flexie

Still doesn't explain why I can't name a hugely popular programming language, library or framework created by a French programmer but several by Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Dutch, all small countries but where English is a very strong second language. I'm sure there are great French programmers and programming languages, but doesn't is strike you as remarkable that there are not more?

From a country of 5 million (Denmark) you got the creators or cocreators of C++, C#, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Turbo Pascal etc. From a country of 60 million you got ...?

France is a a power house in so many other engineering fields like nuclear power, auto industry, aviation etc so they clearly have engineering talent. But in software, not so much.

Other Scandinavian countries are also doing quite well, way beyond what their size would suggest.

But also well beyond other countries with developed welfare systems, such as France. I think these discussions always miss one key factor: Language.

If you don't speak English quite well at an early age (already at 10-13 years old) you are much less likely to get into software development at an early age. If you don't get into software development at an early age, you are much less likely to do a software based startup when you are in your twenties. There is a thousand times as much documentation, conferences, tutorials, courses, online fora etc in English as in other languages and this is how new ideas in IT spread. Only months or years afterwards, it's translated to Spanish or Chinese, and only if it has caught on. Just about everything new in IT spreads through English, whether it's AI or web development or anything else.

The Scandinavian languages are not that different from English, the countries are small and consume a lot of music, movies, TV etc from the US/UK. Movies and TV have never been dubbed, except for toddlers. So for the last 50-60 years or more, Scandinavians have been quite good at English. Your average 70 year old Scandinavian speaks English better than your average 20 year old Italian. A drunkard on a bench in Scandinavia is likely to speak better English than most academics I've met in Southern or Eastern Europe.

We live in an era of software driven startups. It's easy to forget that it was not always like that. There were times when successful businesses were driven by mechanics (GM), electronics (Sony), chemistry (Kodak), trade or other factors. Now it's software, and whether your language, framework, or library of choice is C, C++, Python, Lisp, Java, PHP, JS, HTML, CSS, Tensorflow, React, or almost any other tech that the unicorns are built with, the new developments in that tech will initially have spread from English speakers to English speakers. The fact that the largest software companies in the last two decades have all been American then reinforces that trend.

It most certainly isn't, not in Spain, nor in the US or most other democracies.

Separation of powers:

- Legislative (parliament, congress, senate, house of ..., many names - in Spain I think they call it Cortes Generales and it consists of two chambers, a senate and a congress)

- Executive (government)

- Judicial (courts)

Great poem. And what I like about HN is that the first dozens of comments on the poem are about technicalities like how it is displayed in the browser, the mathmatics of it etc., not its interpretation :-)

How would a week's mandatory training be prohibitive?

My profession (as a lawyer) required 5 years of mandatory university education and 3 years of practical training and supplementary courses and exams. Other professions require even more. Every year I must take what amounts to 2-3 days of additional courses to maintain my license.

And I just push papers and money around. I don't move people. Nobody gets killed if I do a bad job.

I think it's only fair to require a tiny bit of training for a taxi driver, also if he works for Uber.

> Google still provides immense value.

Absolutely. But so does Baidu. And while doing so, Baidu provides jobs and tax revenue in China with little national security risk for China. And at the same time Baidu creates thousands of extremely skilled Chinese software engineers.

I think censorship is only part of the reason. Protectionism and national security probably plays a role aswell. Look at the list of websites they block:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland...

Google, facebook, instagram, twitter etc. Those are one-way streets that provide next to no jobs, little tech transfer and no tax revenue to the countries they do business in, but tend to outcompete the local rivals if left to it, and are proven to provide a convenient surveillance platform for American intelligence.

It's surprising that any country would allow that to continue unchecked. The Chinese solution is certainly not great but I doubt the US would allow Chinese companies to keep a daily log on the activities of most US citizens and businesses. Or to replace entire industries like advertising without providing jobs or taxes in return.

Nobody is doing Oppression Olympics. There is zero oppression of smokers, as in absolutely none.

