skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Random note about accept-encoding that might have been corrupted by my memory: at some point in the past wikipedia was blocking Googlebot due to it hammering their servers. Some debugging revealed that Googlebot's accept-encoding header was different than browsers and so it was missing the wikipedia cache. (Wikipedia heavily relies (relied?) upon a caching layer because their pages can take like two full seconds of CPU time to render otherwise.)

The kinda awful fix was to add support for the compression variant nobody uses (deflate?) to Googlebot so that its accept-encoding header matched the common one.

It would be ironic if adding this header to Firefox wrecked their page load performance for wikipedia!
On Beyond OWL: Challenges for Ontologies on the Web
Parent poster is responding to your question:

> What kind of things can they measure from urine and saliva?
I would agree. Labels and names are not helpful, because everybody has his own view of it. For some, capitalism is hell, for some it means the only rescue against the hell of communism and vice versa.

Your last sentence describes it very well. It is the mechanics, which are the driving force -- and the direction is predefined by the mechanics. The driving force we have today is profits ... and the result is a de-humanized and un-ethical society, because profits are not ethical at all.
Yes, I have heard it directly from the doctors, I also hear it repeated by other parents who have kids going through this.

Unfortunately doctors don't follow the official procedures all the time. My experience in the UK does not appear to be an unusual one when I compare notes with other parents.

The treatment may be "free" on the NHS but that doesn't mean the doctor doesn't get paid, and I definitely have direct experience of the diagnosing psychiatrist being the one who is assigned to the child's follow up.
The real problem is how demand curve behaves when the price is approaching zero (which is what you eventually get as productivity increases).

Traditional economics assume that if the price of an egg is $1 you'll eat one a day. If the price drops to 1c, you'll eat 100 a day. But: Would you?

In other words, at some point we are going to live in the world where consumption cannot catch up with the production. What then? Surely, economy would collapse: Goods won't be purchased and people producing them would be fired. Those fired would not have money to buy goods. The demand would decrease. More people will be fired. And so on until last human being dies of hunger.

I would even argue that in developed world we've already reached the limit and the economy is kept afloat only by desperate measures such as whipping up the consumption using ads, lowering the productivity by employing large numbers of paper pushers and so on.
Except that in the long-term endgame of automation, capitalism (or, to be more precise and less labelly, the private ownership of the vast majority of capital in the hands of a minority) really is the problem. I've expanded on this a bit more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10369466

That said, this is a discussion about the endgame of automation. In the current state of affairs, I absolutely agree with you that the unreflected "down with capitalism" one occasionally hears is counter-productive. You just also have to be aware that the endgame of automation is quite likely a qualitative change instead of only a quantitative one, and will require some serious re-thinking of economic models.
> when you're <10 employees, you can literally just raise your voice in the room and say "Any reason we shouldn't send Joe to FooCon to speak about the FizzBuzz? It's a bit pricey, probably $1100, but it's it worth it right?" -- that's a much more transparent decision than anything written in a handbook.

This handbook doesn't preclude that; it just says that this is the minimum that every employee can expect without having to wonder what is reasonable or not. Every company, large or small, has exceptions to policy, and the handbook is just a way of making those guidelines common knowledge, so everyone can feel comfortable knowing what expectations are completely reasonable and what will require special consideration.

> so why do they feel the need to specify how many weeks of vacation you should have taken in the year leading up to the sabbatical you earn in your fifth year of employment?

One disadvantage of 'unlimited' vacation policies are that expectations are oftentimes unclear, and many people end up taking far less vacation time than they otherwise would or could. This disproportionately impacts women and minorities in the industry for a variety of reasons[0]. People who are used to being marginalized in the workplace (not necessarily at their current job, but in the past) tend to be less aggressive with their demands, even when their demands are completely within reason.

Furthermore, for people looking at long-term planning (people with families, or people with other obligations outside work), having clear expectations for not just the short term but the long term as well is a huge bonus.

[0] This isn't an argument not to have unlimited vacation policies at all - just that, if you do, you should be conscious of mitigating this effect.
What Bill Gates is worried about
"The Copenhagen theory of ethics" isn't a thing. It is an attempt of the author to ridicule a nuanced and rich ethics which he (I can only assume it's a he, but it seems like a safe bet) doesn't understand and doesn't seem to want to understand. Instead of asking why some people react in a way he doesn't understand, he assumes they're idiots and makes fun of them. Any system which is complex enough because it's a result of careful study of a complex system such as our society, can seem absurd to someone who doesn't wish to understand it, and because they can't see the complexity -- for lack of study -- think that their simple (simplistic) approach is superior.

