skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never seen a more accurate sound (text?) bite for the challenges that today's labour market are facing.

These will only be exasperated further by the onset of automation and robotics in the coming generation(s).

I don't have a doubt that we could easily turn around the benefits of automation and robotics towards favouring the middle and working classes.

My concern though, is that the few that are currently gaining wealth from reduced labour costs in favour of productivity have a stronger grasp on where this wealth goes, than the majority outside of socialist strongholds like Scandinavia and some European states. And that trend will continue.

Edit: grammar, shit pre\post-tense structuring.
Saddest part of the Disney Infinity debacle is the fans. DI was marketed strongly to kids based on the success of Star Wars and MCU franchises. Although game play was lackluster, the target audience (kids 4-8) didn't care. And the figurines were really very cool.

When they pulled the plug on Disney Infinity, they really sent a pretty clear "we don't care" to any kid that loved those DI figurines.

You don't want to send a FU to that market segment, because little boys don't forget.
Awesome. Would you mind messaging me your email over on Reddit? https://www.reddit.com/user/ezekg/
You misspelled pedantic.
> but Gawker seems to very clearly be in the wrong here

That's not really relevant to my point. Even if Gawker was completely wrong to do what they did, why did Thiel pick that case to donate to? Plenty of people file lawsuits just as valid as Hulk Hogan's every day. Or why didn't he file an amicus curiae? This is clearly an attempt to destroy press he has a grudge against, which is alarming even if the specific lawsuit he picked was a valid one and the defendants were "Gawker bloggers". Look at the bigger picture.
Don't think it has any effect. Why would it?

Any effects of education are swamped by the differences in voting systems. Germany has Mixed-member proportional representation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...), which leads to a multi-party system.

The US has some variation of first-past-the-post. Especially together with the primary system, this rewards people for pandering to the base.
Lifting 100's of millions of people out of subsistence farming levels of poverty is a massive good. Probably one of the greatest moral accomplishments of the last 100 years. Your comparison to a Chinese bureaucrat buying an iPhone trivializes that.

The idea of committing to a trade policy which would have left them living in extreme poverty sounds horrendously evil. Likewise, pulling trade now could do great harm.

If the worst interpretation of your fears comes to pass, and we get WWIII, then yes. Maybe you're right. However, can you back up your claim with enough certainty to justify harming so many people so greatly?
Trump's got the same thing with the specific brand of disempowered people that the article's talking about.
I had to dig up my source for this. I did misquote. It was Wolfenstein that gave Tim a shakeup and it drove him from coding to management, not out of games.

> Did you think about doing a first-person shooter after their success with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom?

> TS: It was funny how we got to that point. When I saw Wolfenstein for the first time, that was truly shocking. I'd never envisioned that you could do 3D in a computer game; I don't know why.

> The research had indicated that you could do that for at least 15 years before that, but it was this 3D game with real-time texture mapping; you know, real-time bitmaps scaled up and displayed in 3D on the screen. It never occurred to me that you could actually write code to do that. It was just another lack of foresight there.

> But seeing that for the first time, I was like, "Wow, I'm totally not worthy. I need to get out of programming now, because I'm never going to be able to compete with this." So they just basically demoralized me into becoming a manager for a few years.

> Around 1994, James Schmalz had written this 3D texture-mapping code, and I was starting to think, "Hmm, maybe that's not so hard." So I started reading up on references there and experimenting with it, and it turns out that, yeah, it's just another piece of code that you can learn how to create.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4035/from_the_past_to_...
And the population will reward more reasonable people, when that becomes a useful tactic in voting.

First-past-the-post basically forces you to vote for the idiot, or risk throwing away your vote.
More directly:

https://www.boe.ca.gov/app/mts_rates.aspx?LETTER=S&LIST=CITY
This article is FUD, but then so is this post. People on both sides have huge incentives. And don't be deluded into thinking there aren't sides. The wealth at stake and the ability to dodge banks makes it impossible to be deeply invested in this and not have an agenda.

Here are the paragraphs where I thought the FUD was most obvious. Worth looking over.

Developer mindshare is the most important thing to have in digital currency. The only reason these networks (Bitcoin, Ethereum) and their tokens (bitcoin, ether) have value is because there is a future expectation that people will want to acquire those tokens to use the network. And developers create the applications which drive that demand. Without a reason to use the network, both the network and its currency are worth nothing.

In contrast, Bitcoin has had a leadership vacuum since Gavin Andresen stepped aside after other core developers did not get on board with his (in my opinion rational and convincing) arguments to increase the block size. “Core developers” as they now stand are also relatively fragmented.

