A Strong Welfare State Produces More Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/welfare-makes-america-more-entrepreneurial/388598/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Most people in this thread are conflating "entrepreneurs" and "startups". Anecdotally there are a lot more small businesses (bakers, butchers, independent bookstores, family owned clothing stores, etc.) in Europe than in the US. The people who own these establishments are every bit the "entrepreneur" the founders of Uber are.

Maybe the US has more startups on the ultra-successful end but that doesn't say much about the chances of the average person starting an average, unremarkable business.

<comment><USER3> If we're looking at "entrepreneurs" as a source of growth, then yes, startups are what we're looking for.

If you don't start that pizza business, I'll buy my pizza somewhere else.

Startups create new markets through innovation. A Facebook-like is like the pizza business. Facebook (or its ancestors) was the market creator.

Uber has similarities with the pizza business, but it's all about transforming a business (taxi service) into something else. So it's between pizzas and Facebook.

So I guess there are various levels of disruption or creation of the market. But the pizza business is probably at level 0 of disruption/creation.

Think of Starbucks vs. your coffee shop...

<comment><USER4> > But the pizza business is probably at level 0 of disruption/creation.

There are no pizza restaurant in my town, but plenty of Indian and Chinese take-aways and one each of the big three fast-food chains.

So if a pizza business arrived it could be disruptive to the status quo, particularly if it offered something that the others didn't e.g. delivery beyond two miles or first-class vegetarian options.

Another example of simple disruption is a shop which opened offering walk-in printing. You just pop your memory stick into the machine and hit 'print'. This completely undermined the library which previously had a monopoly on printing and which took > 15 minutes by the time you waited for a librarian to authorize the printing.

Neither are particularly exciting, but both offer a disruptive service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I certainly felt the Canadian social safety net made it easier to start my business.

First, my health care was covered. So I didn't have to worry about that downside risk. In fact I even had a major health problem two years in when money was tight. My medical care was a non issue financially.

I had some extended health insurance through my parents in the early years. Covered wisdom tooth extraction, and rehab to fix an arm injury. (I needed this to type). Not government safety net, but similar effect. Some countries would cover this sort of thing.

Tuition is lower in Canada. Low student debt. And repayment is very lenient for entrepreneurs and low income people. Never had to make payments or interest while starting up.

There are tax credits for low income earners. I received about $1000 a year in cash payments for sales tax credits. Tuition credits prevented my paying income tax starting out.

I would have gone bankrupt several times over without the above. Or maybe not even started. Instead, this year I'll be sending the government a large amount of income and sales tax payments, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to do it.

On the other hand, there was almost no red tape for starting up. This was crucial. I didn't have to ask permission, I didn't need to pass a capital threshold, I could easily open accounts for my business and I didn't even need to register my company. And I didn't have to bother with sales tax until I passed a revenue threshold.

Keeping that sort of bureaucratic regulation low is also crucial for encouraging business creation.

</comment><comment><USER6> The two Olds papers both use clever triple difference designs (e.g. you're using change in entrepreneurship amongst those who've just become eligible for food stamps in one state relative to those who were already eligible as the treatment group, and the change in entrepreneurship amongst those same types of people in another state that didn't have a change in eligibility laws as the control group) which are hard to find fault in. It seems like a lot of people are arguing "other countries have strong welfare states, but less entrepreneurship", but that's a different question - most of the papers cited are arguing that in the United States, a strengthening of the welfare state leads to increased entrepreneurship. That does not mean that this would be true in other countries, nor that moving to a proper guaranteed minimum income would increase entrepreneurship, nor that entrepreneurship is the best measure of dynamism in the economy. But it is pretty convincing evidence that giving potential entrepreneurs the ability to fail at starting a business without too severe of consequences increases the rate at which they'll start businesses.

<comment><USER7> One question I had was whether the _overall_ rate of entrepreneurship increased. As you note, the papers seem to focus on rates _within the population that receives the benefits_ , but the typical conservative argument is that the cost of those benefits in taxes retards economic growth overall. I'm not suggesting that they are right (as far as I know no substantial link has yet been found between low tax rates and economic growth), but it's a question worth addressing in the article and it was not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the result of the "Peltzman effect" or "risk compensation." If you make it so that failure does not sting so much, people take more risks. Bad for car safety, but great for business creation. We've long had a schizophrenic relationship with business creation in this country. We lionize it. We glorify it. However, we also require people who do not already have plenty of money / family backing to potentially put everything on the line for it. It's where our love of business crashes head first into our "dog eat dog, every man for himself, lift yourself up by your bootstraps, everything that happens to you is your own fault" ideology. We say "you can do anything if you try!", but then also tell you "but you cannot afford to risk it."

If we combined the American culture of entrepreneurialism and free enterprise with Denmark's level of safety nets and free higher education, we could probably do a lot more amazing things than we are now. There are likely plenty of people who could make brilliant contributions (to business, technology, art, science, etc.), but are forced to take what they perceive to be the least risky path in their lives, and so never even attempt to get off the ground with their ideas. That's just sad.

[http://angrybearblog.com/2012/01/peltzman-effect-why- economi...](http://angrybearblog.com/2012/01/peltzman-effect-why-economic- growth-has.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> The amount of blind conservatism on HN is pretty rattling. Here's the formula:

"Headline Claiming That Anything About Welfare is Positive, with Supporting Evidence"

Top comment: "Sorry, but the evidence doesn't support that." Evidence provided to substantiate claim: none.

<comment><USER10> I don't think it's conservatism but skepticism.

However I could be wrong, I haven't been around on HN for long time.

Also I personally value skepticism, but I come from a semi scientific- engineering background.

It was pretty hammered hard into us lab techs, we need to be skeptical of our bioinformatics results, you never knew what hidden confounding factor could be affecting the experiment. We even tried to use markov models to help find hidden confounding variables.

Edit: On why skepticism is important, its because propaganda is everywhere [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269760)

<comment><USER11> >Edit: On why skepticism is important, its because propaganda is everywhere [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269760)

There is here too. Not from The Atlantic but in the form of right wing ideological sock-puppets. If you are skeptical of this claim then read the article and its evidence and the comments and their lack of evidence and consider which is which.

Just because there are some smart people here doesn't mean there aren't kooks.

<comment><USER10> On the issue of sock-puppets, it seems like you can have sock puppets for any issue.

After reading [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269760), I suspect there are not only "right" or "left" wing sockpuppets but corporate pr puppets too. I suspect some sockpuppets could drive up controversy to increase ad revenue or product awareness(viral marketing?) as well.

disclaimer:I have no opinion on this Atlantic article nor am I familiar with site. I just didn't think the original criticism of "conservatism" on HN was accurate.

Also I don't think I understand why an article(I don't feel the Atlantic piece is propaganda) can't be propaganda, and the comments section can't be propaganda in another direction.

I'm still looking at evidence,but a big and bold claim should have some fairly bullet proof evidence. I'd also hold something like Crispr [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171039](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171039) to the same standard.

Game changing gene therapy ? I would like some good fairly bullet proof evidence.

Otherwise I think its reasonable to fall to a skeptical position.

<comment><USER11> Of course one should hold all ones beliefs lightly.

But to dismiss quality evidence because of crackpot comments is irrational.

I know nothing about gene therapy. But if you find a venue where peer reviewed papers on global warming are greeted by a flood of comments who deny it yet don't explain why then saying they are equally valid or equally likely to be propaganda is not being rational, it is failing to see a dangerous anti scientific social movement.

>corporate pr puppets too

To whit, post an article about Facebook's appalling privacy policy and watch what happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sorry but the evidence doesn't stand up to this AT ALL.

Americans are much, MUCH more entrepreneurial than anyone in Europe. I'm American, I live in Europe, I know this very, very well. (Yes, anecdotally speaking, of course!)

Americans simply embrace risk, and embrace potential failure, far better than anyone else in the world, taken as a whole. Europeans meanwhile are a more gloomy bunch, more risk-averse, and far less likely to strike out on their own. Notable slight exceptions being the Dutch to some degree.

America is so far from a "welfare state" \- it is about as far away as you can get. America is a "if you're going to fall, you are going to fall all the way down, and no one is going to save you, no matter what". And somehow, a huge part of the world's entrepreneurs and innovation come from there. I don't know why.

And don't take me as some kind of patriotic jingoist champion of the US of A - I am just about as far as you can get from the "Yeah Murica" kind of ultra patriots - heck, I live in Europe because I prefer the slower pace, the old world, the semblance of an actual culture, the environment that has not eaten itself from capitalism taken to the extreme.

Nice linkbait headline though. :)

<comment><USER13> Whose evidence?

According to this list[1] with data from the World Bank, Netherlands is 35th has 45.05 small businesses per 1000 people. Do you have a stationary shop on your corner or in your neighborhood? I certainly had access to many small businesses in Rotterdam, that would have folded 25 years again the States, replaced by mega corps and big box retailers.