Smokers have not experienced persecution. Please use this word more carefully or we dilute its meaning. The shaming of smokers has little in common with what Jews, homosexuals etc have had to endure. Smoking has not been made illegal, smokers are not imprisoned, smokers are not attacked and beaten up on streets. Smokers live in the same communities as non-smokers, are friends with non-smokers, study with no-smokers, work with non-smokers, date non-smokers, marry non-smokers.

The inconveniences and at times rudeness experienced by smokers doen't constitute anything that resembles persecution.

I am not sure what was stolen exactly. If no source code was stolen, no users, no trademark, no trade secret. Only some ideas that were copied. Seems like Zuckerberg was inspired by this guy's site but grew facebook more shrewdly and without much attention to privacy issues.

In Europe, I would say the opposite is happening. AirBnB is being pushed out of or held down in many cities by local authorities. In the last two years I have stayed 50 nights or so in rooms booked through Bookings.com or Hotels.com and only 2 nights in rooms booked through AirBnB, and it's now almost two years ago. I had a good stay in the ArBnB booked apartment but the only reason I used AirBnB in the first place was that I couldn't find a hotel in the city since all hotels were booked. Most people I know have never or only once used AirBnB.

AirBnB is fun to try but I wouldn't rely on someones apartment for my vacation.

Both, and when I bill by the hour I only bill the hours I work. Billing for my breaks would quickly lead to a loss of clients when they saw how much time I spent (and if discovered, I could be disbarred).

But if I had made sure to explain that my hourly rate included breaks, as some do, it actually wouldn't be illegal.

I don't have to justify that to anyone, except maybe my family. I work for myself.

I think I read a couple of hours of news etc. at work. Here I am on HN. It's very individual, but I would not be surprised if it's true for most office workers that they work efficiently for 3-4 hours a day. And for a lot of people, some of that time is spent in a meeting...

I agree that 1.1B isn't that much given the potential size of the market (and given the size of Google's profits, it's a surprisingly small bet they've made).

But how do you arrive at the conclusion that Google is way ahead? I cannot buy a Google car with self-driving capabilities. I can't even buy a car from any other manufacturer with Google's self-driving software in it. I can buy several other cars with some degree of self-driving tech in them, most notably Tesla, but also Volvo and Audi and others.

Already now, you have tens of thousands of Teslas driving around in either self-driving mode or in what is in essence a "recording" mode where they record and simulate. They drive in all kind of traffic, roads, rules, weather, light etc.

Meanwhile, you have a few hundred Waymobiles mostly driving around the perfect, dry and pristine Northern Californian roads with 25 mph. They have merely logged in 3M miles in almost 10 years. That's the equivalent of 10,000 Teslas driving 10 miles per day for a month. In a couple of years you will have a million Teslas driving on the roads. And you probably still just have a few hundred Google cars driving around engineers.

Google is losing the number game with its boutique approach. Waymo is WayBehind.

Both true, Amazon was one of the first web stores, Netflix was one of the first movie portals. And similarly, the ipod and iphones weren't the first music players or smart phones but the first ones that worked really well. Remember how you could chose between 20 different mp3 players, all quite cheap but usually in crappy quality and without a music store? Remember how you could buy several smart phones like an Ericsson with a stylus or a BlackBerry with a keyboard?

Doing it right matters more than doing it first.

- Facebook wasn't the first social network. People were connected, shared pictures, and had friends before.

- Amazon wasn't the first online store.

- AirBnB wasn't the first short term rental website

- Netflix wasn't the first online movie portal.

- Apple didn't make the first cell phone or even the first smart phone, or the first music player or the first home computer.

- Tesla didn't make the first electric car.

- etc.

Still, the one criticism that startup hear again and again is that "You are late - it's already there".

That is just tax defeatism :-)

The rich do pay some tax so it's not impossible to get them to pay and rich people in different countries pay different percentages of their overall wealth. So it's by no means impossible to make them pay more, if that is what society desires.

I don't suggest that. I think it would be silly not to cover those items through taxes. My post is an answer to the guy above who suggests that healthcare shouldn't be paid by taxes because that's not voluntary. Then I point out that with the same reasoning you could argue that primary education or secondary education shouldn't be paid through taxes.

