Growing a Language with Clojure and Instaparse - <AUTHOR> http://gigasquidsoftware.com/wordpress/?p=689

<comment><USER2> One of my future blog posts is going to deal with how what makes a problem area "sexy" often has to do with how much of computer science you touch along the way. I call it the Ingress Factor; how cool something is, is directly proportional to how likely it is to get you exposed to other seemingly unrelated things. For example, an inordinate number of people want to get into "data science"/machine learning right now. What makes ML attractive, I would argue, is how much it brings you into interaction with all sorts of CS stuff that the corporate world would otherwise block out as "too hard" for average developers.

Clojure has this same aura, I think. What's great about it is how much of computer science is accessible at the REPL. It's not about firing up some IDE and not knowing how any of the magic works. Whatever it is, the community makes sure that there's a way to dive in and explore it quickly, and that's really admirable.

<comment><USER3> _an inordinate number of people want to get into "data science"/machine learning right now_

Guilty.

I think, though, that the reason for the data science boom, is simply that it's the next phase in using technology to automate business.

First, we had CRUD apps to allow data entry and storage, with database rows replacing paper documents. Later, these apps further automated the workflow through data interchange and web services (EDI, SOAP, REST, etc.) to make sure the data only needed to be entered one time and could be shared and reused across trading partners. In this phase, the primary concern was acquiring data --there wasn't enough of it yet to really make sense of it.

The next phase was the "business intelligence" industry of the last decade, with analysts slicing and dicing data to make reports and views and visualization dashboards for managers, so they could use sums and averages and pretty pictures of line/bar/pie charts to try to make sense of business performance data and use it to inform (or simply justify) their decisions. Lots of BS going on in this phase, as most of these analysts and managers have little to no actual statistics training, don't deeply understand the visualizations, and only know "enough to be dangerous."

The next phase, in which enterprises have much more data (and more data sources and formats) than an analyst armed with a BI stack can handle, is actually using parallel processing and rigorous statistical modeling to infer trends from the data, and even applying machine learning techniques to automate the decisionmaking itself. This automates away the manager and analysts' responsibility, and now all you need is a team of data scientists and a technically knowledgeable executive with authority to approve the models. I see it as actually centralizing executive control by automating away the lower levels of decisionmaking in the organizational hierarchy. That's where the game is headed.

<comment><USER2> I am with you on the attractiveness of the data scientist role. I know many people with that title who work on distributed systems, compiler hacks for GPU code, etc. It seems to mean "software engineer who is good at math and therefore smart enough to attack the most interesting projects".

If you're a software engineer, there are a million jerks out there who don't understand your job but think they could do it just as well given a couple "21 days" books. If you're a data scientist, you get a lot more autonomy and dibs on the interesting work.

<comment><USER3> _If you're a software engineer, there are a million jerks out there who don't understand your job but think they could do it just as well given a couple "21 days" books. If you're a data scientist, you get a lot more autonomy and dibs on the interesting work._

Well, to paraphrase something you've said in your blog, successful convex work tends to become concave over time. The first business CRUD app was a huge breakthrough. But today, making CRUD apps, which is still how a whole lot of programmers make their living, is becoming an increasingly concave task, as the technically difficult parts are being abstracted away. We won't really need any more LAMP developers soon--Rails is really only one layer of abstraction below the point where non-programmers will be able to generate functioning CRUD apps with a few mouseclicks, to collect their business data. So, those "million jerks" are getting closer to being right every day, if your job as a software engineer is just making CRUD apps.

So, now "data science" (aka massively parallel processing of large distributed datasets with statistical modeling and machine learning techniques) is where the convex work is. And of course you get a lot more control and autonomy when you're doing convex work, because it's uncharted territory and no one really understands it yet, so there are no standards or best practices to manage your performance to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> gigasquid, do you happen to know if this is compatible with ClojureScript, or does it have some Java dependencies? I ask because I started writing a Markdown processor in ClojureScript, but I eventually realized the find-and- replace-based approach I took (similar to John Gruber's version) wasn't going to cut it.

<comment><AUTHOR> After a quick look at the library, there does seem to be some Java libraries being used - like java.io.BufferedReader. But having a ClojureScript port is a great idea!</comment></comment>


A friendlier MIT decisions page - <AUTHOR> http://blog.markfayngersh.com/post/2161565834/a-more-social-mit-decisions-page

<comment><USER2> Nice to see I'm not the only EA MIT-hopeful on HN! :-)

I like what you did. It's cool to make the stressful process a bit social. I understand there's not exactly a ton of data to work with, though.

As a general rule with bookmarklets, however, it's good to put the bulk of the source in an external file that you can update: not only does it make the bookmark smaller, but it also allows you to push updates seemlessly.

By the way, I was really impressed that they sent out an an email _exactly_ (down to the minute) 1 week before the decision date. They said they'd give us a week's notice, but who knew it'd be so precise... All of this is causing way too much anxiety.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Likewise :) Yes, I actually tried a load-script-into-head bookmarklet, but it didn't seem to want to work on chrome (though it worked on safari). If you can get a snippet working, I'd gladly implement it.

Good luck to you too!

<comment><USER2> You _do_ load in jquery, why not replace that script URL with your bookmarklet script?

Script tags aren't subject to cross-domain policies, so you shouldn't have trouble there. Plus, if they were, you would have seen issues alread.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried loading the script, but what happened in Chrome is that the whole page was replaced with the url to the script. In Safari, on the other hand, it worked perfectly.

<comment><AUTHOR> nvm, got it ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Dude! the school colors?!

<comment><AUTHOR> Eh, they change everyday on mit.edu anyway :P

<comment><USER3> Try the logo lab, or if you don't feel like it, the direct download

<http://mit.edu/graphicidentity/logo/forweb.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> OK, well _now_ he's definitely getting in.</comment>


Pill of super-protective 'heavy' fat may treat degenerative diseases - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630214.900-pill-of-superprotective-heavy-fat-may-be-key-to-eternal-youth.html?full=true#.VVYBalUza2w <comment><USER2> Hydrogen, due to its lightness, is very mobile among organic compounds, especially when its partner has higher electronegativity, like oxygen. You can think of hydrogen as the scrawny kid that gets pushed around by all the larger atoms, and oxygen as the bully that always takes his lunch money (the electron). Whenever the environment is energetic enough to ionize one hydrogen, the result is like the tea party in Alice in Wonderland. The hydrogens switch seats, and just end up drinking the same tea out of broken teacups.

The theory here is that if you make some hydrogens less scrawny (deuterium), the other atoms will preferentially pick on the lighter hydrogens, avoiding the destruction of the really important hydrogen-bearing molecules, like the fats in cell membranes.

Sounds good so far. But what happens when the fat needs to be recycled, or the deuterium swaps out to a different molecule?

Replacing 50% of a mammal's hydrogen with deuterium will cause the animal to die, from symptoms resembling radiation sickness, because spindle formation in mitosis relies upon Van der Waals forces, which are reduced in deuterium- containing molecules.

We aren't actually sure what else might go wrong in selectively deuterating the human body. So I think if I needed additional protection from oxidative damage, I'd try injecting my liver with L-gulonolactone oxidase before eating heavy fats. I may be wrong. We'll see.

</comment><comment><USER3> I actually spoke with one of the principals at the company last weekend. I'm still not entirely sure it's a real effect, but he was telling me that they have mouse models that are incredibly impressive. That said, cancer has been cured in mice many, many times.

The general idea is that if you prevent fatty acid radicals from arising in the first place, you radically improve cellular health. They argue that all sorts of things go wrong in a cell, but that the final reason a cell will die is because it loses the ability to cope with reactive species.

Fats are one major source of radicals, because once you get one radical, generating the next radical is an auto-catalytic event. That means one radical generates dozens of others. If you can prevent that single radical, you therefore have a huge impact, and deuterated are absolutely a way to reduce radical formation.

2 things on cost: because there is a single bond in the fats they are targeting that is far more likely to form a radical than the others, you only need a single position to be deuterated to have the effect. The principal's claim was that cost of deuterium was incredibly low, and that everything about the chemistry was scalable. He fully expected that the doses could be made at an affordable price point.

Like I said, it may not pan out, but it did sound worth pursuing. That safety study will also likely test efficacy to a certain extent (common in rare disease research). Could be pretty cool if it works!

</comment><comment><USER4> As always for research at this stage, there is a significant chance that the treatment will not survive contact with reality. Most don't. That said, the mechanism is plausible enough, and more importantly, _this is a serious and direct attack on a major mechanism of aging_. Defeating aging is the most important thing in the world, and credible shots at doing so are rare and precious. Regardless of whether this particular therapy ends up working, I commend the people behind it, Robert Molinari, Mikhail Shchepinov, Robert de Jager and others.

<comment><USER5> > Defeating aging is the most important thing in the world,

Hang on, how about climate change, poverty, distribution of food, or war?

<comment><USER4> Those are also important things, but aging kills - and will kill - orders of magnitude more people than all of those put together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a bit early to even crank the bait headline machine up, but I love "Pill Savior" articles.

Deuterium-containing fatty acids supplant hydrogen-containing in cell membranes despite heavy fat intake being 1-2% of toatl energy intake.

Sounds like trying to fix joint pain with chondroitin.

This angle of attack on degenerative disease seem likely to be, at best, modestly effective, yet expensive - like much of the supplement industry.

