skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It's the equivalent of me donating most of my salary to a "charity" created for the purpose of paying my mortgage. I don't think many people here do that, or would consider it if their accountant suggested it.

Why not? If it was legal, why wouldn't you do it?
To some degree, I suspect a certain number of human jobs will remain long after automation simply for the sentimental value. Like organic or free range food, where people are willing to pay a premium for goods that aren't made via some industrial type process.

So you'd have 'human made' as a label on the side of slightly more expensive products tailored to slightly more well off people who see it as more ethical. Like a non food version of a farmer's market.

It won't save most of the jobs, but they'll definitely be enough people out there who don't want 'machine made' products by companies only using robots.

On another note, I suspect many of these articles also miss one other thing; there's no reason that every company would use robots or AI. Sure, large companies would. But in the same market would likely be hundreds or thousands of smaller ones with at least some humans in the workforce.

I mean, look at it this way. Go down the high street and look at the shops and restaurants. Sure, big chains exist, whether they be coffee ones like Starbucks and Costa or supermarkets like Walmart or Tesco or the likes, but so do tons of small companies run by people aiming at a local market, or a certain niche, or anything else. They're not all going to buy expensive machinery to run the shop, and they're not all going to go out of business. Heck, it could even be the opposite; quite a few businesses in the real world have actually gotten MORE popular once a Starbucks has moved in next door. People will still buy things from small businesses (especially if they're distrustful of large multinational companies), and those small (and even medium sized) businesses will still hire human staff.

That seems to be overlooked in these discussions. After all, if even something as big as Coca Cola or Disney or McDonalds or whatever has lots of competition, what makes you think your future companies won't?
The microcontroller does, however, need a decoupling capacitor and the inclusion of a program in manufacturing. It may also be pickier about power supplies.
I think it's more likely a hypothetical dark age would see them as interesting jewellery, and drill holes in them so they could be worn as necklaces.

Technology has an historical event horizon. If an item is on the wrong side of it, it's literally incomprehensible. Items like these are only useful to a culture that has already reached a similar technological level, give or take some small time delta.

That makes them a very bad way indeed to preserve information about science and technology.
Critical firmware must be open source and public by law. Especially as it continues to take over more control of things like cars.
Somewhat related, can anyone explain this Twitter account[1] to me? I stumbled across it about a week ago. It appears to be a bot that copied some of my (and others') HN posts to an external site (with a link back to HN), and then tweeted about it from an account claiming to be about the 'flu.

It doesn't really bother me; I'm just not sure what it is trying to achieve.

[1] https://twitter.com/FluViruses/status/698733674913755136
The Software Mindset
As a die hard Ultima fan, I just try to forget that Ultima IX ever existed.
For those who found this story to be interesting, I’d recommend listening to the associated This American Life episode. [1]

It provides an insight into the internal experiences of somebody suffering from delusions. In his interview, Alan Pean tells a vividly detailed account of how he experienced the manic episode. He recalled how, at times, he would be able to rationalise the delusional thoughts away but they came so quickly, it was difficult to stay rational as the delusions had their own internal coherence.

One memorable part of his story was when he described how he “escaped” from his third floor apartment building to get to the hospital: he locked his front door (which he thought was being watched by enemy agents) and then swung down from his balcony to the one below it and on to the ground, all the time telling himself to “Remember your training, remember your training” (while in reality, he’d never trained as a secret agent).

In his delusion, Alan thought he would be killed by either a missile strike on his apartment complex or be shot by the enemy agents who were circling in for the kill. The interviewer points out the tragic irony that when Alan finally made it to the place he felt would be safe, that he was actually shot.

Alan still finds it difficult to deal with the fact that a police officer was willing to take his life with a gunshot to the chest. I can imagine such an experience being deeply traumatic for those of us with good mental health but it must be much more difficult for someone already dealing with psychological issues.

