skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most labor-intensive and time consuming activities in the past were, in no particular order:

- Farming, raising animals, gathering food

- Food preparation and cooking (including e.g. grinding grain)

- Taking raw plant/animal fibers and turning them into cloth

- Sewing new clothing and mending old clothing

- Chopping firewood and tending fires

- Making pottery (or similar containers from other materials)

- Carrying water home from a well / river / spring

- Raising (typically many) children

- Cleaning / tidying

- Washing clothes

- Building homes, fences, furniture, etc.

- Transportation by walking/horse/carriage

(The reason peasant societies are poor is that these tasks take up more time than anyone can possibly stay on top of. There’s just always an unlimited amount of extra work to do, and the only folks with leisure time are those with plentiful servants to handle all the basic chores.)

Of those, we started with the low-hanging fruit, things that could be done at industrial scale in factories, and then added on-site appliances to handle the parts that couldn’t be centralized, steadily ticking items off until the overall amount of labor required to keep a basic household running is a tiny fraction of the labor required in an unindustrialized agrarian society.

At this point, there aren’t similar opportunities for new home appliances the way there were in 1850–1950. Sure we have 3D printers and floor cleaning robots and all kinds of computerized gizmos, but as for mass-market labor-savers, we just don’t spend nearly as much time on the kinds of machine-tractable labor-intense tasks that we used to.

Self-driving cars and trucks are one big one coming up.
The Rise and Fall of Everest (the App)
We're using it for immutable infrastructure where we build images with ansible and deploy those images. It's basically the same as a dockerfile and ultimately instead of a container you use a right sized machine. I don't really get the need to containerise everything unless you are buying big metal and deploying on top of that.
Visual bookmarking tool for Mac
I thought so too for a long time. Until that time when I upgraded the RAID10 on our database servers from a 4 drive to a 8 drive configuration (which requires rebuilding the whole array if you want the performance benefits). Getting the intricate configuration of the two machines (postgres streaming replication works, but has a lot of moving parts to keep in mind) back without having to remember any details was absolutely priceless.

Completely wiping and reinstalling the main database servers (one after another of course) during the day while the system was in active use and completing the process with zero user intervention, that felt amazing.

Since then, whenever I had to reinstall a machine for one reason or another, I always appreciated the immense speed-up I gained by not having to ever manually re-do the configuration.

Better yet: All the years of growing the configuration, all the small insights learned over time, all the small fixes to the configuration: All are preserved and readily available. Even better: By using git, I can even go back in time and learn why I did what and when.

"Why am I using TCP for NFS? Oh right - that was back in december of 2012 when we were using UDP and we ran into that kernel deadlock" - that's next to impossible to do when you're configuring servers manually.
> Who wants to remain a developer anyway?

I do.
Ok, I understand now. Misunderstood you earlier. Apologies.
Yeah, the thing that is really important about reviews, is that you as a reader knows the reviewer and their taste.

So we really need something similar to Netflix rating system, where the rating displayed to you is generated from users with similar taste who have already seen the movie.

http://tastekid.com/ let's you search for movies you might like based on movies you do like. It's not quite the same, but I don't know any other.
Want to See Something Really Cool in Java? Try 'Dynamic Java Code Injection'
what are the advantages of this over just having a machine with many VMs?
It looks like the teacher is annoyed that the student is sharing his work, as opposed to the fact he's asking for help.
> And a hundred different problems with C could have been fixed any number of times, and that doesn't make it a bad tool.

CSS is just a presentation language, you can't compare it with C which is much much more. The problem with CSS is it's the only thing we have appart from HTML tables for building layouts but it didn't have the right functions to do so.

I reckon that it's getting better at some point but come one, it's been 19 years since the release of CSS 1 and we are just getting some tools really dedicated to building layouts.

> I'm sorry, would you prefer it took 30? Is it not better that progress happens than not?

What about 5 years? It should have been enough to have some bricks to build columns, centering, grids, etc.

> The CSSWG is a glacial apparatus that create some of the worst bureaucratic bullshit I've ever seen...

I couldn't agreee more.

> but CSS itself isn't a bad tool.

If you thing a bloated presentation layer that have to be hacked to death to build presentation isn't a bad tool... well...

> Yes, programming for the web is hard. Programming is pretty much always hard, no matter how easy we make it because humans suck at long term planning. CSS is still leaps and bounds better than what we had, and makes a lot of things incredibly easy.

I don't know what CSS have to do with the eventual difficulty of programming. Actually it's easier to build a layout framework programmatically with JS, using a restricted features set from CSS and fixing the bad parts in code than to use CSS alone.
Biology, Not Economics, Explains America’s Startup Strength
Try http://www.criticker.com

I've been using it for years, it's pretty good.
> That point you've apparently missed is that current hiring practises among some companies can be discriminatory.