<comment><USER7> Part of the treatment is restricting consumption of the fats that would compete with it. Once it's in place, its stronger bonds might tend to keep it there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow. Wouldn't this also significantly reduce the likelihood of cancer?

</comment><comment><USER9> Oh no, this could ruin death. Steve Jobs: '... because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent.'.

Source: [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/oct/06/steve- jobs...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/oct/06/steve-jobs- pancreas-cancer)

<comment><AUTHOR> Software can be changed.</comment></comment>


Kops 101- the Kubernetes Deployment Game-Changer - <AUTHOR> https://www.reactiveops.com/blog/kops-101-the-kubernetes-deployment-game-changer/ <comment><USER2> This turned out to be a more marketing/consulting post than I expected. It says 101 on the tin box, I expected to see a small demo or links to documentation.</comment>


Town in Iceland Paints 3D Zebra Crosswalk to Slow Down Speeding Cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.boredpanda.com/3d-pedestrian-crossing-island/ <comment><USER2> This is pretty cool as a trompe l'oiel, but it's just plain dangerous to put deceptive markings on a roadway.

The should have called the project "let's train our drivers to ignore raised obstacles on the road".

<comment><USER3> It'll also pretty quickly become useless except to people who're experiencing it for the first time.. and for them it'll just be a terrifying surprise

And now you'll get surprising behavior from random cars, and normal behavior otherwise, which is probably more dangerous than whatever speeding was occurring in the first place

<comment><USER4> My small midwestern town just put vertical crosswalk markers in place on the lane lines right in front of my house. This makes life terrible because I live on 1) a major road right off of the freeway that takes a lot of commute and out-of-town traffic because it is 2) _the route to the goddamn hospital_. This means that the ambulances have to do crazy things to get around the people who have nowhere to get out of the way due to the signs, and more traffic backed up due to people inappropriately stopping at the signs. I also watched a rear ending at one yesterday. These signs are literally dangerous on multiple levels.

<comment><USER5> >My small midwestern town just put vertical crosswalk markers in place on the lane lines right in front of my house. This makes life terrible because I live on 1) a major road right off of the freeway that takes a lot of commute and out-of-town traffic because it is 2) the route to the goddamn hospital. This means that the ambulances have to do crazy things to get around the people who have nowhere to get out of the way due to the signs, and more traffic backed up due to people inappropriately stopping at the signs. I also watched a rear ending at one yesterday. These signs are literally dangerous on multiple levels.

But now someone's desire to have slow traffic is satisfied and they are no longer pestering the local government who is no longer pestering the highway department. That's mission accomplished as far as they care. Making the local transportation infrastructure not suck is not a metric they are evaluated by so all the second order effects are irrelevant.

If you're lucky the marker will have a snow plow accident in a couple months and it will never get replaced because everyone will realize it actually made things worse.

Also, it's worth noting that despite the slowed traffic the situation is probably more hazardous for pedestrians because the traffic now takes more of their time and attention.

<comment><USER4> Nope, they get unbolted when we start having frosts and put back in the spring. They also replace them periodically when they get ripped off by the large trucks and greyhound buses that don't fit between them perfectly... I really wish I could correlate traffic slowdown in a publishable way to provide for wrongful death suits of the ambulance occupants' families against the city, but I haven't figured out how to quantify it cheaply and publicly yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The town where I live installed one. They cost 40% more than a regular cross walk and are a waste of money. I had driven over the thing for about a month before I realized that it was the '3D' crosswalk and not just a poorly painted crosswalk.

<comment><USER7> In the video from the article it looks pretty realistic from a relatively high vantage point (drone several meter high) but from the regular driving position it's still pretty flat and at best confusing. Is this the case when seeing it live?

<comment><USER6> Pretty much. When it was brand new it looked like someone had painted over a old cross walk with two different shades of black paint. After a few weeks it got dirty and worn down from tires and now nobody with assume it is a 3D image at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Uhm … this won't fool anybody with more than one eye. It might look convincing in a photo but once you look at it on location it is gonna be instantly obvious that this is flat paint on the ground.

<comment><USER9> I don't think it needs to "fool" them, just confuse them enough to want to slow down and have a second look.. In my hometown (Portland, OR), there have been several projects that increase the perceived danger of an area in an attempt to slow people down and increase their awareness. I don't know how effective they are, they sure are annoying :)

</comment></comment><comment> marble-drink A better solution would probably be to revoke driving privileges of anyone caught speeding in these areas. Make it very public that this is what will happen. Then do it. I'm sick of irresponsible drivers. If you speed on the railway you could go to prison and never be a driver again. Similar for pilots.

<comment><USER9> They aren't mutually exclusive. I do however suspect that the cost of some paint is a lot cheaper then permanently monitoring and prosecuting these drivers. Also, for prosecution to be effective as a deterrent requires the driver to make a rational decision about the pro's and con's of being irresponsible, is that a reasonable expectation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I want to echo this comment from close04:

> _In the video from the article it looks pretty realistic from a relatively > high vantage point (drone several meter high) but from the regular driving > position it 's still pretty flat and at best confusing._

The first thing I thought when the video opened with a driveover was "it looks like they got the perspective wrong". What viewing angle is it meant for?

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I think if they wanted to do this properly, they would use a projector to get the perspective exactly right from the actual vantage of the typical driver, including cancelling out the curvature of the road for the blocks (but not the shadow).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a cool optical illusion, but it's deceptive at best to actual drivers. I could see it causing rear-end collisions when drivers first encounter them.

And what about cars coming from the opposite direction? They'll see something that they won't recognize at all as a crosswalk, raised or not.

</comment><comment><USER13> One interesting thing is that the video at the end of the article shows a car speeding past it (coming quite close t a child) and then slowing down at the next (ordinarily painted) crosswalk.

<comment><USER14> It looked like the video was speed up at that moment, not sure why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is clever, but does it work? The car in the video at the 1 minute mark doesn't seem to care for them.

> > [https://i.rmbl.ws/s8/2/a/m/1/y/am1ya.caa.1.mp4?b=0&u=8khr](https://i.rmbl.ws/s8/2/a/m/1/y/am1ya.caa.1.mp4?b=0&u=8khr)

</comment><comment><USER16> I am colorblind. A rely on consistency a _lot_ when I am out and about. This sort of thing feels really deceptive. Aren't there other signs, signals or actual three-dimensional tools that can be used to slow traffic (speed bumps) that are not deceptive?

<comment><USER17> The easiest way to slow traffic is to make the road narrower. If the sidewalk "bulged" into the road near the crossing it would probably help a lot.

<comment><USER18> I don't know if encouraging pedestrians to step into the way of a vehicle is the wisest decision. If a car doesn't slow down, it will infringe on the sidewalk. At least right now, a car under control can travel in a straight line and be reasonably assured that their path will be free of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The perspective is wrong I think, unless this is a one-way road.

</comment><comment><USER19> sponsored by the local car dry cleaner</comment>


Ask HN: Nurses who left to code, how was your transition like? - <AUTHOR>

After five years as a surgical nurse, I'm in the final stages of my transition into being a software developer (60 days left of being a nurse). I'm thinking about documenting my transition and was wondering if there are any other nurses turned hacker out there. I've yet to meet any one else in real life who's done this. <comment><USER3> I can't say that I've ever met any nurses who became coders, however the president of an electronic medical records startup I once worked for, was a physician.

He wasn't a coder, but he had some very good ideas about how our product should work. The other two cofounders were experienced coders.

I myself am trained as a physicist. I once met a former french teacher. It's quite common for people to change careers into coding.

Were you to document your story, it would attact a lot of interests; a website would be popular, a book might be a best-seller.

I once had a psychiatrist who was a nuclear physicist before she became a shrink. I looked her up online, she went to medical school in Tennessee - <USER2> Ridge National Laboratory, then school on the side.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thanks for the motivation. I'll start documenting the process and see where it goes!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Spam fighting with bogus lead gen nowdays? - <AUTHOR>

Hey folks,
A couple of years ago, there was an innovative company, that basically took all these spam mails, and for every one of them sent to every recipient, it filled out their lead-gen forms with malicious (but still validating) data. To date, this is the state-of-the-art in fighting spam effectively (to my knowledge), since it impacts their revenue stream instead of an ever-escalating technological arms-race. Unfortunately, they went bust, when the black-hats started DDOSing them out. (My datasource at that time was, unfortunately, slashdot; please correct for any biases / false data).
Has there been any development on this front? Anyone tried replicating their model?
(I understand if it doesn't seems a lucrative idea to this bunch; I'm just saying, there are a couple of well defined sources in my spambox, I would be willing to part with good money to see them eliminated. ) <comment><USER2> I have a little website that i've been working on <http://www.whyspam.me> its a more advanced form of mailinator. It gives you a disposable email that forwards to your inbox. It's free, it never expires, so it is possible to never ever give out your real email to another website again.

In addition we track the disposable emails that get deleted by users, and we ask each user to generate a new email for every new website. That way we can track the websites that spam.

Anytime the word "malicious" and fighting come up in the same sentence, i get a little worried. Our goal is to give the user complete control over their inbox, the problem with having a few gmail, hotmail, whatever accounts is that if you sign up for a few semi-important things (like HN!!) if you delete the email you delete your "forgot password" functionality. Also if you give your web address to someone and they choose to sell it, you have no way of tracking it, or stopping the additional spam sources. I'm trying to fix that with my service.

