what about open-source projects?
Much as how aspiring authors can learn to write fiction from reading the fiction of others and then imitating that, getting feedback on their work, and iterating, it seems like aspiring programmers could learn by reading/contributing to the open-source projects of others and then writing their own.
Example- Linus Torvalds, never worked for a company, made the original Linux while a grad student, and seems to be doing fine (I'm writing this message on a ThinkPad running Linux Mint).
Or Bill Joy with BSD at Berkley, before his time at Sun.
Or heck, why not go all the way back to Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie building Unix and C?
I have a few unemployed hipster friends who get laid a fair amount because their idleness enables them to go to hipster parties where they meet other idle hipsters to have sex with.
I'd argue that overall, having a job, unless it's a job that can easily get you laid (barman/barmaid, working in a shop, especially if you're a heterosexual male working in a clothes shop with an 80+% female clientele, music/artistic performance) is a net negative for your sex life. Working 60 hours/week in a tech company office, if you're a heterosexual male, is probably not as conductive to your sex life as being an unemployed bum who spends a couple of hours a day wandering the streets of a large city talking to strangers. Obviously, if you're a heterosexual female, being paid to be around a bunch of males in a tech office is probably going to massively help you get laid, but I think the key variable is just "number of potential partners encountered", not employment status.
While I agree that having a well-balanced life isn't necessarily the cause of Europe "falling behind", I'd like to point out that the US also shares some of those issues:
bad policies: massive tariffs, extreme spend of the military-industrial complex at the cost of education and healthcare, a completely pointless War on Drugs that just increases violence (to be fair, many states have more or less legalized cannabis at this point), war in foreign countries (if all the money spent of Afghanistan had just been distributed back to American taxpayers in the form of either tax cuts of stimulus checks, how might that have affected the economy?)
bad leaders: I think most historians would agree that president Trump is not exactly Mount Rushmore material
bad deployment of capital: at the state level, this would mirror 'bad policies', ie I don't think war the Afghanistan/war on drugs was a net gain for the US taxpayer. On the private side, the boom/bust nature of tech investments - how many were buying Pets.com stock in 1998? How many people bought trendy NFTs in 2019? How many completely unviable businesses get funded today just because "our product has AI"?
I agree the US has many problems, and I really don't want to make this a EU vs USA thread. I also wouldn't say the US is "successful", whereas the EU is not. I just think the EU has amazing potential and isn't living up to it.
Also I think any success the US does enjoy over the EU is in spite of the things you mentioned, and a large part of that is the US simply has a much larger economy, much more money, and much deeper and well developed capital markets. Which just goes to show how much more the EU could aspire to, being a much larger bloc of countries with a larger population and all.
I also saw a theory (not sure how credible) that the reason humans started doing agriculture was in fact because we killed all the megafauna we used to eat.
This was over 10,000 years ago. Well before the Industrial Revolution, indeed, before even the original Agricultural Revolution.
If it's true that nobody is getting promoted for improving web app performance, that seems like an opportunity. Build an org that rewards web app performance gains, and (in theory) enjoy more users and more money.
If it's because VSCode has built in IDE features like LSP integration, I personally really like Helix. Keyboard based (although not the same movements as Vim/Nvim, it didn't take me long to switch), and it's got built in LSP integration/stuff just works out of the box.
Although no LLM support in the editor, I personally just run Claude Code in a separate terminal, but if you want AI in the editor you'll have to look elsewhere.
I did try Neovim with Copilot a while back, and Google shows a few NeoVim Claude Code plugins, so it's probable that if you want an LLM in your text editor, NeoVim might work :)
asking, for all tasks shown to introduce large amounts of microplastics in our bodies and environment, "can we accomplish this task in a way that doesn't introduce microplastics in our bodies and environment"?
For example, using a reusable metal gourd instead of plastic water bottles for the task of 'portable hydration'.
and because this is Hacker News, I'll kindly welcome the comment: 'well actually metal gourds have some toxic substance in the lining that's worse than microplastics' and reply: ok, Cardboard bottles then. Or a gourd made of a sheep's bladder like back in the good ol' days, whatever they used back in the bronze age.
I think we avoid the whole "personality responsibility" and "these paper straws fucking suck" angle with water bottles and the like and instead focus on "do we need a factory in China making 15,000,000 plastic trinkets for happy meals" or "does literally every single item for sale on the entire planet have to come in plastic wrapping", etc
with all due respect - just because your friends occasionally want to go someplace with questionable names doesn't mean they aren't good friends.
I'm not going to ditch the friends who let me sleep on their couch for weeks at a time during periods when I was homeless and jobless just because they occasionally want me to accompany them to a stupid restaurant.
I disagree about Apple's OS and UI, I prefer the user experience of Linux :)
With a distro like Linux Mint or Ubuntu everything basically "just works", and you have much more freedom with how you setup your computer. Plus, while Apple is generally better about not bloaring their OS with bothersome corporate BS ("log into your Windows account! Sign up for OneDrive! AI in your email!") then Microsoft, they're not exactly perfect.
Example- Linus Torvalds, never worked for a company, made the original Linux while a grad student, and seems to be doing fine (I'm writing this message on a ThinkPad running Linux Mint). Or Bill Joy with BSD at Berkley, before his time at Sun. Or heck, why not go all the way back to Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie building Unix and C?
reply