fyi, there's no private messaging option on HN - people usually post contact details in their profile.
Cool, updated the profile.
Readit Newsthomasdullien commented on Switzerland – Europe's Silicon Valley for Developers? wearedevelopers.com/magaz... · Posted by u/eigensinn_
thomasdullien commented on Switzerland – Europe's Silicon Valley for Developers? wearedevelopers.com/magaz... · Posted by u/eigensinn_
>> Not much for developers who are looking for interesting challenges .. From a Swiss person
This is simply not true. I'm Swiss and working as a developer and consultant in Switzerland since the nineties. I - as many others - was able to do several studies at a world-class university right on my doorstep without getting into debt. People are fair, hardworking, innovative and responsible. Switzerland has ideal conditions for companies and people looking for work. And it's a great place to live. Why do you think Google and others have large development departments in Switzerland? And it's also good for start-ups. Have a look at e.g. https://www.organisator.ch/die-100-besten-startups-der-schwe... and https://www.top100startups.swiss/index.cfm?page=136340&cfid=....
Also see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swiss_companies_by_rev....
(The reason Google has an office here is because Urs Hölzle studied at ETH at knew people here.)
thomasdullien commented on Switzerland – Europe's Silicon Valley for Developers? wearedevelopers.com/magaz... · Posted by u/eigensinn_
FWIW: I am a 2nd-time entrepreneur. I bootstrapped a company in Germany from 2004-2011, and sold it to Google then. As part of that I moved to Switzerland. I started another company in early 2018 in Zurich, believing the hype about it being a good place to do business.
I won't go into details publicly, but: If your market and your potential acquirers are primarily in the US, and you think your startup will have a long-term focus in the US, avoid incorporating in Zurich. Go to London, Berlin, Paris, pretty much anywhere but Zurich. If you absolutely have to incorporate in Switzerland, move yourself to a startup-friendly Canton such as Zug. Do not incorporate in Zurich, and do not open an office in Zurich.
My experiences have been resoundingly negative, and I am not the only one - founders just avoid talking about the negative experiences for fear of causing more problems.
If your market will be primarily Switzerland and the immediate neighbors, starting here is likely fine (albeit you will get better price/performance on engineering in neighboring countries).
Feel free to reach out in private.
thomasdullien commented on Supporting Linux kernel development in Rust lwn.net/SubscriberLink/82... · Posted by u/dochtman
The point of this LPC session was how to incrementally introduce Rust in the existing Linux kernel, with all its existing drivers and syscalls and similar. A rewrite would indeed be a daunting and problematic proposition.
There are kernels written in Rust, such as Redox, but those are separate projects, and that's not what this conference session or article are talking about.
Standing reminder: the Rust project is not a fan of rabid Rust over-evangelism (e.g. "Rewrite It In Rust", "Rust Evangelism Strike Force"), and sees it as damaging and unhelpful. We discourage that kind of thing wherever we see it. We're much more in favor of a measured, cautious approach.
Man, thank you for writing the last paragraph. I looked at Rust, I quite like the language, I think it gets a million things right and is a substantial improvement over existing languages, but ... every time I point out that Rust does not magically solve all security problems, I need to spend two days dealing with people with less security expertise than me yelling at me that I am wrong and rewriting the world in Rust will deliver enlightenment. That particular fringe of the Rust community almost turned me away from the language.
So reading your last paragraph makes me feel welcome as someone that says "Rust is great - but rewriting everything in Rust will not solve security". Thanks. <3
While I have only skimmed the article, I have not noticed:
* an explanation how to test the multiple heterogenous out-transitions of a state efficiently,
* the reason for the silent assumption that at most one out-transition of a state is followed, i.e. that this is not an NFA [0],
* most importantly, a comparison with Binary Decision Diagrams [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_finite_automa...
Yeah, the (ro)BDD comparison really is missing; those would be the default data structure I'd reach for for such a problem.
You're cherry picking. France imposed a wealth tax and they repealed it.
"At least 10,000 wealthy people left the country to avoid paying the tax; most moved to neighboring Belgium"
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-14/france...
s/cherry picking/showing an example with interesting properties that is different from France/g
So this is actually where the discussion should go: What properties does the Swiss wealth tax have (particularly in the wider taxation system) that the French wealth tax did not have?
