research to help find answers to hard questions he cares about, which I think is a lot for him (I was surprised to learn he even had that amount to spare as his own company wasn’t a huge success).
When I tutored, I found students often had some misunderstanding, somewhere. So my task was to listen, to find that misunderstanding, so I could correct it. This "teaching" is listening, more than talking. The idea is they are lost, but to know what direction they need, I first must know where they are.
To correct misunderstanding without this guidance can be very difficult, and might only happen serendipitiously, years later... assuming they continue with study. Which an unidentified misunderstanding can prevent.
Recently, I'm seeing the other side, while self-learning some maths. I can see how much one-on-one tutoring would help clear up misunderstandings. Instead, I'm using the strategy of insisting on starting from the basics, chasing down each detail as much as I can, using online resources, and working out proofs for myself. Each step is a journey in itself...
Luckily, I have enough skill, confidence, motivation and time. By working it out myself, I think I'm also gaining a depth of understanding I could not get from a tutor's guidance.
But it sure would be a lot more efficient!
[ PS I haven't yet read the two pdf's in the question ]
That said I must to add, that I am referring to teaching humans who are 12 years and older (IMHO young kids require physical interaction if you want to avoid psychological conditions).
P.S: I was supposed launch a month back. But a lot of rewrites made it difficult. For now, I can say I will be launching soon.
The commenter above made a good point about the value of removing barriers to learning as a primary asset of a good teacher. People tend to focus on content knowledge/curriculum as the mark of good teaching, but removing barriers is the real, difficult work. Tools that assist the instructor in understanding their students’, their students’ knowledge, and their learning behaviors would be valuable. Don’t focus on content delivery. Focus on making in-class assessment more frequent and trustable. Focus on tools that assist an instructor understand thirty students as they might understand five.
With that in mind, one of the interesting findings in language acquisition studies is that when free reading (reading things for pleasure), it takes 95% comprehension of the text in order to acquire new grammar and vocabulary in context (quite a bit higher than most people imagine -- which is one of the reason people advance a lot more slowly than they might otherwise).
With that, just like your experience, the key to teaching is to ensure that the student comprehends at least 95% of what you are saying. The only way to ensure this is by constantly testing their comprehension with a two way dialog. Once a very high level of comprehension is reached, and once enough repetition happens to remember the thing, you will acquire the knowledge.
It is incredibly difficult to do this unless you are teaching 1:1. There is a special technique called "circling" that you can use to teach language to a larger number of students and it worked extremely well for me. I still can't effectively do it for more than about 10 or 15 though. If you think in a 45 minute class, if I have 15 students, then each student gets 3 minutes of my time. It's not actually surprising that classes of 30 or 40 basically impossible.
Quick note: I'm no longer teaching, in case it is unclear from the above.
I am not saying that their technique is the most efficient (e.g., adding hints would undoubtedly increase the efficiency, but also ruin the game experience), just that there are other methods of making sure a student understands a concept. You don't necessarily need the one-on-one conversations. Those conversations are mostly useful to round up incomplete teaching material (again, I am not saying that creating perfect teaching material is easy).
The one-on-one tutor idea is that you have a master who sees the mistakes the student makes and gives him an exercise to target precisely the misconception the student might have in his head.
The Witness, on the other hand, doesn't possess such intelligence. Instead, it is a carefully crafted series of puzzles which slowly broaden the possible moves. Most of the time every next puzzle requires you to learn a new part of the rules. Sometimes you assumed that part anyway, and the puzzles are easy. But sometimes you have to find out that misconception in your head and replace it with something correct which makes the puzzle harder.
So one concept includes an intelligent observer while the other is more like a perfected text book.
strongly disagree. learning chinese by youtube. I comprehend 15% but I pick up new patterns and words all the time.
then
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfAyWdGHnLdErys013Ysp... 走遍中国 Across China https://hooktube.com/watch?v=slFB9JhOTxk Homeland Dreamland 远方的家 no subs = better!