Obviously improving things even a little is better than not improving them at all. People just disagree whether what the author sees as a clear improvement is in fact so -- that's why you and the GP disagree.

Also, a nuanced ethical view may support a an action that improves things while at the same time note (and accept as the lesser evil) an ethical problem with it. No one says that any desired (or "good") action must be ethically perfect. Even moralists know how to compromise sometimes, even though they do so with protest. Seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to me.

> Since I'm more utilitarian and I don't take Copenhagen as my moral axiom

You and the article's author seem to subscribe to what ethicists call the "non-worseness claim". I found a discussion of this claim here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/#4
Thanks for the spoiler! Do you really
think there's anyone here on Hacker News
who wouldn't get the joke without
needing you to explain it to them?

Just to point out your own prejudice, not everyone here is a native English speaker.
Your attitudes are common and somewhat align with the way things work today, but I think everyone would be better off if society viewed the market as just an efficient medium for exchange and took more direct responsibility for the welfare of the poor rather than foisting those responsibilities on arbitrary economic transactions. The market already has a mechanism in place to determine price by balancing supply and demand. Markets have problems, like big players and lack of information, but this basic price determination mechanism is great when it works.

Also, I think it's best to pick a different example than prostitution because of the importance of cultural factors there. Instead, what if I offer $20 to a poor person to let me slap them hard in the face? That might be a good deal for them, but I'm still a jerk for doing it. The problem though isn't that the transaction is exploitative. It's that it's wasteful. Why did the poor person need to endure the slap? What was the point?
Capitalism and free markets are fine with some fair regulation on the outliers/abusers.

Capitalism is ultimately a human system. Humans are much scarier than robots, the robots are only doing as other humans instructed (at least at the beginning). Capitalism, a human creation and system, has become a force that is ultimately good for advancement/innovation, but one that people can take too far in greed.

Without some regulation, by design humans take it as far as they can go, it is part of our programming. But, when the future depends on the good will of mega rich humans to spread it around, that future is a very frightening prospect indeed.
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Bullshit. Public defenders are lawyers.
Remind me, which countries did US annex.
From the slant of your comment, I guess you're an Anarcho-Capitalist: a Right Wing Libertarian who think universal private property will solve most current problems.

If I'm right, you think the problem is the state, and the solution is getting rid of it. You are probably overlooking, ignoring, or downplaying the power of private corporations, or you think they would lose their power once we get rid of the state.

My guess is different.

I think that if we get rid of the state, we're more likely to get a corporate government than anarchy. Like what's described in the Continuum TV show. Whether that's a good thing… well at least, we would no longer kid ourselves about living in a democracy.

---

Sorry if I put words in your mouth, but you forced my hand.
If this trend of trying to optimize away away any profit in blue collar jobs until people can barely sustain themselves continues for much longer, we will have a much bigger problem to worry about than the minutia of employment. Once employment starts to dance at the low-wage edge and some people start to lose the ability to eat, open revolt and/or revolution happens.

A popular misconception is this is unlikely in America, because nobody is suffering that badly. The people that believe this obviously haven't worked in the fast-food or similar low-pay industries recently[1].

[1] https://medium.com/@sarahkendzior/the-minimum-wage-worker-st...
"Free market" is a really complex idea and as such I think it requires dynamic maintenance, not just a good set up (compare: open and closed systems in control theory).

So in this case, solution #2, so it happened that because of people shouting "free market!" we have last-mile lines owned by companies and a bad oligopoly has appeared. The solution should be to adjust - the government should come and say, "thank you for all your service, but the balance of force needs to be restored", take over the line and put everyone in order.

Yes, there are (recursive) problems with that particular solution, but still, if we want to implement a perfect theoretical "free market", we need to embrace the constant adjustments that are required to keep it.
But would you rather him not offer to trade? You could say no, how are you in a worse position after he makes an offer? Why would you rather he didn't?
I am old enough to remember watching come in live on TV. It was painfully slow in those days: They showed the image build up scanline by scanline over tens of minutes. I forget which TV station had the patience to do this. Wouldnt happen nowadays.
Do you realise how rude you sometimes are?
India is a lot more equal than the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

The US is extremely rich. We have close to 100% penetration of flush toilets, clean water, 24/7 power, etc. 75% of our (relative) "poor" have a car, 70% live in a house with 2 rooms/person, and 45% own that home. In most of the world the word for that is "rich".

http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf

Compare to overall numbers in India, or if you can find them, to various communist nations.

Hopefully India will get to the US model, they are certainly taking many positive steps. I'm bullish. But they aren't remotely there yet. Basically the entire country lives in what would be called deep extreme poverty (e.g. probably the bottom 1%) in the US.

