skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Democratically elected" for some value of.
Take voting in North Caucasus, for example, where official turnover is 99% but tens of percents say in polls that they never go to elections.

But. Putin stole elections to Duma. Those were totally baked, and to make matters more humiliating, they did it in Moscow, they outright rewrote results, they let same people to vote dozens of times, they threw batches of fake votes into bins. This is widely documented.

Do you think this will be forgotten? Do you think this will never shoot back?
I don't really agree with the author's method of measuring progress. "Progress" is not measured by how surprising today's world is compared with a world, say 100 years ago.

Despite the frenzy around technology and startups today, I do sincerely believe that we are making a lot of "scientific progress". We have more people than ever before doing scientific research and publishing papers. We have more physicists, doctors, more engineers etc. and I would argue that having so many skilled people in itself is "progress". Also, we have come a long way with society: normalizing gay marriage, stripping down racist laws etc.

Anyways, point being: scientific and social progress does not always manifest itself as glitzy gizmos.
Frankly I'm very skeptical about the idea that people don't use drugs when fulfilled. There's always stress in modern life, and drugs are always attractive at some level
We have indeed had fewer innovations in consumer goods that take up visual space in a living room.

However we have had massive innovation in medicine--many diseases that were once a death sentence are now treatable.

Cars, though still totally recognizable as cars, are much safer than they were. Airplane flights are both cheaper and safer.

Infant mortality has dropped. Certain diseases have been eradicated.

Due in part to the ability to communicate and coordinate economic activity on a global scale, the number of people in extreme poverty has declined since 1950--Not the percentage of people, the absolute number of people.
At Clef we’re working to build an inclusive company with a value-driven culture.

Am I the only one who would rather work for an exclusive company than an inclusive one? Inclusive makes it sound like the company will hire anybody, regardless of the value they bring to the company.
Income inequality in the United States has grown massively.
What you are describing is exactly the type of test that should be automated.

Manual testing should be exploratory, it shouldn't be following a script. Computers are there to follow scripts.
It's actually a rather common sentiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gun_control_theory
Octohire.me – my love letter to GitHub
They take a load of space, they look like a leftover from the nineties, they take different space on every browser so if you want a precise layout positioning you can't, they don't reliably report positions or events, they can't be reliably scrolled at a specific relative position on every browser and more.

I'm fine with the downvotes, people around here downvote to disagree even if they don't actually know what suffering and misery cross browser development is.
> But yes, we're mostly catching up, not leaping forward.

What concerns me is that we (or at least some folks) used to leap forward. I'm struck by a comparison to the citizens of the Soviet sphere of influence: they were almost all materially much better off than they had been years before, but they weren't as much better off as citizens of market states. The Soviet system did, indeed, enable them to catch up and even surpass the Britain of 1914 or the America of 1917—but that didn't seem as good a deal in 1987.

I wonder how much potential innovation and improvement has died in the cradle due to regulation, financial disincentives, cultural aversion &c. Sure: we're better off now than we were a decade ago, but how much better off could we be?
My long-running goal for the past couple years has been to get hired from GitHub.

Here's my last attempt, open sourced. Hope you'll like it!

I know I had 20 hours of pure fun in building it :D

Website: http://octohire.me

GitHub repo: https://github.com/trumbitta/octohire.me

"Me" repo:
https://github.com/trumbitta/me

I'll had a "help me spread the word" twitter button later today... I just need to sleep now. So if you like it, please spread the word by your own means :)
The article reinforces a point I was making recently; biotechnology and medicine is essentially invisible to most people, and they ignore the massive gains made in past decades, and ignore the potential for the near future.

https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2015/10/the-arcane.php

We are in the midst of a transformative revolution in the capabilities of medical technology and other biotechnologies. But most people don't care, take their vague ideas of the present state of medicine as a stable situation, set in stone, and don't devote any attention to medicine until they have to.

Medical research and development is an arcane world: invisible, you don't know anything about it, and yet it is the greatest of influences upon your own personal future, determining whether you will live or die, suffer or be healthy.
Just because we need trucks doesn't mean that we should subsidize them. If trucks paid their fair share of road repair costs, then those costs would be allocated into the costs of goods and services accordingly, while gas and fuel taxes on personal vehicles could decrease. One might argue that this is a more "fair" distribution of costs.
No I'm pointing out that you have a borderline rude "I and I alone knows best" attitude that detracts from the discussion.
"1. This is excellent. It means we're well on our way to sustainable energy generation. Wind and solar are only going to get cheaper. Even without subsidies, there is no reason to ever build another coal or oil fired generation facility. Natural gas will stick around until utility scale batteries ramp up, to where peaking plants are too expensive compared to utility scale batteries."