Yes, I know they are. My question ("Will the bet on minority over competence will yield greater gains in the long run?") was genuine; I really wish I knew if positive discrimination to counteract the existing discrimination will improve the situation.

> All that said though, I don't believe there's any actual evidence that people end up hiring less-than-competent people because of quotas.

Evidence? Maybe not. But believe me, there are quotas with perfidious results in large companies. I've seen it happen somewhat like this: department X has 5 vacancies to fill; due to department "demographics", company mandates that 3 of the 5 vacancies are for female candidates; due to candidates "demographics", department X ends with a pool of N candidates for 3 vacancies and another pool of 10N for the other 2.

But, as you said, it's theoretical. If the candidates had a quantifiable "skill", the "no subpools" approach would yield better results - a bigger "skill" quantity for the total of vacancies. However, in practice, you can't quantify skill, and much less the impact a candidate will have in the department. The apparently sub-optimal "subpools" approach might get the 5 vacancies with "more than enough" skill; The apparently sub-optimal "subpools" might even yield better results due to e.g. diversity. That's why I said that this is a question for the ages - only cohort-like analysis of hiring practices will give us something close to a answer which isn't merely speculative.
what about the Roman Empire? surely predates the middle ages
I click on related articles and there's someone wishing a God would strike down a transgender person they saw on television, using the phrase 'cleanse our nation of all purulence and disease.’ so it seems saying nasty things is easier, even when what you're signaling isn't very nice.
Full credit for coming on here and resolving the issue Mike, thanks!
I'm not talking about quotas. They're a political tool usually.

I'm talking about the well researched and well documented advantages of diversity for an organisation.

You appear to be assuming, somewhat ironically, that there is only one point of a diversity programme and that that is to have some kind of impact on society as a whole. A worthy goal, sure, but not the only one.

My point is that an organisation may have a diversity programme, the main aim of which is to improve the financial position of the organisation, say. My contention is that does not necessarily require them to go beyond gross corrections in their diversity profile. The fact that they may have to for legal reasons or may wish to for societal reasons is a separate matter.

Now clearly you don't hold that taking such a position meets society's needs and you may well be right. You may also feel that all organisations should use diversity programmes for societal ends and that's not an uncommon view. It just happens to not be the only reason for having a diversity programme.

Oh, and thank you for the advice regarding intersectionality. You appear to have mistaken my not considering it important for my point for ignorance of it. Easy mistake to make.
Then, finally (for now), you have Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath numbers (http://timeblimp.com/?page_id=195)
> "50% black trans women speakers"?

Bingo, this seems the natural end (or just the beginning of absurdity, really) of emphasizing equal representation of intersectionality, and it doesn't seem productive, dignified, or fair. Can anyone show that this is distorting the article's point? I don't see why transexuality should be minimized more than race or gender, and why it's not a component of intersectionality. Or defend why it's actually a good idea to turn people into a tuple of (gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, sex, sex at time of birth, religion, caste, language) and select uniformly (or oppression-intersectionally)? How are you even going to find all those things out? (In some cases, asking would be a legal liability, and doesn't seem the most appropriate thing to ask.)

I'd rather wear down barriers where I see them and let diversity organically grow, than to constantly be categorizing people and fudging the numbers into something artificially diverse.
Anecdotally, yes I've met people who won't hire a woman. Reasons vary from an assumption that they won't be as capable because they have interests outside of coding, a belief that other developers won't be as productive if there's a woman on the team because they'll be distracted, or that they won't want to be a part of the company long term because they'll want to leave to have a family.
Which countries are doing the most to stop dangerous global warming?
Ansible is a fantastic tool. I put it up there with Rails, Backbone, and jQuery. The shadow of Puppet and Chef is large, but many are starting to see the light.

I hope that Redhat will accelerate the growth of this very well engineered platform.

Congrats to the Ansible team!
TypeScript's generated code looks very much like how you would write it if you did it in ES5.
Classes are prototype based, namespaces are variable with IFFEs, modules are commonjs or requirejs, etc. This means that the generated code feels like your own code, variables, parameters and function names are the same so it's actually your code in ES5.
Because of all these reasons we never felt the need to use source-maps (TypeScript can generate them). The only source-maps that we did use was for the minified files.
Yeah, I think you're right. I should read more slowly :)

> You can either argue for ignoring all labels or for special label-based treatments, not both.

So, your question is how to square the value-add of diversity against the idea that race/gender doesn't affect technical ability?

If that's the case then I'd call out what I think is an incorrect assumption; that technical ability is perfectly correlated with either productivity (as an employee) or interestingness (as a speaker).