Beyond a leadership vacuum, Bitcoin’s “leadership” is less clear and toxic. Greg Maxwell, technical leader of Blockstream which employs a solid chunk of core developers, recently referred to other core developers who were working with miners on a block size compromise as “well meaning dipss.” A second discussion board needed to form on reddit, /r/btc, because of censorship on the original /r/bitcoin. The content on the Bitcoin discussion boards feels like squabbling while Ethereum’s is talking about relevant issues and new ideas. In summary, Ethereum leadership (and as a result its community) is moving forward while things need to get worse before they can get better in Bitcoin.*

What is very real, though, is the possibility that Ethereum blows past Bitcoin entirely. There is nothing that Bitcoin can do which Ethereum can’t. While Ethereum is less battle tested, it is moving faster, has better leadership, and has more developer mindshare. Developers → apps → users → network success. First mover advantage is challenging to overcome, but at current pace, it’s conceivable.

Also, I still don't understand why I'd want a programming language in my currency.
Not that it necessarily should, but the article did not really address why they were moving away from RDS. Was it cost, performance, other issues?

I've been trying to compare RDS for Postgres to other offerings like Compose or Heroku but have come up surprisingly dry on comparisons.
That's just what the example script does. In the database all the data is stored granularly so you can, and we (AdRoll) do, use TrailDB to examine individual trails one by one after you select the subset that you are interested in.
tldr - a howto
It's Bond, Jane Bond: Gillian Anderson throws hat into the ring to be next 007
At the highest level, Bitcoin is relatively easy to understand. There's a lot of additional detail in the communications algorithm and the programmable extensibility embedded in transactions (for instance, how multi-party/escrow/conditional transactions work). But the concept of a proof-of-work-based blockchain can be explained rather briefly.

As a miner, you have access to a pile of transactions that people want to resolve. Take enough of those transactions to fill up a block, based on some rules you want to follow (e.g. prioritize transactions that pay a transaction fee, which you claim; prioritize transactions that have been waiting longer). Add a transaction that gives you the current consensus mining fee out of "thin air"; that's the only place new coins get injected into the system. Include a hash of the previous block; that's what makes it a block chain. Then, via brute force computation, come up with some additional data appended to the transactions such that the double-sha256 hash of the data block (the sha256 of a sha256 hash of the block) is smaller than a certain upper bound (determined by the current consensus "difficulty"). Since you can assume the hash is evenly distributed across all possible values, to compute a hash smaller than a certain value requires brute-forcing enough hashes for one to land in that range. This is equivalent to "find a hash that starts with a certain number of 0 bits", but "less than a certain value" allows increasing the difficulty without doubling it.

Once you have a new block, tell other miners about it. Assuming you've followed the "consensus" rules for difficulty, mining fee, transaction fees, and similar, then the other miners will accept your block, and immediately start trying to mine a new block starting from yours rather than starting from the previous block. So, at that point, the consensus block chain includes your block, which means all the transactions you included took place.

The rest of the complexity comes in with questions like "how do you advertise a transaction you want to the miners", "how do miners communicate with each other", "how does the consensus change over time", and "how can existing clients handle new kinds of transactions that they don't natively understand".
From 2013: http://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/
SV Billionaire Has Been Secretly Funding Hulk Hogan's Lawsuits Against Gawker
The Senate is ridiculously undemocratic. Because every state gets two senators regardless of population, a vote by a Wyoming resident is worth 65 Californian votes.
This is incredible, and almost sounds like the algorithm dreamed up by Pied Piper's middle-out. Incredible application of machine learning technology.
OSI layers were implied. ;)
Please see Scott Sumner's blog at http://www.themoneyillusion.com/ . He has lots of posts explaining why this makes sense.

The `no free lunch' theorem only applies when you are already at the efficiency frontier. If someone is still banging their head against the wall, they can stop doing that for a very quick and `free' win.
CTO Series: How to Build a Distributed Tech Team
Serfdom was an economic system that was predicated on the economic value of peasants. The entire problem is that the peasants are no longer valuable, they drain wealth rather than generate it.
I am looking at the bigger picture, and what I see is that those who wield extraordinary power, whether it be financial, political or otherwise, rarely use it purely in defense of the 'greater good.' However, sometimes their pragmatism serves it by coincidence and I'm willing to celebrate when that happens.
Nitpick: Terje Mathisen [1].

The man is a legend. I remember using his little set of DOS utilities (things like stuffit.com [2]) back in the early 1990s, which I got from a friend whose dad was a colleague of his at Hydro. They were all written in assembly language, and were superb little extensions to DOS.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/terje-mathisen-b740181

[2] http://files.mpoli.fi/unpacked/software/dos/utils/keyboard/s...
Yeah, I would* do a `pg_dump | pg_restore` with these settings: https://github.com/heroku/heroku/blob/master/lib/heroku/help...

