flexie

It's really not true. I'd say that it's more Silicon Valley recruiting all over America, than the rest of the US trying to recruit in Silicon Valley. And even if they did, they don't need to pay SV salaries to compete. Salaries adjusted for taxes and living costs is what matters, and other perks such as the City, family friendly areas etc matter too.

And worldwide, Silicon Valley is probably less than 1 percent of all tech hires and less than 10 percent of the top hires. Silicon Valley takes an impressive amount of the top talents for its size, but not most, and almost certainly a decreasing amount. The world is large, and by far the most talents couldn't even get a visa for the US if Google or Apple wanted them.

Basecamp is selling all over the world. What should their salary level be like? Bay Area because that’s where a lot of the larger tech companies are situated? Washington State (Microsoft, Amazon)? Copenhagen (where one founder, DHH is from)? Sudney where one major competitor, Jira, is from? I’d say whatever the market is that they hire in. If you wanna pay above market rate, by all means do that. If you can attract employees in Chicago for less than Copenhagen or Bay Area salaries, then by all means, feel free to do that. Employees are free to leave.

What I don’t see is why all companies should follow Bay Area salaries.

Why would you want to be disturbed every few seconds? It's bad enough with interruptions from emails, chats, skype, calls, messages, coworkers walking in etc. This might actually have the potential to kill your remaining few productive spells.

This is wrong in so many ways. Indian engineering is many things just like in the US or Europe and you can get world class IT specialists in India. If anything, the existense of the IT outsourcing industry in India has helped establishing a growing educated middle class which is the prerequisite for one day being able to churn out even more world class engineers.

An idea that the EU, China or any of your other large trading partners would never allow to fly for more than a split second without introducing reciprocal measures.

It’s simply not true. In the 4 countries I have lived in, the US was the only one with very expensive heathcare, and in the other 3, which all have what Anericans call socialized medicine, healthcare was even more detached, but much cheaper.

This is true. But the easiest way to fix the inadequate transportation is to build more densely. Build more highrises. A 30 floor highrise with 8 apartments per floor can easily house 500 people but only takes up the land that 4 single family houses with less than 15 persons would occupy.

But the effect is multiplied if this highrise is in an city with many highrises. Now, instead of commuting 30 miles to pass another 1,500 single homes to reach work, the inhabitants of our highrise may only have to walk 1 mile to pass the homes of a similar amount of people and reach work.

You seem to know about this. Am I risking anything driving my 6 year okd old winter tires for 3 years non stop (winter and summer, 15k km yearly)?

Oh, there are countless ways governments can regulate crypto currencies without such regulation being built into the currencies themselves. Right now, crypto currencies are entirely useless for 99 percent of real world purchases. You cannot buy a cup of coffee with your satoshis. All you can do is to buy a few digital assets and a tiny fraction of the world's real assets. You might as well try to buy dinner with your facebook stock or to pay your rent with cacao or tulips.

Let's say that government decides the only legal tender for purchasing real estate is the government's fiat currency of choice, for example euros or dollars, and that the only way to obtain a deed or to legally borrow money is to show through a government run website that you paid for the real estate with that fiat currency. That's it. Now government indirectly controls crypto currencies. You can develop all the crypto currencies you want, but if you can't use it for purchasing real estate, the ramifications of that constraint will trickle down through almost anything else. Then receiving rent in crypto is less interesting. then being paid in crypto is useless.

And about that: Want to pay or receive a salary? What if government says that can only happen with fiat and that any attempt of paying or receiving salary in crypto currencies is a felony that will land you in a fiat funded correctional facility for years? You would think twice. How will government know? The same way they know that you bought drugs: Through witnesses, agents, ISPs telling on you etc. It doesn't have to be 100 percent efficient. If they have the ability to catch 0.01 percent of transactions and the punishment is severe, most people will not do it. Don't tell me that crypto is encrypted and anonymous. As soon as you use it for a real world thing, you leave traces. You buy a car; someone sold it. Someone heard. Someone saw. You can't show a fiat transaction; that will be the proof that legislator says is enough to convict you. If government decides to make crypto illegal, or to make certain transactions illegal when paid with crypto, crypto will only be good for the grey economy.

Or what if government said that no matter in what currency you make your money, taxes have to be settled in fiat.