Wind/solar + batteries will never cover everything, because statistically there will be an event that the (very finite) capacity can't meet - then people will die, either freezing or overheating.

"2. Nuclear is dead. Very dead. Thorium. Fast breeder. Pebble bed. I don't care which you pick, no one is going to pour 10 years and $1-4 billion into a plant that won't be cost competitive when it turns up (maybe some governments, but you can't fix that; it'll just get mothballed)."

You're very wrong here. China in particular is investing heavily in nuclear going forward, including thorium. There are a number of companies here in the US, such as Flibe Energy and Thorcon that are working hard on next-gen nuclear solutions.

Nuclear is actually more environmentally friendly than wind, as it doesn't decimate bird and bat populations, has a much smaller land use footprint, and doesn't cause widespread noise pollution. It also has the additional attributes of reliability and low cost. The inherently safe next-gen nuclear technologies will come in at less than 5 cents per KWH, perhaps as low as half that.

On a level playing field, wind in particular can't compete. Eventually solar may, given enough technological breakthroughs.
This begs a question. Why are we listening to Stephen Hawking?

Why do we think that destruction of jobs by technology is something new? Do we really think it's happening faster now than in times past? I call this presentism. The cotton gin, the loom, the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the internal combustion engine, the assembly line, domestication of the horse, the wheel -- each of these in it's time put a sizable share of humanity out of a job. Compared to the steam engine, the self diving car is a mere incremental advance.

Perhaps the time and place of the most rapid job destruction was the 19th century in the U.S and England. During this period, the standard of living of the average worker shot up somewhere between 10-fold and 100-fold. You will not find a measure by which average people's lives was not radically improved.

In free markets, the blessings of technological innovation are enjoyed disproportionally by the immediate innovators, but they cannot hold their advantages for very long, not without protection from the state. Competition levels. History and reason amply show this.

People see rising inequality and are told to reflexively blame capitalism. But is what we have today in the U.S. really "capitalism?" If capitalism is "fee markets bounded by private property rights," that's not what we have. The U.S. system is best called crony capitalism[1], or corporatism[2], and lemon socialism [3]. While some of the rising wealth of the rich today is earned, much of it is scam. Bailouts, regulatory capture[4], and the Fed's serial asset bubbles[5] -- these are just some of the zero-sum schemes which today shift massive wealth from the middle toward the top.

Automation in free markets has always and will always make everyone richer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_socialism

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

[5] https://mises.org/library/how-central-banks-cause-income-ine...
The author fails to note the difference in the ease of access to information. Some time ago, if I wanted to e.g. find out what is the half life of some medication in blood, I'd be lucky to find that in encyclopaedia and would probably need to visit a library or consult a pharmacist. Now I can find that out in one minute, without leaving my home.
Mexico?

Texas and California.
Well, in California specifically (and the Bay Area even more specifically), how do you think that would be fair for lower middle class service employees commuting 2hrs+ each direction every day to get to their jobs on the peninsula or in the city? In this case, a use tax just penalizes people who have already been marginalized due to decisions municipalities have made about RE development.

I'd be more in favor of increasing property taxes to cover more highway infrastructure than I would taxing the vehicles themselves. And for that matter, Prop 13 has to go.
Is Web Design really dying?
Full video is available on YT, highly recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4ou9rOssPg
Not to mention his dismissing computers as "interactive televisions", for example, is absurdly reductionist in an attempt to force his point.

Agreed, terrible article.
You (along with everyone else) have a set of implicit biases

Which you can correct for without ever meeting the person in question or taking into account their gender, color or age.

How do you not know these things in a small startup?

I don't understand. Does starting a company suddenly make you stupid?
I'm talking about the Western world, yes. But is this not also true in others parts of the world? Has anywhere seen income inequality decline?
Bruno Latour's response to this text can be found here: http://entitleblog.org/2015/06/27/fifty-shades-of-green-brun...
>> Technological change is ultimately a process by which the ratio of capital input to human labour input increases.

> Where is the evidence for this?

If you do more with same amount of people it still holds true. It doesn't mean technology causes people to loose jobs only that human labor needed for unit of stuff made per unit of capital decreases as technology progresses.
Yes, but as the (hypothetical) MS is fighting against IBM, the IBM is free to employ every trick in their book, including shoving things like TPP down our throats, to get rid of the rising competitor. No rule of the market says that they should just give up and die, or that they should just compete on merits, ignoring the influence that comes with money and established position.
This article seems to ignore the speed at which things can be done nowadays, which makes all those 'familiar' things that bit more amazing to a 1950's traveller. It also seems to set the metric for progress as the visible physical changes in the world around us. This ignores the amazing things we can do today.

