skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Profit margins are very high compared to historic trends. Why?

GS notes that costs of production have been going down. Firms move jobs from parts of the world with higher wages, to parts with lower. Firms eliminate jobs through mergers.

GS notes that some commodity demand has been strong as places like China develop.

Lowering costs and keeping demand strong has kept profits high, says GS.

After a time, that should end. Beyond a certain point, mergers are less likely to pay off. Beyond a certain point, there aren't many jobs left to ship to low-wage regions. At the same time, global demand for commodities is weakening.

Those trends should cause immediate drops in revenue, hence profit margins. As these drops take hold, the price of capital assets like factories or tankers of oil or silos of wheat should fall. This should result in job losses, wage reductions, and generally a spiral that further reduces demand, increases deflation, and shrinks profit margins.

Many would argue that deflation and collapse in the corporate profit rate should already be going on, yet it hasn't been. Why? (There are good explanations but this article doesn't talk about them.)

GS quipped, roughly, that if the profit margins don't fall, maybe that means capitalism is broken and doesn't work anymore.

-------------------

Not in that article but just FYI: A marxian argument can be made that the real rate of profit is, on average, already negative. If so, that is a sign that capitalism is, as GS suggests, maybe self-destructing at long last. The GS quip is, I think, kind of a wry nod to the marxian view.
> Don't all contributors have to at least set up an account through the web interface?

You can clone/pull anonymously from github and eg: email patches.

I'd say using github just for hosting read-only/read-mostly git is a bit like running http on IIS or email on Exchange - or indeed a propietary XMPP server that allows federation.

I'd prefer Free projects to use Free infrastructure - but building on established open protocols is good. Contrast with bitkeeper: you'd have to reverse engineer the protocol to pull/push - or with slack: there's no way to set up your own server snd federate with it.
And my ax!
Interesting and much needed!

Few questions if the maintainers / owners read this:

1. what is the license? it seems to be not commercial friendly at the moment, but I couldn't tell if it's GPL / AGPL or something else

2. what are your plans for supporting network/graph data structures, graph analytics etc.

3. visualisation plans?

4. is the target to become a fully fledged BI tool? compete with the likes of Tableau / Spotfire only on top of Big Data? (if so I'm very interested!)
That's fair.

But for the individual with a massive student loan and no way to repay it is a problem even if they better the world overall.

Part of the problem is that for some majors supply massively exceeds demand. Stem definitely isn't immune from this issue.

Unfortunately due to politics nobody (schools or government) is up-front about where jobs exist and shortages occur. A lot of the time when you hear about a "shortage" it is actually just whining that wages are too high.
I think most developers are wary about putting their company's tech stack at the mercy of a profit-driven company that may abandon them.

Heroku? Salesforce bought them, still going, still very heavily used.
I think you're underestimating the complexity of building scalable file syncing across multiple platforms that pretty much just works from the end users' perspectives.
I consider no need for a schema a plus of MessagePack. But the Nos are all red, haha.
Another name would be Dutch disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
The article does make a very interesting point. One which I'm hoping jerguismi could respond to.

The article talks about the slow transaction time being a barrier to arbitrage. Basically, you couldn't buy in one market and sell in another market simultaneously. Wouldn't that make an arbitrage opportunity speculative?

Also, because jerguismi is a founder of a bitcoin exchange, isn't it in his interest to promote trading bitcoin? I have no reason to believe that jerguismi would misrepresent his knowledge, but I think his role in the bitcoin community isn't de facto evidence that his statement is true.
THE 80/20 RULE
According to the engineer who tested the cable:

"Most devices with a well-specified connector will not have any reverse bias protection in them because both it shouldn't be needed and for the technical reasons of power loss and space used.

Reverse protection is usually done with diodes, the canonical "one-way valve" of electronics. Diodes have a voltage drop across them, usually 0.6V for standard and 0.4V for Schottky types. Using one of these to protect one rail means you'll have about 1W lost to heat when charging at 3A. They are also not small for the currents involved with high-speed charging, being about 7x6x2.5mm for the smallest ones I can find that can handle 3A.

