skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you (previously: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was-obsol...), but I don't see where this article is talking about basic income. Did I miss the reference?

Thanks!
Well, having both % and .format was already a clear deviation from it.
If you're going to do that sort of piracy check, you have to be absolutely certain that it'll never trigger on a genuine copy. Red Alert 2 had a similar idea - about 60 seconds in to a game, all of your units will explode and the game ends - but it will sometimes trigger on legitimate copies of the game (usually due to mods, but I've had it happen on a clean install as well).
I have, but briefly. This is solving a different problem.

I was told today in discussing it with a peer that it's a "marketers dream."

But I am not a marketer. Yes, this is me welcoming intros. :)
> Those at the very top of the chain lived like kings, while those at the bottom starved.

I don't think that was always the case, in particular, I doubt it was the case in Czechoslovakia.

Being a member of UV KSC (board of directors of the Communist party, the central organ) had special benefits such as better access to health care, goods imported from the West and having an american-sized house, but they were quite modest compared to benefits of today's top American CEOs. And in fact, the best paid people out there were probably some popular singers, who had maybe 50x the average salary. Typical director of state enterprise had maybe 5-10x the average salary. At the bottom, people didn't starve even if they made trouble (that meant a prison sentence and a menial job).

There are people who disagree with this assessment, but I have never seen a good evidence for the claim they would "live as kings". I agree there was inequality, but it wasn't so much monetary as it was in power and status.

It was probably one of the reasons why there wasn't a bloody revolution. Everybody, even the top officials wanted a "better" system.
Google wants faster CPUs that use lower power and don't cost too much to be used in their server farms.

Sooner or later they will port Android to it so it can be used in smart phones and tablets.
Even at 0% GDP growth, the total assets of the nation is still growing, so the pie of wealth is growing as well. Did I miss something?
It's not just windows.
Huh, I looked into them again and getting them seems quite a lot more involved than I remember. Strange, probably confusing it with something else...
> Ruby on Rails is not a unique programming language. Matz created Ruby.

What does "not a unique programming language" mean? Perhaps 'discrete' or 'distinct' in place of 'unique'? As not an RoR developer, I'm hardly in a position to say, but surely at a certain point a DSL deserves to be called a language in its own right. (Extreme case (that, I realise, is far past what anyone would call a DSL): Perl, as with many other languages, is written in C, but certainly counts as a separate programming language.)

EDIT, in response to two downvotes: surely it's a legitimate question? I genuinely don't know what it means to say that something isn't unique (except mathematically, that it means that there's more than one of it). Assuming that it means what it seems to mean, how does one draw the line that I mentioned?
Maximum wage would have little impact on maximum income of the wealthy.

Already in the current situation their main income is not as wages but simply the value increase of assets (companies, real estate, etc) that they own, and with a minimum of legal paperwork all high-end wage income can be restructured as such unless you prohibit owning and selling businesses.

It would be a symbolic statement with no practical effect.
One of the ways to address income inequality is to implement a basic income. While the article didn't mention it, it sort of hinted at it. In order to make a poor person have enough money to get a good education you have to give them a basic income so they can live off it and pay for their education with it.

Many nations in the EU have some form of basic income, but their populations are smaller than the USA and they don't pay much for their military because NATO protects them.
Skeptical. I've been using Bing as my primary search engine for awhile here and haven't noticed any changes of late. When I can't be bothered running a VPN, it's the only foreign-language (ie. English) indexing search engine with reasonable results that is accessible (Duckduckgo and Google are blocked). For all the problems, Chinese internet has its perks though: we have many great, instant media streaming services, pervasive mobile payments and Taobao!
a big, discontinuous jump in rankings like that suggests a couple of things 1) the bot was taken offline and updated with a different engine hence different rank and/or 2) KGS recalibrated it's relative kyu/stone ranks (which it does from time to time)
I wonder how this conflicts with the fact that the difficulty of studies especially in exact science in primary education has been steadily declining even math teachers have difficulties solving highschool math problems from the 70s these days.
What's to stop people doing that now (dumping money into corporations and using the corporations as vehicles of political influence)? Strikes me as a separate (but related) bug that already exists.

One way to tackle this issue in the political space is to forbid for-profit corporations from funding political lobbying. All funding for lobbying efforts have to come from individuals or not-for-profit organisations.
https://twitter.com/levie/status/172463250867367937

Tweet from 2012. If the graph Levie is referring to is indeed accurate, then fast forwarding 3 years later means growth for Pinterest has effectively halted.
I wouldn't be shocked if he goes that route, but he's still the CEO of an engineering-driven company. I think it would inspire confidence that the person at the top cares about technical stuff and can empathize with other employees who write code for a living.