Need to get to the other side of the world? 24 hours max. Need to write to someone other side of the world - instant email. Need to face to face with someone on the other side of the world - instant video.

Live TV from everywhere, instant access to the worlds information fight in your pocket, instant social networking when needed too.

Need something built for you? Commission anyone from anywhere in the world in moments. Maybe even 3D print your complex project overnight.

Got a problem? Ask for help and get responses from people around the world in seconds. Got a complaint? Publish your grievance and have it shared around millions of times, maybe even get together with your countrymen and bring down a tyrannical government using just the power of social communication.

What about simulation and the power computing gives us to 'get it right first time'? We can do incredible things with minimal physical testing thanks to computer simulation.

And medically - the author skips over almost the entire field of transplant surgery as just one single example. We've progressed amazingly far in medicine. Even in the last 15 years huge advances have been made in trauma care (thanks in part to Iraq/Afghan wars) that would be astounding to doctors of the 1990's let alone the 1950's.

We live in a wondrous world full of things that we take for granted. Maybe the author doesn't realise just how much more connected we are nowadays and just how much more empowered an individual is in terms of knowledge and creative potential. And that's not to speak of the incredible advances in energy, materials science, social progress, reduction of poverty, transport, communication, education and scores of other fields.

Just because there aren't such highly visible physical changes immediately apparent (though they're there), that doesn't mean 2015 would be any less of a stunning place.
Ben Carson's comments weren't in a void: it's long been an NRA hobbyhorse that the holocaust wouldn't have happened if only the Jews had guns. He's just repeating a long-stated claim.

The problem is that for those events in WWII where such a claim can be tested -- for example, the Ghetto Uprising -- the claim fails miserably. In the Ghetto Uprising, the Nazis lost 300 soldiers and the Jews lost at least 13,000 people, perhaps far more.

I think what we're seeing in this article is an attempt to redefine the metric:

> Nearly every Jew who participated was eventually killed — but they were going to be killed anyway. By choosing to stand and fight, the Warsaw Jews diverted a significant amount of Nazis resources from battlefields elsewhere, thus hastening the Nazi defeat.

So according to the author, Jewish deaths don't really count as a metric because they were "going to be killed anyway". And the metric instead should be about whether "significantly resources were diverted", a highly dubious claim in and of itself. Essentially the uprising would be considered "successful" if it hastened the end of the war, not if the people in the Ghetto were saved.

Whether true or not, the problem with this claim is that it doesn't help the gun lobby's agenda, which is used to justify arming people in the US: that having guns would have prevented the immediate deaths of those with the guns. The whole article reeks of misdirection.
You're missing the authors point, heck you're even reinstating it yourself:

> Cars, though still totally recognizable as cars, are much safer than they were. Airplane flights are both cheaper and safer.

> Certain diseases have been eradicated.

That's what he's saying. We've mostly (massively) refined existing technology instead of revolutionized it: vaccines, airplanes and cars are all pre-1950 technology.

Not sure if I agree, but it feels like you haven't even read the article.
Strange article, it does not even mention that parts of the USSR were countries occupied before WW II and that they were never happy about it. Perestroika and glasnost gave some room to breathe for their independence movements which gained strength in in late 1980ies. I am still amazed how we were able to pull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Way off.
My country (Lithuania) declared independance back in March 1990, Latvia did the same in May, and Estonia was well on its way—that's more than a year befor August 1991 happen. And by the August events we already had January 1991 so I highly highly doubt there was a real chance for USSR to survive and continue business as usual.
>>It is the height of sociopathic narcissism to think individuals or small bands of "freedom fighters" would be able to defeat such a system.

Wholesale defeat of tyranny isn't necessary - a deterrent is sufficent. Very few soldiers would follow an order if they knew that it put their family at risk for reprisal.
If we didn't have free markets, then MS would not have risen up to replace IBM

Considering the United States was (and remains) a mixed market economy at the time, your statement is incorrect.
That's a very good point, I hadn't looked at it like that!
Definitely. But it would have been very easy to yell at the developer ("you should have known not to do it that way") or the DBA ("why are you doing tickets out of order? you know we have to do deletes last!").

Especially after a dramatic event, those are very easy reactions to have, and they can sound very sensible.
Indeed, technology leading to unemployment is happening right now while a Skynet-style AGI is IMO tremendously unlikely.

However, "everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared" depends on someone maintaining the machines and the distribution of produce. (Because the opposite of Skynet - an AGI that maintains itself and keeps every human satisfied - is even less likely than Skynet.)

And who is going to work for free while keeping everyone else's best interests in mind?