Devices don't usually have too much in the lines of over current protection outside of something like a polyfuse because the device will dictate the current used; if everything is okay in the device it'll set the charging rate and it only needs the most basic of protections in the case that something goes grossly wrong with the device. Sources are what really need overcurrent protection as they don't "have a say" in how much current is drawn.﻿"
On Friday, United Nation can decide that Assange is being illegally detained
Are they really using content unlicensed? I feel like that would be an awful risk to take when it's so easy to do a content id (they did it themselves multiple time) and take all their revenue or even simply force it to be take down. They could easily license any video for a couple hundred or a revenue sharing model.
Bash handbook
Bookmarked this post and thanks for asking! My plan, which may/may-not work out - Start consulting, work like crazy to get _high quality_ clients, find common needs among them, build products from these common needs. I'm hoping I can find specific things between multiple clients that I might be able to sell as an actual product, alongside the consulting. Anyway I just started indepedent contracting on evenings/weekends about a month ago.. so far it's working quite nicely for me :)
Saudis are the ones waging the price war. Without their effort, oil prices would've been quite a bit higher now.
How to BE a BLOCKHEAD?
'STUDENTS' - this word is the problem. Students are those studying to become engineers/surgeons[producers] and those studying sociology/gender_studies[parasites].

That's why so many people in humanities departments are liberals/communists. How else is a sociology student going to get a smartphone? They have to tax producers, take their money by getting a fake job in some non-profit/government agency/college and receive a salary there[taken from tax dollars].

The word 'student' makes it seem like we're all in this together, but we aren't. Parasites are eating us alive.
The downside, of course, is that people who are from poor families never get to attend college. This perpetuates poverty in certain families/neighborhoods/regions and discourages diversity of opinion in universities and the workplace.
> how can a 20-something person go out and start a company living on zero or little income for a while?

It's not just starting a company, it's living life.

How can they travel for a year or to understand more about the world as-is so common with 20-somethings from other parts of the world (Aust, NZ, UK, South Africa, Isreal etc.)?

How can they pursue their passion of painting or learning the guitar?

How can they volunteer in the local community to help others?

How can they do anything other than put their nose to the grindstone?

They can't. They're trapped.

Before they've paid off their student loans it's likely they'll have a car loan, a house loan and eventually even have some kids, meaning they'll miss out on all of the above because of their crippling student debt that took away their options.
> Hmm... Yea those Scandinavians are a ticking bomb,

Most Scandinavians countries are kingdoms ( I think only Finland is actually a republic) and when people talk about socialism they usually have Marxism-Leninism in mind. The Nordic model [1] relies on the free market to have a welfare state, which contrast with Marx's ideas of state and social classes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model
On one of these pages, the claim is made that Protobufs is not self-describing, and therefore cannot be used for "network applications". It seems that "self-describing" here means that the format includes key names, instead of compressing them by using numbers like protobufs does. I can't understand why having field names is going to make a difference for anyone. Once you are setting up a system to deal with a specific format of data, why not just include a protobufs schema?
(Some of us on Linux)
> People in US clamoring for leftist populism should take deep look at Venezuela.

All things in balance. Capitalism is not inherently good, nor is socialism inherently bad. You've got to balance the two: there are certain markets (namely anything around health care or essential needs) where profit creates a perverse incentive.

The US is also starting from a much better place than Venezuela did: our economy is far more diverse, so market changes don't affect us as strongly. The US could do with being a bit more socialist in some ways, but we can also afford it.
No longer mysterious: Digital power solutions are becoming easier to implement
They have some terrible policies, like massive gasoline subsidies.

http://reason.com/blog/2015/01/20/venezuelan-fuel-subsidies-... (first link I found, but you can find other less ideological sources as well. I'm not in the reason.com camp, myself).

I'm sure they've done a few good things too, but I think the bad has mostly outweighed the good.
But to be fair, if it was more democratic it would have been even more reflexively anti-Catholic at the time...
Another fellow living in Canada since 5 years ago... How are you doing? :)
No, I'm not. I'm saying a part of maturity is paying and cash flowing things.

It might take a lot longer, and it might be a lot harder and a few less dinners with friends, but it is very possible to cash flow college.

It's a different mindset. What most people think today is you should always have a loan for something -- car, house, college, a little consumer debt... but it's incredibly freeing when you don't have any of that stuff. I wasn't given anything, but I've learned that hard work and no debt can make life so much greater.
To be fair, Transit is probably a better message format than edn. https://github.com/cognitect/transit-java
Its rather unfair to call them gullible. I'd say most people are "brainwashed" when it comes to things outside their immediate area of work/knowledge/expertise. Certainly geopolitical issues evoke a strong emotional response because of their direct link to human suffering, but even looking at nutrition or fitness or accounting or car maintenance or what have you, its all a mess ! Yes, even tech people aren't as objective as we like to think we are. Some topics bring out the similar religious fervor - UNIX vs Windows, iOS vs Android, Open Source vs Proprietary, etc. We have our own conspiracy nuts too - Blaming MS for everything, reading evil intentions into normal business decisions, etc.
If you have a life and job like that, you should definitely hold on to it. It certainly doesn't sound like the past 15 years I've spent in Silicon Valley. With commute and flights and extra hours and company events, I'm confident that work is the biggest component of my life.
How about making "defer" be snooze with a hard limit of 2 or 3 times max?
This I think would work because you could snooze if really you cant/dont want to deal with a message immediately but eventually you would have to.