Also I imagine he probably misses just hacking on stuff for fun.
Make your scientific Python 3 code reproducible by deterministic hashing
Read HN. Write code. Play games. Eat with family & friends. Repeat. Thank you, universe.
Although, to be fair, it's hard to know what would be a meaningful visual shortcut for 'universe'. Mostly black (or, I suppose, #FFF8E7 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte )) space with a light pixel or two?
How to engage audience of different ages
Tesla happened because individuals were able to take extremely large sums out of an unrelated business (Paypal), as did a huge part of early stage tech investments, funded at that point mainly by individuals who got multimillion exits in their previous businesses. If the money had been kept inside business, then you'd have the innovation rate that internal subsidiaries of IBM achieved, not the innovation rate of the Silicon Valley.
Thank you. I find the context helpful.
Not the op but Im guessing just using + (which calls .__str__(), iirc?)
This is not my work, I just thought it merited discussion.
Annotated notes and summaries of the TensorFlow white paper
I would just like to take a break from the very literal responses (I admit I immediately thought "that's not digital" too) to say that this made me laugh. :-)
We were speculating as to why Oracle would be interested in getting in bad with these guys on this architecture, specifically. Google is if anything an opponent of Oracle, so I assume Oracle's reasons for getting involved are somewhat different than what you've outlined.
Sounds like a fun challenge, but some of the comments here are a bit too hero-worship-y for me... He's a mere person.
Oops, yes corrected
I question your assumption that in the actual real world, having more money has any kind of correlation to being a better decision-maker. Also, more power to people who make the best decisions isn't, I think, what people generally understand 'democracy' to be, in part because there's no "objective" way to determine who are the better decision makers.

I also still don't understand why there'd be some 'threshold' (threshold of what?) at which rich people would start making bad decisions (or at least decisions that are bad for everyone that's not them?), whereas before that they would be making 'good' decisions (meaning decisions that benefit people other than them, I guess?).

I'm still not sure what you think 'democracy' consists of exactly.
Besides the irony of digital files, there's the fact that these just seem to be scans of old books. That sounds nice in theory (wasn't technology in olden times simpler and therefore easier to get going after the collapse of civilization?) but the problem is that the materials described might not be that easy to find in the modern world (even without an apocalypse). I once tried to build some devices described in a 1920s electronics book but was stymied by the complete unavailability of many components.
> It's just the only way to present clearly data.

If not anywhere else, then surely on a hacker news site, one would expect not to see a statement of the form "this way that things have always been done is the only way to do it" (especially if 'it' is a subjective thing like presenting data clearly; think about the totally changing UI paradigms that could authoritatively have been predicted to be impossible before the widespread availability of touch-based interaction).
The excessive breadth comes at the expense of depth.
> My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man.

> This should be a fun intellectual challenge to code this for myself. I'm looking forward to sharing what I learn over the course of the year.

I would be seriously impressed if he still had the technical chops to build and code this kind of ambitious project on his own.

It's also interesting that he's opening his life up like this and promising to share his (somewhat) individual work with the world, which most CEOs would never do. It has the potential to open him up to critical scrutiny and/or change his public persona. You would never see Musk releasing any updates on personal (less-ambitious) projects because it would detract from his hard-earned and paid-for superhero/wunderkind persona.

Seems like Zuck wants to be perceived more as a fun, quirky, techie rather than the corporate CEO of Facebook. On the plus side, he'll probably get to spend a lot more time with his daughter if he's hacking around the house all day :)
I'm working on a C# self-hosting HTTP server library for standing up restful/websocket based services. Managed code only, with focus on Linux(Mono) deployment.

https://github.com/joongonn/mHttp
I wonder if this is as causal as people might think.

The Scandinavian countries are known for their extremely lax culture especially when it comes to child education, yet same discussions are present there.

Being poor is also making you sick. I wonder if it's more to do with our interpretation of sickness than with any actual change. I would still expect our kids to grow older than we ever where, but sure it doesn't mean they will be happy.
I agree that predation is not zero sum.

The antelope loses its life. The lion gains nourishment for a week.