The United States on the other hand is 69th on the list with 19.98 small businesses per 1000 people

[1] [http://www.nationmaster.com/country- info/stats/Economy/Micro...](http://www.nationmaster.com/country- info/stats/Economy/Micro/Small-and-medium-enterprises/Number/Per-capita)

<comment><USER14> in all fairness, comparing numbers of micro businesses across countries is tricky. differences in tax laws can create incentives to register as a micro business vs some other way, but not much of a measure of large scale entrepreneurship. But, either way, little evidence that US is more entrepreneurial

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems to make a little sense: If you're not worried about the worst case scenarios you can take on more risk.

ie: if you know your kids wont starve (food stamps), you wont end up in permanent debt (bankruptcy laws), you wont be killed by your creditors (social order) etc etc. then you can do things (start a business) that would otherwise risk those consequences.

<comment><USER16> Right, same reason we have limited-liability corporations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am European (Swedish), but I have a hard time wrapping my head around the notion that the welfare state would produce more innovation/entrepreneurs. We have a large public discussion here in Sweden that we need to create more new companies and we definitely have a welfare state.

I would argue that a welfare state COULD be helping entrepreneurs, but that depends where all the taxation for the welfare state comes from. In Sweden it is very expensive to hire people for example, and it is also very hard to fire people (besides the point, taxation-wise, but still), The companies that hire people pay a large part of the welfare state. This makes it very hard to grow a company since it is so very expensive to hire.

</comment><comment><USER18> I can see the argument making sense that with a strong safety net folks are more willing to take risk. I know for me and my family needing to shoulder the full burden of health care expenses, even with the ACA changes, was one of the major inhibitors to striking out on my own. Even with the ACA and the opening up of the individual direct insurance market, we end up with a catastrophic high deductible plan that makes me loathe to seek medical care for some issues that maybe I should take care of and that a citizen of a nanny state wouldn't think twice about going in to have checked out.

Unfortunately a strong welfare state often goes hand in hand with a stronger bureaucracy in general including many regulations, red tape, unfavorable tax codes, and other obstructions to entrepreneurship. This is where the US trumps the strong welfare states.

<comment> noir-york "Unfortunately a strong welfare state often goes hand in hand with a stronger bureaucracy in general including many regulations, red tape, unfavorable tax codes, and other obstructions to entrepreneurship."

Often... in general... - too many maybes. I know for a fact that the UK and Ireland make it very simple and painless to start up.

"This is where the US trumps the strong welfare states."

Does it? Most regulations are set at the state level as well, so you're saying that, say, Massachusetts is more bureaucratic than North Dakota?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Honestly, social-structure probably has a lot more to do with amount of entrepreneurs in a nation. In America, we utter the word "entrepreneur" the same way a 1960s boy would utter the word "astronaut" (or, if Soviet, "cosmonaut" or "potato"). As an American, I take it for granted that I can do a startup without my wife fearing she'll be ostracized by her friends, that I can still find a job if things don't work out, and the general public thinks it's endearing to support local/small businesses. Plus my parents don't feel the need to wallow in shame if I were to stay in their garage for a year to build my prototype (unless they're Asian), which effectively removes all my internal barriers to quitting my job and going down the path less traveled. The fact that social-security is there for me when I retire at 65 (lol) or so, general medical insurance won't be denied to me (considering the demographic of your average entrepreneur, why would it in the first place?), etc., don't occur to me at all.

As much as your average 20-something cynical know-it-all likes to bag on our education system and its spew of "you're special", "believe in your dreams", "don't be afraid to do something if you truly believe in it", etc., I should think it's that very sort of indoctrination starting at a young age that is ultimately responsible for so many Americans casting caution to the wind and pursuing their "American Dream", and for so many other Americans to sympathize with and be willing to support such folk on their trek.

But I will admit that the one government innovation that definitely helps entrepreneurship is the creation of the corporation. The fact that I can create this entity that's owned by me and the family, friends, and fools who believe in me, and that if things go South, the corporation can die without dragging me down with it, is extremely helpful in encouraging folks to venture. If I was a builder and the law was that if a house collapses and kills its residents, the builder will be found and killed in an eye-for-an-eye manor, I'd seriously think twice about building a house for anyone other than myself.

So what encourages entrepreneurship? Telling people since the founding of your nation that entrepreneurship is good and providing a means of separating the entrepreneur from his corporation.

</comment><comment><USER20> A very important premise has been ignored: the consequential government intervention in the economy. That means hundreds of regulations that constitute a barrier for many aspiring entrepreneurs.

Living in a welfare state, it took me 7 months to incorporate and ~$50000 on licenses+fees to start a simple exporting business. Maybe America and certain EU countries just haven't gotten there yet.

<comment><USER21> Kafkaesque licensing processes and protectionism are totally orthogonal to the welfare state, as demonstrated by many a developing country which neither permits the average person to try and start a business larger than a food stall nor provides them with access to any form of welfare whatsoever.

Edit: Do people _genuinely believe_ that the average sub-Saharan African state, or even growing economies like Vietnam or Indonesia are either easier to legally form a trading company in or more generous with welfare (relative to incomes) than say, the UK, Sweden or even the USA? If there's evidence rather than blindly partisan "he said welfare states weren't bad for business" knee-jerk reactions behind the downvotes, I'd really like to see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If the conclusion of this is true, why aren't we seeing grand scale innovation and entrepreneurship from European countries that are most certainly very strong welfare states?

Why instead are we seeing massive amounts of unemployment?

There seems to be a delicate balance to strike to get this right. The fact of the matter is that in many European countries someone who is not working can enjoy the same standard of life as someone who is, except they don't have to get up in the morning to earn it.

Those benefiting from these states likely have very little incentive to rock their own boat of comfort by stepping out and taking on debt/risk for more of a reward. Especially when you throw high taxation into the mix, where that risk/reward ratio is further skewed because even if you do very well you'll end up paying the state a huge amount of tax, to then support the same welfare system.

In the US, on the other hand, you've a significantly less generous safety net and I would imagine the vast majority of those who fall into it from a more grand place - such as being securely in the middle class - would fight more to get out of it.

That's intuitive anyway.

Where the argument starts to fall apart is when you look at all the young tech entrepreneurs, whether it's hardware or software, or those starting up new media companies, or whatever, very few seem to come from the type of background where if they failed they'd end up on food stamps.

Are they better risk takers because they have a better, non-government provided safety net, perhaps? Which then goes on to conflict with the enhanced safety net available in Europe and the comparatively low level of innovation and entrepreneurship.

My conclusion would be that the government provided welfare is likely not a factor in determining innovation and entrepreneurship and that there's other, less obvious, factors at play.

<comment><USER23> The strongest welfare states (and by that, I also mean the best managed) are the Scandinavian countries.

And the amount of culture and technology that comes out of Sweden alone is extraordinary for their population size.

<comment><USER10> wow really, I know of ikea, but do you mind linking me to some references ?

<comment><USER23> Tech: Skype, Spotify, H&M, Neo4j, Mojang

Music: Tove Lo, Robyn, The Knife, Miike Snow, Those Dancing Days, Icona Pop, Lykke Li.

In fact, pop music around the world has been shaped and written by Swedish producers and writers, everything from Brittany Spears to Katy Perry.

And look at all the Swedish films that America loves to remake. Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Let The Right One In, etc.

And remember, this is just Sweden, a small country of 9 million people in the middle of nowhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think the headline is a misnomer. It's not a strong welfare state that promotes entrepreneurism but rather simply a saftey net. There's a huge difference. A highly centralized cradle-to-grave welfare state seems to actually facilitate the opposite. But the point is taken that a limited but efficient social safety net is facilitative of risk taking. A universal basic income would probably be more effective than either the strong centralized European welfare state or the inefficient multitude of highly specialized national programs in the US.

</comment><comment><USER25> Yes, there are two sides to the coin. Look at France, which once had a 75 percent tax rate [1] on the wealthy. When you are only getting 25 percent of what you make (or even 50 percent in many countries), you have that much less incentive to succeed and others have that much less incentive to invest. There are not very many French startups, relative to other countries.

I'm not saying you can't have the best of both worlds. You could have a good social program and low taxes, if you cut things like defense spending (I believe in a strong defense, but I also believe that in the US we let contractors bill excessively and do little to curb it). But I think you give the consumer more freedom when you just cut taxes - it gives them the choice of what they want to buy, without government imposed restrictions (i.e. certain things not being covered in healthcare, having to live in low income housing, etc). If you want to encourage startups, you can always provide government grants (most countries already do in many areas), or tax breaks for small businesses.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france- drops-75...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france- drops-75percent-supertax)

<comment><USER26> The post-World War II US had even higher top marginal income tax rates than that, but many see the US 50s as glory days economically. Certainly there was a lot of progress and innovation going on.