While it might not be for everyone, its extremely useful to me...so i'll keep improving it and making it a service I want to use. These spammers essentially make money off of your data (email), so why don't we put some data back in your hands, like a listing of the source of spam!

Let me know if you have any comments about the site, its a fully functional beta...but not quite ready for a "Ask HN: Review my site". I'm also open to new anti-spam technologies techniques or methods (preferably non-malicious), so feel free to leave a reply.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really think email spam is a problem already solved (at least for most end users). I use gmail, yahoo and hotmail (for different accounts) and I rarely get any spam.

Now, I know the anti-spam tools are working very hard to stay updated, but using the spammers tactic is too much. Why change if the current research/defense tools are working?

</comment><comment><USER4> When you start playing on the same standards, what is the difference between you and them?

<comment><USER5> That's nonsense. Spam deliberately attempts to defraud (at worst) and irritates (at best) millions of people. Fighting back is attempting to prevent this, by wasting the time of people that spam. That's the difference, and the two acts aren't ethically similar.</comment></comment>


Show HN: HNLive – Hacker News in Real Time - <AUTHOR> http://hnlive.cf <comment><USER2> Not really "real time". See [2] (quoted below).

`function update() { $("#live").load("/get_links/hot"); } setInterval(update, 10000);update();`

Polling per se is ok but you should do it on the server and push to the client through web sockets or server-sent events [1].

Refs:

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server- sent...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server- sent_events/Using_server-sent_events)

[2] [https://github.com/Max00355/HNLive/blob/master/templates/new...](https://github.com/Max00355/HNLive/blob/master/templates/newest.html#L8)

<comment><USER3> Especially when there's a fancy fully-real-time API provided for free by firebase. Not that it's the most efficient way to query all the top stories, but there's plenty that can be done with it.

[https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories](https://hacker- news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories)

<comment><USER4> when I wrote hnwatch last year, there were some "issues" with the firebase feed, but for the most part the firebaseio goods are in fact realtime.

<comment><USER5> It works pretty well, but there are still some "issues" you need to deal with:

\- Items for users with a delay configured get posted to the API before their content is made available (if you go to the story id on HN proper, there's a __* placeholder)

\- The odd item will come back as `null` from the API for a while

As long as you deal going from not having content for an item to having content in an update, the API usually corrects itself eventually.

Here are live feeds of new stories and comments from the Firebase API in the client I wrote when it was announced:

[http://insin.github.io/react-hn/#/newest](http://insin.github.io/react- hn/#/newest)

[http://insin.github.io/react-hn/#/newcomments](http://insin.github.io/react- hn/#/newcomments)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Look at [http://www.hckrnews.com/](http://www.hckrnews.com/) It does about the same thing. It is instructive to compare the two and understand one is more usable than the other.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hi there I found a character rendering issue.

HN front page: "Why do people keep coming to this couple's home ..."

HNLive front page: "Why do people keep coming to this couple's home ..."

<comment><USER8> If anyone is curious, this is a UTF-8 encoding error as HN automatically coverts normal quotes to smart quotes. Makes things annoying when scraping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Suggestion: add links of comments. Many people like reading comments at Hacker News. Users have to open the original HN home page to open comments.

btw, I created another HN web client: Hacker News Room [http://hackernewsroom.com](http://hackernewsroom.com)

</comment><comment><USER10> This guys submission history is littered with this thing.

</comment><comment><USER11> With HN data being provided by Firebase, why not leverage the realtime capabilities their service provides?

</comment><comment><USER12> I guess everybody has it's own clone. With Firebase opening up the dat, it's quite trivial to build your own Here is my version: [https://hnews.xyz/#/](https://hnews.xyz/#/) It grabs the preview of the landing pages so you kind of know what you are getting into

</comment><comment><USER13> Nice. This would be good as part of a dashboard on a second monitor.

Request: I'd love to see domain names included. Submitter usernames would also be nice as long as it doesn't make it too cluttered.

Edit: I'd really like to be able to click through to the comments page as well. Speaking of which, are you sure those comment figures are correct?

</comment><comment><USER14> This is great. When I go to the new page, one of the first things I look for is articles where a conversation is just starting. This makes it really easy to see which submissions are starting to get some attention.

</comment><comment><USER15> Seems like the points and comments numbers are often inaccurate. Sometimes they're right but other times way off. Any idea what's happening there?

</comment><comment><USER16> Neat. Another issue along with the others mentioned is something is probably wrong with the text encoding. Some punctuation is displayed incorrectly.

</comment><comment><USER17> Typo: hacker hews (right in the subtitle)

</comment><comment><USER18> What can you tell us about the stack powering this?

It's gunicorn; I was hoping to see hendrix. :-)

How are you doing the push?

<comment><USER19> It seems to be a jQuery bit of code querying the api every 10 seconds.

No push or anything of the sort, so that's a bit of a shame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have the same in my FB being subscribed to their facebook page.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the most innovative technologies for fighting wildfires? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> There is one thing I'm always thinking about: a mesh network of autonomous devices that scattered across a field or a forest and a base nearby. These devices can have temperature sensors and someone can rather quickly see that something is going wrong either by temperature or if some amount of devices went down (say burnt in fire). I think those things called sensor networks or something like this.

<comment><USER3> I am not sure how can this scale up, if a sensor can cover X square meters then you need a LOT of them to cover huge forests like Sweden has for example, not to mention the amount of bases, communication channels etc.

<comment><USER4> If it's on a tower on the peak of a hill, the coverage might be measurable in miles. That's the case with fire towers today. But yeah, even then scaling could be difficult. It might work for realtively smaller, more developed areas prone to fires, such as parts of CA. Maybe put them on existing cell towers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Fighting or detecting ? I think that the most efficient way of detection is by covering a lot of area at once and satellites are best for that, I see that there are multiple efforts being done around automatic real time detection and alerting of forest fires from above.

</comment><comment><USER5> Aerial drones with thermal imaging cameras to predict where wild fires will occur.

[https://apnews.com/3546526d7ce34881a92df0688268e3a4](https://apnews.com/3546526d7ce34881a92df0688268e3a4)

</comment><comment><USER6> Regular intentional Burns.</comment>


Deep Beneath Your Feet, They Live in the Octillions - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/science/subsurface-microbes.html <comment><USER2> Doesn't even have to be deep beneath your feet, a square meter of average soil contains thousands of _species_.

In that square meter you can have 10,000,000,000 baceria, 1,000,000,000 protozoa, 5,000,000 nematodes, 100,000 mites 10,000-200,000 individual Collembola, 10,000 rotifiers and/or tardigrades, a few thousand larger insects/spiders/diplurans and dozens of slugs & snails. That's within a few inches of the surface. A cubic meter would increase that considerably for stuff like bacteria and protozoa.

This is my biggest issue with terraforming another planet. It isn't the massive geo-engineering, it's adding all of that biodiversity and spreading it over a regional or global scale... even transplanting an initial acre would be a daunting task.

<comment><USER3> maybe a _natural_ square meter of average soil.. think of the micro-plastics, hard chemicals and decaying man-made materials and _their_ prevalence.. quite a mess I would think

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was surprised to recently read that there are bacteria and archea living inside oil wells.

[https://www.slb.com/~/media/Files/resources/oilfield_review/...](https://www.slb.com/~/media/Files/resources/oilfield_review/ors89/jan89/4_bacteria.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of the Deep Hot Biosphere theory by the brilliant and controversial Thomas Gold. Posited as early as 1992 this theory states that microbial life is very prevalent at great depth and that it may be responsible for the production of hydrocarbons. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold)

<comment><USER6> I remember reading this at the time and finding it quite persuasive. I would love to find out how it fares compared to current scientific consensus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://outline.com/3HbVpd](https://outline.com/3HbVpd)</comment>


Jon Stewart: Lower entrepreneurial risk - <AUTHOR> http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/jon-stewart-proposes-an-entrepreneurial-policy-dont-laugh/ <comment><USER4> Countries with much broader safety nets for entrepreneurs are not producing the risky innovative companies that America is. But, as far as I can tell, health insurance really is the biggest factor keeping people from starting new companies.

For myself and my peers, with new families and houses and student debt, etc., it's the _one thing_ that scares us more than anything else. The prospect of a business going under is nowhere near as terrifying of getting caught off guard without health insurance. It's positively paralyzing, knowing that it is something that could be essentially impossible to recover from, unlike simply writing off a failed venture. Hopefully the Affordable Care Act will mitigate some of that.

<comment><USER5> _Countries with much broader safety nets for entrepreneurs are not producing the risky innovative companies that America is._

Could this be because countries with broader safety nets also have more regulation and make it hard to fire people?

I've always kind of thought a combination of making it easy to hire people and let them go, along with strong safety nets (ie, good unemployment insurance and not having health care tied to employment) would be optimal.

<comment><USER6> Denmark has been moving in that direction. Its overall level of safety nets, taxation, infrastructure spending, etc. is _much_ higher than in the U.S. (tax revenues about 2x as high, as a percentage of GDP). But in some ways it's actually more privatized: for example, the bus system in Copenhagen is bid out to private corporations to operate. The government comes up with the fares, set of routes, etc., and then the corporations bid on how much subsidy they'd need to operate under the specified parameters (Movia won the current contract). Whereas, most American transit systems are operated by city or state employees.

