skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It applies to both labor and capital. Overuse of licensing for jobs, including barbers and hair stylists.

Regarding labor, guilds or labor unions, or the American Medical Association that makes it more difficult for foreign doctors to work here than Israel makes it for foreign doctors to work there. And so on.
Free Standing Bookshelf: Plans to Build Your Own
racket has some nice gui libraries.
Exactly, anyone building a VM-based system would do well by taking a good look at Smalltalk (past and present implementations) and Erlang to see what a VM-based environment can do before they reduce the feature set to that of what's available in browsers (or less).
I am saying that Africa can create its own politics. At end it will be about paying billions to pharma companies, or fraction of that to someone in Thailand or China.

And every part of Africa uses inventions such as car or gun.
How could discrimination against gays be the cause for the spread of HIV? Did some country sign a law that forbids the sale of condoms to gays?

Gays are at higher risk for contracting this disease because they have more sexual partners. The same is true for any person (doesn't matter if heterosexual or homosexual) that has more than average sexual partners.

You know it's called a sexually transmitted disease for a reason, so anyone that has lots and lots of sexual partners has a higher risk.
> ...getting a single Universe parameter at the beginning of the program is of no use, because then you couldn't query the system date right now.

This is like saying, "...getting a single input at the beginning of the program is of no use..." but see below.

> The Church-Turing thesis is a statement about computable functions...

It is a statement about what is "computable", which is the alpha and the omega of what computers can do. If there is a Turing model for a particular "computation" there is a Lambda Calculus model for it.

A program that returns the system date operates on the machine state. You can treat this as "read from the tape" in the Turing sense or as input in the Lambda Calculus sense. The "output" can be seen as one of:

* A tape where the system states has been updated (since we took some steps, we updated the CPU counter, handled some interrupts, &c) and the system time has been written to a special place on the tape so the next computation can find it.

* A tuple of a new system state and the time value (picked out, again, for our convenience).

If we imagine the world "as a computer" then it is natural to compute a later state of the world as a function of the previous state. This approach actually works well in practice and it is not coincidental that this approach works with computers, since it is deeply tied into how they work.

Per Heraclitus, we never set foot in the same river twice. Treating the State or Universe as non-comparable captures this idea.
Ask HN: Boss won't fire a chronic slacker. What should I do?
I love my job, its the best job I've ever had except this one issue that has been bothering me a lot.

One of my coworkers has been employed for over 2 yrs and has produced nothing of value. I am having to pickup the slack and I feel a little overworked because of this.

I've bought this up to my boss many times, he acknowledges it but refuses to do anything about it. I am really puzzled by this.

I am at a loss as to what to do about this. I really don't want to quit over this.
Economic rents apply to workers as well: guilds and labor unions. Licensing for any work including barbers and hairstylist with licensing requiring expensive courses.

Even in medicine, it is much harder for foreign doctors to work in the US than in Israel, a country with lots of competent medicine.

It really applies to any group that uses politics, regulation, to give profits beyond those in a healthy, efficient market.

In the case of taxis, it is helpful to eliminate economic rents so that fares are more affordable.

Instead of using economic rents to ensure that drivers get undeserved income which works against wealth creation, the workers should focus on eliminating economic rents that creates higher living costs, chief among these are the use of zoning density restrictions to create artificial land scarcity which results in higher rents.

Since a significant portion of one's salary goes towards renting an apartment or house or paying for an overly expensive mortgage, then eliminating the onerous zoning laws will go much farther towards improving the economy.

It is because of zoning density restrictions that housing is so expensive in SF, NYC, Boston, LA, SD, and other coastal cities.
If you have some other obligations so you can't work full time, that already rules out most jobs, so it could be a barrier to entry all by itself.

I don't know how many people that is. It would be interesting to find out.
Probably, since most people are generally ignorant of how drugs are developed. We've been making synthetic insulin with recombinant DNA since the 70s and no one bats an eye.
1) There is an assumption that Uber is not only profitable, but wildly profitable. There is no data to support this claim outside of Uber's press releases (obviously biased) stating "oh, yeah we just raised another billion but I promise we're profitable in a few markets". To argue that Uber is withholding profit from drivers, one would first have to prove that Uber is making profit, not just a positive contribution margin.

2) The high liquidity of drivers would imply a functioning market (not to say that it's perfect). The most obvious solution for drivers who are unhappy with the pay would be to get a different driving job, right?

3) The core issue is that the barrier of entry to driving for Uber is very low, increasing labor competition. This also keeps the price of a ride low. The wage of the driver is the agreement between the rider and the driver for the service, Uber is acting as a mediator. There is nothing in this article that comes close to proving that Uber is not fulfilling it's role as a mediator.

