skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, you're right, apologies to you and to 'gorhill.

I misunderstood before and at the time I read "Fanboy's Anti-ThirdpartySocial" as "Fanboy’s Social Blocking List" not "Anti-ThirdpartySocial (see warning inside list)", perhaps because the latter sometimes seems to change its name to "Anti-Facebook List" for reasons I haven't identified. The former does block numerous Facebook addresses, just not that one.

I'm not sure any of this really invalidates my original point, though. Two weeks ago my Firefox had a couple of privacy/blocker extensions installed, and with no real configuration beyond ticking the "everything" boxes in the Ghostery wizard, they blocked pretty much everything that bothered me. Today, with FF42, neither of them works any more.

Apparently the new version involves figuring out which of the almost 50 lists that are suggested but not active by default in uBlock Origin are needed to get a reasonable level of blocking. I dare say almost no-one is actually going to get that right reliably even if they want to. And while I might have guessed to just activate everything under the social heading to block Facebook Connect (at least if I'd realised something related to Facebook wasn't already blocked by default), I have no idea which of those lists to even check to see if I can disable the various web font resources that involve tracking.
I don't think the author adequately makes the case that a UBI has problems as a form of welfare.

His argument seems to boil down to the following:

1) Labour being replaced by automation isn't going to happen because it is going to create more jobs than it displaces..... Not sure if I agree with this point.

2) That a basic income necessarily needs be IN PLACE OF existing welfare and labour protections... While some other forms of welfare may evaporate and some labour protections loosened, it doesn't have to. It provides flexibility for labourers and employers to negotiate without the looming threat of not having a basic living wage. It increases the labourers negotiating position more than the employers IMO.

3) Technology makes us more productivity, which means we can work less hours which means we can have more leisure time. The problem with this argument is that it assumes those "less hours" are equally distributed across the entire pool of laborers. What it just means is there are less hours for a limited pool of skilled labourers to fight over. Which means more unemployment. It does not mean that the taxi driver who has his 12 hour days eliminated by driverless ubers now gets to work 3 hours a day driving an uber or gets to work 3 hours a day programming those cars.

4) Instead of having a UBI, we should have a militant (violent) revolution against the rich where we demand increased welfare and labour protections. Increased welfare like a UBI? I'm not sure why the author feels like positive social institutions can't be a voluntary concession of the rich to satisfy discontent of the masses. Why do we have to get out our pitchforks to get bread if they are offering to hand out a livelihood to every citizen?

This sounds like the sort of leftist rhetoric that comes from someone in a very comfortable position. Try telling someone in real need that they shouldn't accept a basic income because "it's just a bribe from the rich so we don't start some vague revolution!".
> Managers of software teams (and their bosses, all the way up to CTOs and CEOs) need to allow their engineers to contribute fixes to OSS with the understanding that it helps the community.

I was speaking with a free software developer about a position at her former employer. She warned me that while she enthusiastically recommended most aspects of the job, the worst, most frustrating, and generally unpleasant part of it was dealing with the upstream communities your managers would insist you get patches mainlined into.

The problems are not isolated to greedy employers.
Not when your country imports oil and you have a negative impact on its trade deficit (and/or environment).
It's even more ironic when you consider that a small group of political philosophers riffing off the musings of some early Enlightenment thinkers are essentially responsible for Western civilization as we know it.
As with drinking water, you need to have a goal (e.g. surviving) to say need. I suspect GP was saying that they need to do that to have a non-parasitical relationship with open source projects they use.
Nuclear will die. Solar will live
I respect your opinion, but it's only your opinion, not a global truth.

Compression is a style. There is far more to musicality and emotion than compression. The problem compression solves is that the environments where industrialized cultures now listen in are not dedicated listening areas, but alternately loud and quiet places, so compression makes all parts of the music almost equally loud so there are no drop outs where the quieter parts would be. There is no need to compress music in headphones, for example, to the extent that it is currently compressed.

I find compression and other techniques such as removing vocal breath sounds, makes most recordings unlistenable. They don't sound like humans anymore, but synthetic puppets animated by humans with conflicting values. Take the Foo Fighters, for example. They're popular, sure, but all of their songs sounds like one continuous din. Between the compression induced by the guitar distortion settings and the compression added to the recording, then the compression added by the radio station, it just sounds like a waterfall with a few bandpass filters changing between the verse and chorus.

Also their vocals have no dynamics. When he yells loud, the vocals don't get louder but the timbre changes. That changes it from cathartic to strained. The dynamics have all been flattened.

Why do you think the indie rock movement and bands and styles with wide dynamic range like the Pixies, Nirvana and dubstep got so popular? They eschewed the trend of hardline compression with alternating loud and quiet parts. They match the rhythm of human thought and motion which has fast and slow, detail and empty parts.