And: it's fairly easy to fire someone, certainly easier than in most of the rest of Europe. The compensating factor is that the social safety net for the person who gets fired is also quite good, and not just in monetary benefits, but in active assistance to help them find a new job (both through job banks and training/internship programs). Incidentally, _that_ is also outsourced, with a number of private (though subsidized and nonprofit) "a-kasse" social- insurance organizations competing for members. I'm a member of one that specializes in researchers, for example. If I become unemployed, for the first two years I would deal with them, not with the state. That tends to lead to people joining the organizations that they feel will provide the best job- finding assistance. Some element of competition is introduced, since a totally useless a-kasse would (hopefully) see an outflux of members.

<comment><USER7> Denmark has a reputation for being the most flexible job market in northern europe. I wonder if this strategy has payed dividends basedon your experience

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> OK, so, I am ardently socially liberal, and I've had a man-crush on Jon Stewart that hasn't waned ever since his appearance on Crossfire.

 _But._

I don't think that decreasing risk will result in more entrepreneurship.

I would support a wider social safety net for entrepreneurs -- er, business owners -- on principle alone, because I think what we _should_ be saying is that these people are vitally important to our economy and to our nation's future, just as much as larger enterprise is, and we should support that.

But the thing is, most people don't want to run their own business no matter how safe you make it. I've spent the last few years encouraging people around me to start or run or improve their businesses, but so many of them just want to be a professional in their field; they don't want to deal with all of the other aspects of running a business.

So don't lower entrepreneurial risk because you think it will open more businesses, because you think that the guy with a good paying job and some savings is worried about his health insurance. If he (or she!) wants to open or run a business, he (or she!) will do that regardless. It's one of the few probably universal aspects of entrepreneurship that the people who will do well at it aren't really happy working for other people anyway, they have this itch that they can't scratch unless they strike out on their own, risks or not.

But _do_ lower entrepreneurial risk because you recognize the value of entrepreneurs and you want to make sure that small business owners with families can still get good health care and dental care and afford a modest living.

<comment><USER9> I agree that starting a business isn't for everyone. I'm doubtful that I would enjoy it, but I would like to be an early employee at a company. If that company can't afford health coverage, then I can't take that risk for my family.

It just baffles me that health coverage is so tied to where you work. What if you could only send your kids to the schools that your employer selected, or eat at the restaurants the your company had a deal with? It's just weird. I don't know if government provided insurance is the solution, but employer provided just doesn't make sense as the only solution.

<comment><USER10> What I think would be a better solution that could fit in everyone's worldview (those that want a more socialized health care system and those who don't want a powerful federal government) is to have cities provide a public health insurance option that a person or business could buy into.

I think that the risk pool would be large and the members would be local (thus giving more rights to local communities rather than the federal government).

I think it could then encourage cities to be more healthy cities (less pollution, more activities for locals, encourage walking/biking rather than driving) in order to drive down health care costs for their citizens. Being a healthier city would then encourage people to move to there thus increasing the risk pool.

Citizens wouldn't be required to purchase through them but the plans could still be managed by private companies like Aetna, Cigna, etc. so that the plans could be used when local citizens travel to other parts of the country.

<comment><USER11> _have cities provide a public health insurance option that a person or business could buy into._

That only works if _all_ cities have plans, otherwise you can find yourself trapped staying in a city that same way that one might find himself trapper working for an employer.

<comment><USER10> Good point! I guess I was looking at it as an advantage and other cities would start their own program to compete just like employers do today. I just figured people tend to not move geographically as much as they change jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is the essence of the Peltzman Effect ([http://www.angrybearblog.com/2012/01/peltzman-effect-why- eco...](http://www.angrybearblog.com/2012/01/peltzman-effect-why-economic- growth-has.html) and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation>)

"Risk compensation (also Peltzman effect, risk homeostasis) is an observed effect in ethology whereby people tend to adjust their behavior in response to perceived level of risk, behaving less cautiously where they feel more protected and more cautiously where they feel a higher level of risk. The theory emerged out of road safety research after it was observed that many interventions failed to achieve the expected level of benefits but has since found application in many other fields."

<comment><USER13> The industry joke at the time this research came out was that if the regulators were serious about auto safety they should mandate a sharp dagger sticking out from the steering wheel aim directly at the driver's chest. People would drive _very_ carefully!

<comment><USER14> If you did that some people would regard the dagger as the perfect place to attach their mobile phone on long journeys.

<comment><USER15> You know, this is why I keep coming back to hn ..even the comedy is mindblowing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The US already has the most lenient bankruptcy law in the world. It already has the highest "social tolerance" for entrepreneurial failure.

I'm in great health, and young, so I'm not worried about saving for retirement (yet). But starting a company is still really damned hard. It's years of hard work, too much time at the office, too much time away from friends and family. Too much fear that tomorrow no customers will show up, or they'll go to your competitors or you'll find our your DB backups don't work and you have to go out of business. It's fear that you're not managing employees correctly, or not hiring the right people, or not prioritizing the right things.

The government can't make any of those things go away. And the only issue it could help is money, which has terrible downsides to go along with it.

<comment><USER17> Speaking of bankruptcy laws, I wonder how the ballooning student debt (which cannot be dismissed through bankruptcy) plays into that.

Anecdotal, but, did (m)any people here on HN graduate and then start a business while still in debt with student loans?

<comment><USER18> I started a business with a ton of student loans (almost 6 figures). I actually took out an extra student loan I didn't need and put it into Apple stock, using the gains to last another two months. And then I went into credit card debt.

I don't recommend doing all that. You can put away $20k pretty easily working in the Valley. That would be much less stressful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One of the key comments made by Jon Stewart:

 _What we need to do in this country is make it a softer cushion for failure. Because what they say is the job creators need more tax cuts and they need a bigger payoff on the risk that they take. … But what about the risk of, you're afraid to leave your job and be an entrepreneur because that's where your health insurance is? … Why aren't we able to sell this idea that you don't have to amplify the payoff of risk to gain success in this country, you need to soften the damage of risk?_

</comment><comment><USER20> Without some kind of medical safety net, quitting your job to start a business becomes the luxury exclusive to the really healthy, the single, the really rich or the really lucky.

If you have any kind of condition that requires continuous oversight, you're screwed unless you have a ton of money saved up to afford a very expensive insurance plan.

If you're initially healthy, but suddenly get seriously ill, you might be set back by 7-10 grand before your cheapo $100/mo insurance plan kicks in. Even then you might still have to fight against the insurance company to have the necessary care approved and covered. You might hit the limits of your coverage.

If you have a family, you better hope that your spouse's job provides you with a comprehensive family-wide coverage, otherwise you'll have to deal with the exorbitant costs of insurance.

It's clearly sub-optimal, but the conservative side will often argue in favor of this system. I've (anecdotally) been told that if we provide everybody with universal health care then the masses will all start shooting up heroin all day and we, the hard working citizens, will have to foot the bill.

<comment><USER21> Or the very poor or old who quality for Medicare/Medicaid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have to respectfully go against the crowd here and disagree.

When you're leaving your job to start a business, the assumption is that you have _some_ money saved. You're guaranteed not to be turning profit for a certain period of time. Depending on how lucky and how good you/your idea are, that could be anywhere from a month to a year or two.

Not having government health insurance just means you'll have to get your own. I am speaking here from experience: I quit my job, posted about it on HN, bought myself health insurance, and started my own software company.

How much did the health insurance cost me? 200 dollars a month. (Edit: yes, this is in the USA. IL to be exact.)

Yes, 200 dollars is not nothing. Yes, it would be nice to not have to pay that. But then again, I'm paying 1200 for my apartment, 80 for my cellphone, 80 for electricity, and I'm sure I can come up with some other monthly obligations that I have. Health insurance is maybe ~10% of my "maintenance costs" that I can't avoid.

Why aren't we arguing that the government should provide apartments for everyone so they don't have to worry about finding a place to live when they take the risk of leaving their jobs? Or require special restaurants that are publicly funded so that you don't have to worry about that, either?

I know a lot of people will take issue with this, but, keep in mind, I am _not_ saying I'm against government health insurance. I'm saying that _this_ isn't a very good reason for it. Going off on your own is and always will be a risky situation, unless you're already independently wealthy. By definition, it involves giving up a cushy job and steady pay for the _chance_ of striking it rich on your own or (as in my case) doing what you love. That's the nature of the beast, and that's why we have both entrepreneurs and employees.

<comment><USER23> Hi. I am an entrepreneur, and like you, I sought out my own health insurance. Where I differ from you: 1) I am female. 2) I have a prescription for birth control.

Currently, my birth control prescription is through Planned Parenthood, and it's cost me about $25/month for many years.

When I applied for my own health insurance, they asked me to list any prescription drugs I took. Even though I get checkups and my birth control prescription from Planned Parenthood, I dutifully listed it in the form (knowing, too, that lying about this might cause me to get disqualified if I claimed something later.)

I received a letter from the insurance company that I had been declined for insurance. Reason? Prescription medication. This was the _only_ prescription I was on at the time. Yes, apparently the fact that I have a prescription for birth control makes it worth it for a health insurance company to not insure me. This is _completely legal_ for any insurance carrier to do in the United States if you are a single person applying for insurance. And guess what? Once you've been declined for single-person health insurance for any reason, you're pretty much screwed.