From a personal point of view, a woman in my social circle about 15 years ago was suffering from bipolar disorder. I’d known her for about a year but had no clue that she had any problems with mental health. Then one day my brother and I met her on the street while she was having a manic episode. We took her into our home to look after her. I can’t recall the details but we found looking after her to be a distressing experience. We invited other friends in common around to help as we felt very much out of our depth. The next day her parents took her to a psychiatric hospital where she spent a few weeks while the doctors found a combination of medication that helped even out the mood swings.

[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/579/m...
There was a really good point with XMMS when Winamp music vis's worked OK, and life was good.
Design Taxi: Browse Ad-Free for $4.99/mo or Whitelist Domain
Apache Jackrabbit Oak 1.3.16 released
There has been a great deal of exactly that feedback from attendees (including me) and Chris Anderson is definitely hearing it -- he addressed it at length from the stage twice this year. However, he seems to think that is a necessary side effect of producing talks that will be viewed millions of times (I think he said ted.com has hit a billion views now). I'm not sure I agree, but in any case I enjoyed it more back in the day when you never knew if the next talk would be an epiphany or a train wreck!
It’s a Fishapod the story behind the discovery of the four-legged fish
I've worked with vice-principals at elementary schools investigating porn on library machines who had a better grasp of forensics.

Really, I teach a course in a local forensics program and have helped a couple local schools over the years. Any teenager with an iPhone could have explained that resetting the AppleID was a bad idea. There are plenty of very intelligent kids out there who need jobs. For the FBI to act in such a manner is inexcusable. Ditch some of these hack cops and hire some proper technology experts.
Anyone know why Medium do that / what the identifier is for?
From the ranks of Microsoft’s permatemps
On another note, does all this mean that in the future, intelligent robots will actually be in the same situation as humans? I mean, if simple ones can take care of simple jobs in stuff like manufacturing, driving vehicles, admin work, etc, one with real AI would basically be unemployable. If they don't want to pay humans for work, then they won't want to give a robot a paycheck either. That's going to be an interesting issue too.
yes, we're planning to release some sort of an SDK for it
The Birth and Death of JavaScript
I believe that for at least ten years there has been a clear path forward for Sears. It's just that management refuses to follow it.

The way forward is for Sears to move completely over to franchising. I remember working in a small town in West Michigan fifteen years ago when a local opened a Sears franchise store, it carried a small subset of what a regular Sears store carried kind of a greatest hits.

I was certain that it would be a complete failure. I didn't know anyone who shopped at Sears and the brand would be a drag on the new business. I was totally wrong the new store was a huge hit! I got to know the manager and there are a couple hundred of these stores and the overwhelming majority succeed.

Sears is sitting on a lot of valuable real estate that they could sell if the big stores were sold. Franchise stores would popup in the communities that would support them. Just because there aren't any franchise stores in big cities doesn't necessarily mean they wouldn't succeed. Apparently the big brand still has some pull, but the overhead of the big store pulls it down.

The key is local owners who are free to stock Sears brands or chose other merchandise, people who understand their communities and can provide great service.
However, there was an audience member talk at TED itself on how to tie your shoes that I believe was very influential. :) Not sure if there's an online video of it.
undefined.cache.js ...
Tell HN: I'm making free websites for nonprofits
Hi I'm a web developer interested in the nonprofits. I'm working on a startup in this space and in an effort to learn more I'm willing to make some high quality sites for nonprofits that need them.

If you or a nonprofit you know needs help with their site I'm willing to design/maintain a website free of charge (provided you cover my minimal expenses).

Shoot me an email at saurek115 at google's email service or leave a way to contact you!

Chow
> No nation state has any business having nuclear materials in their possession.