94% for 1944 and 1945. Above 90% until 1964. Above 70% until 1982.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#History_of_top_rates)

<comment><USER25> Yes, has largely to do with our shift from blue collar jobs I think (we are no longer producing housing/infrastructure/automobiles/etc at the rate we once were). We are seeing this growth in places like China and India where these jobs still dominate.

<comment><USER26> I don't follow. Companies like Apple and Microsoft, among others, were founded regardless of the US having a 70% top income tax rate; what's the connection between that and blue collar jobs?

<comment><USER25> Oh, I'm just saying that the 50s were "the glory days" because there was no shortage of jobs, relatively low inflation (IIRC?), high housing demand, etc. College degrees (up until maybe as late as the early 90s) used to guarantee you a good job, and student debt was far lower, and overall there are many factors that you can't necessarily correlate directly to economic policy (IMHO). A lot of our jobs are going overseas (but they are jobs we don't particularly want, I suppose). That goes as well for current economic policy I think - for example, we see a lot of growth in Silicon Valley even though California is no haven for businesses (albeit many of those get registered in Nevada).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Argh, yet another simple economic principle conflated by politicization.

Entrepreneurship is directly correlated to easy access to capital and the legal environment surrounding both starting and maintaining a small business... this has been proven ad nauseam.

I can't directly critique the papers linked in the article (especially because one of them 404's) right now, but I'd be willing to be a lot of money they cherry pick policies that (either directly or indirectly) created greater access to capital or made it legally easier to start and run a small business. That, or they've found some correlation between the two and are trying to gloss over the actual economics of the deal and support their political opinions.

Strong "social good" (read: welfare), strong laissez faire, totalitarian, anarchic, doesn't matter your political leanings as long you increase capital and ease of legal machinations you will experience an increase in entrepreneurship (comparatively, of course).

<comment><USER28> Surely there can be more than one thing which has an influence on rates of entrepreneurship... Why couldn't it be the case that both increasing ease of access to capital increases entrepreneurship and, separately, increasing security against risk of destitution via a strong welfare state increases entrepreneurship?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I suspect there is a correlation between welfare provision and protectionism around small businesses/anti-big business behaviour. This would lead to many more small businesses than the free market would support, but there is a bit of a question mark over how entrepreneurial and economically valuable this is.

I live in Amsterdam (cited elsewhere in this thread as being entrepreneurial): I appreciate having small independent shops and see the Dutch entrepreneurial attitude relative to other European countries in which I've lived. But I also understand why Hacker News readers would not believe the article is reflective: the majority of these businesses are not going to risk everything, change the world, or be worth millions/billions. Perhaps the count alone is not a useful metric.

edit: I'm European. Lots of neutral comments treated to downvote-disagree in this thread.

<comment><USER30> I think entrepreneurship is more of a mindset where you liberate yourself from the wage constraint and take control of your life by directly producing value for others.

Changing the world and being worth billions is just the Silicon Valley mythology, but that is not the only 'real' form of entrepreneurship there is.

Dare I say, a small business owner is more of an entrepreneur in my opinion than some wealthy dude who made an app, raised 5 mil, and ran the company into the ground in 12 months.

Now startups are great, but I really don't get the contempt the startup-types hold for small businesses. Maybe that's just a form of class contempt.

<comment><USER29> I like your perspective and agree the 0.1% of glamorous tech startups do not define the whole word. I think though that more people lean towards a concept of risk-taking and innovation (me too).

I guess my hypotheses are: a) HN will mostly lean this way too; b) America will mostly lean this way (but I have not lived there); c) if you accept this definition, European business are _on average_ less of this style than American ones (due to government mitigating their risk or them being in established segments) in some - but definitely not all - cases.

You are of course free not to accept the definition ;) and I could be wrong about what the majority of HN readers/Americans think. If I'm not, the Atlantic - an American magazine with mostly American readership - is being a bit unrepresentative. As others have said, even if I'm wrong the conclusions seem a little strong for the evidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The first thing I expected the article to show: a correlation between welfare state strength and rate of entrepreneurship, with the counterintuitive result that there are numerous countries with higher rates than the US and weaker welfare states, but if there are, it didn't list them.

The closes it comes is showing that the already-abysmal rates of entrepreneurship for people around CHIP eligibility levels, it's 30% higher for people just below the bracket.

Then there's idle theorizing about how food stamps "must" embolden entrepreneurs because they know they can fall back on it if their venture fails. While it sounds superficially plausible, can anyone give a concrete example of the kind of hypercompetent person who launched a successful startup and who would also have needed food stamps if it didn't succeed? Bezos? Musk? Kalanick? Even Brin or Page?

<comment><USER16> None of them needed food stamps because they had rich backgrounds.

<comment><USER31> Sure, but I think the causality is reversed: had they not been rich, they are still extremely capable people who could and would have build up a big buffer before starting their business, which didn't depend on food stamps.

<comment><USER16> Had they not been rich they wouldn't have gone to university. Had they not gone to university, I doubt they'd have been able to go anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Worth noting that a "welfare state" approaches basic income as it benefits more and more people.

Without getting into the various hairballs on here about the truth of the research, -if- this were true it might imply that the core conjecture of a basic income promoting innovation holds up.

</comment><comment><USER33> Although the cost of healthcare is not insignificant, it pales in comparison to general living expenses (food, rent, utilities, etc.).

Everyone is discussing conceptually, here are concrete numbers... When I was striking out on my own a few years ago health insurance was "the big one" everyone brought up, so I went on Kaiser's website and got a quote from ~$250 - $450/month (varies with copay, benefits, out of pocket max). It's a bit of a cost though not nearly as scary as everyone makes it out to be and not enough to plunge you into the depths of debt if things don't work out (it's also tax deductible).

</comment><comment><USER34> I totally get this. Most people I know who are on welfare also describe themselves as "entrepreneurs". Unfortunately, they are not very good at making or saving money.

</comment><comment><USER35> Why not give every graduate a bursary for one year and see what happens. In the logic of VC's it will take only 1% to pay that back and more.

</comment><comment><USER36> "More" doesn't necessarily mean "more successful". It's not unreasonable that government intervention creates more entrepreneurs - as a Canadian I know I can go and get tens of thousands to start my own company along with some nice tax breaks - but it doesn't mean they would produce much value or amount to anything more than a barely afloat small business.

</comment><comment><USER37> There is a point where this makes sense, but I would venture to guess that there is also a point where increased welfare benefits yield less and less entrepreneurship. People have to be willing to take a risk because they believe they could be better off - if the benefits of welfare were too great, there would no longer be any desire to take risks.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is true. It would be nice if the welfare didn't have to come from the state.

I'm solving this and am announcing my findings Sunday at the Texas bitcoin conference.

The fix is really pretty simple.

</comment><comment><USER39> >America is a "if you're going to fall, you are going to fall all the way down, and no one is going to save you, no matter what".

I don't see how this is even remotely true. There are 42million people on food stamps, costing $82bn a year. This is a mere fraction of the spending that goes towards catching falling people. There is no capitalism. Open your eyes.

<comment><USER16> A welfare state is not incompatible with capitalism. Actually, it is a natural consequence of capitalism, a thing bolted on to try and work around some of its more severe issues.

</comment></comment><comment> kuni-toko-tachi This article, like every other one produced by the laughable Atlantic magazine is pure nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER40> Sure

</comment><comment><USER41> More dishonest sludge from The Atlantic. This simply isn't true.

<comment><USER42> Is your source on this reliable?

<comment><USER41> A welfare state is reducing some people's economic security to add to other people's economic security. There is no way that can produce a net increase in entrepreneurship. Plus, a welfare state adds more regulations that block private enterprise in various areas and make it more difficult. Moreover, a welfare state hurts economic growth overall, also dragging down the total amount of entrepreneurship.

<comment><USER43> So, uh... sources? Because the parent article had sources. Simply from a logical standpoint, it makes sense to me that having a safety net would make person less risk averse.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


PostgreSQL's Powerful New Join Type: Lateral - <AUTHOR> https://blog.heapanalytics.com/postgresqls-powerful-new-join-type-lateral/ <comment><USER2> T-SQL has this as CROSS APPLY and OUTER APPLY.

Like pgsql's LATERAL JOIN, CROSS APPLY has been a game changer in the way you think iteration in sets. Highly recommended.</comment>


Purported iPhone 5 Built From Individual Parts By Chinese Repair Site - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/07/iphone-5-pics-from-parts/

<comment><USER2> Submission accurately reports Wired's headline, but the site is in fact Japanese. This helpfully lets me read it, but there isn't much "there" there.

They were able to purchase some parts of shadowy provenance which, on basis of their previous experience with iDevices, do not appear to be known parts. They therefore assume they're iPhone 5 parts. (Two competing hypothesis that jump to my mind are "Knockoff" and "Unauthorized overproduction of non-Apple parts with Apple logo attached to them to increase the resale value." because, hey, China.)