I don't know what the solution is, and I don't think our government got it 100% right when they passed different laws recently. But I also know that something is not right when I can get declined for health insurance for being on birth control (that the insurance company would not have even had to pay for anyway.)

The system is broken, and you are the exception. Let us hope that you never have a spouse who would like to be on birth control, or that you never have to take a prescription drug for any reason for any length of time.

<comment><USER22> I take some prescription allergy pills. Probably cost the same as your birth control medication.

The catch? I signed up over the phone. I made sure to stress how I won't be going through the insurance for these, how it won't be a cost for them. A human on the other end of the line - no matter how dedicated he is to finding a reason to say no - is better than a soulless piece of paper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I absolutely support this. I think a lot more experienced people would do startups if they didn't have to risk their families' health in the process. And I think there is a lot of benefit to experienced people doing startups versus young kids who can tolerate the risk because they have little to lose.

</comment><comment><USER25> A lot of people are talking in terms of "leaving" their jobs to start businesses.

For me, it's the opposite. I am considering leaving my business to get a job.

Why? Healthcare and retirement.

So I agree with the article. If we had universal healthcare, I don't think I would ever consider leaving my business.

</comment><comment><USER26> I agree entirely. I'm only one data point but I've only been able to get as far as I have in business because of the good graces of the Australian tax, welfare and health system.

Perhaps this is why the model for entrepreneurship in the US is so heavily geared towards huge, VC funded worldbeaters with far less "mircopreneurship" - a trait of the Australian economy that is said to be a mainstay of economic resilience.

</comment><comment><USER27> or we could remove the tax break for employers that provide health insurance. If health insurance was tied to the individual it would stay with them in between jobs. You could also find plans with lower premiums and higher deductibles/less coverage if there was a market for insurance.

<comment><USER28> A thousand times this. We've distanced the individual from the costs associated with all things medical and, in so doing, have removed a lot of the power of having a free market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Jon just nailed the problem in the head: frankly I'm tired of hearing rich kids talking about _how easy_ it is just to leave everything you are doing and make a startup, and to add insult to injury the new buzzword is to say that you don't even need an idea.

Yeah sure you can leave your job or college and just start throwing darts at post-its to come up with an app idea if you have a rich dad who is willing to bankroll your adventure in the Bay Area. You need at least $36k a year just to rent a decent flat in that place, some families, not just people but actual families, live on less than that in this country.

I had friends on highschool who had tremendous hacker potential, but they also had problems, REAL problems like bad health and a poor family. Most of them are quite happy right now working for the evil corporations that pay them those $75k a year salaries that the rich kids laugh at. They depend on company healthcare and can't even dream to let that and their paychecks go just to give startups a try.

And that is just one side of the problem, the other is the facade of equal opportunities in startups, the idea that everyone applying to YC or other incubators is in the same level.

The social network movie made a lot of generic hacker culture statements but it forgot to mention that the zuck had a private programming tutor paid by his parents. Seriously, how many of you here had parents who could afford that? I tried to hire a Java tutor when I was in highschool and it was incredibly expensive, more than hiring several tutors for most of my school subjects.

I have met entrepreneurs with amazing companies that didn't get into YC, yet the guys from diaspora, the same guys who burned through a quarter of a million and did next to nothing, they got in, and with what? a meme app, because that's important, another memegenerator clone.

I'm using a throwaway account because I know this is going to be downvoted to hell, many of these rich kids make an overwhelming clique in HN and other sites, and they don't like when it when someone speaks up and shatters their BS.

The irony here is that this country is fast becoming like the third world hellholes that immigrant entrepreneurs where escaping from. The stories you hear from those places are becoming eerily familiar: a guy from South America told me how over there all entrepreneurs are rich kids, legacies from generations of crony capitalism and favoritism. Practically none are coders or hustlers, they get their parents to bankroll a clone a cookie-cutter startup and take advantage of the wage slave condition of engineers over there, after all what are those poor souls going to do? they can't afford to make a startup and don't have any connections to investors, so what is left for them? get a visa and come here? nice try...

And that is what America is becoming, a place not of opportunity but of class lockdown, social mobility is at an all-time low and everywhere you hear pundits whose idea of equality in America is actually that of Sweden's, which ironically is a socialist country.

But go ahead, keep believing we are all in the same league, by all means try to defeat my point by saying how you _help_ other less fortunate entrepreneurs with your link-bait blog full of empty advice, keep saying that all of us who are not in the same position than you are a bunch of envious and resentful pricks, or that you are where you are right now because you worked for it when actually you are where you are right now because you were half the way ahead to being with.

</comment><comment><USER30> This addresses a larger issue, but the specifics discussed hit home with me. I started my company several months ago and lost my health insurance. After paying into the system for the last 8 years, I feel like I've just been giving my money away. I had always been under the impression that I could never be denied for insurance if I had an existing policy but obviously that was misguided.

I'm overweight, I'm a smoker, and I have high blood pressure. Starting a company could literally kill me (on top of aforementioned dumb decisions). The rich used to pay 90% taxes and we still had Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Morgan.

<comment><USER31> No... Those folks had no income tax. Income tax came later.

The 90% bracket was extremely high when it existed and snared very few people.

<comment><USER32> Could you elaborate? The 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913 and from what I can tell the top marginal rate was in the 90s until 1964...

[http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...](http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=213)

<comment><USER31> The 3 billionaires mentioned were pre-1913. Morgan might have had a little bit of overlap.

The 90% tax rate was indeed in effect but very few people fell victim to it: [http://almostclassical.blogspot.com/2011/03/90-tax-rate- myth...](http://almostclassical.blogspot.com/2011/03/90-tax-rate-myth.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Great Scott! It's just crazy enough it might just work!

I've always felt that America's psyche is evolving us to a "Everybody's a CEO." mentality. With the introduction of 401K we upped the risk taking, driving white collar workers into consulting away from full time employment with benefits of incorporating, tax benefits of corporations, preferential tax treatment of capital gains vs salaries. These are all incentives to create your own corporation over being a salaried employee, but they all involve taking more risk. We are rewarding risk more and more while devaluing safety. Not passing judgement per se, but making an observation that America might be interested in this if they understood it. And that America might need this anyway because we are pushing more people into accepting the risk without their choice. (see 401K as an example).

Another side benefit to this is it might drive up competition for workers because more people might be interested in working for smaller companies because benefits are more equalized. Driving competition for workers means higher salaries too on a whole as they compete for the talent. That's the real societal benefit.

Now, if I could just figure out a way to pay myself entirely in dividends over a salary I think they might give me an honorary 1%'er membership. :-)

But on the other hand. All I know is that it won't be that much fun when everyone is doing it. It never is.

</comment><comment><USER34> We can pretty clearly see that lowering risk is increasing the number of software startups. You can see a pretty clear micro example of this just by looking at YC applications.

The number of YC Applicants has increased as the risk of doing YC has gone down.

When someone going into YC had an expected outcome of basically $25000, less people were willing to leave jobs to go start companies. Think about pre 2009 YCombinator.

Now consider post 2009 Ycombinator.

As the process became less risky: more guaranteed capital (the Ron Conway, Yuri Milner portfolio strategy), and more Acquahires. The value of the average company went up, the downsides went down, and the risk to starting a company went down. Thus, more people were willing to apply to YC, and Paul and the YC partners were able to accept more companies.

You could probably argue that this was a function of the popularity of YC. I believe that founders are rational, and the popularity of YC again decreased their risk. How many founders do not quit their jobs until they get into YC? (many)

This is a separate argument from whether or not we need government healthcare, but I think it's pretty clear that risk evaluation is absolutely part of being an entrepreneur.

(As an aside, dealing with healthcare is just one of many things that we as founders have to do that provides very little net benefit to our business. The less of this BS we have to do, the better we will deploy capital and the more focused we will be on important problems)

</comment><comment><USER35> So sad that in the US people like him host comedy shows.

<comment><USER15> I don't know what you are talking about. The Daily Show is not comedy. Its where everybody under the age of 30 gets the news from. Fox News - now that's comedy. Seriously, they crack me up. And if you want tragedy, there's always MSNBC. CNN - I don't know what that is - maybe comedians trying their hand at tragedy. You see their chief mascot Anderson Cooper standing knee deep in flood water, or being blown around by stormy winds, or sweating it out in tropical weather, and seriously wonder about his health and well being.

<comment><USER36> [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2005632/Jon- Stewart-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2005632/Jon-Stewart- loses-cool-Fox-News-host-Chris-Wallace-You-insane.html)

Mr Stewart erupted: 'You're insane... Here's the difference between you and I.

'I'm a comedian first. My comedy is informed by an ideological background, there's no question about that.

Stewart has a large audience, and he's feeding people his brand of BS. With such a large viewership, he has a great responsiblity but he is acting as if he doesn't. He cops out by saying "I'm just a comedian"

The suggestion of a "social safety net" for entrepreneurs can only come from such a man who doesn't take on responsibility and who isn't an entrepreneur.

A real entrepreneur starts a company, takes responsibility for it, and assumes the risks. Putting up a safety net for this will just tax middle-class families that much more, and make it even harder for someone to start up a company and be dedicated to it.

<comment><USER37> This seems an ad hominem argument.