Not even for medical imaging, radiotherapy, and so on?
Interestingly the U.S. does make natural persons pay tax on income earned outside their domicile. U.S. residents (of any citizenship) have to pay U.S. tax on their worldwide income, and U.S. citizens do even if nonresident. Foreign taxes paid can be taken as a tax credit, to avoid double-taxation, but you can't escape U.S. taxation by booking your income in a lower-tax jurisdiction.
That’s a nice little $1-2M SaaS company you have here. Will it scale?
Some tax planning is clearly legal, and is an expected use of the tax laws.

Some tax planning is clearly illegal. People are hiding money and evading tax.

There is a grey area in between. People use tax laws in unexpected ways. Their accountants and lawyers claim this new planning is legal. The tax authorities claim it isn't. To find out if it's actually illegal it gets tested in court, except no-one wants that. Companies don't want it because lawyers are expensive. Tax authorities don't want it because lawyers are even more expensive for them and it looks terrible if they fail in court. So some weird deal is made. The company repays a trivial amount of tax, some rule gets added or taken away to make it clearer that the tax plan is unlawful.

So, here, a big company can do it because spending many thousands on lawyers and tax accountants means they save hundreds of thousands, millions, billions, on the tax bill.

I can't afford the tax accountant, so those schemes usually are not available to me. And as soon as enough people start using them the laws change, sometimes leaving me in a tricky situation.
Every day.
It should be noted that taking over Berkshire was probably the biggest mistake of Buffet's career. If journalists were comparing the purchase of Sears with the purchase of Berkshire they were already predicting trouble (probably unintentionally though).
Indeed. I literally said "ugh" outloud when I saw that photo. I usually slouch down as far as my cube will let me, and I don't want to play footsie with my opposite. And if I want to stare into space, I don't want that space to include my opposite's face.
>> The glitch had been reported by drivers of new Volvos who said the engine could cut out without warning, creating a brief absence of steering and braking.

Created by Volvo - who wants to be death proof by 2020...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3409102/Volvo...
It's nice that it's BlueTooth and a small button but the same effect, but instant, can be achieved with a 434 MHz receiver [0] and any remote that can switch wireless powerplugs like [1]. The sending units (that can be addressed using GPIO pins) are very small [2] so no doubt there are small button varieties.

[0] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10532

[1] https://www.google.nl/search?q=impul+electro&ie=utf-8&oe=utf...

[2] http://www.watterott.com/de/RF-Link-Sender-434MHz
> as search deteriorates

Can you expand on why search is deteriorating? Honest question. I certainly don't see the relevance of search sinking, nor can I see any competitor in the market that could even come close to threatening Google's monopoly on search.
These sorts of services usually have limits on what can be transferred, or extra verification needed for transfers to new accounts etc
I didn't imply that I have one. I was just explaining why Google shouldn't be proud of what they do.
And there's also a browser-agnostic bookmarklet https://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-for...
Clarified my post you quoted.
YourMechanic (YC W12) Looking for Director Of Ops, Data Scientists, Engineers
Amusing on the surface, but of course that feature is for the benefit of the audience (and quite useful--the breaks are a bit of a zoo with 1000 people milling about), and they explained from the stage how to turn it off when desired, so he is reaching a little bit with that one.
Suppressing reasonable dissent isn't a viable long-term strategy. If I were running YC I'd want to hear people's thoughts on how to handle PR situations like this.
> The courts have interpreted "protected computer" as any computer connected to the internet.

The mismatch between the world views of jurisprudence and engineers is a neverending source of joy. (If working in tech has made you cynical like me, that is.)
The US invaded a country on the pretense it had weapons of mass destruction. Weapons that did not exist. That is not what I consider "stable", as least from a military and foreign policy perspective.

The US Pentagon and US CIA are now fighting a proxy war, inadvertently, against each other based on the factions they're providing support for in Syria:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mikegiglio/america-is-now-fighting-a...
8-bit election results for Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primary
Or if you truly are clean, it would be easy to use witness testimony to put you at a crime scene, Steven Aviary style.
Redzepi is one of the best in the world at what he does, that alone should be sufficient to pique your interest!
But if it is just the access point they need, go get it and connect it to a network connection that is working.
Kudos to the young fellow who dug through boxes to find your order.