Or maybe have up to X "snooze slots" so that you cant snooze everything and you snooze things that truly dont deserve to be deleted. And you would have to empty a slot by dealing with a snoozed message to be able to snooze a new one.
Speaking as a student who graduated not too long ago, here's the reality for those who are saying "we should know better":

1) We aren't required to know shit. Pretty much anyone can get a loan for any amount, depending on what school they're going to. I for one borrowed about $26,000 to go to a local technical college, and that included about 2 semesters of classes in a major I ended up dropping. I was never once questioned about how much was borrowed, or asked to demonstrate any knowledge, just sign on this line and you get free money. How many 19 year olds wouldn't jump at that? I'm not saying that's right, I'm pointing out the fact that if I were going to a bank to buy a house or a car, they would demand a LOT more (proof of income, talk me through the terms, interest, etc.) than a school does.

2) It's basically required. At this point a high school diploma isn't getting you shit if you aren't some startup funded golden child. Someone going out into the market for white collar work pretty much MUST have at least a 2 year degree, and most businesses prefer 4 year degrees. It seems wrong to me that we're billing people for what is more or less an essential part of their resume if they want to do something other than trade skills and that sort of thing, and doubling down on that, it seems insane than the debt incurred is not dischargeable in bankruptcy and can be payed back via seizure of tax refunds and other assets.

3) Entrance counseling is a joke. Yeah I know how loans work, I get this money now, I pay it back later. That does not cover nearly enough, and not to mention you can breeze through it in about a half an hour and fail the tests as many times as you want, as long as you check all the right boxes you can get past it, get your loan and never think about any of that shit again.

I'm not in trouble personally, I make my payments and I'm up to date. It just drives me crazy when boomers are out there saying "we started out with nothing" and my reply to that is "I started 25k in the hole, I would've LOVED to have started with nothing."
Breaching a contract does not make you a criminal.
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Our differentiators allow devs to get started faster, leveraging our UI and intuitive API to automate their deployments and scale with ease. Some of our larger customers have started with just a few Droplets in a stage/dev environment and have grown to thousands of production Droplets managed via their application.

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Also our price:performance ratio is outstanding and with a static pricing model it's trivial to calculate your bill and plan ahead for growth. And we provide the same on demand utility per hour pricing that allows maximum flexibility. One click snapshots, automated backups, web console, extremely friendly support, tons of documentation make DO a perfect fit for startups.

If you’d like to consider DigitalOcean for your startup just reach out to us via https://www.digitalocean.com/company/contact/sales/ and we’ll support you.
> but they are a problem for dummies studying sociology, gender studies etc.

I'd suggest caution before referring to anyone who is earnestly and seriously pursuing sociology and gender studies as a "dummy".

There are probably plenty people who are studying these things without enough awareness of the ROI, but there are also people who are pushing our understanding of these fields for the benefit of our society at large.

For example, if we didn't have people advancing sociology and our understanding of gender, we may not have come as far as we have in respecting people's gender identities, especially when they are non-normative.
Awesome, thanks.
Bought two for my friends.
1 million = 10^6. 1 billion = 10^9. 6+9+9 = 24.

This isn't rocket science.
I'm an employee for SnappyData, just letting you know I'm going to make sure these questions get answered.
Open Container Initiative
Also the possibility of deportation and prosecution in US (for Narco trafficking), of many leaders in top including Cabello.
It always shocked me that for the amount American students pay for on-campus housing that they don't even get their own room.

Here while rooms might be only slightly bigger than a jail cell (room for one single bed, a desk, small closet and a bathroom w/shower); they also cost less and students get their privacy. They still share a kitchen and other spaces.

It is like student housing in the US is still set up like it is really cheap but actually costs insane amounts of money.
This [1] doesn't concentrate on kerning as such, but it is my favourite typeface-related comic strip.

[1] http://wondermark.com/650/
Any guides or links to get started on this kind of thing?
Slack changes a decent amount of money for access to their platform.
The other comments here are true, but it's worth pointing out explicitly: High-quality fonts have already had this done to them, and contain the resulting information explicitly in the font file. Most software packages (Latex since forever, recent versions of MS Word) understand how to read this information and apply it automatically to text. There are relatively few cases were you actually need to touch this in practice, assuming your fonts and software are doing their job.