Nor does the performance of the individual equate to performance of teams or large organisations.

While it's not conclusive, there are studies that show that diversity in the workplace correlates with increased performance, and diversity as a nation correlates with increased GDP.
Try http://www.criticker.com
Same concept, I'd say it has a simpler and clearer interface.
> Loneliness is the largest cause of unhappiness in the developed world.

that is a very good insight that i never thought about! I m sure there's billions in it for someone who can crack the case and solve it in a systematic fashion.
Not really. The 9/11 terrorists (those who participated in the actual hijackings) did not live in Germany -- or anywhere -- after the acts, so Germany clearly wasn't harboring them.

At the time they lived in Germany (before the attacks), the officials in the country obviously did not know of their plans.
Looking back it's amazing how little change there was through the twentieth century in fundamental consumer tech. Radio, TV, record players, fridges, washing machines & vacuum cleaners were all available in the 1930s. Sure, they became cheaper and more widely available, but IMHO, not much changed in home tech until the 1980s.
Where did the principle of secrecy in correspondence go?
You're welcome to not take/seek the deal. For what it's worth, I have asked ~100 YC founders whether they felt it was valuable to them, and have had precisely one person say no.

Incidentally, for virtually the entire startup era prior to YC, "two geeks with a gleam in their eye" was worth ~$250k. The first check from an angel to pay for ~6 months of rent and ramen bought 1/6th the company for $50k.
That's because we are being pushed back into the working conditions of a peasant.

They worked because there wasn't enough time to do everything. And we're being worked because we cannot get enough money for the basics, like rent and food. Its another way of control.
So, in short,we can't modify anything if this deal gets through.
I think you severly underestimate the complexity of ironing and cleaning -- I would say wiping dust in a room full of objects (many of them fragile and of complex shape) is a significantly harder task for a robot than steering/parking/stopping a car. And ironing has been solved, though the machines dry cleaners use take too much room for most households to be practical,
Syntax and semantics are separate, not having to learn a new syntax is handy.

Syntactically the problem I run into is that it's got it's own DSL in task definitions, so it can be hard to keep in mind what's YAML and what's the DSL.

Semantically loops and conditions are essential features so I don't have a problem with that. The inheritance could use some clarification, I was hit last year by a regression that remains unresolved.
It's always a question of "is it worth it?". If they take 7.5%, but make sure the money actually reaches the destination and doesn't disappear along the way, then I would say it's pretty good. Unless there are any alternatives that are reliable and are cheaper? I don't suppose you can just send 100 quid from a UK account to someone in Somalia,because they might not have an account, or live very very far away from the nearest "bank". And even if you could, I imagine both banks would take a nice cut, probably just as large or larger than 7.5%.
Reprising a comment from the story on the original article this editorial is based on:

The TPP is not itself a law. It's a meta-law, which commits its signatories to enact actual enforceable laws based on the framework established in the treaty.

No device can be destroyed "under the TPP". The TPP instead demands that its signatories enact laws so that they have a judicial process whose remedies can potentially include the destruction of devices. The TPP hasn't even been ratified yet, let alone enabled by law.

This seems like hair-splitting, but I don't think it is. I think the question of what impact TPP will have on security research depends entirely on what the enabling laws for the TPP look like in each country. In the US, our laws already cordon off security and interoperability research from anti-circumvention enforcement.

The TPP itself also acknowledges non-infringing use. First, note that the Vice article selectively quotes the leaked TPP text, which does not demand destruction of "anti-circumvention devices", but rather of devices engaged in prohibited activity. The TPP does not demand a prohibition on security research. Further, the TPP earlier (QQ.G.17) binds each party to balance IP law with fair use for criticism, comment, and research.

I'm not arguing that the TPP IP law is going to be a good thing for security research. It probably won't be (at least, not outside the US). But it's too early to know what it's impact is going to be, and certainly to early to say that it's going to result in the confiscation of security researcher laptops.
SQLite 3.9.0 Released
Whant happens if you try to plot the relative improvement instead of absolute reduction of working hours? Because it's much more difficult to kill the remaining ones than the ones gained by the washing machine!
The article surely is full of anti-corporate paranoia, but their points about security research of safety-critical systems is certainly valid and destruction of private property used for reverse engineering doesn't exactly sound like free trade. If TPP contains this kind of stuff, one may wonder if it has anything to do with trade and unification at all, unless by unification you mean "monopolization by obfuscation".
Right, if you look at washers, dryers, and dish washers, it's not like they automated the exact procedure that people performed to do the task. They used a different method that was possible to automate.
Johns Hopkins Epilepsy Study Is First Researchkit App to Use Apple Watch
Why is the 'Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate' for women going down again?
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/search/?search=transformers

