skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's suppose for a moment that we accept the thesis that due to automation, there won't be much work for humans in the future.

Instead of taking wealth from the smaller number of humans who are creating that wealth and giving it to those who are not, why don't we just accept that we don't need so many of us any more? Let the extras die off naturally (note to angry skimmers: I SAID NATURALLY) and migrate to a new lower-population equilibrium. There have been a lot of explanations offered for why the world's more advanced economies have been seeing lower birth rates for decades, but one rarely reads the most obvious one: people are having fewer children because fewer humans are needed. This isn't a problem to be solved, it's a boon to future generations.

While some resources are created through economic activity driven by humans, others (most notably land, in the form of space between neighbors who desire it, frontiers, the economic viability of wilderness conservation, and of course land for economic purposes) are fixed. If fewer humans can create just as much of the variable stuff while leaving more of the fixed stuff for each one, how is that not better for all? The vast majority of humans, if not literally every last one, will be much wealthier. And that's even before we consider the fundamental unfairness of redistribution, or the waste associated with the political and bureaucratic machines it entails.

Instead of thinking about how to redistribute the dividends from automation, we should be making sure we won't have to. In a given environment, every species has an optimal population. If we alter our environment such that fewer humans can produce the same amount of wealth as more humans, that optimal population has decreased. We need to accept that and adjust to it, not fight it with gimmickry and theft. If (and it's a big if) automation is really going to put billions of people out of productive work, then the only sustainable answer to that is fewer people. Embrace it.
Ask HN: Have you been Challenged lately?
I am asking for your feedback on ios app ChlgClub. Challenge Club provides you ability to challenge your friends on tasks, causes and activities dear to you, while you test your own limits. It's the only platform where you can create, compete, and invite others to join you in the coolest, craziest, entertaining and most extreme challenges. Vist at http://www.chlgclub.com
LuaJIT supports the 5.1 Lua standard, so goto doesn't exist.

Yeah, finalizers and weak key value stores would be an issue in certain versions of JS.
And given an event like this sucking more resources out of the IRS, I guess I and others marked to be audited (they didn't believe I existed at first?) won't get our returns any time soon.
Exploring the Demographics of Ferguson, Missouri with R
I got there (on the net all the time) in '96, that's probably the earliest it was possible for a residential customer here (Canada). Before that, unlimited plans weren't a thing.

I stopped being on the net all the time in late '97 when my ISP banned me from the modem pool during prime-time since my Linux box would tie up one of their line 24/7.

Then I got it back again in late '99 when we moved somewhere with DSL coverage (early Nortel 1024/128k "DSL".) I have had high-speed, always on internet continuously since. Currently FTTH at 100/30m.

So Jobs, speaking in 1994 about average consummers, was right. Late '90s / early '00s saw ubiquitous DSL/Cable take over as the dominant access technology. Obviously iPhone brought always online to the mobile phone market later.
Sweet name! Austrian for tomato, good choice!
I would rather get burned by "the norm" than something unexpected. At least if I know something is happening, I can plan for it. The fact that young people "accept this as the norm" is encouraging, because it certainly beats the alternative of being completely unaware of it.
I find the negativity weird, given that most of us here are (supposedly) building things. I think his idea has merit, and is different enough from Youtube Gaming that it can probably survive alongside. I think he perhaps just made a few mistakes -- the biggest one trying to get funding before testing the business model. (Although in his defence, that seems to be happening a lot these days).

Anyway, rather than just whining uselessly here I'm going to actually find his contact info and give him some suggestions.
This.

I was in Microsoft, part of an org which pulled in billions of dollars in double digits annually. When doing planning and visioning exercise, time and again we would never focus on scenarios which seemed to be ‘trivial’ (translating to hundreds of millions dollar revenue oppurtunity), as we had limited headcount and finite amount of time to execute.