Anyhow, iLabFactory had their technicians take the parts they had bought and attach a current-generation screen and whatnot, for what they think is a sneak preview of what the new iPhone 5 will look like. Pictures attached at the original link and quite comprehensible without being able to read Japanese.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wired is reposting [http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/29/new-purported-next- generation-...](http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/29/new-purported-next-generation- iphone-part-photos-show-fully-assembled-device/)

Discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4308864>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link to source (in Chinese) - <http://ilab.cc/news/5888.html>

<comment><USER4> That's not Chinese, it's Japanese.</comment></comment>


Serverless-side rendering: How to sell 40k Yeezys without breaking the internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.reaktor.com/blog/serverless-side-rendering-how-we-ensured-kanyes-midas-touch-didnt-break-the-internet/ <comment><USER2> Serverless.io is awesome! I don't deploy to Lambda any other way.</comment>


Ask HN: How is your backend instrumented? - <AUTHOR> Backend and data engineers, what analytics tools do you use to instrument your backend? What is your stack and DB? What are you tracking? <comment><USER2> Was using datadog's APM to track the transactions and our API usage. But because we are using GC AppEngine, we had to use a workaround by installing the agent on a separate VM. Then we found out that we will have to pay for APM and that VM too, not just APM, so we left it.

We tried newrelic before, it was good, but datadog seemed like a complete solution (and has better design).

Actually I am surprised that there is no high quality open source APM.

<comment><USER3> Huh? Prometheus definitely exists.

<comment><USER2> I don't find it easy to use. I want something like existing APM SaaS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We use instana.io. It's UI is clunky but gets the job done. It allowed us to troubleshoot multiple severe bugs in production which would have been hard to solve otherwise.</comment>


The software errors that made NATS close UK airspace 2014-12-12 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/2942/v3%200%20Interim%20Report%20-%20NATS%20System%20Failure%2012%20December%202014.pdf

<comment><USER2> Interesting reading. The key points on how the incident actually happened I pulled out were:

\- They had two links from their System Flight Server, one for redundancy if one goes down. Both went down at the same time, apparently unprecedented for them.

\- There was a system limit for a shared system resource (Atomic Functions) that was defined twice in different systems, but with different magic numbers. The problem wasn't spotted earlier because a recent system change actually brought one of the systems close to the limit for the first time. (More military controller functions were amalgamated into NATS the month previously)

\- There was a UX problem where the "Select sectors" button, which is used often, is placed directly beside the "soft Sign off" button, which isn't often used, and in fact was well known to be pressed by accident relatively often. It was pressed at the time of the incident, putting the system into an illegal state and hence triggering an automatic shutdown.

Problems that on their own you could argue aren't showstopper problems, but when triggered together cause things like this.

<comment><USER3> > They had two links from their System Flight Server, one for redundancy if > one goes down. Both went down at the same time, apparently unprecedented for > them.

What I understood here, is that they were redundant systems, but running the same software, with the same bug present, so both went down. Redundant hardware can only protect you against hardware failures.

<comment><USER4> > What I understood here, is that they were redundant systems, but running the > same software, with the same bug present, so both went down.

a.k.a. "flailover"</comment></comment></comment>


Airbnb Announces Global Party Ban - <AUTHOR> https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-announces-global-party-ban/ <comment><USER2> Cannot overstate how much better hotels are than Airbnb. Airbnb is more expensive, less consistent, more restrictive, less flexible.</comment>


Jeff Bezos explains to Amazon investors why no profits are a good thing - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/12/4217794/jeff-bezos-letter-amazon-investors-2012

<comment><USER2> It should read "no profits _is_ a good thing." The subject is the singular "no profits", not the plural "profits".</comment>


Ask HN: Ways to automatically make inferences from data? - <AUTHOR> Suppose I have sales data - it is easy to run a few queries to find out top selling items, top regions etc.
But, is it possible to do this on any set of data, without knowing anything meta about the data at all? In other words, can this be generalized? Are there any models, theories I can learn to achieve this? <comment><USER2> I am not a specialist of this field but here is how I would deal with this problem:

My understanding is that it is possible to find the main components (items, regions, etc) in a dataset, for example with PCA [0]. However it will not name those components, but it might be quite easy to infer the name of each component. Once you know the data in one component, you can find their min/max. I guess there are several similar mathematical techniques to do the same job and there are also several user friendly Business Intelligence software.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis)

<comment><AUTHOR> If I had a CSV, I can import it into a database and simply run queries, systematically, isn't it?

<comment><USER2> You can alway do that, the question is (as the other comments told) "will your users get meaningful answers?"

You could simply use Excel (it has PCA) also to test your ideas. There are many resources on Internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yes - but not in the way you think.

A program can be written to read in a dataset and correlate each set of data with every other set of data in that dataset (think producing a set of graphs comparing every combination of 2 properties of that dataset).

Somewhere in that mess of graphs there will be useful ones but the program won't be able to tell the difference.

You still need a human for that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Your title is about inferences, but your text describes a summary, a descriptive statistic or an aggregation - they are very different problems. It's quite straightforward to "find a top item" regardless of the dataset but I don't know why you would want this automated at all.

</comment><comment><USER5> As a general answer to a general question: not really.

Domain knowledge and prior knowledge on how the data is associated with reality exists in the brain of the human, who expresses that using code and science for the problem at hand.

Otherwise the computer doesn't know the difference between sales data. And any other data.</comment>


Bitcoin Drops Below $5,000 as Crypto Markets See $13B Sell-Off - <AUTHOR> https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-drops-5000-crypto-markets-see-13-billion-sell-off/ <comment><USER2> Bitcoin has barely been above $5000.</comment>


A top recruiter on what anyone can see after 30 seconds with your resume - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/525496/done-what-a-recruiter-sees-on-your-resume-at-first-glance/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps I'm being a little cynical, but the author of this post comes across slightly offensive. Like a millennial trying to tell an older generation they're doing it wrong. was a discussion before on this board about hiring practices, and considerable support for the practice of double-blind hiring. I think the key to fixing the recruiting and hiring practices of today, is to remove the emotion from it, and make it less about hiring someone you'd want to have a beer with, and More about the best person for the position.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hrm. I'm not looking, but I like reading these things. Regarding "Objective, seriously? It's not 1992 anymore", I've always put an objective on my resume. Typically something short and sweet, like "seeking a senior software engineering position solving challenging systems problems" or whatever. Is that not useful? I wouldn't want someone to read beyond the first couple lines of my resume if they're looking for a web developer or a finance manager.

<comment><USER4> Think of it this way:

1) Your resume is sitting somewhere that it will be mixed with web devs and finance managers. Or...

2) Your resume is given to people who are hiring senior system software engineers.

Try to make sure #2 happens, which you should be doing anyways. And once that happens, the objective doesn't really matter much anyways.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough, but here's another example. Say someone is trying to move from IC to management. They might have no mgmt experience so they put "seeking engineering management position" as their objective. Is there a better way? The other traditional thing to do would be to explain this in your cover letter.

Edit: I get that you should be shopping it around and applying to various positions but it seems inevitable that a copy of your resume will get filed into countless HR databases. It seems rational to me to indicate what you're looking for on the resume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Things I wish people would stop doing:

> 2\. Writing resumes in first person

> 4\. Mixing up first person and third person

Is that a deliberate joke, or does she actually think that third person is preferable?

</comment><comment><USER6> I liked it. Honest and quick read on how to present yourself.</comment>


Discover your first Tweet - <AUTHOR> https://discover.twitter.com/first-tweet <comment><USER2> Is "discover" really the right word to use here?</comment>


Python doesn't need no steenkeeng conztantz - <AUTHOR> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2003-July/216656.html I found this amusing: "More seriously though, no, there's no equivalent for constants in Python, as the programmer is generally considered intelligent enough to leave a value he wants to stay constant alone." <comment><AUTHOR> I found this amusing: "More seriously though, no, there's no equivalent for constants in Python, as the programmer is generally considered intelligent enough to leave a value he wants to stay constant alone."</comment>


The Hayworth-Miller 2019 Debate About Brain Preservation - <AUTHOR> https://brainslab.wordpress.com/2020/09/11/archiving-the-hayworth-miller-2019-debate-about-brain-preservation/ <comment><USER3> What if consciousness requires an active synapse loop to be maintained, kind of like a magnetic field, with little hysteresis eddies etc, but one that if it loses all power, it disappears forever?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi @russfink. That can't be the case since, as mentioned in the debate, there are medical procedures [1] where a person's neural activity ceases and the patients recover their (long-term) memories

[1] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001346...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0013469489900333)

<comment><USER4> Hm. The cessation of electrical activity is just that which is measured on scalp EEG; ie, we can only really be certain that the most superficial layers of cortex aren't firing and what we are measuring.

