skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The book author, Robert Gordon has been on this "economic growth is over" Jihad since forever. I found a 1988(!!) paper where he is complaining that productivity has been slowing down for 20 years (in 1988), that despite the vast investments in computer technologies nothing is showing up in productivity statistics etc. etc. For an advanced economy like the US, economic growth boils down to productivity growth. Well, how did he fare since then. Pretty sure no one is going to say we stagnated between 1988 and 2015. It is clear that there was a huge burst of productivity in the period 1995-2005 when people figured out how to use computers to improve productivity. Curiously, Bob Gordon became silent in this period.

But then it slowed down after 2005 and now Bob Gordon is back with his theories about "productivity is over" and growth is finished etc. The new twist is that he claims today's technologies are not as important to productivity as the early 20th century were. Well, the 1988 paper has comments by William Nordhus who shows that in the period from 1900 to 1917 productivity growth was zero and it was very low between 1924 to 1937. For the whole period the productivity growth came in a burst from 1917-1924 and then 1937 to about 1948. The reason is productivity is based on combining technologies in novel ways and it doesn't proceed in a regular 3% manner like population growth or investment. It is likely "bursty" and non-uniform. I fully expect to see another explosion of productivity (and thus economic growth) as mobile/cloud/AI/ML start infiltrating the general economic system.

[1] http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Projects/BPEA/1988-2/1988b_...
USA today is not exactly a news source of note. I'm not saying there is no bubble, but I wouldn't personally put a lot of stock in their take on anything.
Unless you live in an area with lots of Superchargers or if your works place has electric car charging stations. I feel like that's the reason why so many people that I work with get Teslas.
Yeah that's unfortunate... They are growing very quickly in terms on onboarding devs right now. They're also putting a lot of effort into building better tooling for interviewing / onboarding. I fortunately jumped on before the growth really got crazy.
If you use this API very often from Swift you can introduce nice wrapper around it. It would be better to see these issues by Apple but I think they are minor and Swift overweights with its benefits.
Well it might need to release that data to convince shareholders that all the money they are spending on original content is worth the hundreds of millions a year they are spending.

It's hard to tell if Netflix's growth is because 1) the huge catalog of rerun content they purchase for pennies on the dollar or 2) the original content they create for dollars on the dollar.

The viewership data sheds light on that. If only three million out of 75 million watched House of Cards? Then they better stop spending 100 million dollars a year on it, because it's not worth it.
This is a pretty egregious example of what has been called "chronological snobbery". I won't deny that the 1950's had their problems. But to assume that they were distinctively more "grotesque and arrogant" than today is kinda silly. You want grotesque? Look at the modern hookup scene enabled by Tinder and its ilk. You want arrogant? Look at the comment above.
Phased mobile onboarding
It might be interesting to use LLVM as a backend to Firm, especially considering that two most important backends (ARM and amd64) are "in very early phases"
Anyone care to tl;dr this?
If one farmer works harder than the guy next door and becomes richer as a result, how is that bad?

It isn't. But if one farmer works harder than another, wealthier farmer, and the wealthier farmer makes 1000 times more than the harder working farmer, that is bad. And that is how the system currently works: we systematically reward people for being wealthy, regardless of any personal qualities or talents. And whereas there is a natural upper bound on how hard you can work, or how clever you can be (we're all human beings, after all), there is no upper bound on how wealthy you can be, and therefore no upper bound on the advantage you can be born with. It's tough to work 1000 times harder than someone else, but trivial to earn 1000 times more from investments if you have 1000 times more to begin with.
Is possible to drive the code with swift instead of the custom language?
I thought Tesla sent out letters to people using Superchargers for daily charging, clarifying that they were intended for long-distance travel.
You can make my_realloc() simpler:

void *my_realloc(void *ptr, size_t size)
{
return size ? realloc(ptr, size) : (free(ptr), 0);
}

According to the C standard, realloc(NULL, size) is guaranteed to be equivalent to malloc(size). From n1548 7.22.3.5 para 3:

> If ptr is a null pointer, the realloc function behaves like the malloc function for the specified size.

Also, free(0) is well-defined. From n1548 7.22.3.3 para 2:

> If ptr is a null pointer, no action occurs.
I live in a town with an excellent, healthy food culture. The school lunches are terrible. The result is most everyone packs lunch for their kids. Eventually I hope to figure out why there hasn't been a movement to improve the lunches, but so far no one's really talking about it.
In a future brave new world will it possible to live forever?
Modern compression has an entropy code step where you have a probability of seeing a symbol. And yet DEFLATE, the algorithm zlib is based on, uses Huffman coding, which means probabilities can only be integers. Arithmetic coders (like Brotli uses) and ANS-based coders (like BitKnit uses) have support for fractional probabilities. So already, the improved entropy encode step means that you get some gains. They're not perfect in any case, but they're a wide improvement on most data.

zlib, the library, isn't even perfect. You can easily get more out of DEFLATE by simply replacing the compressor with a smarter one, e.g. Zopfli.
History of Computers in the Movies: Panel Lights, Spinning Tapes and Lab Coats
For Apple, they must be thinking about cars vs other things. Maybe electric cars are a great idea, but VR maybe a much better idea (seeing as a VR headset is basically two iPohnes glued together)
Happy MLK jr Day!