Clearly the total number of utils in the system has decreased.
Fair point. There are ways to tackle the asset issue, such as a land ownership tax, but I'll give this some more thought. Thanks for your comment.
i call people in that position "frenemies". often times in the large enterprise space, even your largest rivals have something you want/need, whether you like it or not.

sometimes it is writing software that interoperates (bi and the like), other times it is direct need (java in the case of google and oracle, and i'm sure at least some backend systems).
This pairs well with my LSD micro-dosing efforts
Every time this comes up, the answer I see trotted out is that increased land taxes will cause land prices to fall and rents will get cheaper.

I don't understand how this makes any sense, at all. If the town raises the property taxes on my rental, guess what, the rent is going to go up at least as much as the tax increase.
Edsger Dijkstra's work was almost entirely oriented towards breaking programmer intuition, emphasizing that we should reason /as/ the machine and eventually /ahead/ of the machine.
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF
The dominant culture says you are a loser.

Paradoxically I'm doing OK by society's standards. By valuing personal space and control over it I decided to get into the property game with my partner earlier in life, enabling us to purchase an inner city property before their prices exploded. Now I'm watching my friends work their arses off to live further away in the 'burbs. Often success comes down to timing...and an aversion to bullshit social rituals can also help.

Problem is you can't opt-out fully because you have to live and for that you must pay banker tribute via rent.

No rent, but you point remains: gotta work to live.
There has been one tape-out of Z-scale. An early iteration of it was used as a power management controller in one of our DVFS test chips. But we've made many changes since then and haven't taped it out since.
Why should the people in power ever institute this? It would ruin all of them.
Your sad thought is interesting because it suggests that children are being overworked in zero-sum games, ultimately gaining nothing, because all the other children are overworked too.
If only a couple percent of our currency exists as cash what (if anything) is stopping a hacker or unethical banker from just adding $1,000,000 to their the database entry for their account?

Double-entry bookkeeping, distributed financial controls, routine accounting audits, and the certainty of a long stint in jail once that is discovered.

Double-entry bookkeeping is a technology which should fascinate anybody whose buttons Bitcoin-qua-ledger pushes. It enables a 1920s grocery store to detect a quarter missing from the till at the end of the day. The key insight is that "all money came from somewhere and all money goes somewhere; those two transactions should exactly balance; if money ever spontaneously appears or disappears then mistake or malfeasance is afoot."

The government does not routinely directly keep logs of the accounts of businesses, but requires that they do in a variety of circumstances. Companies which do not keep adequate logs face a variety of sanctions, including e.g. punitive tax rates, fines, and criminal prosecution. This keeps the average level of accounting competency at most businesses in the real economy rather north of that at e.g. a typical Bitcoin exchange.
Doesn't sound like he is planning to implement new AI algorithms on his own:

"Thanks buddy! I'm still deciding between using the FB environment and AWS. The FB environment gets me access to all of the great stuff the Facebook AI research team has worked on, so I'll probably do that." (https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102577175875681?commen...)
I just memorized it.
Ruby on Rails is one of many frameworks on top of the Ruby language.
Am I crazy or PHP had this feature since forever? String templates can significantly improve programming speed specially for those of us who are keyboard impaired. Not having to remember how many %s' you need or if one of them should be %d and so on may to most seem just knit picking but personally it makes a day and night difference.
I think a major difference is that in the late-90s bubble, everyone felt like they were winning. Stock market valuations were rising, many ordinary Americans held stock in dot-coms, high-paying jobs were being created that were being filled by ordinary middle-class people. Ordinary people could look at their brokerage account and think "Wow, I'm rich now!"

The only problem was that it was all fictional. Having your portfolio worth a million dollars now is useless when it's only worth $2000 when you go to sell. Getting six-figure salaries at a dot-com when you just have six months HTML experience is kinda ridiculous (okay, we have a variant of this today as well).

In many ways, this boom is a lot more honest, and a lot more real. It has winners and losers, many (but not all) of the winners put in years of hard work to get there, and people generally have a sense of where they stand. The problem is that there are far more losers than winners. That doesn't make for a positive mood, or a stable society.
That doesn't answer my question. After all, you can use the same argument to say all of computing depends on governments needing more accurate ballistic tables.