The article itself is describing what you would do to fix kerning in a low-quality font. But really, why would you want to waste your time with that? Even properly kerned, a low-quality font will have other flaws.

There are still certain typographical tasks like avoiding rivers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_%28typography%29) which are not handled well by existing typographical engines. But most everything else can be done well with Latex and a good font.

So the real lessons here are:

1. Pay for high-quality fonts. This is just one more reason to do so.

2. If you have to use MS Word, use a recent version or run it through Adobe InDesign afterwards. Or just do it correctly from the beginning with Latex.

3. For very large text that will be used frequently (such as in logos), pay for a designer.
Slack is gaining a lot of momentum in the enterprise space as a collaboration platform. Considering that they are basically a supercharged IRC, I'd say that's pretty nifty. I don't see them shutting down any time soon.
This is very cool. I like how clean this particular implementation is, it really adds to the "magic" effect. I wish the code was posted! The article links to HomeMirror[1] but I wonder if that's the code and if there were any customizations.

[1]: https://github.com/HannahMitt/HomeMirror
Microsoft's Project Natik Test-Drives a Data Center Under the Sea
The DMCA law in 1996 was written before youtube even existed. The assumption at the time was that people controlled all the contents of their website.

Then web services were invented, and now the law doesn't match up with how people typically use the internet. The laws need to be updated, and to do so we will have to fight against the Hollywood political lobby.

You see, the DMCA is a perfectly acceptable law if you were hosting videos on your own server. YOU would get the DMCA notice, and then you can decide whether or not you want to be held liable in court.

Today, you put your video on Youtube. Therefore: Youtube gets a DMCA notice, and Youtube administrators need to make the decision whether or not to go to court about the issue. The admins don't want to stick its neck out for millions of users using its servers for free, so they just comply with the DMCA notice and take down the video.

Its the reality of the current situation. If you're not paying for server space, you have no power. I'm not entirely sure that's a "bad" thing either, but I can admit that you can feel powerless as a user.
The standard usage in the field of crypto is that a phrase like "1024-bit prime" means a number between 2^1023 and 2^1024. For symmetric keys, yes, a "128-bit key" can start with a 0 and can even be all zeros. But for integers with mathematical properties like prime numbers, there's a big difference in the ability to e.g. factor the product of two "1024-bit primes" randomly chosen from [2^1023, 2^1024) and the product of two "1024-bit primes" randomly chosen from [0, 2^1024).

It matches the common-English usage of a phrase like "a six-figure salary." A salary of $020,000 isn't what's meant by the phrase.

You can verify this by, say, running `openssl genrsa 1024 | openssl rsa -noout -text` a few times and looking at the generated prime1 and prime2. They each have the 512th bit set. (They seem to be printed with a leading hex "00:", but there are 512/8 = 64 bytes afterwards, and the first byte always has the high bit set.)
Not OP but in a similar (almost exact) situation and living in the Great Toronto Area. So far... loving Canada :)
Parse Server uses Mongo, there are plenty of operations-free Mongo hosting options, like Compose. Also, Parse server code itself could be given to company such as Heroku or AWS beanstalk to host it for you.
John Giannandrea Is Google's New Search Chief
Anyone has details regarding the severance package given to those that were let go?
I agree almost completely, but I think it's not adequate to simply point the finger at the producers, but also at the consumers, who demand prices so low that callous cruelty is essentially guaranteed. Of course, overall, we're mishandling resources massively to channel agricultural output into livestock, we need to actively reward eating less meat, rather than subsidizing ever more of it.
I don't think I've seen it on HN, and it hardly seems worth bringing up unless you're bringing it up among such people.

Edit: well, there's one, just above a little bit. I guess they are out there! But still, it hardly seems worth calling them out considering they seem to have zero (probably less than zero) influence.
Your gut is bad at statistics.
A dollar spent on student loans is the same as a dollar spent on rent, food, or video games from the perspective of how one earns it. The average student loan is presently around $25k; this corresponds to a monthly payment in the ~$250 region. (US student loans are generally paid back over a 10 year interval.)

Entrepreneurs in my social circles generally had personal expense floors in the $1k to $2k region when they started inclusive of student loans; most handled it with either freelancing or working while beginning their companies.

If one borrowed $100k and desires to work for a long period of time without receiving income, I would observe that "income-contingent repayment plans" are a thing and would ask, in trade for this advice, that one take opportunities to tell younger people to make good life choices with regards to fields of study and career paths given one's hard-won experience on the matter.
Yeah exactly, wish I could vote this up.