What is needed for a wealth tax to have no negative effects? What about income and capital gains tax at the same time? Etc. etc.
I am not trying to make an argument pro wealth taxes, I am trying to make an argument against shallow and non-empirical arguments.
Perhaps notable: Switzerland has a wealth tax (of up to 0.3%), and there is zero evidence that this has any deterrent effect on wealthy people settling in Switzerland or startups being created in Switzerland.
Other features of the tax system more than offset the 0.3% wealth tax.
Personally, I am a bit disappointed by the lack of depth of the discourse: Wealth taxes and their effect have been studied quite a bit in economics literature, and there are various peer-reviewed papers that attempt to measure the effects, but the Silicon Valley crowd is strangely avoidant of examining evidence or explaining their opposition with real-world data. It's all 101ism and polemics.
See also https://twitter.com/halvarflake/status/1295283922117566464?s... - I tried to ask @rabois for the source of a claim, and got crickets in return.
I'd like to see a more nuanced and thorough discussion, to be honest. Perhaps that's a bit much to ask.
thomasdullien commented on We Don’t Need to Work So Much (2015) newyorker.com/news/daily-... · Posted by u/thesumofall
As an European working with lots of American contractors in the tech field, I'm always impressed by their work ethics. The put in 10-12 hours, 6 days a week.
But from talking with them, it seems like their focus is on retirement - hopefully in their 50's. That's their grand plan, because that's when they'll start "living".
It's a bit of a contrast to us Scandinavians - as we really like to live in the present. No pie in the sky dreams.
Which is also why we guard our working rights and work-life balance like a national treasure.
There are also cultural factors about how you present your work. GC Rota wrote about the mathematics culture in the 50's that European and US researchers worked similar amounts, but the Europeans took great care to present an image of working less than they actually did, and the US researchers often presented an image of working more than they did.
My experiences of working both in the US and in Europe (Germany and Switzerland) was that the number of hours worked in the US was higher, but the intensity of work was lower: There was more office chitchat, more goofing around, more "watercooler/coffee talk", and so forth. There is also an extreme culture of "presenteeism" in the US that starts in highschool (where being physically present is much more important than being attentive in any form).
thomasdullien commented on Deutschland AG rethinks workers’ role in management economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/c0restraint
I've never heard of anybody using exports as development metric. It's usually just a sign of developing country with cheap labor.
> wage stagnation that set in in the 2000s.
And imagine that. Seems to fit the low wage story pretty well.
When speaking about "competitiveness", what measures aside from current account balance and share of global exports is better suited?
Not to be snarky, but you can't do any reading in economics about competitiveness and not encounter the current account balance (which is exports - imports): https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6701/trade/importance-of-...
thomasdullien commented on Deutschland AG rethinks workers’ role in management economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/c0restraint
Their GDP per capita is about 17% lower than the United States, but their GDP per hour worked is only 3% lower with their average work-week being 22% shorter than in the United States.
So, from a very narrow and short-sighted point of view.. they're just as productive as we are, but they have 1/3 our population and they work fewer hours which limits their ability to compete in the global marketplace.
For German companies that serve only domestically or within the EU, I doubt the councils are a problem or even an impediment.. but for companies that want to operate globally, I imagine it does reduce their ability to compete.
I guess the question for Germany is, do they want to sacrifice these broader protections and slightly better working conditions in order to improve profits for a handful of companies that can actually take advantage of it? I hope not, but it looks like the groundwork is already being laid for a campaign to change this.
The "reduces their ability to compete"-argument does not hold water considering the data, though. One useful measure of a countries competitiveness is the size of their exports (because it implies that there is a lot of foreign demand for the products from that country), or in their "exports-to-population" ratio.
If you check https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/exports you can see that Germany exports about EUR 112bn worth of goods per month, on a population of about 83 million, about EUR 1350 per head. For comparison:
Canada exports about 49bn CAD per month, on a population of 38m, for approximately 1297 CAD per head.
The US exports about 208bn USD per month, on a population of 327m, for approximately 638 USD per head.
If anything, the big weakness of the German economy is not that it is not competitive enough, the big weakness of the German economy is a lack of domestic consumption due to not much of the money actually reaching workers pockets; this is a result of a fairly aggressive wage stagnation that set in in the 2000s.