4) It will be interesting to see if the app works, but the strategy seems flawed. The constrained variable are the riders; there are already plenty of options. Paying drivers more doesn't seem to be a very compelling reason for riders to choose a different service.
Here are my thoughts. If you no longer need funding and are just concerned with missing out on talent, then I'm not sure it matters where you're located. Maybe start figuring out how to be a distributed team or get some space in SF in a co-working space where those that live in SF can go to work there. You'll never lose the anxiety of wondering if you're missing out on top talent. That will always exist. The best way to temper that anxiety is trust those that you have or make it easier to let your team work remotely.
Yeah, I think this article is talking about something that isn't programming at all. There will always be programmers (unless we're talking about a real robot uprising situation) and if we enter a world where people can tell AIs to perform programming tasks effectively, that won't just be the provenance of programmers; it will reshape society in general.
Learn Quantum Mechanics with Haskell [pdf]
> because the relationship is all projection

Yup. I'm convinced my cat is on my lap for reasons other than "This thing feeds me and pets me" too. But at least it comes and sits on my lap, even if it's conning me. And... I'm not projecting that, either.
Anecdotal evidence can support the initial inquiry into gathering actual evidence, but isn't evidence towards a claim itself.

Everyone in my family has brown hair and is at least 5'8". This anecdote doesn't support the claim that everyone in your family is the same.

> It's not like we're inside some huge institution and we are required to have 10 levels on bureaucracy and massive statistical findings before we even attempt to discuss anything.

If you want your argument to have a leg to stand on, using facts and citations are key.
There are barriers to entry to most jobs than don't fit your saying they are all harmful "economic rents".
Has Peter Norvig written about why Google went all in on java?
Just to add to that, "invented" might give the wrong idea. "Revival" is more accurate. It wasn't used in the day to day, and making it useful that way took some work. But it wasn't invented from nothing.

In particular, if you know modern Hebrew, you can mostly read the ancient Hebrew in the bible, which shows it is not truly a new language.
Zertz and Tzaar from GIPF project.
Netflix: Distributed Resource Scheduling with Apache Mesos
The best part of this is that buddy spent first 15 seconds of the video explaining the system improvements they made before getting to what was essentially "by the way we had 70% unrecoverable data loss". haha!
Blendid – Digital Social Media Cards
In a sense we already do this. For example, every time you create a website in HTML/CSS and javascript, you use high level instructions and a lot of declarative stuff. It is already very far away from the actual hardware. If you use some framework with builtin templates, all you need is the actual content and some plumbing. Everything else is handled by the lower layers and it is much more declarative than you realize. It also means that you do not specify thousands of things/little details and you trust the lower layers to do the right thing. It is already happening and it will only get better.

People freak out every time when this idea appears and the recurring argument is that "the AI will not do the right thing, it is too stupid". They forget that our frameworks/libraries and complicated software stacks already work as dumb AIs. They follow hardcoded rules and try to please us and most of the time it actually works otherwise we would not use libraries. Using a neural network may not be the right choice for this problem but the general idea is correct. A good library should hide the "how" as much as it can and only require the user to specify the "end goal".
Alaska is so enormous and sparsely populated that I doubt much that the residents do will have a significant impact on the ambient CO2 levels, compared to a state like Texas or California, which are about 80 and 250 times more population dense for their size.

I agree with all the rest of your factors, though high CO2 is likely not a mark in Alaska's favor. My main concerns with Alaska would be suitably large cleared land area to collect sunlight without damaging the environment, and not having panels get covered in snow in the winter.
The XML tag style is much, much easier to work with when you're dealing with markup. And XML's purpose is to be an Extensible Markup Language. It's way more appropriate than JSON or S-expressions for that.

(Do you prefer to write HTML documents as S-expressions?)
The phrase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture applies to what you're describing here more than "economic rent" does.
Yes, and socialists believe in democratized distribution of capital (and the connections between drivers and riders is a form of capital since this has value) to workers. If the industry were to be truly disrupted the profits would go more to those doing much of the labor.
To cite Brian Goetz (Java language architect) [1]: "It is totally in Oracle's self-interest for Java to remain vibrant. We have billions of lines of Java code. We have tens of billions of dollars a year in revenue from Java-based products. We employ 10-15 thousand Java developers. If Java were to become irrelevant we wouldn't be able to hire new developers, we would have to pay a lot of money to retrain those developers, we would have to rewrite billions of lines of code. Much better to make sure that Java remains a productive platform for development. And if it happens to benefit the rest of the world that's collateral damage."

[1]: https://youtu.be/Dq2WQuWVrgQ?t=56m14s
I totally agree with your point about the comparatively low conflict in ONUW. In addition to the points you mentioned that drive this, I'd add uncertainty about your own team membership, and the fact that "good guys" may also be telling lies, so it's not necessarily true that a liar is a bad guy.