Less than 50 years ago, it was legal to discriminate against all minorities. And some of my older Jewish Americans friends can give awful examples. They still don't feel save in the US. You might think it's irrational, but discrimination scars. Minorities are forced to form tight communities.

The majority tribe also looks out for its own. Something like 70+% of white people don't have nonwhite friends. We are wired to seek our own, so exclusion is the default human behavior. I have a dream that one day we will overcome this silly little thing called tribalism. :)
Make a catchy video, presenting the idea, create an kickstarter. Hope to get viral (hire an ad agency who can make that happen). Research the market. Know the market. Hire someone to build a sound business plan for you.
Go begging for that money shower. Cry for the thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours already spent which you may never see again.
First because it validates the hypothesis that there are significant differences in intelligence between ethnicities (i.e. if Ashkenazis are genetically smarter, perhaps the lower avg IQ in blacks is at least partly genetic).

And second, it can cause some people to perceive Ash. as "others", enemies and give rise to various conspiracy theories.
I switched to Taskwarrior to manage TODO because org-mode is hard if you want to make API call to generate reports or sync it with a bugtracker.

I wonder why the atom org-mode package is not more popular ... The power of a desktop js editor with org-mode capabilities would be awesome !
Looks like the author works for Rackspace so it may be related.
I believe a caveat with this technique is that it won't work for sites that send the X-Frame-Options header as SAMEORIGIN in supporting browsers.
Your comments about language reminded me of this:

When I was younger, I had hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). Whenever my blood sugar would start crashing, I could actually feel my brain functions start shutting down, in a rough order from highest to lowest.

First I would have trouble with concentration and attention. I would feel 'spacey'. Lots of things can cause this though, so I didn't always realize it was a blood sugar problem and that I needed to eat something.

The next thing to go would be my ability to process language. Usually when someone is speaking to you in your native language, you aren't really conscious of the difference between 'hearing a sound' and that sound having meaning. Someone is talking and the meaning just forms in your head. But when my blood sugar started dropping, English would start sounding like a foreign language. It was all just sounds. The sounds had the rhythm of language, but not one I understood anymore.

And then when I tried to speak, I would clearly form the intent of speaking certain words and completely different ones would come out of my mouth. Before I knew that it was hypoglycemia, I had an episode once in high school where I knew something was wrong, and I was repeating the words 'I need to visit the nurse' over and over in my head, but when I managed to speak, all I could say was 'I don't feel good' before I lost control and started sobbing. Laughing or crying uncontrollably happens right before I black out.
The thing that really got it through for me was reading other people's configurations, specifically Bernt Hansen's.

http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

Seeing how someone else who lives on the platform does their configuration helped put it in perspective, then I just cherry-picked the ideas I liked from there in building my own.
> I can relate to this since I went to a Singapore school for a while and the only thing they cared about were your test scores. You really weren't encourage to think; just memorize stuff. It was awful.

Did you try hiring people from the polytechnics (pre-university institutions, for those unfamiliar with Singapore)? I studied at one, and it felt like there was less emphasis placed on test scores, and more on creative thinking and getting the job done. An increasing number of students are starting to choose this route instead of the more conventional A Level system.
Reading used to be supremely difficult. A piece used to be read aloud - after several personal practice sessions to gain familiarity with the text.

In the 4th century being able to read silently was notably strange.

We've refactored the process quite a bit since then:

Splitting individual words. Introducing capitals to highlight paragraph boundaries and proper names.
Punctuation to speed up parsing.
Inter-paragraph spacing and semantic and syntactic conventions to improve concept parsing.
Etc., etc.

I see no reason to believe we are done yet.
:-)
It's an allusion to Moby Dick the white whale. A whaling captain, Ahab, is obsessed with killing Moby Dick, because Ahab lost his leg to the whale.

Ahab sacrifices everything in his mad pursuit. Moby Dick ends up sinking the ship, killing his crew, and Ahab himself. It cost him everything for something that was foolish.