Startups don’t realize how constrained are the product teams in big organizations, much more than many startups. Every headcount, every contract worker (if they are allowed at all) need to be fought for. And then there is bureaucracy - post planning and spec’ing it is impossible to do any sort of minor pivot, once the juggernaut starts rolling there is no stopping, no room for even a pause to evaluate a new threat.

I’m not an expert of gaming by any stretch and I’m sure the founders decided on best course of actions based upon their priorities but looking at the YouTube Gaming page (http://youtube-global.blogspot.in/2015/06/a-youtube-built-fo...), YouTube seem to be aiming for something which is natural extension of what was already happening in YouTube: “More than 25,000 games will each have their own page, a single place for all the best videos and live streams about that title. You’ll also find channels from a wide array of game publishers and YouTube creators.”

I thought the founders were right when they said YouTube Gaming launch is a validation. I’m sure in the initial days YouTube Gaming org would be taking small steps and would try to consolidate what is already happening in YouTube but perhaps in a disjointed fashion. Go for easy discoverability etc.

In this situation I would assume that there would be plenty of scenarios left uncovered which an innovative startup can solve for (which initially YouTube Gaming would be incapable of paying attention to due to resource constraints - people, time - however compelling they may be).

And hey, one could always build something with acquisition in mind - an acquisition by Google (YouTube gaming) wouldn’t have been a bad way to get validated in the end.
You'd expect they'd learned their lesson after the result of what they did to Iran in the 50s...
Copper Gutters: A Marriage of Beauty and Function – LGC Roofing Blog
Almost 20 years later, I distinctly remember my high school physics teacher standing at the front of the class on the first day and saying "Remember this: everything you will learn from me this year is wrong."
Ask HN: What is the most difficult server performance problem you have debugged
Hi, I am working on an open source efficient kernel-level latency tracker (I/O, CPU, scheduling, IRQ, etc), and I am looking for feedback from the community. I would like to know what are the hardest to debug server performance problems you have faced. The goal is to automate the detection of these problems at runtime. Thanks !
That's a fantastic comment and example. Know your answer. Ask the question.
I also highly respect Pixar's model - encourage collaboration and feedback between peers.
I'm managing a team at the moment. We are a democratic group. I mostly ask Questions to steer toward success. The team (mostly women) are empowered to own, experiment, share and collaborate. It's been a fantastic experience.
Interestingly, when we started, there was a lot of sass about gender superiority - but that's gone away since I expressed several times that we are all people, no other attitude will be tolerated.
It's largely a concept I've encountered online, with varying degrees of precision in discussions. There will be books about it in 20 years once the academics notice, sort of like stagflation (which was "impossible"). It really strikes me as an exact description of today's economic reality -- stagnant wages, deflation in manufactured goods and anything tech, and crazy inflation in areas like housing, rent, health care, and tuition.

So far this has been driven mostly by outsourcing, not automation. When automation really kicks in with good AI, it's game over. There will be universal basic income or blood in the streets.
Thanks!

The switch from Node to Python was mostly incidental -- I had written a peer-to-peer style program in Node, and I wanted to simplify the logic by rewriting it with a primary/secondaries model.

The switch from Python to Go was more intentional. While running gut-sync, there are times that sub-commands that can take a long time to complete, e.g. git-fetch or implicit calls to git-gc, and git provides feedback in the form of progress meters. I wanted to be able to have gut-sync do simultaneous fetches to N servers, and to have statuses interleaved in the console in real-time (I'm doing a bit of TTY hacking here). I tried rewriting logic first using Python 3.4's asyncio, but I found it too complicated and too slow to do non-blocking I/O in Python. There are readline() methods and read(N) methods, but I had a ton of trouble getting them to work in non-blocking mode.

Basically, Python's subprocess stuff works great if you're fine using proc.communicate() or proc.stdout.readline(), but if you want to do something real-time, the lower-level stuff gets very complicated and slow. asyncio is a step in the right direction, but it was still pretty awkward to have to specify `@asyncio.coroutine` and `yield from` everywhere, and it could be fairly tricky to track down whenever you screw one of them up.