Frankly you come off way worse than any of the employees in this story.
What kind of work-issued device is not put on an enterprise management policy? (a.k.a. the employer should be able to unlock it)
See, you fail to understand perspective. I know people with hundreds of guns that hunt all of the time. They keep them in their personal bags, coats, etc. Those are all safe places to leave guns when you have no children and don't share a home with people you don't trust.
World famous ancient Siberian Venus figurines 'are not Venuses after all'
This is the future. Copyrights and patents were really only effective when the means of production were out of the reach of the average person.

3D printing, digital audio, and other current technologies are almost certainly going to make copyrights only effective at stopping mass monetezation of copied content - not at stopping the copying and sharing of content for personal use.

3D printers in particular, I believe, will trigger the decimation of the scale model and toy markets as we know them. The only vestiges which are likely to survive will be those requiring a high number of moving parts, motorizations, and more.
>> ">> The glitch had been reported by drivers of new Volvos who said the engine could cut out without warning, creating a brief absence of steering and braking."

Do they just mean the power steering cuts out and brakes lose hydraulics? Because there's a pretty huge difference between that and 'a brief absence of steering and braking'.
HN readers: what products do you know of that used the 555 IC?

I'm working of a catalog of popular consumer electronic devices that used this chip. Anything you know of that used this chip would be helpful.
> All else equal, everyone wants to minimize nuclear states, and nobody is happy about Iran having a nuclear program of any sort.

Not that I agree, but there was at least an argument for a nuclear Iran made in Foreign Affairs about three years ago (July 2012 issue). Though the situation has obviously changed since then, e.g. ISIS and the Iranian nuclear deal.

tl;dr: The Iranian government isn't as irrationally belligerent as the Western media and foreign policy establishment make them out to be, and that it would bring stability to the only remaining region with a single, unopposed nuclear power (Israel).

http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~fczagare/PSC%20504/Waltz.pdf (pdf copy linked because the article is paywalled on the FA site)
Google is removing ads from the right-hand side of search results
I am curious about the background behind it and the author's opinion of the basic idea as well. I think the 128-bit math part was just intended to invent context for a jab at standards that assume recent hardware and not really intended to make sense in context. I admit it was a low effort comment on my part :/.

It seems like something along those lines could be a good idea, although in practice I think 22 URL-safe base64 characters with four error correction bits would be better representation. Looking at Wikipedia's nice base64 page, one possibility would be to use '-' and '_' for the two non-alphanumeric characters and allow the longest run of zeros ('A's) to be changed to '~'. Automatic error detection seems like a really good idea whenever humans are forced to interact with 128-bit numbers, but then you can't easily generate subnet masks by hand.

In general, I think avoiding interacting with them as much as possible is the most important step. At this point, it would take a while for any alternate representation to be widely supported by software even if there was wide agreement that it was a good idea. OTOH, a general "least bad" compact representation of larger numbers with error detection could potentially be useful for other things (even if it doesn't get used for IPv6), such as ECC public keys.
TED just seems so neat, thought leaders talking about things no one else did.

Except the depth is necessarily shallow. So I listened to a TED talk about how social media needs to change and it exacerbates problems. Except he's light on analysis and ideas.

Which is fine I guess, but to me, hearing about how the problem exists without the follow up of ideas on how to fix, just seems incomplete.