I am a real entrepreneur with a real company taking on real risk... and I absolutely believe healthcare is a _huge_ problem for entrepreneurs. Providing health coverage for early employees is very expensive for a startup. The alternative of not offering coverage greatly restricts your hiring pool in a way that is unacceptable. And, IMHO, it's often unfair to the people you do hire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Consider the organizational qualities that create successful startups: agility, speed and clear vision. Entrepreneurs live and die by efficiency and effectiveness. This is the exact opposite of what government programs give us. Believing that any government initiative will enable entrepreneurship is naive. Founders relying on a government cushion to lower risk will be inviting unnecessary encumbrance.

Government programs across the board, from corporate tax credits to welfare programs are universally gamed. Creating a government net to catch failing entrepreneurs will only increase the cost of doing business, while slowing down the pace of entrepreneurship.

Is the goal here to promote new businesses, or is that just an excuse to push for socialized health care? If the goal is provide health care, then the best option is to lower the barrier of entry for new businesses in the health field, whether insurance providers, healthcare practitioners or pharmaceutical companies. This is another topic, but there are many safe and legitimate ways to do this by cutting out corruption and waste.

<comment><USER39> If government programs are so inefficient, why is U.S. healthcare the most expensive per capita in the world? I just don't buy the argument that governments do everything terribly.

<comment><USER38> Government inefficiency is the cause of unreasonable expense of U.S. healthcare.

<comment><USER39> But all the other healthcare systems, which are cheaper, have equal or far higher levels of government intervention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think that this would result in hundreds of thousands of bad ideas hitting the marketplace and then the government having to bail out all of the crap that didn't succeed. Risk is there for a reason, it's to stop you from doing something stupid, to make you think twice about the decision you're about to make. I don't believe that we need government to bail out risk takers... not with the amount of national debt that we already have.

You know what happend the last time there was no risk? Banks lended out sub- prime mortgages to just about anyone with a job that walked in the door. You know why they were able to do this? Because those sub-prime loans where bundled up and then sold off to investment banks which then packaged them as mortgage-backed securities. We all know how that one turned out... Risk is a necessary part of life, we need to accept it.

<comment><USER41> I do agree that risk is essential and ought to be accepted. After all, I think I am more defined by my failures than anything else. But that deviates from the main discussion.

I think the main discussion revolves around healthcare, or the lack of healthcare for start-ups. It is one thing to take risk yourself, but it is another to jeopardize your family's health services. I think that's the main arguments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think it's a fair point.

But - what problem are we solving? Do we think there are too few entrepreneurs, and this will help create more? How many is enough, and how much should we spend to create them?

The problem Stewart seems to be solving is that he'd prefer to remove ammunition from his opponents' argument, which isn't an actual problem.

</comment><comment><USER43> I started my own business right out of school. As a result, I better be damn successful considering I have a lot of student loan debt to mop up. I have wondered, why not offer advantages in these situations to people who start businesses (say a window of ~6-12 months after graduation)? Either some sort of tax break or little to no interest rate on my debt would be handy.

Another big one is health insurance. I've been swimming in open waters without insurance for about a year now. The only plans that I can get are abysmal with 5k plus deductibles (please direct me to a better deal if I'm being naive and something exists).

Even though I've taken the leap to build a business ahead of my peers, I'm getting the crap end of the stick.

Does seem a bit unbalanced.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's interesting when I lived in the US it was surprising how many of my coworkers on their early twenties were averse to risk... they wouldn't start a new business venture and their reasons were: \- I have student loans \- I need health insurance \- I need to build a foundation so that my kids can go to college. \- After the economic crisis, it isn't worth it....

But living in a contry were: \- You don't have student debt \- Your health services are warranted \- Your kids can go to college and even great colleges for free...

Makes being an Entrepreneur SO much easy... that you wouldn't believe.

<comment><USER43> What country are you located in?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> We'll the USA already has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Maybe if they were paying less in taxes, startups would have more money for health insurance for their employees?

All entrepreneurs know that they can get better employee retention with health care policy. If companies could afford it, then would there not be a higher incentive to provide it?

That being said, I believe national health insurance is a good idea. Assuming government spending is significantly restricted in other areas.

<comment><USER46> Startups don't forgo health insurance because it's expensive, they forgo it because purchasing health insurance is a gigantic, time-consuming pain in the ass.

<comment><USER47> To be fair, it is damn expensive.

The BLS lists benefits as roughly 30% of total compensation[1]. Much of that goes to healthcare.

So for a developer earning $100k in total compensation (say $70k salary, $30k benefits), healthcare costs for that one employee might be $25k+. Providing a _good_ policy for employees (and their families) is expensive. Worth it to care for the team, but still expensive.

To the people skipping coverage in the US: it's stupid and not worth the risk. You may be healthy, but you cannot control everything that impacts your health. Infectous disease happens. Car crashes happen. Skipping coverage is playing Russian roulette.

That said, I'm young and am fortunate to still be covered under the policy of my parents. Perhaps the college years and shortly after are best for trying a startup--while family coverage is still in effect. Then, or after you're married to someone and are under his or her policy.

1\. <http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/eci.pdf>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I would love to quit my current day job and work on my business full time if I could be guaranteed health insurance. When I graduated, more than anything I wanted a job with good health care. I could not risk joining a company that would drop me or not cover me if I got some major health problem. So I got a job with not the highest income but a very low likelihood of losing health insurance...state government.

</comment><comment><USER49> Humans are complacent and humans are risk-averse. Increasing reward and decreasing risk play to different aspects of human nature.

<comment><USER50> True but that doesn't mean there is no place for those who just want to build a small business without having to sacrifice their personal life to it. Decreasing risk is also beneficial to society at large if a larger portion of people are allowed to build businesses that provide jobs.

There is also the thought that lowering the personal risk to you and your family allows you to take more chances with your business ideas and become more innovative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> FYI if you live in San Francisco and make less than 54k a year you can get Healthy San Francisco (<http://www.healthysanfrancisco.org/>). It can be free depending on how much you're making. When I had a startup I broke my arm and had to get surgery, it was only $100 bucks.

</comment><comment><USER52> The funny thing is, you can lower entrepreneurial risk _without_ lowering the rewards, at least in this case.

The US is by far the most wasteful healthcare spender in the world, with vast amounts of money producing very mediocre outcomes. But as we saw, the political will is barely there, perhaps in another decade or two.

<comment><USER53> > The US is by far the most wasteful healthcare spender in the world, with > vast amounts of money producing very mediocre outcomes.

I'm a proponent of free/social healthcare but do those results stack up if you look at where the spending goes? What I mean is do 40% spend 80% of that money and get the best healthcare in the world and the 20% spent on the other 60% of the people buy poor enough healthcare to bring the stats down?

I also get the impression that doctor's salaries are high and that might need to be factored in to the cost comparison (e.g. do the healthcare spend comparison in units of doctor's salary.

US doctor's salaries may be necessary incentive to get them to take on US scale student debts for the duration of the medical degree, I'm not saying that they are necessarily greedy but that unless doctors can be cheaper it may not be possible to spend the same and get equal medical outcomes as other countries.

It might take more than political will, outcomes may decline for the best off and doctor's pay may have to fall for the same spend to get world class results for the same money. I would still be a proponent of such a system if all people could be treated humanely, not bankrupted for injury/illness even for some reduction in quality of care for the currently well covered.

*All numbers are examples. Lawsuit costs are also often cited as a reason for the high overall costs so that may be fixable to some extent although other forms of regulation and safety net's for victims may be required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Better social nets probably would create much higher wages as employees think "screw this I'm gonna at least try it on my own", so companies have to up the ante.

But I don't see more entrepreneurs turning into economic growth. That takes a specific, rare entrepreneur that focuses on building growth, rather than replacing a paycheck.

On the flip side, I don't see less taxes becoming economic growth either. Taxes have to be pretty damn high to change your operations. The amounts usually talked about are not going to cause a company to say "hey let's build a new product".

The question should be "what's preventing companies from growing" instead of this class warfare framework. In the US, I see big companies being limited from growth by their own C-level executives' eye on their stock take - <USER2> makes no sense until you realize the amount of money they can gain from short term manipulation. But I see more of a problem due to bad skill sets - <USER3> many people have the wrong set of skills. A retail store clerk is not going to help anyone grow these days.

</comment><comment><USER55> for the Canucks:

[http://www.thecomedynetwork.ca/shows/thedailyshow?videoPacka...](http://www.thecomedynetwork.ca/shows/thedailyshow?videoPackage=123198)

</comment><comment><USER36> who is going to provide this safety net?

</comment><comment><USER56> The risks that exist today "weed out" failures before they ever exist (failures are very expensive/bad for the economy). Most people realize that they do not have a good enough concept, enough time/dedication/work ethic lack a high level of life/business/leadership/social skills/self confidence.I could go on and on here.

If people have little/no risk to follow a venture, we will see a lot more people quitting their 9-5s and starting garbage businesses.

HMM - This sounds a lot like people getting home mortgages who have no business getting them... I know that John was a big fan of the affordable housing act as well.