Over in Go-land, though, you can just read streams one byte at a time if you want, and do whatever sort of fancy processing you need to, and it's all blazingly fast by comparison. And go-routines are very simple and flow naturally with the language (compared to feeling bolted on like an after-market mod in Python).

Edit: PS I still love Python. It's wonderful for many programming tasks. It's just not as great for low-level real-time systems programming as Go.
One teacher per 5 kids seems reasonable to me and will more than quadruple the kindergarten teachers. Homeschooling is a terrible idea as is, but more pedagogues will completely remove any logical reasons to even consider it.

But why do you latch to the specific job i picked? More ecologists, more physicians, more nurses, more psychologists, more people in the creative industries. More people in the "caring" industries as a whole. Workforce shifted from labor to knowledge. It will now shift to societal work.
Happy to do it. The last thing I want is for my post to have come across as vitriolic or argumentative; I just wanted to voice the one case of unease the article left me with :)
Only if you can afford the upfront capital to purchase and maintain the machines.
For instance, around the time this article was written, someone from Microsoft was sitting across the desk from me (this is in Seattle) and told me "you can re-engineer our product to use our technology, or we will bury you". Re-engineering would have made us microsoft windows only, and dependent on them for everything... and we would have lost all our value because it doesn't make any sense technically (the guy didn't understand what we did.)

Well, it's now been almost 20 years, and Microsoft has still never released what they claimed they were going to release and have us build on top of them.

So yeah, I have no love lost for Microsoft. Yet they're still not as evil as Google.
$91 for a router with a few mb of ram?

with some $20 more you can build a amd 5350 or a Intel j9200 with some 4 port pcie network card and have any os on a fully capable computer, probably using less power than that thing.
How does the DMCA stop a tractor owner from replacing a faulty sensor, engine part, or a drive belt? The article implies that the DMCA stops the farmer from fixing even mechanical components.
Search Combinators (2013) [pdf]
Luerl – An implementation of Lua in Erlang
What do you plan to do exactly?
This is the problem with services that store user information: it is highly probably that vulnerabilities like these exist. Security is rarely given the time and attention it requires.

I'm not trying to single out Pocket; they are just the latest evidence that even in the few cases where "you can trust us with your data" is said honestly, it isn't a promise that can be kept in practice.
Everything IS being done in the shadows!!

All you've done is write a few paragraphs about how great the community is, and make a repo.

CF's work on nginx is of no concern to me, and even less so is the tendency of CF to hire people to work FOSS projects. Big deal. Nobody that's reading this is stupid enough to believe that it's out of the realm of possibility to spend some money on your image.

What you've said about LuaJIT all but confirms my suspicions that CF will suck the project dry for efficiency until it's a dry withered husk.

You are shoehorning developers at CF into LuaJIT the same way that Google shoehorns developers into the Chromium project. What ultimately happens is the work that gets done in Chromium ends up being misused in Chrome as a commercial bloat whose function is to extract and extrapolate as much as it can about the user. The user's intention is just to browse the web smoothly, and they get taken for a ride.

LuaJIT is meant to be a performance implementation of Lua, suitable for embedding within larger applications and games as a DSL. At this point in time, I would absolutely stand behind the argument that CF seeks to turn LuaJIT into a more standalone project that leverages CF's infrastructure to make CF even more money.

I just can't abide, and I certainly can't believe that you expect the community to watch this happen as you systematically corporatize a well-loved, well-used, well-done project.
20 years later with Chromebooks this finally happened.
Mozilla claims that they don't get money for the integration, and I don't see a good reason why I shouldn't believe them. Pocket very likely doesn't have that much money lying around, compared to Mozillas budget.
Streaming percentiles: 2 solutions
thanks I was trying nc
If you sit 8h+/day and your back hurts, get a SmartDesk
Sadly, strange loop is sold out. I very much wish I could go there, but it's impossible for me as a student in the Netherlands, both too expensive to go there, and it's too far away. There are many people there I'd love to meet in person.
I love the next question just as much