And yes, I know, I'm giving him a hard time, etc. But the problem is very real, and needs a very real fix. More videos about how the problem came about just isnt gonna fix it.
Open Access Meets Discoverability: Citations to Articles Posted to Academia.edu
Some of their speakers are just talking out of their ass. There was a woman on TED Radio Hour a few weeks back who was going on and on about how it's so bad that we bury the bodies when people die, and we should instead dress our dead in some mushroom spore infused garbs she's trying to sell. Having a brain of my own, I was like "Lady, do you realize that each of these bodies has produced an enormous mountain of waste in their lifetime? Several tons of shit alone, not to mention garbage, CO2, etc etc". Add to that the fact that those "pollution eating mushrooms" can't really do anything ordinary soil can't do. They can't convert heavy metals to unicorn tears, sorry folks. The stuff dead bodies will release when they decompose matters not one iota. And yet someone in TED approved her participation, and people paid $8K to see this inane drivel. WTF?

Update: here's the talk https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee?language=en
There are a few Mark Twain audiobooks there that are quite good.
Why don't any of the luxury car brands (other than Lexus) focus on reliability? It seems so strange that the market is willing to pay ~$40-$80k for a car totally indifferent to its engineering quality. If I were to own a luxury car, I'd want to know its engineering is rock-solid first and foremost. I'd want to be proud of it as a machine not just a symbol. Maybe that's just a techie thing, though.

Volvo has been notorious for extremely difficult-to-diagnose and expensive-to-repair electrical system problems for at least a decade.
The Spectacular Failure of $1B Startup That Was Going to Change the World
The Onion Talks series parodying TED talks has some real gems. My favorite: What is the Biggest Rock?

http://youtu.be/aO0TUI9r-So
I love Eco, Borges, and Calvino—but have never heard of Mulisch. I'll have to check him out—thanks!
You can run a node script that runs a golang executable. You just have to pack the go exe into the zip bundle.
Yes, the problem is that without basic income you have to work to earn your right to live but to do volunteer work which may be much more meaningful to you than your day job.
Twitter struggles because of the sharp divide in its 2 types of users: those with high ratio of people following them vs. those they follow (read influencers/celebs), and everyone else.

For the first group, the creation function is phenomenal, interactive/engaging and not suffering the signal to noise problem.

For everyone else, they struggle with a)consumption only (that's me), b) bad signal to noise rate (follow too many), or low engagement/interactivity (not enough follow them).

So to truly make the platform work for you, it is a longer cultivation to become somewhat of an influencer. By definition this cannot be a mass market appeal in terms of all users fully realizing the platform's potential.

Instagram has a similar structure but has overcome these problems with simplifying the media/content type into pictures and limiting links. This makes the signal to noise ratio better, and allows for the creation function of non-influencers to go farther.

This is why I agree Twitter should embrace being smaller, and focus its efforts into helping the 2 user types in parallel, and also help users cross from being consumers to influencers more. They can take cues from YouTube in all of their creator programs and rev sharing to work on that part of it.
How to bypass the Netflix VPN ban
There was a post about that exact topic on math-blog recently http://math-blog.com/2016/02/01/was-richard-feynman-a-great-...

Summary: he wasn't a great undergraduate teacher.
HLS video hotlink protection with Nginx and Varnish
RFC 6920: Naming Things with Hashes
Learning to do laps with reinforcement learning and neural nets
Some problems need to be acknowledged long before you close in on a solution. Sometimes stating a problem in clearer terms will bring new thoughts on a solution. That can have value in and of itself.
He's not on librivox, but the best audiobook narrator I've ever listened to is Ray Porter, who does a lot of books on Audible. His 14 by Peter Clines and the Fold by Peter Clines were two of my all time favorite audiobooks. Also his The Cartel and the Power of the Dog by Don Winslow were both great.
Who actually makes the 555 these days? Or is everything old stock?
It might be a good idea, but they've already got a lot on their plate for such a small company.
Does not make sense to say that most people will not have jobs and we will have minimum income, and then add that all the infinite goods will be limited in supply by law.

The whole point is yes we have no more jobs, and all the infinite goods are free to whoever wants them. The producers of the infinite goods live off either other business models or on structured income, perhaps determined by how much of their infinite goods are consumed by the public.
Town Crier: An Authenticated Data Feed for Smart Contracts