<comment><USER5> Very fair point. There are other examples that go beyond DHCA, though, and point clearly in the same direction. One example is that sometimes people suffer cardiac arrests and lose consciousness for minutes to hours 10.1016/j.resuscitation.2014.06.015. Coordinated electrical activity stops after a few minutes following cardiac arrest, but people can (rarely) be revived with their apparent memories and personality intact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If a "backup" is made of your brain before you died, and it's restored afterwards to a new body, wouldn't that new copy be totally disconnected from the original. The brain in the new body might behave identically to the original, but the entity (or "soul", for lack of a better word) experiencing it won't be the original. This is trivially demonstrated by using the same backup process to make a clone (ie. restoring the backup but not killing the original). Clearly you won't be having the experiences of both bodies, would you?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox)

<comment><USER7> If you believe the soul is a separate thing to the body, then it naturally follows that duplicating the body is merely a cargo-cult version of immortality.

If you believe that there is no separate thing which is a soul — that all that we are is just a particular arrangement of matter — then duplicating some particular arrangement from a backup is like forking from an old git commit: just because you can label one particular branch "master" doesn't make it genuinely special, and any special treatment you give to one branch is merely your convention.

<comment><USER6> >just because you can label one particular branch "master" doesn't make it genuinely special, and any special treatment you give to one branch is merely your convention.

It does matter, depending on your motivations. If you think the reason for living is that you're a great person whose continued existence will benefit society and/or your loved ones, then sure, it doesn't matter as long as the copy is identical. If you simply want to stay alive and _experience /enjoy_ more of it, then having a bit-for-bit identical copy might not achieve your goal.

For the latter option, consider the following thought experiment: suppose say you want to do an enjoyable activity, such as going on a one week vacation, but you can't afford it. Would you pay 50% of the cost (which you can afford) so a clone of you go on vacation?

<comment><USER8> In many respects, I think you already break your stream of consciousness when you sleep or are knocked out. When a copy of your brain is made, that copy will experience what all of us do after a good night's rest in a train: waking up to an unfamiliar environment, subtly changed by random firing of your neurons when you were asleep. The "you before sleep" is effectively not the "you after sleep" because there was a break in the chain.

Thus, there's no benefit to the "you that didn't go on vacation". There was a benefit to the "you that did go on vacation".

<comment><USER6> So you acknowledge that in the event of a brain transfer, two versions of your consciousness will exist, and that the "original" one will be lost, but it's fine because neither would be able to tell (ie. the original will be "going to sleep", and the copy will be "waking up")?

<comment><USER9> Exactly. I would put forth that you can take it even further, and assume that every moment In time represents a recreation of your conscious experience of the past up until the present.

Under that perspective, Consciousness is like the illusion of motion on a computer monitor. There's some sort of framerate, related to the minimum period of time in which you can perceive a conscious thought, and the sequence playing back at a high frequency creates the illusion of continuity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Coincidently, I've just been re-reading Neal Stephenson's _Fall_ , which is a fun story about simulating uploaded minds (or brains, or whatever).

[https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Dodge-Hell-Neal- Stephenson/dp/00...](https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Dodge-Hell-Neal- Stephenson/dp/0062458728/)

</comment><comment><USER11> > _A terminal patient choosing brain preservation with the hope of future > revival via mind uploading is making the same type of rational judgement > –faced with the alternative of oblivion I choose to undergo an uncertain > surgical procedure that has some chance of restoring most of the unique > memories that I consider to define 'me' as an individual. Hopefully this > makes clear that I am rejecting a 'magical' view of the self. An > individual's mind is computational and, just like with a laptop, an > imperfect backup copy is better than complete erasure._

Doesn't this argue against the entire brain preservation enterprise? That is, without a "magical" view of selfhood, why attempt to preserve a partially faithful replica of one's self instead of finding other ways to do the things that you'd want to do in the future once revived?

I don't really back up my laptop in a conventional sense. I do git pushes of my git clones, I copy some files to rsync.net, I do a lot of work on cloud services like Google Docs and Trello, etc. A lot of what's on my laptop is transient. This is nice, because I'm not backing up _a Mac_ ; if I decide to run Debian or switch to a Chromebook or whatever, I can still achieve my high- level goal of not losing work without the low-level implementation of restoring a Mac. And certainly I don't back up servers at work in the conventional sense, either; most of those "servers" are now just Kubernetes pods anyway, represented declaratively, and that's a lot better than a backup.

I think in the same sense, I do have a plan for immortality, and that plan is to change the world for the better while I am alive, now, as conventionally defined, in lasting ways. I don't really know what I would do if I were resurrected many centuries in the future. (I would expect at least as much change in the world as between now and many centuries in the past, and I can't really imagine even the greatest thinkers or doers or heroes of ages past productively helping the world today. Should Arthur return from Avalon to save Britain today, he'd have a lot of trouble recovering the throne in a largely pro-democratic society, and he'd have no idea what to make of "Brexit.")

Meanwhile, there's quite a bit I can do _today_ to improve the world, to improve the lives of others, to try to improve by a fraction of a percent the chances of human society even existing a few centuries hence, etc. My self - my life and physical conscious existence - is just a tool for accomplishing whatever goals I have; it's not the goal itself. My laptop is also a tool; if I can keep doing the work that was on my laptop, I don't need a clone of the laptop itself.

It seems to me, then, that the only argument _for_ brain preservation - <USER2> attempting to preserve one's "self" into the future and for investing in the ability to make it happen - is seeing one's self in this "magical" way, in believing that there's _more_ value in the very fact of one's existence, and in fact even a partial and inaccurate continuation of that existence - than in what you do with that existence.

(And it does not save you from having to influence the world and engineer its future. At the least, as we can see, you have to spend a fair amount of your life today convincing society that it should develop in a way so that, in the future, they build the means to restore you.)

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure historians from every category would positively salivate over the prospect of being able to interview an actual person from a few hundred years ago. And it isn't like they'd stop being interested at just one.

And in terms of work one can do to improve the world- the tools available today amplify the work someone can do by orders of magnitude compared to centuries past, particularly mental work. I see no reason to think this trend won't continue. Who is to say that, given enough time and development, a society of the future might have an entire pathway for the freshly-revived to go back to school, so to speak, and become able to do things those of us now can only dream of?

<comment><USER11> The first one is a good point, although it doesn't quite sound to me like the folks advocating for preservation are doing so with the intention of being valuable to future generations _for the interests of those generations_. If they were, then they'd get themselves comfortable with being revived multiple times (either re-preserved or terminated and re-cloned, whatever's easiest to future society) and would prefer to be revived as far in the future as possible, and they'd accomplish what they intend during this life. But most of the motivation I see around this seems to be focused around trampling down death by cryopreservation and continuing to live your life in the future.

You could also imagine that, in a future where we are close to being able to revive human brains, we can just _query_ human brains via simulation without bringing them back to life. The ethics of that are different, but - at least with consent from the person while they were be alive - it doesn't seem obviously wrong.

Re work improving the world - why do we imagine that someone from the present would be more effective at using those tools than someone from the future? Again, take the example of Arthur: if he returned, what would he do? What would you have him do? Or if even Isaac Newton were to return, would he be able to keep up with the brightest minds of the present generation of students who all took calculus in high school? I'm not doubting that he'd still be a sharp thinker, but would he be doing anything groundbreaking and world- changing like he did in his natural life, or would he "just" interview well at FAANG?

I'm not disputing that both of them would do things beyond _their own_ wildest dreams during their lifetimes. Honestly, I think Arthur would have a lot of fun being in the House of Lords (which is probably where they'd put him) and Newton would get a blast out of being an entry-level engineer at FAANG. I'm disputing that they would do anything beyond what the natural-born of today would do, and that unless you have a sentimental correlation between your revived self and your old self, there's not really a point in one more average or even above-average person existing in the future.

<comment><USER12> >The first one is a good point, although it doesn't quite sound to me like the folks advocating for preservation are doing so with the intention of being valuable to future generations for the interests of those generations.

They probably aren't. But that isn't incompatible with both them desiring to continue to live and them contributing to whatever society they are reborn in to. After all, people today are primarily concerned with their own lives first and foremost, yet we manage to work together to build societies just the same.

>why do we imagine that someone from the present would be more effective at using those tools than someone from the future?

Diversity of thought. That doesn't mean that revived-person-x is going to be better at any particular productive activity than someone who was born in to the future in question. But simply by being from a different era, I like to think that there is potential to be able to contribute meaningful value. Or, put another way, while it is true that the world benefits greatly from those who are the best of the best, it is also true that there is a place for a large number of competent but not exceptional people to do the bulk of the work, and that their lives have positive value, too.

<comment><USER11> Would it not be more feasible, more robust, and more effective to ensure diversity of thought for the future by building mechanisms into society to sustain them on their own (e.g., value and uphold communities that take both strongly positive and strongly negative views towards modernity) instead of relying on developing the technical ability to unfreeze people from the past and then promptly putting them to work in average jobs?

(It seems _silly_ , leaving aside the ethics of it, that we may find ourselves in the position of wishing we had the "diversity of thought" of peoples that we had long since either wiped out or pushed to assimilate into what's rapidly becoming a single global dominant culture.)