> That's like saying the internet is bad because there's porn on it.

Yes but on the internet you can go where there is no porn. Where can you find music with no compression?
Thank you. A basic income increases the negotiating power of the laborer because he now has an implicit price floor from where he can start his negotiations.
I don't think it's unreasonable to differentiate between reading assembly produced by a compiler and handwriting assembly. I do the former several times a month and the latter almost never.
> Stuff like adding a "donate" button on the page looks lazy.

Not only that, but from my own experience, relatively few people (as a percentage of total users) will ever donate.

Explicitly asking money for things of value has much better results.
Yep it totally claustrophobic if you are over 5’ in height. I really, really hate low ceilings.
Ask HN: Is there a physical push-toggle switch for keyboards?
Hi, Hacker News!

I'm daydreaming about an emacs-inspired homemade keyboard. Something like:

q w e r t y u i o p
a s d f g h j k l
Sh z x c v b n n m Sh
H C M S space S M C H

(There are surely superior alternate placements for the control, alt/meta, windows/super, and hyper keys, but that's not what my Ask HN is about.)

You'll note the lack of punctuation and numeric keys--even tab and enter are missing. Well, C-t for tab and C-j for enter. H-q for 1, etc.

Since this keyboard would rely heavily on the meta keys (the bucky bits), I was thinking about making half of these shift/alt/ctrl keys out of special physical toggle switches.

I imagine a switch that is like a regular keyboard switch unless you push it HARD enough to click. At that point, it sticks down and stays down until you push it hard again.

In summary, does that switch exist? Like, for a keyboard, pin and cap compatible with the 'cherry' type switches. What is it called? Thanks in advance!
> Virtually EVERY product

Well not just physical products. Flights are another good example.

> Compare that with many flimsy, plastic machines today

... that are available at a cheap accessible price. It's still entirely possible to buy espresso machines that are built like tanks, or ones that have lots of expensive electronics, and so on. The high-end of the market has not disappeared...

> it's no wonder there is a market for these older machines.

Market being the operative word here. We've seen a spread in the market to where the cheap end is now affordable by everyone, and the expensive end is even better than (and more expensive than) the best of the best was 20 years ago. Hard to see how this isn't a good thing, except from an environmental perspective.
Maybe, but it does explain the general encryption process in an understandable way, so I doubt it's sarcastic.
Shouldn't I be regulated as to when I can open my windows then too? (as in, not in winter)
This isn't so much leapfrogging roads as it is improving on bush planes. There are lots of light aircraft can take off and land in insanely short distances, some as low as ten feet [1]. You can get most anything anywhere, even with almost no facilities.

The big thing that these drones offer is cost. Being able to get medication to a small community for less money means aid organizations can stretch dollars farther. At the moment, a bush flight is several hundred dollars an hour. If these drones can offer service at even $100, it will go a long way to improving quality of life.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNwl8ntUhL0
that is tragically and hilarious ironic.

with older songs, you can turn them up louder, then the dynamic parts really punch you.

with newer songs, it's just a steady fatigue.
Java Mixed-Mode Flame Graphs at Netflix, JavaOne 2015
There was generation of Germans for example who thought a good idea to elect Hitler, and then cheer for him even as he dismantled the state.

Or there was the boring generation of the 10's, compare with the more lively roaring 20s.

Or consider the 60s vs the more conservative 50s.
Why not just learn swift? I never understood this random language -> other random language...
> Newcomb describes it as “one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever had to
> make because it meant letting go of some people.” Stressing the firings
> weren’t easy for him. “Before I made the decision, I drove scar from San
> Francisco to Baltimore and back to think it through,” he explains. “I took
> eight days.”

I have fired people. It is brutal. I have been fired. It's worse. So managers, please: Never solicit sympathy for the pain of firing people.
Hwæt Beowulf Online
> If a business requires overpriced contracts to survive

Greater than $1 is now overpriced?
I just meant that an economist would have written differently in a lot of ways orthogonal to the point you were making. I didn't mean it as a value judgement (i.e. that an economist would have written it better), even though my post might have been read that way.
The Tragedy of the Anticommons
But isn't automation the most effective way to higher productivity? The zero-sized workforce is clearly the most economical one for the employer, and where's the union then? And it is precisely the loss of a big percentage of available jobs to automation, that the OP article offers as the elite's best motive to support BI.
This is exactly right - it is done to reduce the building cost.

Of course having a ceiling this low is terrible for natural cooling so you then have to run air conditioning all the time costing far more in the long run. I live in a 1920s building with 11’ ceilings and I don’t have or need air conditioning because the place stays cool enough even through the height of summer.
At 16 bits dithering is probably pointless for listening purposes.

What dithering does is it decorrelates the quantization noise with the signal. Absent it, quantization generates harmonic spurs. In theory, on a very clean and noiseless signal these harmonic spurs might be more audible than you'd expect from the overall quantization level.