Maybe the moral of the story, try a travel startup, but be willing to pivot.
It seems to be a simple multiplexer. They can only be used alternately, the example script on the page lists code to first select one of the (up to 16) cameras using GPIOs, then capturing with the normal Arduino utility.
Unfortunately, many times the 'default' gatekeeper to anyone else worth your time in the org IS the recruiter. Using social engineering and/or linkedin you are sometimes able to figure who you need to speak to and access them directly.
Also, I have found that destinations punish you for not booking on their site. Want to cancel that hotel reservation less than 24 hours before you were supposed to check in? Sorry, we "don't have enough information" because you booked with an aggregator site. Free checked in luggage? That's only if you book with us.
Electric vehicles are far simpler than internal combustion engines. I mean, you don't even need things like electronic fuel injection. Literally, the complexity of building a car goes from the complex systems developed over a century back to the simple vehicles of the late 1800's.
There was actually a GSOC project for doing org syncing with bugtrackers, called org-sync.

http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/gsoc2012/student-project...

Unfortunately it went dormant pretty quick after the original GSOC implementation.
I recommend the articles of Sacha Chua (on org-mode and anything else she writes about).

Here are some examples: [1],[2],[3]

More tutorials here: [4]

1 - http://sachachua.com/blog/2008/01/outlining-your-notes-with-...

2 - http://sachachua.com/blog/2012/05/org-mode-and-habits/

3 - http://sachachua.com/blog/2013/06/how-i-use-emacs-org-mode-f...

4 - http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/index.html
French president declares economic emergency
> Many things now - smoking bans, health awareness, the public Internet - are huge improvements.

IMHO smoking bans have been a terrible thing. It's nowhere near as pleasant to listen to music or hang out in a bar or pub without the blue haze of tobacco smoke making the place feel comfortable and happy. I miss it terribly — and I don't smoke cigarettes!
Something about travel is deadly alluring to some category of entrepreneur. I once went to a party in Silicon Valley, where I met multiple people working on "it's sort of like WikiPedia for travel" (this was a few years ago, when "wiki for X" seemed like a reasonable business idea and occasionally even got funding and actually launched something). And, I said, "Oh, I think I just met your co-founder a few minutes ago." and, they replied, "No, my co-founder isn't here", or "no, I don't have any co-founders". Multiple people, multiple conversations. None of them knew the others or had any awareness that they were competing with, seemingly, thousands of people who had the same brilliant idea.

By my calculations, something like 10% of all the people at that party were working on a fucking travel wiki. That's kind of a microcosm of Silicon Valley, in general, but yeah...travel seems like a weird black hole for entrepreneurs.
The only thing I get from xyz domains is spam and viruses (I didn't click the link).
Retrospective on a horizontal product failure to launch
I believe we are partly to blame.

As developers, we've spent a long time demanding "leave me alone, I just want to write code!" without taking the time to understand the customers' problems, their constraints, or the business as a whole. We helped convince the project managers, etc that just sending us the requirements is sufficient. Now whether they email the docs to us in the next room or from the other side of the planet, what does it matter?

To fix this, we need to accept that our job is to solve problems not just write code.

We need to understand the customers, their constraints, and how our choices and work affect the business (or at least our product/team). Eventually, most people will realize that code is just one potential solution and sometimes other approaches - better docs, clearer UI, throwing people at a problem - can solve the problem too. We don't have to become experts in all areas, just realize how we and they fit together.

TLDR:
Yes, it's because managers believe developers are easily replaceable. Understand the customer, business, and/or industry and you won't be.
I submit that it's because of the egalitarian ideals that certain professions are looked down on. Work that is seen as doing the scutwork that someone else is too lazy to do for themselves is vaguely looked down on. In an egalitarian society, you are a servant. You have chosen to degrade yourself.

It's a repulsive thing, in that mindset. It's an active betrayal of ideals, and not even for a particularly good payout.
Here, write these down:

File->Open

File->Save

File->Quit

Edit->Copy/Cut/Paste

Use cursor keys to navigate the document.
Interesting tidbit: Anki's predecessor was also an Emacs mode http://ichi2.net/flashcard/
I'm rather incredulous about the whole, electric is simpler.

Combustion engines are pretty damn simple, at their heart. Modern engines are complex monsters because we have been steadily refining them- lower emissions, more power, greater longevity. You have a whole host of devices managing the engine to make it perform optimally.

Electric engines can also pretty damn simple. And yet we switch to brushless for durability. We thermally manage the battery banks for performance. We add regenerative modes for efficiency.

I suspect eighty years from now, the electric engine will be just as complex if not more, than the combustion engine of today.
Rowhammer is a great demonstration that the memory abstraction in almost all languages does let you statistically modify the memory of other processes on appropriate hardware!

I don't think rowhammer lets you read memory, though; does it? There are certainly some cache timing attacks that do, though.
It seems like a lot of academics and hardcore computer science enthusiasts love CLRS. But I remember taking an algorithms course just a few months ago and that book was almost unreadable. A lot of my classmates shared the same sentiment. The math was dense and the explanations were unclear. Juggling several other CS classes that quarter, nobody had the time to work through it. Maybe I wasn't smart or patient enough to understand CLRS, but it just never made much sense to me, especially on more advanced topics of algorithm design.