The fact that, well, nobody would, not really, is somehow missed by people who blame "capitalism" or whatever instead of blaming human nature.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Europe

That shows a bunch of places where positive discrimination is not legal, and a few where it's tried, but none of them mention that it happens in universities.

Did I miss it? Is Wikipedia missing something?
I had been downloading the zone file for .PK domains on daily bases until they blocked the zone transfers. Based on comparison of these daily zone files I managed to publish the statistics [1] and also broke the news about hacked .PK domains [2] which was picked up by all leading tech blogs and news agencies.

Currently, I cannot find a way to get the zone file even by officially requesting the registry manager.

[1]: https://www.i.com.pk/pknic-domain-registration-statistics/

[2]: https://www.i.com.pk/110-pk-domains-managed-by-markmonitor-g...
I'm more scared of Democrats and Republicans than Capitalists.
I kinda agree that jobs shifted, but you can't forget that not everyone is able or wants to shift. If you create a "perfect" car mechanic robot, the cat mechanic won't suddenly find a better job. He could maybe seek a job in another type of industry, but why should he have to? He was perfectly content working on cars.
Technological progress mostly relies on discoveries made in physics. Things that will amaze a 1885 person in 1950 were mostly made possible with electricity and derivative technologies, plus nuclear physics, and a few other things. Even engines for our flying machines wouldn't have been possible without electricity.

So the reason the leap between 1950 and today is not as noticeable in terms of the author's time machine experiment, may be because there have been no more major, truly groundbreaking discoveries made in physics, as in, e.g. discovering a new force in nature not known before etc.

But the author is of course right in saying that the past 65 years were marked with a lot of hard work rather than earth shattering discoveries.
Depends which era. The workers of the 8-hour work week era would not be impressed.
That was my though exactly. The Nissan leaf does have a car side lock. Since things are getting heated one should use the lock in a responsible matter.

Also with CarWings, Nissan remote control, I believe you can lock/unlock on the fly without having to go to the car. So pretty much no reason to use it.
I would go so far as to say that outside of technology companies the concept of a product manager is almost completely foreign. Instead, the "small CEO" is usually the business project or portfolio manager, which is often a role completely separate org-wise from the IT folks doing the work. On the one hand, the justification for this is "better business alignment", but that's just a lazy way of justifying the nepotism and political wrangling that marginalize IT organizations as purely a cost center rather than a revenue enabler.

Source: spent 15 years in "big IT", in roles from programmer up to senior director, and this is why I left.
That's an interesting question as well. We may be saved by the fact that as literacy and wealth increases, natality rates go down. I've heard all kinds of estimates of when we'll reach the peak, ranging for 30 to 100 years. Whether the ecosystem will support us until population grows smaller and more sustainable is unknown.
We could be a lot better. Assuming "we" is "people from reasonably developed country".

We could work 6 hours per day, 4 days a week.

We could avoid having problems with drugs, ghettos, extreme poverty - that sort of self-breeding thing.

We could live in fairer world, with less government supervision. Right now there are whole classes of businesses for which ripping customers off is okay (cell companies for example). This did not have to be the norm.

The price? Some undeveloped countries will probably be left to their own devices. Which is an unstable situation: once you solve infant mortality for them, you get population boom and then political instability. Hunger, I'm afraid - maybe on grand scale.
Some things will be more expensive. Right now services are expensive and goods are cheap. It could be reversed a bit.
Christof Koch: The neuroscientist tackles consciousness and the self (2014)
I read this the other day in Ben Horrowitz's book "The Hard Things About Hard Things" and loved the idea by other commenters here to apply it to other fields. Just [my own version](https://github.com/ajmurmann/good-developer-bad-developer) that represents my views on engineering. I tried to stay away from concrete, good practices like TDD or pairing that are en vogue right now. Although I have very strong opinions on some of those, they are controversial and I think they would take value away from the larger points.

I would be excited to hear people's thoughts on it!
It's very much a thing. Coldtea explicitly said he's not responsible for the pregnant woman "because I'm not making money off of her", implying that if he were to observe/interact with her he would be responsible. Retra did the same thing.

That's by definition the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics.

If you want to make a different argument that does not depend on the Copenhagen interpretation, go for it. The fact that you can make a different argument doesn't mean that others (e.g. coldtea) aren't using Copenhagen.
Anarcho-Capitalist: a Right Wing Libertarian who think universal private property will solve most current problems

FWIW there are variations of anarcho-capitalism such as agorism, which is much less overtly propertarian (i.e. either advocating land value tax or not readily accepting the labor theory of property), and moreover which makes a distinction between entrepreneurs and mere capital owners.