In practice, 16 bits is enough precision that these harmonics are inaudible even in fairly pathlogical cases. But quantization eliminates the potential problem by replacing the harmonic content with white noise.

Adding noise on playback just adds noise, it would not remove the harmonic generation.

The _best_ kind of dithering scheme is a subtractive dither, where noise is added before quanitization and then the _same_ noise is subtracted from the dequantized signal on playback. This is best in the sense that it's the scheme that completely eliminates the distortion with the least amount of additional noise power. But it's not ever used for audio applications due to the additional complexity of managing the synchronized noise on each side.
While I'm a bit enamoured of UBI myself, a thought came to me while reading this:

If we are going to be dismantling the welfare system at the same time we implement UBI, we will have absolutely no margin for error; if UBI turns out to be the wrong policy, then rebuilding the welfare system will be very difficult after having fired all the people who make it function.

Living in Oakland, I also think his point about housing is particularly salient. The ideal of basic income is that employers should hold less power over employees, but that won't be the case if you need the wage to afford rent.
>> to get productivity growing again, labour has to become more expensive. And the only way for labour to become more expensive is for there to be a genuinely global and militant labour movement

> I don't even know what that means. Want to know a surefire way to make labour more expensive? Minimum income for everyone.

It means when labor is cheap, there is little thought investing in labor-saving capital equipment, but when labor is expensive, labor-saving capital equipment is developed and invested in.

Some companies pay dividends. This is money not being used to resupply the company, nor reinvest in the company, nor to pay wages. Workers creating that wealth fighting for it to go to wages as opposed to dividends will have some side effects, one being a desire to automate the industry jobs more. Basic income for all has an effect on all of this, but not as direct. Particularly for say, programmers in San Francisco, where the small amount of money they get from basic income won't have much effect on work, automation and such at all.
I would look at it sort of like a CTO/CEO relationship, but with a somewhat inverted power dynamic (if there is one at all). You have someone reliable who you can ask when a technical question comes up (so that you can determine whether someone else in the community is trying to tech-bullshit you), but you have a better grasp on how to deal with the human aspects of the community.

That said, I'm not sure where you're going to find these people. Good managers are probably getting good manager jobs, and likely don't have the time to hand-hold another community. Combine that with the fact that their power mandate will be less clear in a community, and I doubt you'll get many people that want to get involved in this way.
Undue Certainty: Where Howard Zinn's a People's History Falls Short (2012) [pdf]
> let's try it somewhere that is game

Somewhere that's game, but also has very strict immigration rules, or a very low existing quality of life. I like the idea in principle (and I'm very pro immigration generally), but don't see how it can work without strict immigration controls. Eligibility controls will just cause a flood of cheap labour, and an artificial middle class made of those who were eligible in the first tranche.
Do yourself a favor and change the font to not be a typewriter font. It may be bourgeois of me, but reading fixed-width font for prose to be sub-optimal.
link to homepage: http://web-artanis.com/
I keep seeing this sentiment and I keep not understanding it. Many actual autopilots are simple heading or altitude holding systems. The analogy to Tesla's system seems just about perfect.
Someone also pointed out that people have called monads "programmable semicolons".
Why Remote Employees Crush Office Cube-Dwellers
Universal income? Sure why not. With your own money.

My money stays in my pocket.
I don't really disagree. But copper and mortar plumbing from 1915 might not be shabby at all.
From a purely economic perspective a building that lasts more than 50 years is probably not worth doing. In theory you could invest the initial savings and replace the whole building in 50 years from the income.

The downside of pushing the engineering to the limit is the builders often cut corners to make their own savings so that the building does not even make 50 years. Plenty of new buildings here in Australia are having major structural issues after only 5 to 10 years because of this.
As long as human requires another human for providing services, universal basic income would only translate to inflation. In essence, money is simply an unit for purchasing slice of another human's life time. It is however possible to have a world where all mining, manufacturing, farming, construction and most form of services is provided by self-maintaining robots and then humans are truely free to pursue their interests as they see fit. In that form of society, price of basic food, clothing, housing etc would be near zero and value of humans would be accounted by their ability to entertain, explore and educate as opposed to their wealth. So universal basic income is absolutely possible as long as humans are not part of the supply chain all the way until final consumption.
>That said, there's one thing the article does not address and that is "beating", or really inter-modulation distortion from instrumental overtones.

Beating and intermodulation distortion are entirely different things. They look similar on an oscilloscope, but they're not and they don't sound the same.

>Instruments are not limited to 20-20kHz. They can have overtones well above this range.

Correct. You can't hear the overtones beyond the upper portion of the hearing range (many people believe you can).

>In a real listening environment (i.e. live performance) these overtones have a chance to interact with one another in the air.