*disclaimer: I wrote that code while at heroku
It takes a few seconds for the screen to change for the color display.
http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/05/24/up-close-with-e-ink...
(Watch the video--the flickering are the colors changing.)
> The world needs to return to feudalism

Traditionally feudal lords have aimed mostly spend the minimal amount possible on welfare for their serfs - staving off social unrest but keeping for themselves as much as possible of the GDP subject to that constraint. Are you suggesting that neofeudalism will somehow do better in this respect? Or simply that that would be better than what we have now?

> is less likely to turn lawless

What's meant by this? It might true in the tautological sense that the despot acts within the law by definition, whatever he does. But I sense that's not what you mean.
Drug firms fueled ‘pill mills’ in rural WV
I'd weigh lifting 100's of millions of people out of extreme poverty as much more morally important than avoiding stagnant American middle class wages.
That's neoreactionary moldbuggery. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater - we can't figure out how to help people in the midwest, so let's make them serfs.
I have been and remain intrigued by Ethereum, but there's one element that always struck me as impractical.

All its advocates get very excited about all the complex automated things it can do, which is admittedly very cool. But for the real world, I'm skeptical that anything more complicated than a basic escrow could work. Once you're talking about real, complex applications (like a DAO), what if there's a bug? Even if bugs are rare, the potential implications when they do happen are so severe that it still diminishes the value of the platform.

And the ability of members to "vote in" new code is no solution. Nobody in their right mind is going to do that without a thorough code audit, which is a pretty high friction interface to what is supposed to be a financial or business instrument. It would inevitably devolve to trusting a relatively small group of "experts", which rather defeats the point of the whole enterprise.

Even worse, voting on updates is broken by design... a majority of participants could collectively decide to screw over a minority and simply steal their assets by voting in a code update.
Very good points.

My instinctive rejoinder to "the age of the corporation" is to ask how many bayonets the corporation has, but the answer is increasingly "not zero."

This also causes me to notice something else: what if neo-fascism and its Asian counterparts are becoming popular precisely as a way to coerce corporations -- because nothing less than that can bring them under control?

This sounds very plausible, and it's not a pleasant thought. You'd think that the international business class would know what _noblesse oblige_ means, and would realize that they need to not antagonize the planet, but that would be giving them more credit than they deserve; I've read books that casually, in passing, praise the merits of tax havens and condemn all social-welfare programs...
How about the knowledge that other people know that you are unarmed, and therefore are free to attack you with fists or knives without fear of you shooting them?

This is not idle rhetoric. Britain has much lower gun violence statistics than the US, but higher total violence statistics.
See my other comment for your question why you might want a programming language in your currency. An example of a real world "programming" language in your currency is a legal contract (e.g., insurance contract, escrow contract, corporate bylaws with dividend rules).
Nim's author was originally a Turbo Pascal/Delphi programmer. A lot of Nim and its conventions (things like prefixing type names with T and members with F) come directly from Borland's Pascal dialect.
Depending on the sizes available, any device where you'd normally have an LCD, if it's outside, could have a color e-paper display that can be easily read in sunlight.
Before reading this, I had no idea that that Twitter frequenters characterized the entire Internet.
Much of the trouble with IDEs revolves around not coding, but finding all the parts. The usual IDE Does Not Play Well with Others. Most IDEs have some strong ideas built in about where Things are Supposed to Be. This causes trouble when they have to interoperate with some other system which also has strong ideas about where Things are Supposed to Be. (Makefiles, Cargo, Github, Go's tools, packaging tools, etc.)

Working around this involves either manually editing text files or trying to find the right dialog box into which to put some pathname.

The other big problem with IDEs is that they usually have no understanding of the tools they invoke. This is a UNIXism - programs take in parameters, but just return an error code. There's usually no machine-processable output from compilers or linkers. If you're lucky, the IDE might be able to associate an error message with the right source line in the right file.
Thanks. That definitely sheds more light, even though I will admit I have some partiality to the romantic notion that it was jinxed even in its last excursion into criticality.
It hasn't updated in nearly two years. Wonder when people will stop recommending it.
On the plus side, you can still read it outside in daylight. I have both a Pebble Time and an Android watch, and the Android watch is almost impossible to read outside in daylight.
> So if JFK Airport removed TSA and just let people walk on to the plane, would you board one?

Yes.

Many smaller airports and regional carriers don't have TSA now. I've flown dozens of times between Harrison, AR and Memphis, TN without going through so security. Many of those times I declared a firearm... and they handed it back to me to take to the plane.
I'm not convinced you actually want interoperability at all costs in most places.

Just this year I've bumped into two separate security-related networking devices which were stripping out all TCP options except the MSS from the SYN packet [0]. So no window scaling and no selective acknowledgements. This is absolutely crippling to TCP.

In one case the middlebox was next to an FTP server used for transferring huge files all over the world. Just taking that box out of traffic would have given a 5x-10x speedup on those connections. The other was in an LTE core network; in that environment just losing window scaling cuts the maximum throughput to maybe 20Mbps. A bit of a problem when your marketing is promising 100Mbps.