These factors prevent people from identifying too heavily with one team or the other, and that issue, for me, is at the heart of why there is less conflict in this game than other Mafia-style games. Right before getting into ONUW we had played The Resistance a bit, a similar game which had some fun moments, but in which we found the conflict potential to be high. Some people would be just dug in on one view, in direct conflict with others, throughout almost the whole game.
Java EE is back. Oracle reversed course recently. I'm on mobile so I can't find the soyrce but if you browse /r/java you can read about it. They were thinking about killing EE for their own proprietary platform which backfired.

SE isn't going anywhere. Personally I'm a JVM developer but I really don't care too much about EE.
The CEO already said that the top 30 cities produced over $1B in profits. I don't think your information is correct anymore.
My partial solution to this is just to make make Chrome darker, using a plugin like Dark Reader[1]. It "inverts" the colors on the page but lowers the contrast so the page still looks pleasant.

That means that my terminal, Spotify, my desktop, and finally Chrome are all dark at night.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...
Have you tried it? I use Emacs+SLIME+ClozureCL on Windows without problems. It mostly worked out of the box, I think I had to tell SLIME where to find ClozureCL but that was it.
Ask HN: How to deal with conflicting KPIs?
I'm looking for how to define the correct KPIs for marketing and product in our E-commerce startup (we're based in SEA, we sell everything like Amazon). Currently everyone shares the same KPIs (Revenue & Conversion rate). For those who are working in similar businesses, how are these KPis set at your companies?
No, its the right thing to do. If you joke about something, it looses its mystizim, its dark alure. No one wants to worship some meme.

Its similar with "Mein Kampf", Hitlers book. In Germany, the copyright ran out and it was sold again on Amazon. However now people see, how batshit crazy the guy was and what a shitty book it is. It lost most of its appeal.

As German, I say: Bring more Hitler jokes. Bring all you have.
Having a Lisp implemented in the JVM has its advantages, but also its downsides. For one, all these libraries available for the JVM are targeting Java, not Lisp. This means that they are expected to be used as Java objects, not as part of a Lisp program that follows a more functional style. The result is that you lost a great part of the advantage of using Lisp, since you're forced everywhere to make concessions to the OO programming style when using these libraries.
Ask HN: Why are most voice interfaces female?
Alexa, Siri, Cortana, 'Ok Google' all have female voices. Is this random chance, a symptom of something more systematic?
Our obsession with AI has come and went several times in recent history. Conversational AI is becoming more promising thanks to neural network. However, I don't think we are quite there yet in terms of the technology or the application.

The thing is, if a company is actually able to figure out how to do this conversational AI right, that company is be a game changer.
> With respect to "it's difficult to leave without screwing the economy", that seems hard to justify given the number of countries that are not in the EU and yet which are not "screwed".

I think being outside is not what hurts. Leaving hurts. Business loves stability and brexit is anything but.
(I'm the author of the article.)

Today, it's clear that text/html has won over application/xhtml+xml and JSON has won over XML for most (non-enterprise) non-document uses. But back around 2003..2009, there was no shortage of people who advocated in favor of XML and got it wrong when writing it by hand or when generating it with text-based templates.

Philip Taylor (not to be confused with Philip TAYLOR) was one of the regulars on the #whatwg IRC channel around 2007..2009. He had a hobby of trying to get XML advocates' systems to produce ill-formed output. He pretty much succeeded every time. IIRC, he even found a bug in Validator.nu's XML output, even though Validator.nu practices what I preach in the article.

The easy way was to supply user input that contained U+FFFE and watch the output blow up with the Yellow Screen of Death when U+FFFE was echoed as-is. Unless you have a templating system designed with the warts of XML in mind, this will happen. (A proper XML serializer has to scrub the characters that aren't allowed in XML, as seen in https://hg.mozilla.org/projects/htmlparser/file/dd08dec8acb7... .)

He even found a bug in Tim Bray's code that was written to make the point that it's possible to generate XML correctly... (https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009Mar/006...)
It is because special interests have a greater influence in lobbying for their good than the diffuse interests of the general population.
Perhaps a concrete example should help: KPis like conversion rate are affected by a gazillion factors IMO, if Marketing drives the wrong traffic then obviously CR will suffer. On the other hand if we don't ramp up the traffic then we'll have a hard time hitting our revenue.
I'll second Hanabi. In addition to being inherently very fun, collaborative games are a great way to bring in people who aren't as into board games and are worried about getting stomped on by experienced players.

An interesting and much more challenging variation for experienced Hanabi players is to disallow people from saying a number or color. You point to a set of cards in another player's hand and that's it. Those cards share some attribute, and all the other cards in the hand don't have that attribute, whatever it is.
Surely it depends where your output is going? Print and friends are ideal for producing human-readable output, especially when it is temporary, for monitoring or debugging. And they are awful for producing stable machine-readable output which you might want to store.