In reality they do not unless you're driving the air so hard the trough rarification is approaching hard vacuum. (That's not actually impossible. It's how ultrasonic audio 'beaming' devices work). Some performances are powerful enough to get close, eg, if you're sitting six feet from the pipe organ.

Once you're driving air so hard it becomes nonlinear, thus introducing intermodulation distortion in the air, that distortion produces actual audible-range distortion products. And because the distortion you're hearing is in the audible range, a recording will sample and reproduce it accurately.

You're hearing the audible _result_ of IMD, you're not somehow listening to the distortion curve itself.

> It is possible that these overtones may beat with one another

You're continuing to confuse beats and IMD, but here you're talking about beat frequencies, so Yes. But beat frequencies are a sort of auditory illusion. If one of the frequencies that would produce a beat is inaudible--- there's no beat. Easy to test, go try it.

> and cause inter-modulation products in the audible range.

IMD is not a beat. Inaudible ultrasonics will produce audible artifacts when the underlying reproduction system is nonlinear (another way of saying 'there's intermodulation distortion'). However, that's a playback artifact. If the IMD products were audible in the original signal, audible range sampling would reproduce them.

If it wasn't audible in the original performance, it should not be part of the recording, and it should not be part of the playback.
Well, "should" or "shouldn't" can get too complex to analyze.

There's no god given set of rights -- what we get to do is what the era/society/legal system we live in allows us.

And what's moral/good to do even outside or against what's allowed, is a matter of philosophy.

People expected to be able to smoke even on an airplane in the 70s. Nowadays not so much. Asking someone not to smoke "within 30 ft of this building's entrance" (a common sign), would seem as ridiculous to them as the regulation of heating to you.
It also contains the point roughly: "UBI is a pittance offered to the proletariat from the elite to prevent us from revolting"
The problem with argument #3, and the one no one ever brings up, is the fact that people still need to be able to pay for stuff. And you could argue that one now has the time to go back to school, but how are they going to pay for it? How are they going to support their family while doing it?

UBI can be an answer to this, but given the political climate, I don't particularly think it's a viable solution in the short to medium term.
A Survey of Personal Data Sharing to Third Parties by Mobile Apps
I really wish this was more the case. When it comes to economic systems, everyone has theories about what will work but most of the time it's just that.

Instead we would be better off actually trying things on a small scale to see how it works rather than everyone bickering on their thoughts about how humans make decisions.
Hey all, I've never registered or written on HN; I'm most definitively not a hacker. I barely speak computer.

I am an F '85 alumnus. I just wanted to say hello, my guess is that most of the responders here went to Hampshire, too. I know a few who are diehard computer-builders, but, since I left that notorious social media platform, I've not been in touch.

I'm in Vermont, if any of you are of that crew, You'd likely guess who I am based on that tid bit.

I doubt it, I simply wanted to extend my well wishes, and send my support.

Saudade; nostalgia brings fond memories.

Be Well, and Take Good Care...

~RA
Sure it has, although trickle down is a completely inaccurate way to describe it.

Real adjusted income per capita is skyrocketing. The only reason it looks like it is going down is because Liberals always quote the household income. Of course household income is going down, households are getting smaller and smaller.

A mere 5 percent of those in the bottom quintile in '75 were still there by '91.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZTj_GfalJo8/UCGLgI8nDII/AAAAAAAAFt...
Elon Musk: In less than 20 years, owning a car will be like owning a horse
I think that depends a lot on the level at which the minimum income is set; 1k is very different from 10k is very different from 20k.

If you abolish the welfare system and institute welfare at 1k/yr, you've probably fucked a lot of poor people over.
> However abolishing IP would be digital communism and many people are for whatever reason adverse to that idea.

Perhaps, because it would just mean even less money would go into code that wasn't held as a trade secret? And instead of companies only being able to (without risk) be bad citizens of permissively licensed projects, they could just rip off everything GPL licensed as well.
It's a the result of new of building code, which has minimum energy efficiency requirements. Residential energy efficiency is projected via heat loss calculations among other things.
Sorry, NOT RELATED TO THIS POST:
I wonder how some articles got to the first page even when they have 0 to very few points... this post has 8 points so far and I see posts which have > 100 points still on the second page. Is it page views?
They very clearly laid out the requirements for the project.
Yes. And this is actually one of the benefits of nation states signing the TPP!
You can keep your money. What you owe in tax is by definition not yours.
Depends a lot. If you can just install prefabricated elements large elements, steel is not that expensive.

On the other hand every brick has to be laid by hand. Good bricklayers are scarce because brick has not been in fashion. And therefore they are expensive. Bad bricklayers are slow.
I'd like it to be a bigger part of economics training, but most econ majors have about a year of formal statistics/econometrics as a year of their coursework.