I loved The Algorithm Design Manual. Used it for my class as well as preparing for technical interviews. Although looking back at it now, TADM is great for learning algorithms (quickly) for the very first time, while CLRS is a good reference manual once you already understand how they work.
Zero-length objects in general may behave quite differently, because there may or may not be a guarantee that pointers to two different zero-length objects compare as unequal. In particular, this is a point where GCC's C and C++ implementations differ!
"JSON based executable file format"

My brain had a core dump when i've read that...
I tried, and didn't do terribly well, at launching a horizontal web based product and this a short retrospective.

It's a bit light on details but I'm happy to answer any questions for anyone who going through (or thinking about trying) to do something similar.

I'd also find it interesting if anyone wants to pick it apart or press for details (feel free to be blunt).
Here is another: ReadTheOrg, ReadTheDocs style formatting with org https://github.com/fniessen/org-html-themes#readtheorg
They were only touched by the busts, while the booms went unheard. It's a ratchet down for all but maybe a dozen alpha cities and a few college towns.

Most of the country has been in a depression of varying intensity since 2000. I don't care what Pravda says.
These are the types of problems that a 22 year old with a BS in Comp Sci are capable of solving. Which is why both spaces are so crowded: there isn't really anything difficult about the business, the consumer experience sucks, and they're decentralized enough to actually break into. The reason the industry sucks is further down the value chain, and you have no realistic shot at changing any of it unless you can also break into the (much bigger, much more profitable and much more competitive) business travel services market.

But neither of these businesses leads to "sticky" customers: people don't travel frequently enough to develop brand loyalty to a travel site, and for a dating site, the ideal scenario for your customers is that they find someone and stop subscribing to your site. This is the kind of business problem that's not readily apparent until you start to dive into the customer lifecycle and personas.

As a result, dating and travel sites are essentially branded experiences where the only difference between many of them is the advertising.
It is just a TLD, dude. Doesn't mean anything.
I've never reached out to someone I've never met but I've reached out to a lot of people that I met _super_ briefly. It let me go "remember me?" in an email I sent and it breaks the tension. People are surprisingly willing to help.

I found that it wasn't the first degree connections that led to work but the second degree connections. Get your immediate network to introduce you to others and drum up work from them.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/688844190826942465

"Ship landings are not needed for flexibility or to save fuel costs. Just not physically possible to return to launch site" - @elonmusk

One party or another has the wrong information _shrug_.
> We're blatently repeating the exact same mistakes as before, the exact thing we frown upon.

I find it enlightening. Why did people let the nazis take the jews away? Why did people support slavery, even turn escaped slaves in, for money? Why did they allow lynchings to happen?

Well, now we know. Now we understand. Maybe we can view our ancestors in a different light now.
What about the complex battery management needed for an EV? Or the power and vehicle dynamics management needed if there are multiple motors? Or the additional complexity of the regenerative braking system? Or the fact that the car itself is a very small part of the entire product lifecycle (think design, testing, parts availability, service, etc.)?
I totally believed Perez' thesis until the iPhone came along. So what constitutes the current cycle

1. Mainframes/Mini computers

2. PCs

3. Desktop internet

4. smart phones

5. Mobile broadband

6. Cloud

7. Machine Learning

8. AI/IoT

Each one has a different investment pattern and each one is affecting industries in a different way in a different time period in different geographies. So why are all of them clubbed under "information revolution". How is clubbing Mainframes with smartphones makes sense. According to Perez' the peak investment in this phase happened during the dotcom period. This can't be right. No smartphone, mobile broadband, AI, ML, IoT existed in a investment form in 2000. I have seen some adjustments to her theory which seem more like adding epicycles to ptolemy's. Not satisfying at all.
Some serious judgement from sama in that comment. Maybe "average people" would like us techies more if we weren't so sanctimonious in addition to being affluent and insular.
> If you pick a bad client, or a job where you need more time than you anticipated to complete it, you might end up underpaid

These things are easier said than done. Could you share a bit about what you've learned in the way of avoiding bad clients and estimating your work?
> Look at the modern hookup scene enabled by Tinder and its ilk.

I find wasteful extravagance grotesque. You find people rubbing bodies together grotesque.

And I like many cultural developments of that era. None of them have to do with white people in their racist suburbs driving gas guzzlers between the city and their useless lawn.
I don't understand why everyone is so outraged that the volt can have a mechanical connection with the gas engine. It's more efficient in some circumstances that just charging a generator.

It still can (and does) go in all electric mode, even up to 100 mph.

The BWI w/ range extender still only goes 150 miles between gas ups. That's pretty annoying. It's great for days when you just need a bit extra to get through. But for road trips, it's nearly a deal breaker. Though I guess you could just suck it and stop every 2 hours.