I mean, it rather sounds like we have changed the pitch from "If you desire, you can avoid death" (and the specific form of "If you have a terminal disease at a young age, we can freeze you until the disease can be cured, so you can live out the rest of your life") to "It is good for society that we build mechanisms to clone large numbers of people from the past into the present to lead average lives," which at the very least is a whole different ethics ballgame.

For one, there's the question of what happens if turns out that we can clone people from the past, en masse, even without them having been prepared specially. (Perhaps certain types of embalming cause enough stability in brain structure. Perhaps we can revive people who froze to death, like the hundreds on Mount Everest or similar mountains.) Going back to the idea that we only need a partial restoration and that there's no magical "self," is it ethical to clone them, if it is helpful to present society? Is it ethical to clone _parts_ of them, if that's a technology we develop and it's beneficial?

Also, it seems pretty unlikely that humankind is on its path to having a vastly lower population than we do today, and we have yet to be assured that we will be able to colonize other planets. Lives have value, but when we have reached the capacity of Earth, how do we weight the potential value of cloning millions of people rom the past?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What an extraordinary pain to read. This really demonstrates why Twitter is awful for debates. This can be made readable, but you'd have to rewrite the entire thing, more or less, to pull out the individual points, consolidate broken up thoughts, and create consistent formatting per author so you can follow it instead of being a sea of text with occasional implicit author switching.

(It also demonstrates why you shouldn't have light-gray text on gray background, pale green links, and dashed underline links.)

<comment><USER5> I apologize and wish I could have presented it better. I first compiled this in 2019 and had been planning to summarize it more. Alas, I recently realized that I wouldn't have the energy for that and that I should simply publish as is.

I'm surprised that people care at all, but perhaps I underestimate how many are as interested in the content as I am.

Regarding the formatting, I will try to update the background to something more readable using wordpress, although I obviously lack your skills in this area. In the meantime, you're free to copy it onto your website or elsewhere.

<comment><USER14> I've learned several new things from this conversation. Thank you for saving it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Automated calls to European phone numbers (urgent, details inside) - <AUTHOR>

An emergency has come up and I want to quickly hack a web app.
What I want is:
- a service with an API that would allow me to
- automatically call a mobile phone number and
- hang up when the person answers.
That is all the interaction I need.
I would be happier if I could also have multiple CallerIDs/names but at the moment this is #2.
I couldn't find anything useful through Google as I'm not sure what exactly this is called and what to search for. If anyone can give me some links or keywords or whatever it would be great.
Many thanks and apologies for the uninteresting thread. <comment><USER2> Basically you want a "dirty dialer" program. You could always hack together something that accesses a modem attached to a server that makes calls based on a set of numbers. I remember doing something similar on my Commodore 64 way back... :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do you need this? To check that the number is valid? There's been someone recently using this tactic to validate numbers and then spam them with SMS scams.

<comment><AUTHOR> What I want is to receive phone calls on my phone at regular time intervals. Something like a reminder service.

<comment><USER4> You can use Google Calendar's SMS notification. In Europe it's free to receive messages and calls, so it costs nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.twilio.com/how-twilio-works>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, last I checked they only offered services to US and Canada.

<comment><USER5> I think SMS is restricted only for US and Canada . Voice calls are enabled for all countries.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: pingy.io simple and fast online network tools - <AUTHOR> http://pingy.io

<comment><USER2> Works nice. I got a ping of 1ms for my server, so you must be in Amsterdam / Haarlem? Or is there some multi region distributed magic going on?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The server is in Amsterdam yes! I do plan to add more regions to ping from, though.</comment></comment>


Learning Clojure Made Easy - <AUTHOR> https://clojurecademy.com/# <comment><USER2> My advice would be allowing to start take a course without signing up, and offering to create an account during the learning process "to save progress" i.e. the way Codecademy does it (as far as I remember).

<comment><USER3> Fortunately it accepts throwaway e-mails so you can test it anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not clear if the site does this or not, but it would be good for the Clojure community if the course covered a lot in Clojurescript (or even focused on it). I think the browser development audience is likely much larger than the JVM audience, and Clojurescript and its ecosystem are an area that particularly shines in the industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> hi I'm author of the site,

You are right! I'm also considering to add Clojurescript feature to Clojurecademy(it does not have at the moment) and this would be very useful for browser development audience like you said.

<comment><USER5> Hi, have you also considered forgoing (or delaying) the sign-up step for your site? I would love to try without having to register.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey, actually I did not until lots of people started asking for it. I did not think that that would be a problem, if I did before I would not have asked for sign up. I guess I need to find a way for that. Thank you for your suggestion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Please copy and paste the following code and click Run. > (+ 1 2 3)

I typed (+ 3 3 3) and lo and behold...

> 2\. instruction failed.

> Apparently you did not copy and paste properly.Please check copy paste > order.

What on Earth? Please don't make programmers feel like copy & paste monkeys - many other sites are doing this it already.

<comment><USER6> Copy and paste might be the wrong method to use, but following directions isn't hard. It's not a REPL, it's a tutorial. Typing something wrong _should_ cause you to fail the lesson.

<comment><USER7> Never underestimate the power of being able to goof around.

When I was a kid, I learned basic Unix commands using 'learn', a tutorial program that worked like this: you were presented a menu of concepts to learn from which you chose one. The program would then give you a textual overview of the concept and any associated commands; then, to test your knowledge, it would give you a goal (say, move a specified file into a specified directory, or edit a file) and drop you into a fake shell prompt.

The fake shell worked just like the real shell in most every way. You could mess around, delete files, destroy stuff, etc. When you thought you had finished the lesson you could type a command (I believe it was 'ready'), and the tutorial would then exit the fake shell and assess your progress. If you did not meet the goal, or you seriously messed up the fake environment, you would not pass the lesson but you could opt to be dropped into the fake shell, restored to the exact same state as when you first saw it, and try the lesson again.

Rapping newcomers on the knuckles for exploring is not how you win them over. Give them directed goals to accomplish, sure, but also give them a safe environment where it's practically impossible to seriously mess things up while exploring, so that they can satisfy that "what does this button do?" urge as they hunt for the solution.

<comment><USER6> Again, that's the job of a REPL. If you're taking a spelling test in school and they ask you to spell "butterfly" and you write "treadmill"... sure, you've written a word correctly, congratulations. You still failed because you didn't write the correct word, and writing the correct word was the entire point of the exercise. If your boss tells you to write a landing page and you write a Twitter clone, hey congrats you did a great job. Now you're fired because you didn't do what you were specifically told to do.

There is a time and a place for exploration and the first step of a tutorial is _not_ that time or place. It is the time for following directions, otherwise the rest of the tutorial will not work and you will be frustrated.

This is a tutorial, not a playground. Here's what you're looking for: [https://repl.it/languages/clojure](https://repl.it/languages/clojure)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Serious question: what problems does Clojure solve for programmers? Every time I try a new and interesting language I end up saying "Gee, that was pretty fun I guess" and then go back to whatever it is that I was using prior to that. I have never been able to justify moving away from Python or C. Learning a new language can be fun and enlightening in it's own ways, but it also feels like a waste of time.

Just curious if anyone can add some perspective.

<comment><USER9> In a production environment: Clojure combines all of the resources of the Java/JVM environment with a nicer (in my opinion), dynamic syntax. It also has the best standard library of any language I have worked with, bar none.

From a learning standpoint: Clojure and other functional languages are worth using because they make you approach problems differently, and in doing so you become a better programmer.

Source: used Clojure in production building a real product for ~3 years

<comment><USER10> If compared to non recent java, clojure turns KLoC in LoC. Remembering raw swing vs seesaw gui makes me dizzy.

Also, remember that when java devs were tired of suffering bloat, they invented gui designers to hide it. Now you have two problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thank you for what was probably a lot of hard work to get this site together! I appreciate it a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are welcome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Learning clojure is relatively easy, the hard part would be to get paid for writing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> If language gets enough attention over time, there will be more job opportunities so that's a start I guess :)</comment></comment>


Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dougpetkanics.com/thank-you-heroku-or-how-to-eliminate-sysadmin

<comment><USER2> _Heroku never goes down, and it eliminates the need to pay a sysadmin (or the time value of sysadminning yourself)._

Those are two bold, scary statements.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're definitely correct about the first statement. It should be revised to "Heroku has a strong history of very little downtime."

Regarding the second though, I truly believe that the cost + time savings are tremendous from using their platform vs administering your own early on in a startup product lifecycle.

<comment><USER3> In a perfect world heroku would be the ideal "pay later" option. I.e. you start out with them and once you outgrow their platform you simply hire the sysadmin _then_ , and make him transplant the beautifully clean rails app onto your own infrastructure.

Except... reality is harsh and ugly.

You want the guy with the sysadmin foo on your team from as early as possible. Because if your thinking goes along the lines you just described then clearly you don't have him yet, nor someone who told you what slippery slope you're about to tie yourself to.