I also wouldn't want to go back to the poverty of the US 50's and 60's. I think everyone deserves a flush toilet (as in our modern "some people are richer than others" world), not just the top 80-90% (back when we were more "equal").
Viking 1 Orbiter, Photo No. AC85-0760-4 -- Early morning clouds in Noctis Labyrinthus on the Planet Mars. Condensate clouds are seen here in early morning in the canyons of Labyrinthus Noctis, which lies at the western end of the equatorial Valles Marineris system.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/images/content/73476main_Ma...

and

Viking II's photo of Water Ice on Utopia Planitia
"
This high-resolution color photo of the surface of Mars was taken by Viking Lander 2 at its Utopia Planitia landing site on May 18, 1979, and relayed to Earth by Orbiter 1 on June 7. It shows a thin coating of water ice on the rocks and soil.
"

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00571
Special Interest groups misusing their position in a capitalistic system is capitalism. You can't separate the two. Wherever capitalism exists, special interest groups misusing their position exist. Thus, I'd say the problem is not divisible.

It's just like communism. Wherever communism exists, tyranny and oppression exists. Every single place. For capitalism, it's the special interest groups which in many cases rise to the level of tyranny and oppression and serve the same purpose.

I don't know if there is a solution for special interest groups in capitalist systems, but as long as people keep separating this as 'not part of capitalism' there won't be. There certainly isn't one for the communist equivalent.
> rather than foisting those responsibilities on arbitrary economic transactions

Transactions are never arbitrary. They're an action taken by individuals based on their interests, and their interests are determined by their values, and their values are often shaped -- at least to some degree -- by communal values.

> but this basic price determination mechanism is great when it works

How do you know when it works? Obviously, there is difference of opinion in determining what "works" means.

> Instead, what if I offer $20 to a poor person to let me slap them hard in the face? That might be a good deal for them, but I'm still a jerk for doing it. The problem though isn't that the transaction is exploitative. It's that it's wasteful.

OK, that's a classic.
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"Show HN" is reserved for stuff the community can use.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
"Show HN" is reserved for stuff the community can use, not content.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
This is very important to establish every time there is a discussion, in that there are politically convenient labels, and there are what we can consider terms that are useful to further the argument. The terms capital-ism and commun-ism refer to compatible aspects of reality. Like self interest and sharing for common good co-exist in reality. Trying to eliminate either would make us unhappy. USA economy has been favoring a less people consolidating more capital.
Privatization isn't bad provided that key corporations are answerable to more than just profit alone. This is the key aspect of a benefit corporation.

A lot of what is wrong with large corporations is that they don't place any priorities on customers, employees, and the environment, when making the most profit is what they are legally mandated to do.

Making a profit needs to be balanced with the reason the company is in business, (i.e. the needs of its customers),
its employees, and the environment.
They use a measure called Multifactor Productivity. From the linked report :

Multi-factor productivity (MFP) growth measures the growth of GDP over the combined contributions of total hours, workforce skills, machinery and structures and ICT capital.

From wikipedia [0] :

Multifactor productivity measures reflect output per unit of some combined set of inputs. A change in multifactor productivity reflects the change in output that cannot be accounted for by the change in combined inputs. As a result, multifactor productivity measures reflect the joint effects of many factors including new technologies, economies of scale, managerial skill, and changes in the organization of production.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifactor_productivity
The US government allows the Isalmic State to exist, from providing them training, Toyota trucks + enabling the "black market" sales of oil

all this is mostly fear mongering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXe4gy_ABf8
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Do you have a source for those robot taxes? Would like to read more, but google doesn't yield much.
If I'm checking the length of what I think is a list and it turned out to be a generator I WANT it to fail.
Are you suggesting it's good manners to reply to all the jokes on Hacker News and preemptively explain them for people who aren't native English speakers, and it's prejudiced to be against that? (That's a rhetorical joke. Please don't reply and explain it.)
> For those who don't understand, gasoline taxes provide a large portion of highway maintenance revenue (often most).

The gas tax indeed provides the largest single source of funding, but many roads are funded mostly by general revenue nowadays. I seem to recall that half of major highways and interstates fail to capture enough gas tax revenue to maintain themselves, with roads in general only getting about half of their funding in the form of the gas tax.
Or that ne'er-do-well Mister X, akA Carl Sagan:
http://marijuana-uses.com/mr-x/

An immediate family member, who happens to be a 30 year practicing behavioral therapist freely admits most science preceeding the 21st cemtury is bunk science based more on policy than science. The blank brain scans of the "habitual pot smoker" hanging on the clinic walls were the source of many amusements. The pro's I speak with all agree, addictions and self-defeating behaviors are the products of deeper problems... and, "everything in moderation".
Oh, but we as a culture are taught to always blame external 'demons' we can point to to excuse our personal shortcomings without having to shoulder that whole 'personal responsibility' burden. Meh.
Since around the same time, income inequality has grown massively and rises in wages have become mostly confined to the top earners.