The point is that all government has to do is to ensure that fiat is needed for certain key parts of the economic system. Then people will need fiat, and government can then focus on regulating the exchanges between fiat and crypto. There is a very limited number of banks, and a small number of payment providers and a small number of ISPs. They just need to ensure that these organisations enforce the rules (register who bought or sold what crypto currency etc.). Pretty soon, the only crypto currency that 99 percent would use would be the government backed one, the one that had backdoors or whatever government demanded built in.

Or Copenhagen where 62 percent bike to work, 21 percent take metro, bus or train, 8 percent walk, and only 9 percent drive a car to work.

And how ridiculous is it that it would take half a decade to state the obvious while this company funded by tech billionaires competed on unfair terms with tens of thousands of tiny taxi companies that followed rules and acquired licenses, expensive mandatory equipment etc.

I would love for the taxi industry to be liberalised but just not for the benefit of a few Silicon Valley billionaires with complete disregard of legislation.

70 years after the author's death is a very long time. That's maybe 100 years after the works were published.

Not only has language changed a bit. Many of the issues that authors dealt with 100 years ago are also different today. I didn't see a single Danish author among them whose works are still well known or widely read. I don't think you can enter a typical Danish bookstore and buy the works of any of these authors.

Perhaps 70 years after the death of the author is too long. Maybe 20 years after publishing the work would be better. After all that should give the publisher and the author plenty of time to make money, if possible. Then there could be 5 or 10 year extensions if the publisher could show a certain amount of marketing cost.

It’s the exact same cables that powers the thousands of light bulbs, hundreds of computers, AC, TV, fridges etc in the buildings next to the street

When doing business in the EU, Whatsapp and whatnot will have to abide by EU legislation, including EU data protection rules, EU consumer legislation and national rules on entering into and interpreting terms and conditions and other contracts.

Data may be used only for the purpose it was collected and transfer to other legal entities require consent. In May 2018, the data orotection regulation ebters into force and the mandatory rules will be even tougher.

Maybe one day one or more of those companies will even have to pay a bit of tax in the EU.

The consideration thing is considered an exotic common law curiosity in continental law countries :-) Generally, an offer and an acceptance creates a binding contract inmost of Europe.

We don't need improvements at a rate that is anywhere near Moore's law. Moore's law is about doubling transistor density every two years. But for EVs to reach that kind of ranges (7-800 km for mid range price) we just need to add 50-60 percent or so one time, and I'm talking about that happening in 4-5 years. For the cheap EVs that currently have a range of around 3-400 km we need to double one time. I suggest we will get there in less than 10 years and that is not even taking into consideration the fact that prices on batteries keep dropping.

A "modest" 5-10 percent improvement like we've seen historically, for another 7-10 years, and we have more or less doubled the energy density of batteries. Plenty for EVs to beat combustion engine cars.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/08/daily-...

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-battery-energy-density...

First world city streets already have electricity supply (for the street light and for the buildings). Setting up charging ports is already rather cheap and once cities realize that they can

- drastically reduce air pollution

- make more money selling electricity than just charging for parking

they will quickly start installing plugs everywhere.

Battery range is already at around 500 km for Tesla model S and X and the long range version of model 3, and close to 1,000 km for the new roadster. With the current incremental improvements, in 4-5 years battery range for ordinary medium priced EVs will go beyond 7-800 km on a single charge, super chargers and other chargers will be abundant, and charging will become a non-issue. Within 8-10 years, even the lowest priced EVs will have a range beyond that of combustion engine cars (6-800 km), unless innovation mysteriously were to end.

Articles like this is when you doubt whether journalism even deserves to survive (it does, inspite of the abundance of these poorly written, never researhed pieces). CNBC is a larger network, not the weekly paper in a small town. Why don’t they have someone with a bit of knowledge in cars or tech edit an article like this? Can they really not afford that?

There is barely any info on the car and the little info they give is obviously wrong. Why do they compare it to model X and not model 3; is it because its specs are simular to model X? Doesn’t look like a van or SUV at all.

Edit: here is a better article on the car with relevant info: https://electrek.co/2017/12/16/nio-es8-all-electric-suv-batt...

In a few hours the Americans will wake up and a bunch of them on HN will say that it's a loaded or divisive or misleading title or that the statistics is flawed. And HN is decisively more progressive than most of the country which simply ignores this kind of news.

It is the way it is in America, because - as a whole - they don't care that much about gun violence.