If you have the admin guy then he will find you a cost effective platform to start out with quite effortlessly. Which might be heroku in some cases, but is usually just a bunch of rented or virtual servers that he sets up over a weekend. In the latter case it might actually cost a few bucks more initially than the "heroku free plan" - but he'll explain to you in kind words why he thinks it's worth that in the midterm. And he'll probably be right.

If you don't have him, then heroku can't save you. Heroku will run your stuff for a while just until things get interesting and worthwhile load starts to build. That's the point where the sum of your mistakes brings it to its knees. Due to basic mistakes usually. Related to simple things like file descriptor limits, stuff about TCP connections, or a basic understanding of how disk i/o works and how to craft the SQL to make it not hurt so much.

At that point all you can hope for is that you're already profitable enough to afford not only that guy you skipped on initially, but rather his bigger, hairy brother, which is the only kind generally willing [and able] to take on "search & rescue" gigs. For an adequate sum.

At this point your friendly "pay-later" route has turned into a nasty "pay 10-20x _now_ " roadblock. In an "Insert coin to continue" sort of way.

This is not about what heroku can or can not do. This is about what kind of skills you need on the team for a web-startup. Don't skip on the admin. Or rather, don't skip on at least one guy who has been doing the admin thing on a real live app for a bit and also during some not-so-good times.

<comment><USER4> I'm a sysadmin-turned-startup-founder, so there's my bias right there, plain for all to see.

With that, this is really, really good advice.

In sysadmin-land, all my pain comes from software that was never written with management in mind. Assumptions like 'all TCP ports are open, all the time, between all servers', 'we can put things wherever we want in the filesystem', and 'the server should be configured just like my local workstation' make upgrades and deployment a nightmare, and are nominally difficult to change in a codebase with more than a few iterations underneath it.

Oh, and my other favorite pet peeves: Applications that provide no easy way to verify whether or not they are, in fact, up or down, and having debugging information dumped into the logs marked as errors, rather than as debug messages.

Keep in mind that these won't bite you in the ass initially, when you're only on a single server, or on a small, tightly controlled cluster of boxes. They'll torpedo you when you need to scale up, and you'll get a second shot in the boilers if you ever need meet any number of regulatory standards for various industries (PCI, HIPAA, etc.).

Fixing these early-on is _easy_ , and you can enforce scaling-and-deployment friendly coding practices through automated unit testing and CI. Won't even really cost your coding team any extra time. Fixing them down the road, after you've got a few thousand live customers and a big pile of codebase to dig around in, is... difficult, at best.

<comment><USER5> _In sysadmin-land, all my pain comes from software that was never written with management in mind. Assumptions like 'all TCP ports are open, all the time, between all servers', 'we can put things wherever we want in the filesystem' ..._

One good thing about Heroku, though, is that you essentially _have_ to do a lot of these things properly from the beginning because they enforce a shared nothing, tiered architecture. For instance, you can't write to the filesystem, you can't set up some poorly secured e-mail server, you can't have arbitrary daemons running. In general, every process that isn't core to the web stack _must_ be executed in a completely different tier.

Obviously you can still shoot yourself in the foot with poorly written SQL and other things, but a lot of the "sys-admin" type mistakes are avoided by enforcing best practices when you start with Heroku.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 Not related to the content of the article, but does anyone else get annoyed with sites that put some sort of onclick/mousedown handler on their links, presumably to track outbound clicks or something related?

This overrides the middle-click behavior of my browser to open the link in a new tab. I'm trying to open your outbound link in a new tab so I can continue to read your content AND later read the page being linked to; the analytics being surreptiously added to every link overrides and prevents this.

<comment><USER6> Can't this be done in a non-obtrusive way? Not every site that uses analytics has this type of annoying behavior, so I'm left wondering what additional value they get by overriding onclick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Heroku is great, no doubt about that. My only issue is the 'guilt factor': almost all of my use of Heroku has been for free (my cookingspace.com web site that I use to monitor my diet because I take blood thinners; test deploying prototypes; used it to write 3 articles about Heroku for DevX).

I have had poor results getting customers to use Heroku. I tried twice, and both times the extra cost over running your own EC2 instances convinced my customers to eventually spend much more money having me set up custom infrastructure - not a good decision unless you expect to have a very high volume site (I hope they are not reading this :-)

<comment><USER8> Costs that are represented in obvious dollar amounts with alternatives that have lower obvious dollar amounts tend to go over poorly with clients.

The nebulous cost of more developer and admin time is something they can carefully ignore in their cost calculations.

<comment><USER7> I agree. Also, I suspect that if a deployed app is rarely accessed, then there is some spin up time to load a slug. Both customers noticed this effect that the first page load usually seemed slow to them. Same thing on AppEngine (a 'loading request' can take a while).

Bottom line is that people dream that their web app will attract millions of users, and they want to plan for outstanding success. While I am sure that Heroku must have customers with large user bases, the sweet spot seems to be for moderately sized web portals that you sometimes need to scale up on demand.

<comment><USER9> That would be a despicable thing for Heroku to do: you're paying them for capacity by the dyno-hour, but they don't keep all of them resident while they're paid for?

App Engine is the opposite: you're paying for the usage, so they spin up/down as much capacity as necessary to satisfy the volume you're willing to pay for.

<comment><USER7> You might be right that Heroku always keeps all of your dynos "spinning." If they do spin them down for the two less expensive shared cluster options, that seems OK, at least for my understanding of their service options. My customers used (for a while) the cheaper shared cluster options.

If you are paying more for the dedicated cluster options, then I agree with you that they should not be spun down.

Certainly, it is OK for them to spin down the free option dynos if they don't get HTTP requests for some reasonable time period.

<comment><USER10> That's exactly what they do: spin down inactive free app. Anything which is paid for will never be spun down

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm intrigued by Heroku (and EY Cloud), but the thing that really freaks me out is how they charge for every little extra thing. I love the idea of a turnkey solution for Rails deployment and cloud scalability, but for me personally I don't think I would do a startup on it because the value proposition is squeezed from both sides.

On the low-end I can get a VPS for $10-$20 month and get a Rails app up and running for a significant number of users with just that modest outlay. I can install SSL and any software I want and have a predictable amount of resources to play with. Yes, there is some sysadmining overhead, but setting up Nginx w/ passenger is like an hour of work once you've been through it a couple times, and similarly a lot of the add-ons that Heroku charges a monthly fee for are just a small one-time time investment. When I'm trying to bootstrap something really small the last thing I want is ramping up a significant recurring cash costs just to run some open source software that is really not hard enough to setup or maintain to justify recurring costs.

On the high-end when I'm using a lot of server resources, I'm paying a growing premium for a given amount of resources. Now don't get me wrong, it's nice to be able to magically adjust for traffic spikes, but if I have a consistently high amount of traffic, once again I'm paying a high recurring cost for actual resources that are a fraction of the cost, _especially_ if I need any add-ons which are not inherently resource-intensive—maybe I'm actually just paying for SaaS of essentially open-source components. Actually I have this problem with EC2 and S3 in general to some extent, though much less so than with Heroku because the markup is lower and I've still got a large degree of control.

The benefit of Heroku is that they maintain an up-to-date and well-tuned Rails stack w/ add-ons on top of EC2. There is definitely value there. But in all cases there is this downside of overhead and flexibility. The clincher for me is that ultimately Heroku may end up not supporting something I need that would be trivial open-source stuff on any UNIX VPS. At that point I will need to migrate off of Heroku and all those supposed sysadmin costs hit me full in the face all at once rather than being amortized over the life of the project. Maybe I'm just turning into a cranky old man (at 31!), but VPS or dedicated servers still seem like a better value considering all risk factors. If I had VC money and was trying to ramp something up really fast I might reconsider.

<comment><USER10> Even though I had a VPS configured and running for almost a year (i.e., all the upfront sysadmin setup done) I was stressing about what I hadn't done, or more precisely what I didn't know I needed to do. Forgetting to update the OS, check if the machine had been compromised, check the load/mem/disk space etc. Just a hundred little worries floating around inside my head.

So I moved to Heroku to focus purely on the app. It's wrong to say they change for "every little thing"... most addons are free. But yes, hourly cron, background workers, unlimited bundles etc are charged for.

I'll always recommend to anyone that they check out Heroku because I think it's a real time saver _if_ your app fits within their constraints. During development you'll usually save money and then the costs will scale (hopefully) with your income after launch

<comment><USER12> For me, not owning my own server as a serial entrepreneur is like a graphics design consultant not owning a mac. Or a mechanic without four extra cars in his backyard.

I'm sure Heoku is a great deal if you don't have the sysadmin skills. My skills are just good enough and I manage my own box. I bought it 5 years ago..4 cores, 8 GBs, 73GB RAID-1...for $5000. I pay $105/month to host it.