If TCP stacks wouldn't negotiate the connection settings like that, crap like this wouldn't get deployed. It would be obvious that something is horribly wrong. Now they get deployed, and nobody realizes that this particular box is why the network is currently working like crap. (Until somebody looks at a trace of the traffic, and notices that the TCP options are straight from the '80s).

And TCP is supposed to be the canonical success story for Postel's law!

[0] Why would anyone do such a horrible thing? AFAIK in both devices this behavior was linked to SYN-flood protection. So it might have been some kind of a horrible SYN-cookie implementation that could not encode any interesting TCP options.
Yea, although I'm more concerned about the total number of pixels. I'd be fine with a 4K display at 150 DPI.
We've tested out DMS to migrate from a 3 node Oracle RAC to Oracle RDS, and I was incredibly impressed. They list a bunch of limitations in their documentation that you should look at first. It migrated our roughly 1 TB database in two hours and ten minutes and handled replication flawlessly - not a single record discrepancy between the two database systems over a week long test. We were not expecting it to work that well and doubted that it would work with RAC as the source.
Absolutely! I would put up with a fair amount of latency just to have this. I'm picturing late-night work with a lamp in front of my monitor (not kidding). And it would probably do wonders for a laptop's battery, right?
Just don't accuse me of being racist or fascist, and you can call me what you like. But note my point about having more social mobility than feudalism 1.0.

(Even back in the Middle Ages, though, serfs had property rights; they were sharecroppers, legally bound to their land but entitled to keep a proportion of their harvests. In the late Middle Ages, the obligation to give their lords a portion of their harvests was turned into the obligation to pay a certain amount of money -- which was not indexed for inflation, with interesting long-term consequences.)
Then the health care business owners will be rich, and then the health care business owners children!
Protection
thankyou for your support
Except he used it correctly here, didn't he? He could have said condicio sine qua non but my understanding is that either would be accepted usage.
Sounds like some crossover with https://qrates.com/

As someone who has been buying vinyl from independent/underground artists and labels for nearly 20 years, and buys 4-5 records a month, I can't say that I've ever once thought that I could be bothered to 'force' artists to release on vinyl if they don't want to.

The sales numbers would likely be so low, and the margins so tight that you would need to get insane volume to generate revenue. Are you working with pressing plants directly? If not, forget about it.

You're also presuming that fans are going to want to upload stuff for you, you'd be better off seeding the site with content yourself to get things going. There's nothing more offputting than an empty two-sided marketplace (which is essentially what you are building).

I think it's a fun idea but you really need to get some product market fit before you take this further. Good luck.

Disclaimer - I have a lot of contact with independent artists and labels from running https://www.soundshelter.net/
I'm reading two books right now. The Rise and Fall of American Growth [1] by Robert Gordon and The Grapes of Wrath [2] by John Steinbeck. They complement each other, and this post, very well.

I would recommend Gordon's book as an objective overview of the astonishing growth in economic and quality of life terms from 1870-1970. It's not as thoroughly researched as I expected it to be, and the prose is somewhat clunky, but it's a good lesson in the history of technology that we take for granted nonetheless.

Steinbeck's tale of the banks/landowners displacing poor, rural farming families is also extremely pertinent in light of this post. Car dealers extract value from the fleeing, unnecessariat farmers in "Grapes", while insurance companies/debtors prisons extract value from the unnecessariat rural poor chronicled in this post. The promised land of "Grapes" (California) continues to be successful today, with the coasts accreting a large portion of the nation's wealth. It's also just a beautifully written and thoroughly considered (to the point of seeming spontaneous) piece of art.

I am waiting for the next paradigm shifting technology with bated breath.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/dp...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Grapes-Wrath-John-Steinbeck/dp/0143039...
Devil's Advocate: If the court system is presumed to be functional here, billionaire is funding a just outcome that could not otherwise come to pass.
How Narcissism Kills Startups
That's actually 5 bits per channel, or 15 bits per pixel altogether. Quite an achievement if true.
> Even worse, voting on updates is broken by design... a majority of participants could collectively decide to screw over a minority and simply steal their assets by voting in a code update.

Such is life though. It is not just ethereum. Bitcoin cannot survive a majority attack. In the long run, I can't see how even a government can survive a majority attack. One obvious solution to the problem is to try to prevent any one bloc from gaining majority status. I'm sure there are more elaborate solutions though and if any of them is elegant, I'd like to learn about it.
Provide sharp knives – Ruby
To be fair, you covered only the blockchain construction part of Bitcoin. There's also the transaction part - keys, addresses, scripts, etc. Of course these also have an equally simple high-level explanation.
Sure, but the observation that an extensibility mechanism that isn't regularly used will tend to rust shut is very widely applicable.