It's mostly blacks and Latinos getting killed and they are still minorities. And the poor white Americans that also fall victim to police and other gun violence just don't have much political influence.

Now it will get much easier to fabricate statements and much easier for someone to deny something they actually said (by claiming it was fabricated).

This is a Photoshop of voices and as such it is neither more or less dangerous.

We desperately need better ways to detect BS built into browsers, social networks etc.

Apart from the Porsche family that would be all 8 million citizens in the state of Lower Saxony and the 2.5 million in Qatar? Why stop at the shareholders? Some shares are owned by pension funds. Surely those greedy savers would fit in your giant prison too.

It should, thanks!

I chose to believe that this is a side-effect of facebook trying to combat fake news with some lame algorithms and an understaffed department of reviewers, not facebook actively trying to please the Romanian authorities.

But even so, this shows how utterly unprepared facebook is for its role as a de facto news business. A bunch of engineers thinking they are smarter than they actually are unwillingly facilitate the election of Trump, Brexit, genocide in Myanmar, and apparently the suppression of opposition in Romania. And who knows what.

At the end of the day, relying on a social network run by a bunch of college kids, with absolutely no editorial board, no knowledge of any of the news they show, no local presence anywhere, no income except what they generate on advertisement, and worst of all, an incentive and an ability to show every individual exactly the news he wants to read in order to keep his eyeballs for another ad, is a really bad for civilization.

But that's what we have.

It's not that I disagree, especially with the opinion that the gaming industry is over-saturated and that a lot depends on luck in that industry. But I'd say that 4 months worth of savings is in the better end when starting a new business. Most people who do startups or who otherwise become entrepreneurs have much less than that. And I think having too much of a cushion can lull you into a false sense of "doing something right" and that needing revenue soon can be an excellent motivator.

I was about to get married when I quit my job and started by myself, and my wife also had to quit her job because we moved country. And we honestly didn't really work out whether we were in a bit of debt or if we had savings for a few weeks. Sure, the first 6 months without pay were hard, and so were the next few years with low pay, especially when we had kids.

But if having 6 or 12 months worth of savings is a requirement, then you can rule out just about everyone except rich kids and upper middle class teenagers.

There is personal liability for board members and management boards (CEO etc.) in many (most?) jurisdictions, usually including for some things that they should have known but didn't know, typically if the "not knowing" part can be characterized as gross negligent.

Also, the personal liability for board members and managers is something that is exceedingly pursued by shareholders and creditors (for the financial liability) and prosecutors (for the criminal liability) compared to how it used to be.

I don't think it matters much, though.

Then, isn't that what the Roman Empire underwent as well? Language stayed, territory diminished, religion only gradually changed, most technologies and societal structures only gradually changed (just like in USSR or British Empire). The biggest differences were the changes in institutions and governance (although that also happened gradually).

They had as much (or rather as little) to do with ‘nations’ as the Roman Empire. Vast conquered areas, spanning several religions, languages, and etnicities.

Did the British Empire collapse? Yes (and it’s political influence seems to continue it’s diminishing).

Did the collapse happen while the life of ordinary Britains improved greatly? Yes.

Did the USSR collapse? Yes. Is the quality of life for the ordinary Russians better today? Yes.

Holy Roman Empire, Greek civilisation, Roman empire: Same story

Look at the map I linked to. It’s the same in New York State, Texas and California.

If you exclude tiny Prince Edwards Island, the most densely populated Canadian province is Nova Scotia (with 17.4 Canadians per km2). More than 90 percent of Americans live in states have higher population density than the densest populated Canadian province. Only Maine, Oregon, Utah, Kansas, Nevada, Nebraska, Idaho, New Mexico, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Alaska are more empty. Those 13 states account for less than 10 percent of Americans.

So - on a state by state / province by province basis, Americans live more close together than Canadians and should have better opportunity for maintaining infrastructure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_populat...

And just like Canadians tend to cram together close to the coasts and the Great Lakes, Americans also cram together close to the Great Lakes and their coasts. Go 50 miles inland from either coast, and it's vastly less populated than near the coast, with the rivers as an exception. Take a drive from Buffalo to NYC, and you'll see that it's populated near Buffalo (Great lakes), somewhat near Albany (Hudson river) and again once you get near NYC (East Coast). The rest of NY State is rural.

Take a look at this map of US population density by county: http://i.imgur.com/hY8tpOn.jpg