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/search/?search=fast+and+furiou...
When TypeScript was first released yea, VS did offer all the power of TypeScript, but these days the compiler is soo easy to plug into that you have integration for any big IDE out there, and they are all very good at bringing the power of auto-complete, refactoring, intellisense, stc.
It is not all perfect, and there are still issues that each IDE suffer from, but it's much much better than plan JavaScript where it's all "guesstimate"
Not considering it important is ignorance. Cheers
They may have existed in some form but that doesn't mean they were good, widespread, or useful. It's like saying that since the first semiconductor was invented, nothing has really changed in computing tech.
New Relic alternative Ruxit launches managed solution with on-prem data storage
Unless you know, you're also a tad pretentious, just roll with the audience scores. Audiences don't care about art. It's more difficult to buy the audience and you can't really intimidate them into giving you good reviews. The audience will nuke those independent films because they don't care that it was an amazing achievement from a small studio. The audience will likely tell you the truth.

When it comes to PC gaming, it's been fairly well established for a long time that you can't really trust most of the reviewers. They're either bought and paid for, intimidated or not giving enough time to evaluate. I've been relying on user scores for a long time and whilst I doubt this is perfect, I'm happy with my decision.

Example: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/grand-theft-auto-v
We still use chemical propulsion almost everywhere from cars to rocket engines, a breakthrough in propulsion systems will not only make solar system exploration feasible but will be greatly beneficial to our society by reducing pollution and costs.

We need the next steam engine for a new industrial revolution, space exploration and our society depends on it.

I think that all space resources should be channeled into this, our current approach to solar system exploration is the same as trying to explore the world by foot, expensive an inefficient and no matter how big our ambitions are we don't have the technology to accomplish them.
> Everything Facebook, Google and Microsoft designs gets built here (or nearby) anyway.

I'm going to have to disagree here. The vast majority of stuff is designed or thought up elsewhere. Things might get assembled or manufactured in Shenzhen (it is after all, the manufacturing capital of the world) but the innovations aren't coming from China. In fact, China doesn't even rate that high on manufacturing innovation (they rank 41st place). While they may manufacturer more than anyone else, the bulk of their manufacturing is low tech stuff (Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-innovative-countries/). - Scroll down to manufacturing.
That's really interesting. I presumed that Braess' paradox was as a result of the overhead of competition but this demonstration doesn't seem to model that.

I presume in the demonstration you're describing the central rope was not partially elasticated as the other two? (as demonstrated in the two videos)

Does Braess' paradox apply if the central rope is elasticated? Does it apply for a parallel route also or just for a route that joins to existing series routes?

I think if it's just a joining link then the effect could be modelled in signal theory as the result of partial feedback. Still no idea how the experiment works though :-)
That freedom and abundance will only ever reach a small subsection of the global population.

These treaties are written by the wealthy for the wealthy. The average schmuck will be worse off.

So this TTP and TTIP can go fuck themselves.
12 Blogs Developers Should Follow
Relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/3ohbh9/as_a_divorce...
I understand how difficult these tasks are to automate - I just wanted to point out how uneven technological progress is. We imagine a not-so-distant future where we have self-driving cars, advanced AI, trips to Mars etc. and yet tasks that bothered people for hundreds of years aren't even close to being automated .
Not all of Ansible's technology is open source.
Welcome to modern universities, where anything that could possibly be misconstrued is and title 9 inquisitions are a thing. Even mentioning a gender could trigger someone, so you best be careful!
> It's ok if people disagree

Well, certainly, but on what basis? Is a "gut feeling" enough of an argument to go against established definitions and facts?

I didn't want to be rude - I wanted to provoke a bit of research on the part of millstone. I might have utterly failed, but my intentions were good...
This is the kicker.

It's not even the average working person in the West that will benefit, it's big business.
Thoughts on the new Windows 10 devices for Developers
There have been instances [1] of shady companies buying popular chrome extensions and then injecting ads and affiliate links in every website. There was an interesting reditt AMA earlier this year from the dev of popular extension Honey [2] on this topic

This could greatly tarnish the reputation of the OP and therefore should ask the company what they plan to do with the extension. If the answers are vague and it does not look like the company is buying the extension for the benefit of the consumers, walking away from the deal might be a better situation.

[1] - http://www.labnol.org/internet/sold-chrome-extension/28377/
[2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vjj51/i_am_one_of_th...
My own experience is that there is no correlation between online rankings and my own enjoyment.

I enjoy some higly-rated popular movies, and I hate many of them with a passion. Many of my favorite movies, which I would consider truly great, are somewhere around 4-6 on IMDb/metacritic because they don't have mainstream appeal.

Suggestion engines like NetFlix or Spotify don't seem to do any better at predicting what I like.

There's no accounting for taste.