My question was: In building the Internet we use today, how much money was spent by governments, and how much by private industry?
Ask HN: Why is there a big number of employees in small companies
As a freelance web developer i've worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and made their vision come true by creating their product. Some were simple but others weren't. But i always firmly believed that i could keep most of them floating in my own if it were my company. But sometimes i'd read an article about a small web app that has 50 employees behind it, and just wander to myself "but why though?". A developer to handle the coding, a designer to handle the UI/UX an SEO and marketing expert are more than enough to run a web application business until it grow beyond 10.000 users, in which case each of those 3 could hire four under him to keep the ship flowing etc. I know that i'm probably wrong since almost all web related companies have a big number of employees, at least more than i deem enough. So can anyone explain to me why a company would need that much working force?
How are the issues you listed relative? How does Mark Zuckerberg being super-rich contribute to "huge swaths of our country do not have the ability to fully explore and develop their talents"?
I've been working for 2 years solely through upwork and I am really happy with it. I get a normal freelancing rate for my country (Australia) and sustain my family with it. I was sceptical at first seeing the low rates but decided to give it a fair try and was happy and surprised with the result. Most often it lead to move the work to outside the platform since their 10% fee can get to big numbers pretty quickly.

Also I'd like to add that some of the companies that I work for have found some great talent through the platform.
You've created a false dichotomy, leaving out a major "Startup" class: get acquired. There are also many other options.

"Startups" in this context exist to get VC's an acceptable exit.
Being able to give a 20 minute speech in a passable - if poorly pronounced - second language seems like a level at which one could say they "knew" that other language.

Clearly no-one ever has learnt a language completely. I think it proves he's no layabout at the very least.
I've generally agreed with this sentiment and usually sum it up with the thought "One million people will usually better allocate one million dollars than one investor allocating one million dollars". That said, this isn't a hard and fast rule. There are certain types of "moonshot" projects that will never get built under such a scenario because you'll almost always fail to allocate enough money to such projects. Moonshot doesn't even have to mean something like sending a human to the moon. Moonshot can also be relative to an economy locally, like the decision to invest in power plants and transmission lines in many parts of the developing World that are underserved with regards to electricity needs.
All taxation is already robbery. That doesn't get taken in to account when deciding what to tax and at what rate for any other source, I fail to see why inherited wealth should be the exception.
This Is What a a Tor Supporter Looks Like: Susan Landau
I'd take all this as less of an opportunity to complain about our own growth, and more of an opportunity for everyone who has or will choose to procreate to think deeply about raising your own children, and to do better for them than has been done for yourself.
Cydia No Jailbreak for iPhone
> My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man.

I wouldn't throw those names around too much. The Marvel movie empire might not be worth as much as facebook, but it may be close. Those trademarked names are valuable assets. There are firms out there ready to pounce on any unauthorized use. Not the acceptable wording "like Jarvis in Iron Man." That's ok as it uses the terms descriptively. His legal department would have rejected "I'm building Jarvis".

https://trademarks.justia.com/862/94/jarvis-86294162.html

"Computer application software that may be downloaded via global computer networks and electronic communication networks for use in connection with mobile computers, mobile phones, and tablet computers, namely, software for use as a voice controlled personal digital assistant." .. not fictional software. The Jarvis mark is protected in the real world just like Siri.

In the international descript Jarvis is also a "fire-extinguishing apparatus." A coincidence, but it made me laugh.
A million people with $1 apiece will buy a million McDoubles or coffees. Or a million Candy Crush credits...
Ender's Game (The Ender Quintet) by Orson Scott Card
Great answer. I spent quite a few hours using double-entry bookkeeping while in business school so I understand the concept well. Thanks
"The supermarket aisle has become a confusing place. It used to be full of recognisable items like cheese and butter; now you find yourself bamboozled by all manner of odd alternatives such as ‘raw’ hummus, wheat-free bread and murky juices. You have to stay pretty alert to make sure you pick up a pint of proper milk, rather than a soy-based alternative or one free from lactose. Supermarkets have become shrines to ‘clean eating’, a faith that promises happiness, healthiness and energy."

Supermarket and their marketing teams catering the orthorexia nervosa shopper. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthorexia_nervosa
The land value tax was a nail in the coffin to the decadent Roman empire. People just got up and left their property.

...the decay of trade and industry was not a cause of Rome’s fall. There was a decline in agriculture and land was withdrawn from cultivation, in some cases on a very large scale, sometimes as a direct result of barbarian invasions. However, the chief cause of the agricultural decline was high taxation on the marginal land, driving it out of cultivation. Jones is surely right in saying that taxation was spurred by the huge military budget and was thus ‘indirectly’ the result of the barbarian invasion.

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

History does not repeat, but it surely does rhyme.
> Excel will tweak an input cell until the output cell reaches a given condition.

Never trust a statistic you haven't faked yourself? ;)
The same reason they ever implement anything: because they are either worried about losing all their power / something even more "abrupt".
Silicon Valley’s Unlikely New Frontier