I think it works very well to pay all those things through taxes.

Thank you. It beats me that Americans when looking for alternatives to their current system(s) or the lack of systems in third world countries overlook the European models where "socialized medicine" in various forms works well and has done so since around WW2 (different from country to country).

My experience in Europe is limited to living in Denmark, Spain and Bulgaria, and in each place health care could certainly be improved. But most citizens don't worry as much about health care as they did when I lived in the US.

Having seen hospitals in those European countries and what is supposedly a top class Manhattan hospital, I would not trade the European model for the American. Just the humiliation of asking a woman in severe pain for her insurance before treating her; it's undignified.

But whereas the European models could - and in my opinion should - inspire in the US, they are not easily transposed to third world countries where you lack a strong government without too much corruption to collect taxes. Here, a private model might work better.

Anyways, kudos to anyone trying to improve healthcare in the third world or ours.

Money is taken from citizens against their consent to pay for

- military

- roads

- primary education

- secondary education

- criminal justice system

- research

Each and every one of those could in theory run entirely on a voluntary basis and has through history been doing so here and there from time to time.

And that is why the burden of proof will soon be on the company, not the user, cf the data protection regulation

As long as Google does business in Europe, Google's license is subject to law: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...

While it's not a complete deletion, it's a step in that direction.

One ad driven website making a business out of trying to get you off another.

Wonder what the internet would be like if there was an easier way to make money than ads.

These are tools used by thousands of devs, but not hundreds of millions of users.

Older than 5 years

Project tango is great but not a product with hundreds of million users. It is a tool for developers.

Chromecast has sold 30 mio units since it was launched 4 years ago. Whereas that might be a lot for you and me if we launched a company, it's very little for Google.

If it had been an independent company selling 30 million units in 4 years for maybe $10-15 a piece to the stores, making maybe $5-10 per unit, you would likely never have heard of them. In 4 years Chromecast has probably made less revenue for Google than the ads make per day.

Google used to be this unique company that again and again would launch exciting new services or products. Often it was services that helped them sell ads, but it was services that users found very helpful.

Gmail, Google Translate, Google Map, Google Earth, Chrome, Android. These were all unique in their own way when they came out and found hundreds of millions (mostly free or low paying) users.

But what is the one thing or service that you use from Google which was launched in the last 5 years and are widely used? Nothing.

What is the one thing that they charge for, except advertising, and that scores of people care to pay for? Nothing.

Sure, there have been ongoing improvements of their services and lots of tools, languages and frameworks released for developers. They have been testing self driving cars and there have been rumours about what they do in their lab. There have been laptops, glasses and loudspeakers, but none of them have really been successful or close to be considered market leaders.

Apparently, it's really difficult for one of the richest companies in history with tens of thousands of the most talented engineers, to market just one new product every few year. Was there ever in history so much money gathered so easily by such an amazing force of engineers?

Even within software services that you would think a global company with the largest user base ever, and millions of paying webshops, could dominate; Why is Google not a leader in payment technology? Why are they not dominating hosting services? Why are they not dominating cloud storage? Why don't we buy content such as books, news, movies or songs on Google? Shared economy? Social networks? Why are they not dominating anything else but a few software services that help them sell their core product, the ads?

Google can make such huge amounts of much money selling ads, that everything else is dwarfed in comparison. How could you ever get the attention of management for a project that could potentially - if everything goes well for 5-10 years - make 5 billion in revenue, when Google makes more than that in a month right now?

Not despite of their money but because of their money, Google cannot innovate. Take 1,000 Google engineers elsewhere and they could do amazing things. Have them in Google, and the world would barely notice if they all called in sick for the next 10 years.

Maybe Google's restructuring will help on this. I doubt it, unless the umbilical cord to all the advertisement money is cut completely. Size matters. Google has gotten way too big.

That's deep

Why would anyone try to understand the ramblings of a twisted person who murdered 3 and maimed many more?