I wonder if these are related.

The era of unrelenting progress and ever-rising living standards is gone. It was a real thing for a few decades, but I think it's coming to an end.
In terms of material progress, you need to understand fundamentals before you can apply them.

There are only so many fundamental things about the universe. We are still learning, it's true. But we've pushed the darkness back on a lot of fronts since the late 1800s. You kind of expect that once science takes a hold there will be fewer mysteries.

As it happens, the late 1800s and early 1900s were boom times for fundamental science. Radioactivity, Relativity, Quantum, and so on.

Once you have the fundamentals, you need some economic organisation to occur before thing like mobile phones appear. People need to be figuring out exactly how the theories will be useful, what kinds of work there will be in the area, and so forth. Much of what we've seen lately is this, finding niches for things we know about the natural world.

I can understand the author's disappointment. Not many things that are new are undreamed of. But remember your imagination depends on how you think the world works, and we now know more about that.
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hire for empathy.

And go out of business.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182/Catfights-...
Why is it always "free markets" but never "competitive markets"?

Also last I checked Facebook and Google were operating in very free markets and yet they don't really have any competition.
Sure, if you cherry-pick what you consider "progress," you can manipulate the numbers to show we've slowed down our rate of progress.

Also, don't belittle "refinements." Sometimes it's figuring out how to make a single airplane fly that's the easy part -- it's "refining" that idea into a global network of safe air travel where the real hard work and innovation happens.

Anyway. This article is silly.
And all of that doesn't even begin to address the resource limits of our planet. We can keep artificially sustaining the system by making more throwaway products for ad-driven consumption; we can keep people employed by inventing more bullshit jobs, introducing more managers of managers of managers into advertising industry, etc. - but at that rate, we'll soon hit the energy limit and the entire system will collapse back into middle ages. Or we'll all starve and die as the planet says "fuck it, I had enough" and shuts down the ecosystem for a while.
For another excellent ethics/physics analogy, see: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/17/newtonian-ethics/
I use cannabis to treat ADHD. I didn't like the side effects of the other drugs my doctor gave me. It works really well for me.

I'd also like point this out:

http://gizmodo.com/the-fbi-is-struggling-to-hire-hackers-who...

>The FBI Is Struggling to Hire Hackers Who Don't Smoke Weed

I think most people who work stressful jobs have difficult times when it comes to concentrating on long term goals, it's just human nature. For me marijuana has helped me reach many goals that I would have other wise given up on due to mental exhaustion.
I would argue that the advances in industrialization, miniaturization, energy, and computing are no less important that some of the more visibly valuable inventions in prior decades/generations, but that they are largely supporting technology that provides a scaffolding for us to invent upon rather than inventions that [externally] impress by their own merits. And it's not like our race to the moon was technologically more impressive, either; we just had a direct application of technology we decided to pursue. My $.02 is that for the past 20 years or so, when high-tech manufacturing exploded the domestic economies of the developing world, we've been in a dichotomous environment where the advanced nations continue to pursue original research [but in a largely aimless manner due to all sorts of political incompetence] while the rest of the world accelerates their internal development and jockey for position to gain seats at the table as humanity collectively decide what's next.

"Next" may be manned flight to mars, or it may be elimination of fossil fuels, or eradication of disease, or something completely off the wall, but the point is that -- excepting poverty, war and education -- the world is in a pretty good place right now and the only thing separating most countries from another development-wise is money, not invention.
Currently, neither. It's based strictly upon how much gasoline they consume, as are all highway taxes nationwide (since they are levied per gallon of diesel or gasoline).
> In a sense, robots (automated machines) are the perfection of capital, where the ratio becomes arbitrarily high: human labour becomes decreasingly needed until it's basically unnecessary.

Where is the evidence for this?

Your entire arguments falls apart when this isn't the case.

As manufacturing moved towards automation, labor moved toward rendering services.

The number of jobs is highly correlated to the size of the population. We didn't see a reduction in available employment due to automation. We simply saw a shift in the type of work performed, with jobs moving toward things that were more difficult to automate.
Personally I think tolls will become more and more common, both to capture revenue from electric vehicles and to fight congestion. The tolls will likely make public transit much more cost competitive, so it'll be interesting to see this play out.