This is at least the equivalent in horsepower of what you get from Heroku for $500+ a month (that's being generous). So in a few years, I'm ahead of the curve: $11,300 vs $30,000. Add in the fact that I paid down $5000 in advance as a capital investment and I'm still ahead. You could do this today for under $3000 capital investment and have an even more capable box.

Sure there's risk I'll have a hardware failure (I did have 3 years 24 hours on site warranty, but that's still potential downtime and headaches). But there is also risk that over the course of that time you will want to run things on your server you did not anticipate when you started. It certainly was the case for me. e.g. I started my app in rails then switched to merb. Now I run a second site on the same server with mongodb and solr.

Bottom line, if you have moderate linux skills and know your going to be in "some business" that requires you have a server, buy your own. If not, Heorku seems a fine choice for some.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for this comparison.

Can you recommend the company that you colocate/lease-to-own with?

<comment><USER12> <http://m5hosting.com>. They're in a solid data center in San Diego. I started with them for two reasons: 1- they knew FreeBSD (I use ubuntu now but wanted someone who could hands on cover me in a pinch with FreeBSD at the time). 2 - I was in Shanghai at the time and needed good bandwidth from the U.S. That data center has better routing than most.

m5hosting is bigger than when I started with them but they are still a "medium-sized" company. They seem to be solid and whenever I have a support request they are on it quickly...about half the time I get a response from the owner.

I generally follow the rule of picking business partners that are "right- sized" for me as a customer. For many services I don't want a company so big that I'm not worth their time after the sale...especially when it comes to server support.

I have never been to the data center and never seen my own server. I bought it on ebay and had it shipped to them ;).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A bit off topic, but JumpPost (the site launched on Heroku that this article refers to) looks an awful lot like you ripped RentHop's design. You guys thinking about changing that anytime soon? <http://www.renthop.com/list> <http://jumppost.com/apartments>

<comment><USER15> Down to the arrow in the logo. That's what happens when you market research team = your development team = your design team. Contamination.

Guys, let X/N people do the design, while (N-X)/N go around looking at your competitors' websites for "inspiration". What you wanna do is copy business plans, target markets and monetiziation strategies. Not goddamn pixel and element positions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I tried installing spree the other day, a rails shopping app, and I gave up after entering gem dependency hell and the no local file policy. Went faster on my own server with nginx+passenger.

<comment><USER17> You cannot be PCI DSS compliant on Heroku unless you only use paypal express or google checkout for your payment backend. Be mindful of that before you commit to something like spree. I recommend Shopify instead :D

<comment><USER18> This doesn't sound right to me. Do you perhaps mean PCI Level 1 compliance (which requires on site data center audits and thus cannot be provided by any cloud host)?

For instance, what about Heroku/EC2 prohibits me from using Authorize.net as my payment processor, provided I never store card data?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone have experience with this vs amazon AWS? (amazon seems to be cheaper)

<comment><USER20> They're very different things.

EC2 is bare Linux; you install apache/passenger/REE/memcached/postgres/etc/etc/etc. If you want to scale past one server, you're on your own there. You take care of backups, security, system monitoring, etc.

Heroku is a platform that abstracts you from these things. You just push out your app, tweak a dial or two on your Settings page, and they take care of everything else for you.

If you want CPU-by-the-hour, go with EC2. If you want to host a Rails app, go with Heroku.

<comment><USER20> Edit: this guy shouldn't be downvoted. He asked an honest question (what's the difference between Heroku and AWS) - unless I'm missing something, he isn't trolling. No need to vote him down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there something like heroku for django apps? :)

<comment><USER22> Is GAE not that?

<comment><USER23> No. There are a number of some pretty serious restrictions. I would _love_ something like Heroku for WSGI applications. Ian Bicking is working on something similar, not as high level with his Silver Lining project. <http://bitbucket.org/ianb/silverlining/>

<comment><USER24> A couple of months ago I explored building a Django-friendly Heroku clone. I white-boarded out the architecture, estimated how much work would be needed for all the pieces, and built a spreadsheet revenue model. It's an interesting and attractive business, but I'm only one man and my C skills are rusty (really, really rusty). I couldn't get myself to a point where I could deliver a product for at least a year, and I want to be ramen profitable before that.

My current focus is to look at the plethora of excellent SaaS applications that help provide the whole Rails ecosystem, then turn around and do the same for Django, with an eye towards expanding to handle other Python frameworks, and then into the Java space.

<comment><USER25> I think you could get well into the "people are paying money for this service" stage of a hosted Django hosting platform without ever having to touch C. Python is fast enough to do most of the systems-level programming you'd need for such a beast, especially since so much of the standard library (socket, struct, asyncore, subprocess) sits directly on top of the fast POSIX syscalls you'd be invoking to do the same work in C anyway.

Going down to the metal may help squeeze the last 10-20% out of your hardware, but the the really interesting and challenging work in coming up with a scalable hosting platform is elsewhere: security, monitoring, process spawning/reaping, deployment, et. al. If working in Python gives you a time- to-market advantage, then go for it. You can hire a C hacker when you have enough business to make the improvement in your hardware utilization efficiency pay off.

<comment><USER24> Well, some effort needs to go into some plugins for nginx and varnish. nginx needs to route incoming requests to the right varnish, and some custom cache invalidation stuff should happen on varnish as well.

Other than that? Lots and lots of python, of course ;) I'm only one guy, and there are three or four big moving parts that need to be written. Something to build eggs and push them, something to monitor and manage processes on individual servers, something to dispatch requests to the appropriate servers, and something to monitor and manage the database servers.

Even pulling back and looking at a minimum viable product, I'm still doing most of that work, just far simpler versions. Succinctly, it's too big for me to tackle on my own in the next six months.

<comment><USER23> I'd do without eggs and provide common Python libraries that need compiling on the server (lxml, Crypto etc.). You'd then simply accept Python code over the live for deployments. You'd also want to handle rollback, schema migration, key-value services and a DB per instance, some sort of dumping/loading of data. If you stick with certain django conventions (namely settings-as-a- module and apps/libs on PYTHONPATH) you could get away with a really sweet and simple deployment procedure. A pretty smart client to handle all this is a lot of work too. Have a look at Silver Lining. Just got EC2 working on my fork ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I like Heroku, but it seems overpriced for most situations.

In particular, I think it's an issue that there's no decrease in cost for dynos (though I be for extremely large sites there's special pricing). Because of this and because you get a freebie, dyno pricing is actually a little progressive (ie. your average cost/dyno increases as you get more dynos).

If you have 2 dynos, you're paying for one at ~$36/month, so your average cost per dyno is $18. If you have 11 dynos, you're paying for 10 for a total of $360/month, which is an average of $32.73/dyno-month.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm seriously considering Heroku, for my test/learning projects, and am willing to pay a little. Blossom and Koi are good for me.

But one thing that is making me think about VPS instead of Heroku is the ability to run multiple apps from one VPS unless I really need the power.

Does Koi allow you to run multiple Rails apps/websites per Koi, or is it 1 per Koi?

<comment><USER28> Each app is a separate instance. I have 5 apps there for free. The benefit of my knack for creating unsuccessful side projects. :)

In any case, pricing is separate for each Ruby app you wish to run. You could run one under Blossom and the other under Koi, no problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've been considering using Heroku for my one-man side project , simply because I do not have the time to attend to both development and system administration. I'm aware that it's more expensive, but when your time is precious, I suspect it will be well worth the extra investment.

</comment><comment><USER30> Add php support pretty please

<comment><USER5> Why would one need this for PHP? Isn't PHP already pretty much upload and go?

<comment><USER31> You would want it for the same reason you would want it for any other language.

"upload and go" is a convenience feature of Heroku, not it's reason for existence. It does make it easier to deploy Ruby apps but, again, it's not the reason it exists.

<comment><USER32> What is the reason for it then? Scaling? But you still have to work on those nasty sql queries. Too bad it doesn't support any nosql database.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Would it make sense to ask people to play thinking games during technical interviews (e.g., Portal)? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I don't think it will be a very accurate predictor of ability but it might send the message that you are not a standard company to work for, and make your company stand out in the applicants memory. I'd only consider doing it if game playing is part of your company's ethos, for example as a way to relive tension. As a predictor nothing beats having the applicant write or tinker with a small program.

</comment><comment><USER3> Puzzle questions are a terrible way to interview. Adding the filter of an unfamiliar game mechanic makes it even worse.</comment>


What Technology  Dropbox is using for its client and server? - <AUTHOR>

Hi if its not secret I will be more then happy to know which technology did drop box are using
For its windows client and server <comment><USER2> I know this is no complete answer, but AFAIK they use binary diffs to detect changes in the client and a dæmon that monitors the dropbox folder. I'd also assume that the server has binary de-duplication. In their YC application they explain some other stuff: <http://files.dropbox.com/u/2/app.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply , i was more interested in the technical aspects of the client / server for example i know they are using python , but how did they compile it for windows ? py2exe ? , and how about server side ?</comment></comment>