The Herring: But if Navigator is platform-independent, and…

Jobs: But everybody uses Windows. Come on – 90%+ of the people use Windows, so 90%+ of the people are going to hook into the Internet using Microsoft. Now, you know me, I love the Mac too, but I am trying to be really objective here.
Why do 'radical' politicians have so little to say about the future?
I'm not accusing anyone of incompetence. Only a fool would make the implication that you aren't a knowledgeable programmer. I'm accusing CF (not you specifically) of making the first moves to morph LuaJIT into a corporate tool.
> Microsoft is busy trying to kill Netscape. And it has a certain track record of being successful at those kind of things. So I wouldn’t write off Microsoft right now. But all I am trying to say is that no one is going to make money by selling browsers. I do think a lot of people are going to make money off the pipes, but that ain’t us. The pipe is going to be owned by the RBOCs. Pac Bell and all those guys are going to provide cheap ISDN lines into the home that come with a little box that turns it into Ethernet, and they are going to be impossible to compete with. But, as we’ve been talking about, the new Web set-up is just like the mainframe computing model, where all the apps will run off the server, and these will mostly be custom apps.

Microsoft tried and very nearly succeeded in replacing the open web with the ActiveX "information superhighway". If they had done so we might not yet have the smartphone-with-browser, due to the difficultly in implementing competing ActiveX implementations to run on it.

Lots of people making money off the pipes? Comcast.

New mainframe computing model with web apps? That's certainly arrived.

> As an example, I predict that by the end of this year, Microsoft will announce that it has a Visual Basic variant or deviant that it proposes as the Web-client language. And Sun and Microsoft will have a war. And Microsoft will put everything it has into that war, because if it can win, it will have killed Netscape along the way. Netscape will put everything it has into that war, because if it loses, it is in trouble. So I ask you, who will win that war? Probably Microsoft.

Everybody lost. Microsoft built IE6's fortress of incompatibility that it now struggles to get rid of, like that indestructible anti-aircraft tower in Berlin. Netscape went bust and open-sourced everything. Sun folded into Oracle. Java is now the annoying thing that you have to update while avoiding the Ask toolbar in the installer, and many people have banned it too from their browser. VBScript in the browser is dead.

Only Javascript remains.
Diesel in the US has a red dye added if it's for agricultural use. "Detection of red-dyed fuel in the fuel system of an on-road vehicle will incur substantial penalties."

Presumably you have to piss off a cop in your diesel-powered vehicle enough for them to test your tank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_dyes
You can't usually outsource work for share options, and most startups can't afford pure cash compensation for all work. And they can't afford to have their employees fail as all work in a brand new startup is usually critical.

EDIT: Just to make it clear: obviously employees and everyone else are going to fail sometimes, and you need to try have as much in place to survive that. However, failing on purpose for learning experiences is never the correct approach. You will have more than enough chance to fail in areas you don't have solutions for. Make sure you never fail in an area that you had the information to prevent.
The non-Alphabet AI company I am most excited about is MetaMind: https://www.metamind.io/
DevOps DevOps transformation: Is your IT organization the tortoise or the hare?
The hardware offloading (which seems to be missing with OpenBSD) is what makes that a great piece of hardware for the price.
I seem to remember it being commonly used at the time (and earlier) as a shortened form of "applications". I don't think Jobs invented the term. :)
Often, the biggest perk of airline lounge access with the big US legacy carriers (AA, UA, DL) is that you get access to the lounge agents who do bookings. In the event of long delays or cancellations (especially weather related) the phone lines are clogged up and there are lines around the block at both the gate and the customer service area. However, if you have lounge access, you can just duck in there and have them help you out way ahead of everyone else.
The Inevitable Rise of the Stateful Web Application
Show HN: Find Out How Much Your Business Is Worth
If you travel enough where seating at the airport is a frequent issue, wouldn't you have complimentary lounge access as a result of your status with the airline?
FCC Fines Smart City $750K for Blocking Wi-Fi
From a previous post: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4695