Why does John Stewart stop there? why not lower entrepreneurial risk even more and guarantee that if someones startup business fails that they get money to live on from the govt for the next 18 months? Oh wait we already have that (unemployment)

How about I become a full time entrepreneur then? I could probably make more money per year starting failed business after failed business. I have money to live on and free health care so why not? This sounds great for the economy. This Stewart guy is sure a genius!!!</comment>


The Science Gap - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzcMEwAxSP8

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if there is a place for startup working on cartooning major science discoveries. A cost of such visualization seems very low comparing to amount of important academic grants so it could be considered a reasonable marketing expense for scientists.</comment>


Ask HN: Discounting Salaries for Remote Developers? - <AUTHOR> Is it fair for a company to lower salary for a remote developer based on their local cost of living? <comment><USER2> Cost of living can vary considerably even within commuting distance of the company. Would a company pay more to a non-remote employee who lives in an expensive neighborhood than to one who lives in a poor neighborhood? If not, why should they do this for remote employees?

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends on who you ask. But really, "fair" isn't the question.

The real question is: Will companies do it and will (some) employees accept it? Yes.

If you're a remote employee should you negotiate hard with a company that tries to do this? Yes.</comment>


Why I Only Take Uber and Lyft, and Refuse to Get into Another Taxi - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/mannu-s-tech-stories/why-i-only-take-uber-lyft-and-refuse-to-get-into-another-cab-e469fdbb8731#.6qnqqqbzz <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10926077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10926077)</comment>


The circumflex: a battle over an accent mark - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160215-the-circumflex-a-battle-over-an-accent-mark <comment><USER2> As an Italian living in France, I've noticed a pattern: several times, a circumflex in French corresponds to an "S" lost from its Latin origin.

Examples:

FR "coût" \- EN "cost" \- IT "costo" \- LAT "constare"

FR "crêpe" \- EN "crêpe" \- IT "crespella" \- LAT "crispus"

FR "tôt" \- EN "soon" \- IT "tosto" \- LAT "tostus"

FR "château" \- EN "castle" \- IT "castello" \- LAT "castellum"

<comment><USER3> (As an Italian who has lived in France, but is now fortunately back to our sunny shores ;) ). I'm pretty sure it's something most people are taught in school when learning French. Notice that it's not just S. For example mûr is mature, so it's a whole syllable there.

There is a whole discipline called phonétique historique and all future high school French teacher have to learn it (at least the ones that pass the Agrégation), which basically tells the story of how words have transformed from their Latin to their French pronunciation. Unfortunately the approach that is taught is not rigorously scientific and you get to learn just a bunch of rules of thumb.

<comment><USER2> > most people are taught in school when learning French

You probably mean: when learning French _in Italy_. If you learn it in France, there is usually no comparison with Italian or Latin, so this specific pattern is just lost.

<comment><USER4> I don't know what the parent meant, but I can assure you that in France you're (usually) taught that the ^ stands for a lost letter -- it's what helps remember where to put the accent.

<comment><USER2> Well, I meant: when you learn French in France _as a stranger_, they don't talk about the history of the language, thus the concept of a lost letter doesn't stand.

<comment><USER5> Such courses tend to be very utilitarian, and not go into a language's history much. Although I guess it might actually be helpful to know while learning French as an Italian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > it suggested to remove the circumflex from above the letters 'i' and 'u' > where the accent does not change the pronunciation nor the meaning of the > word, as in 'paraître' (to appear) or 'coût' (cost).

Looks like it's a functional change. I'm a spanish speaker, and would hate to see all the accents go, because they indicate how a word must be pronounced. But we too, have cases which don't indicate anything, and I'd like to see these equally gone.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, I don't remember that the circumflex should signify a change in pronunciation in standard French.

<comment><USER8> Nowadays it's mostly only the case on the letter <e>, where it indicates a pronunciation of /ɛ/.

In the past, when put on a <a> it changed it from /a/ to /ɑ/, however that mostly fell in disuse in most French French dialects and I can only hear the distinction consistently in Canadian French dialects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My name is spelled with an accent circonflexe, imagine my reaction when I learned this :) To further the griping frenchman's cliché, good luck getting me to drop it; The sentimental value, the culture, merde!

<comment><USER10> The accent circonflexe is not going anywhere. They're only dropping it from some words on "u" or "i" where it doesn't bring anything, either for prononciation or to distinguish from a different word.

So it will disappear from "coût" and "paraître" but not from "jeûne" (because "jeune" has a different meaning). It's staying to "e" and "a" (être for example).

Too many people read headlines, not articles. The rumor that the accent circonflexe will be gone completely has spread up because people are too lazy checking the source and just dumbly repeat what they hear.

<comment><USER11> What's funny about that is that most people complaining about the accent circonflexe disappearing already don't use it where it's supposed to be used. They already apply most of the 1990 reform they complain about without knowing it.

<comment><USER12> What evidence do you have that the people that complain about the reform are the same that unconsciously leave away the accent circonflexe? I rather think these two groups are rather disjoint.

<comment><USER11> Empirical evidence. Most people complaining about the "new reform" don't even know it's been around for ~25 years nor what it's really about. Try to ask someone who complained about this reform to write some words like "maitre" or "paraitre", I can almost guarantee you they won't use the circonflexe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hate these kind of imposed spelling reforms. I'd much rather let language evolve naturally.

Dutch has also had a very controversial spelling reform in the 1990s, which changed some very logical spelling rules into very arbitrary ones. I still resist, but I seem to be the only one.

Pannekoek!

<comment><USER14> > imposed spelling reforms It is not imposed at all.

It is a recommendation that was set in 1990, and accept both writing of the words. Why is it coming back in the news? That's a pretty complex question.

<comment><USER2> Because, starting in September 2016, the new ortographe will be taught at school.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a french programmer, since I'm about 12, and expatriate for about 20 years, I learned long ago that:

1) I needed a qwerty keyboard do I don't develop RSI trying to type braces on a french one. 2) I also decided that getting RSI trying to type the accents on a qwerty keyboard was silly.

I thus type french without any accents at all. Sometime the result is funny :-)

<comment><USER16> Similar situation here but I don't have any issue typing all the accents in French on a qwerty keyboard. It's no harder than using proper capitalization.

When I made the switch, it was when I was doing a lot of Perl and I found the French keyboard was _easier_ on the hands than the US one, as the sigils & most operators didn't require any modifier key to be typed—though brackets were another story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sort of tangential, my family is French and I regularly get in touch with them by email. I haven't touched a French keyboard in a long time, so I actually used to know all the ctrl+# combinations for special (i.e. non ASCII 65-90) French characters. I got lazy, it was too cumbersome, so I ended up dropping accents altogether (to the horror of my classical French teacher dad). My emails are completely understandable, but some edge cases can sometimes make it a little bit difficult. Ironically though, while I don't type them, I'm very aware of the accents, and this decision to drop the circumflex rubs me the wrong way, particularly since I've been taught to always be aware of the roots of words (thank you, Dad).

As an aside to this tangent, my family name contains a "ë", "e" with a "tréma", an accent which is used in only a handful of words. Upon moving away from France, the administration I was dealing with tried to input my name in their system, which it broke (reminded of [https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/) here). Since then, I've dropped the accent from my name entirely, which has arguably made things easier in foreign countries. The main issue with dropping the accent is that my name now translates to "toy", and while the pronunciation of my name is the same as the object nowadays, it didn't use to, so dropping the accent means losing a bit of history (including meaning). On the other hand, I noticed that authorities don't care about the accent, at all, not even French ones. My various IDs switched from the version with an accent to the one without, and absolutely nobody picked up on it.

</comment><comment><USER18> These regular changes are one of the most awesome things about French. As the language changes, as all living languages do over time, they change the spelling to match actual usage. Show me a random French word and I may not know what it means, but I do know how to pronounce it, or at least how the Parisians pronounce it.

Compare that with the abomination that is English spelling.

<comment><USER2> > they change the spelling to match actual usage

Unfortunately, as already said, they are not changing it: they are adding an alternative.

> Show me a random French word and I may not know what it means, but I do know > how to pronounce it

Three villages in "Pays de Gex":

Ornex: final "x" is not pronounced, like in standard French.

Challex: final "x" is pronounced.

Moëns: "oë" is pronounced like "wa" in "thwart", as if the dieresis wasn't there.

Btw, tell me a random Italian word and I may not know what it means, but I do know how to write it. Now that's nice, never having to ask: "What's your surname? How do spell it? Where are you from? How do you spell it?".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's pretty silly how people get outraged about the smallest changes in the writing system. In Germany the last real changes were made over 100 years ago (removal of C, Th, etc.). There are so many things where there's no justification to do it the way it's done now. That we write a few words with v instead of f helps nobody. The tons of ways we mark long vocals only confuse. S only being pronounced sh in front of p and t is pretty arbitrary, you use the rule for all consonants and become more similar to the other Germanic languages (e.g. Schweden -> Sweden, schmelzen -> smelzen). You could write ts instead of z, because that's how we actually pronounce it and it would be easier to understand for speakers of other germanic languages (smeltsen).

But no that would be seen as the downfall of our culture or something.

<comment><USER20> What about the reform of the ß and the triple s ?

I have to say that for me as a foreigner with a not-so-good level of German (but who need to use it regularly), that reform was really confusing.

I mean, the triple s, I understand, but the ß, it was hard to know when to put one before, but I find it even harder now ! Also because there are a bunch of words I learned which changed orthography.

To be fair, I never learned the exact reasoning of the new reform, but I would have found more logical to just get rid of it altogether.