If I'm trying to output straight to a user sitting in front of a terminal, they are going to be very unhappy if I output XML at them. And if my program only outputs machine-readable and requires another layer to turn it into something human-readable, that seems overcomplicated for most applications.

Have I missed the point, or is this advice intended for more specific scenarios than I imagined?
Given that we are currently using plants such as corn to make biofuel (at an industrial level, not just in the lab), I think it's actually a very valid comparison.
This article appears on HN on a regular basis, so I thought people might be interested in a bit of historical trivia: the reason this article is called "Lisp as an Alternative to Java" instead of some other language is that it cribbed the title off my original study (http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf). The reason that article was titled the way it was is that I was working at JPL at the time and there was a software crisis underway. To that point, spacecraft had been mostly programmed in assembly language. The then-recently-launched Cassini spacecraft was a notable exception, having been programmed in Ada. But it was becoming clear that neither of these approaches scaled well, and so the hunt was on for an alternative. Java was the hot new language at the time, and it was under serious consideration to become the new standard for spacecraft coding. But Java was new and immature (and, in those days, very very slow), and I was advocating to use Common Lisp instead. That study was conducted -- and the paper was titled -- in order to bolster my case.

Ultimately, Common Lisp flew on a spacecraft once, on the New Millennium DS1 mission. Unfortunately, there was a serious political shitstorm that accompanied that mission, and Lisp never flew again despite several million dollars having been spent to show it to be a viable approach. :-(
I imagine it's because of the male tendency to make things they build female. Boats, AI, Cars, etc.
If we don't understand why we go to war (I find most explanations too high level and utterly unconvincing)

Fear, greed, or ideology. Those were the three reasons the Greeks came up with.
You've totally lost sight of the issue at hand. Now you're talking about things utterly unrelated to this discussion.

It seems you're more interested in dicing up and attacking what I said, instead of what I mean.

I'll re-articulate it for you once more: We don't have a way to mathematically prove a drug for depression or to explain psychological phenomena. The studies in the article are talking about those which rely on empirical observation.

Go home.
Correct, but the article is advocating that full time drivers capture rents from the market. This is justified by implying (without evidence) that Uber is engaged in rent seeking against the drivers.
This isn't exactly a unique problem to Uber. The minimum wage conflict is basically a battle between people wanting it to be a living wage and the beer money / need experience / part-time folks. Favoring either side destroys the opportunity of the other. Living wage means an end to starter, beer money, retirement jobs. Market wage, means no career minimum wage jobs.
Sure,

A program that looks at a pattern, emulates it and then enumerates the various edge-cases, looking for further patterns from the programmer's answer.

It would still require effort but it could be a lot easier than present approaches and it might even find edge-cases a human would miss.
Good luck with the co-op idea.

The problem is that drivers feel like their services are worth a lot, and passengers simply don't believe it. The reason why Uber is a success is that they created new demand by dropping prices. Everyone I know, including myself, would never have taken an Uber as frequently as we do if the prices were as high as taxis.

You can't replicate this unless you keep pushing prices down, and this is what Uber is doing.

So, as long as drivers want to keep their prices high, the riders won't come, which will prevent more drivers from entering the co-op, which will mean riders will wait a long time before their drivers arrive, which means they will just go to Uber, etc. The co-op will never reach critical mass that way and will fail.

The article doesn't even mention the massive amounts of driver incentives that they pour back into the drivers. One driver told me that if they worked 2 hrs during rush hour, Uber would guarantee $50/hr. That's $100 for 2 hrs worth of work, which is pretty damn good and makes the rest of the day less stressful about trying to hit your numbers to become profitable.
I suspect we'll see supervised seq2seq generated code first.

Like:

---

Programmer inputs on left:

compute std dev of x please

AI on right proposes edit to code:

+ import numpy as np

...

+ stddev_x = np.std(x)

---

Not super complicated to start with, but you can see where it will go from there.
Downvoted with no comment! Oh, the irony.
Carl and Jan are from Sweden and the Czech Republic, respectively, and our staff when I joined were a Dane, and Dutchman, a Hindu and an American (me).

There was no particular effort to integrate -- of the team, I was the only one who regularly took lessons in Swiss German -- but it turns out that there are several practical reasons to run a European startup in Switzerland:

* Taxation in Switzerland is fairly light, lighter even than in the United States.

* Business regulation is comparatively streamlined, and labor flexibility is relatively great.

* The tradition of efficient public services is rather relevant to any one trying to manage a small tribe of people, anywhere.

* Lots of European people would like to work in Switzerland and, unlike SF, it is possible to hire from your European network without visas.

Relative to San Francisco, Zurich is not particularly expensive.
lol. my old boat name was 'grunt slayer', I guess it could be female, never really thought about it.
Just How Infectious Is HIV?