> Hey, go ask Google. I think people don’t understand what Google is and how much it particularly cares about doing “The Right Thing” (not much), and the next person to mention the Linear Book Scanner (a prototype that destroys books), well, they’re going to get a hug and my distracting words of love.
I strongly disagreed with the generalization.
I've been waiting for someone to make this. Multiple team support would be amazing!
He was an amazing man. All of the hate is because he dared to follow that vision where it went, instead of merely being a vendor of software for Microsoft, or subservient to Google (eg: Apple built the entire infrastructure to do maps merely because Google wanted to sell apple customers information.)

I've yet to meet a Steve Jobs hater who actually understood what the guy did.

The steve jobs hate is all ideological and comes form the Apple hate which comes from people getting sold PCs by pimply nosed kids in the 1990s and being jealous of their friends much superior macintoshes (which fwiw, since the mid 1990s have been cheaper than comparable PCs, yet the myth is spread otherwise still to this day, because you can go buy a tagamochi for $4.99 and claim it's cheaper than a macintosh, and therefore the mac is overpriced.)

So, yeah, you should re-think what you believe about this guy and learn a bit about the real history.

I've been following him since the late 1980s, and he's always been a passionate, compassionate, genuine, honest and opinionated guy.
- the domain, textfiles.org, is for sale. To purchase, call BuyDomains.com.

- clicking the link and reading the article did not help, so I went to the comments for context.

I got lucky on this one. I've never heard of textfiles, so I was going to question whether or not it's really "well-known", and I got a good laugh when I went to the site you recommended and found a domain for sale :)
BTW, if someone wants to professionally connect Mainframes and Internet: http://www.softwareag.com/corporate/products/adabas_natural/...
"To build its technology, Filament is using a series of protocols that include the blockchain transaction database behind Bitcoin; BitTorrent, the popular peer-to-peer file sharing software; Jose, a contract management protocol that is also used in the OAuth authentication service that lets people use their Facebook ID to log in and manage permissions to other sites around the web; TMesh, a long-range mesh networking technology and Telehash for private messaging."
Wow, that's quite a story, he clearly took it more seriously than I did. Mine is pretty simple, because I loved to tinker with OS's, and since everyone is sharing...

My local ISP gave away shell account I could telnet to and access a home directory that became a free website, ie theirispname.whatever/~myusername

I logged in, used HTML and Perl to do what I thought at the time to be the most amazing stuff in the world. Found out they used a variety of Linux as I sniffed around the commands available to me (like I had done with MS-DOS over the past couple years).

Thought it was awesome, and I ended up putting Slackware on a couple of my old systems people had donated to me and run little servers in my bedroom. Eventually went to RedHat, then CentOS, now mostly Ubuntu.

At the time I saved up for, and bought, any books that said "Linux" on them that came with CD's stuck to the back with a distro I could install :)
Disagree. This is the stage where generic consumers, not just techies, start caring about the fine print and adjust spending habits accordingly.
Do young (new to google) googlers get to work on these projects?
I've said it before many times, but the government's operating procedures are (accidentally (sort of)) tailored to explicitly filter out all the things that make for good hackers/programmers. This is an old essay I wrote on this subject that I usually post in repsonse to comments like this: http://wademeredith.com/2011/05/why-the-dmv-website-sucks/
STEVE JOBS is using the term apps.
Cruise (YC W14) is hiring an iOS engineer to help build self-driving cars
Physics.com
But, as with RPi, you get to boot your own choice of OS.

In my opinion the advantage of this (=more control) easily outweighs tradeoff of not "opting in" to hardware features enabled via binary blobs.

A MIPS board that pretty much "just works" with BSD kernels. No brainer. I'll take it.
Re: point number 2. Libraries like https://github.com/bhuga/faraday-restrict-ip-addresses (ruby) help with that.