<comment><USER12> > I mean, the triple s, I understand, but the ß, it was hard to know when to > put one before, but I find it even harder now

What do you mean with triple s? Triple consonants only occur (and only in the new spelling) if you concatenate a word that ends with two of the consonants with one that begins with the same, as Fluss[-]strecke or Schiff[-]fahrt. Very easy in my opinion.

Much more interesting is the question when to use ss vs ß. Here the new spelling is in my opinion more logical: If the vowel before the ß was short in the old spelling (such as Kuß (kiss)), it is replaced by ss in the new spelling (Kuss). If, on the other hand, in the old spelling the vowel before ß is long (as in Straße (road)), the ß is also used in the new spelling.

So the only remaining question is when to use single s vs. ß in words. Here I openly don't know the exact rules (but people told me there are).

<comment><USER20> Yes, that's what I meant with the triple s, and I do agree it's logical (if you read carefully that's what I was saying, but apparently, it was not clear enough).

As for the ß, I didn't know the exact new rule. At least, there is some logic to it. Now, for a Frenchman, it's not always easy to know when the vowel is short and when it's long, so that's the difficult part ;) (for instance, I would not have thought the a in Straße is long !)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The French are going to get a new standardized keyboard, partly to protect the language. [1]

Would dropping circumflexes help creating a simpler keyboard?

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10805562/france-change- key...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10805562/france-change-keyboard- layout-azerty)

<comment><USER22> No: the accent is only dropped when it doesn't affect pronunciation. When it's used to differentiate between two words, otherwise spelled the same, it stays.

And the reform was deigned 25 years ago, so there is no link between it and the desire to create a simpler keybord.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> As the article mentions, Germany had a big battle around such changes 20 years ago. It has settled down since. Some things in language are pretty arbitrary, and if it's a sufficiently small group of changes, it's probably no big deal to make that change. Matters would be totally different for English I guess ;)

In general I would oppose changes to the language by committee, in particular politically motivated ones, but this seems to be fairly uncontroversial (only that it defies tradition, but "natural" changes in language do so too).

<comment><USER12> The problem in the new German spelling was rather that lots of things simply did not make sense.

For example: "Gemse" (old spelling, which is also how you speak it) vs. "Gämse" (new spelling that was "intended" to be derived from "Gams". Unluckily "Gams" is a dialect word, while "Gemse" is the original German one).

Or an IMHO even more drastic example "aufwendig" (old spelling; also how you speak it) vs. "aufwändig" (new spelling). The official reason is that aufwendig/aufwändig is derived from the noun "Aufwand". But you can also give good reasons why it makes sense to derive it from the verb "aufwenden". No person could explain me the reason why the noun was chosen over the verb.

So yes, I am open to a sane spelling reform. But the one that was implemented in Germany clearly wasn't. If you want to do a spelling reform for the deep impact it will have, it must be (nearly) perfect - an analog in software engineering is "lots of nines of availability". If you are not able to reach this gold standard you better leave it.

<comment><USER23> I agree, they should have changed the verb "aufwenden" to "aufwänden", to make it completely consistent: "Aufwand"-"aufwänden"-"aufwändig".

Other than that, I didn't mean to take that as an example of a great implementation. It's just that it happened and it didn't cause too many deaths, from what I remember.

<comment><USER12> > I agree, they should have changed the verb "aufwenden" to "aufwänden", to > make it completely consistent

But then you also have to change "wenden" -> "wänden" and "abwenden" zu "abwänden". If we conjugate this, we get "ich wände mich ab" (1st person singular). But unluckily "ich wände mich ab" is already the Conjunctive II of "abwenden" (also 1st person singular).

So the consequences of changing the the spelling of "aufwenden" are much deeper than it looks on the first view. My answer is rather to find an abstract, but completely general rule from which words adjectives are to be derived: the noun or the verb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This whole affair is the symptom of a deeper tragedy, that of the French "orthographe" (meaning "proper spelling").

 _Orthographe_ is a rather recent notion, that appeared well after the creation of the Académie française (1635), I would say somewhere in the middle of the 18th century, and then became the universal enforceable "norm" that it is today, in the middle of the following century (19th).

Before that, you could spell French any which way you liked; most authors spelled the same word differently, not just in different works, but in the same page, and not depending on context either.

And it wasn't a problem, because it can be argued that the best works of French literature were written at a time when orthographe didn't exist.

There were "grammarians" that insisted that there should be some rules and that they should be followed, but they were objects of universal scorn and mockery.

Then, I'm not sure exactly how, grammarians won, and now we have orthographe.

Orthographe is a tragedy for two reasons:

\- it's mainly, or uniquely, a social marker

\- it's so complex and so arbitrary, it takes between 5 and 10 years of arduous study to learn.

And after people learn it, they become attached to it, it becomes part of their identity, and it continues to be enforced and imposed on children as a matter of course, without any objection from anybody.

For the record, I'm a very good (or by most metrics, excellent) French speller, but I'm also a parent and am heartbroken to see my kids spend the best part of their young lives learning this thing that has absolutely no extrinsic or intrinsic value whatsoever. They could learn music, or drawing, or cooking, or woodworking, or go play outdoors, but there's no time, because orthographe is so damn hard it takes all of the time in school, and more time at home. Hard and useless.

The worst part is it's not a fight you can fight on your own -- decide that your kids won't learn orthographe after all -- because that would cause them a huge disservice: the social marker part means that those who can't spell are excluded from normal society and have a very hard time finding jobs (any job).

Many social problems in French society -- including, I really think so, recent outbursts of "terrorism" \-- have at least some roots in the actual terror and tragedy of orthographe. If you can't learn orthographe you can't be a member of French society, and in order to learn orthographe you have to already be a member of said society.

Do I like the current reform? No, I think it's stupid and counter-productive, because it _adds_ an alternative spelling to 2000 or so words; the alternative spelling may be simpler, but the addition raises complexity instead of lowering it. -- The point is to get rid of orthographe, not double it.

<comment><USER24> What are you on about...

>For the record, I'm a very good (or by most metrics, excellent) French speller, but I'm also a parent and am heartbroken to see my kids spend the best part of their young lives learning this thing that has absolutely no extrinsic or intrinsic value whatsoever

How can you say this seriously. Not only orthographe is extremely important to the health of the language itself but also to its health abroad. How can you teach the language to someone if while reading two texts you encounter about 10 different ways of spelling the same word.

And contrary to you I speak as a fairly horrible French speller (mostly due to my own lack of attention in class and the fact that English is my first language for over a decade now).

> Many social problems in French society -- including, I really think so, > recent outbursts of "terrorism" \-- have at least some roots in the actual > terror and tragedy of orthographe.

They have, and I really think so, roots in people like you pointing the fingers anywhere but where the problems are. Seriously, orthographe as a factor in terrorism, jesus fucking christ what the fuck.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what the "health" of a language is; the power/influence of a language, however, is a direct factor of the power/influence of its main speakers, and doesn't have anything to do with spelling. English is the world language because of the US economy; when French was the language of reference, orthographe hadn't happened yet.

Regarding terrorism: current French "terrorists" are misfits; and I use quotes not because their acts aren't despicable or horrible, but because their main purpose isn't to terrorise (in order to obtain something by way of fear). It's to exact vengeance (as you'll learn if you watch their videos, they say as much). They are not in pursuit of any kind of political gain; they want to inflict pain and nothing else.

Orthographe, in my (controversial) view, is not a cause and probably not even a factor, but really a symptom of how French society works; and the way it works is, it upsets everyone except the very elite.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are you satisfied with your work? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Day job? No. Side business? Yes (especially once I start making money!)

My job now is giving me no skills that I would want in the future. I didn't realize what the job was when I joined because they kind of switched what I was going to be doing. Because of that, I'm stuck with ETL stuff when I don't want to do ETL at all. I don't want to leave because I only spent 10 months at my last job and don't want to look like a job hopper. Plus I may have a gig coming down the line to join a startup my old boss has started.

</comment><comment><USER3> My job is essentially meaningless and does nothing for the world and the code I write is absolutely garbage because I don't care enough and no one cares enough to critique it or write it themselves.

But I get paid 160k/yr so it's not so bad

<comment><USER4> What do you actually do? (If you don't mind describing it)

<comment><USER3> I maintain an internal legacy PHP and Perl (yes, both) web app from the early 2000s for a large corp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am. My coworkers are great and that helps a ton.

</comment><comment><USER6> Love it

</comment><comment><USER7> not very much, seems like leading nowhere</comment>


Remote Work Policy for Employers - <AUTHOR> https://nohq.co/blog/writing-a-remote-work-policy-with-pdf-sample-templ/ <comment><USER2> > As our homes turn into offices, where do you draw the line? It's common to > cover internet and electricity, but possibly you might also want to cover > part of the rent or a fixed desk in the office?

It's common to pay for internet and electricity? I've heard of covering cell phones and things for people who legitimately are on the phone (sales/biz dev), but not down to electricity bills and rent.</comment>


Ask HN: What's Your Twitter Handle? Let's Connect - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> To be honest, I don't want to. Way too much noise on Twitter. It is terribly difficult to find good content and _really_ easy to find inflammatory content. After connecting, I think there would be too much non-startup, non-technical retweets and tweets from the new connections that would just add noise.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree a bit.</comment></comment>