I did this for a while and gave up the self-learning aspect and went to university to study math part-time. I have the utmost respect for anyone who has the patience to push through it on their own. Some things I can learn on my own but higher maths I couldn't--at least with any degree of efficiency.
I had that experience sometimes when preparing a question to ask on-line. Sometimes it becomes clear when trying to see it from the other direction of the listener, or researching the problem space to phrase the question properly yields unexpected results.
Also, Sam founded YC Research and donated $10M of his own money into it to find answers to hard questions about AI, UBI, medicine/health and other big challenges. He also toured the country interviewing Trump voters to find answers to questions about what was underlying the political climate that led to the election result.
What makes you think YC’s leadership think they have all the answers? At least in Sam’s case, the evidence seems to point to the opposite.
For what it’s worth I think there are other questions that are more important and potentially valuable to society than Patrick’s or the ones YCR is currently working on, but that’s just from my own experience and contemplation, and I don’t criticise people whose own journeys have not pointed them to these issues/ideas yet. I commend anyone making serious efforts to understand and solve the biggest issues they can identify with their own experiences and best efforts.
The difference in style is tremendous, and no statement on their friendship or private discussions was implied or intended. To me it is the difference between 'smart' and 'wise'. You can be very smart and still not be very wise (though it is hard to be wise and not smart).
As far as the evidence is concerned, that we can agree on, the 'changing the world for the better' mantra has outlived its usefulness and should for transparency's sake simply be replaced by the one thing that matters: money.
Watsi is still from the PG days, the UBI experiment is so broken it is embarrassing, the 'hard questions about AI' have been raised since Asimov's days and do not - to me at least, feel free to differ - move the needle at all.
To me, this is not a problem. People should not be rewarded with instant dopamine for low-effort actions. [0] The reward for publishing on a blog is in the responses you receive from readers and not from a counter incremented by a click or pageview.
I rarely see more than shallow insight on Twitter/Facebook, as posts have a short visibility lifetime and replies longer than a sentence are collapsed. By contrast, blogs (not like Medium or Stack Exchange) will often receive deep, thoughtful replies months or years after they are published. There's no "algorithm" to please when you're writing a blog; your post will stay there until your domain name expires.
If you are having issues finding worthwhile blogs to read, ask people around you for suggestions. Not everything needs to be indexed by software.
> And part of the problem is, of course, that writing a good post is much harder than writing a witty tweet.
Where is the problem here? Thermodynamics and information theory tell us that a valuable long-form post ought to be more difficult to write by several orders (of orders) of magnitude. Yes -- it would be wonderful if we could all spit out fascinating 17-page theses every week or two, but that just isn't compatible with our biology. On the other hand, publishing 17 pithy tweets in a week is pretty easy, and people will probably give you plenty of attention for it.
[0] https://yihui.name/en/2017/12/so-bounties/
I’m interested in this as a bald assertion. Have they improved the lives of millions of people? I wasn’t aware of that. Can someone give me a quick before and after?
These are like experimental schools.
Not intended to be mainstream at all.
Admission criteria would seem to be a critical consideration and the further from the mainstream that the experiments extend, the more unlikely it would be expected to be scalable beyond very strict criteria.
Houston comes to mind as a purpose-built city founded on undeveloped land for the primary purpose of entrepreneurship which has grown larger than average by maintaining that approach more so than average. As an example there has never been a zoning ordinance, that kind of regulatory obstacle would be seen as an experiment in cutailing prosperity, certainly not normal. A failed experiment at that after observation of long-term effects in other municipalities. Even though in most other municipalities the removal of zoning would be thought of as an experiment too risky for them to even consider.
In the mature real-world example of Houston it is also painfully obvious the benefit that could have been obtained with a little well-intended admission criteria. Besides, when's the last time you heard someone say "Hey, it's a free country" any more anyway.
> How do we help more experimental cities get started?
You've got to find someone who wants to subdivide their ranch, and then get settlers to move there like anyone else. Incentives might help speed things up, and you've got to figure that the more restrictive the admission criteria, the more people will want to apply.
Or something like that.