skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When was ever Silicon Valley was going to be or has been disruptive to capitalism?
It was always about mega corporations, bubbles and venture capital...

If anything SV did was to "enhance" capitalism as it centralized capital arguably even more than the financial sector, it's super easy to inflate valuations hence generating capital and it requires almost no initial investment and very low operating costs.

SV doesn't build huge factories, it doesn't create "tangible" assets, and it requires almost no workforce (compared to other industries) to operate.

5 guys in a garage birthing billion dollar companies isn't disruptive to capitalism it is it's wet dream; "you telling me I don't have to build multi-billion dollar factories and employ 150K workers to create a 10bln dollar company?! where do i sign?!"

EDIT: As for the article itself, the title is just odd, SV vs "big pharma" has nothing to do with capitalism.
SV (or the "startup scene") was never really good at disrupting markets that require decades of research and tons of "actual work", software is quick and easy to make, if you can easily wrap it around an existing business model or idea you got a product which is relatively quick and easy to launch.
SV can't easily take on the pharmaceutical industry because it's modus operandi is antithetical to the drug industry.
This is the same reason why no one in SV was really taking on companies like Intel or NVIDIA or even the likes of Altera or Qualcomm because you can't "hack" your way into making silicon without doing decades of R&D.

"Hardware" (or if we shall call a duck a duck then "software as a dongle/thingie") startups are now becoming sort of a thing because cheap, small, powerful and power efficient general purpose silicon is now dirt cheap and available everywhere.
Additionally there are tons of chip design/fabrication companies that would create semi-custom silicon for you within a span of a few weeks without you having to really do anything you just define what you want your SOC to do and look like and you get it in the mail 6 weeks later.

SV can still innovate in the medical scene primarily around the edge and core technologies like deep learning, simulating biochemistry and protein folding health information management and the such.
But even then this won't really be traditional SV startups as the majority of them will grow for the academia because you still need research in very specific fields and not a good idea for an app and a few programmers.
Do you actually understand how it really works?
I bet developers will start to lose jobs to AI. Maybe before truck drivers do. The reaction here on HN will be something to behold.
No, of course, no. Goods becoming cheaper means people who sell goods at "adequate prices" will go out of business. Namely, local manufacturers, family businesses, people who pay decent sick leaves, people who obsess over sustainability. Your desire to save that 10% on a pack of potato chips means that instead of a neighboring guy who works in this shop for his entire life, who smiles to you, who knows what you want, you get these cold supermarkets with miserable people working like robots to make ends barely meet. Cheap things mean children working in China to make junk that goes to waste pretty soon, etc. Our obsession with unthoughtful saving means we're stealing pennies from our own future.
Just built our first major react/redux site. Moderate complexity, I'd say. React runs pretty fast, but on page load we take 2.5s to compile all the JavaScript.
The idea of decreased shipping costs might not pan out at all (at least at first).

First, the initial (expensive) investment in the self-driving trucks will offset the wage gains from not hiring truckers ----, so shipping costs will remain where they are mostly for the first few years at least until this is balanced.

Second, the "increased spending"/"creation of new jobs" effect might only be relevant if the shipping costs are a significant part of the final price of a product. From what I've seen, it's at most 10% (at most), and less for the average item. That's why we can have $1 stuff that comes all the way from China.

But, let's accept that this (reduced retail prices) will happen, there are other things I don't see working with this idea:

>Who knows what they will spend the extra money on, could be healthcare, boats, TVs, whatever. But new jobs will be created in these expanded industries.

Which, more likely than not, wont involve people with trucking skills.

And most likely wont involve domestic labor either, most things are made abroad (China, etc) anyway.

>It really, really bothers me the constant "x technology will drive x people out of work, therefore we need Universal Basic Income, so they won't starve!"

That's because your whole job sector hasn't been deprecated when you're forty (or approaching)...

>Instead of UBI, people were forced to leave farming and went into other endeavors

That was in a time those other endeavours had a huge boom and needed tons of hands (and even so, millions of ex-farmers ended up getting the short stick).

We don't have an industrial revolution expanding the need for workers now, we have a software/automation revolution slowly decreasing workers demands sector by sector.

In fact we haven't had a need for more workers for quite a few decades -- what we did is inflate, as much as we can, the services sector to compensate for it instead. But there's only so many service type jobs really viable, plus automation also begins to eat into them, and with the squeezed middle classes pinching pennies its even bleaker for them (being non essential et al), even if decreased shipping costs turn out to mean a (huge and unrealistic) 10% more income.
What then? Progress, perhaps. ::eyeroll::

Disclaimer: In 1997 I was cut off by a semi (in the middle of trying to pass him), who did NOT signal, on a 2 lane road (I-5 in California, speed limit was 85 or so), and ended up entering the ditch and rolling over 8 times and shattered my hand (it's fine now, but it took a while). The driver never stopped. I was lucky to walk away from that one.

Sorry, truckers, but your job can eat a bag of dicks.

Lest we forget, the only reason trucking is so huge is because train cargo wasn't maintained (conspiracists say the oil industry lobbied for trucking).
i play a game where i have duplicate copies of some books to give to anyone interested who has yet to have heard of one

here's a incomprehensive list in alphabetical order:

a people's history of the united states; howard zinn

a rebours; joris-karl huysmans

alcestis; euripides

apology; plato

belaya staya; anna akhmatova

die verwandlung; franz kafka

elements; euclid

epic of gilgamesh; unknown

ficciones; jorge luis borges

fractals: form, chance and dimension; benoit mandelbrot

fragments; sappho

gospels of mary and judas; unknown

i ching; unknown

la vida es sueno; pedro calderon de la barca

leaves of grass; walt whitman

letters of vincent van gogh

meghaduta; kalidasa

my life; isadora duncan

nightwood; djuna barnes

oku no hosomichi; basho

one piece; eiichiro oda

poems; emily dickinson

relativity: the special and general theory; albert einstein

saga; fiona staples and brian k vaughan

the brothers karamazov; fyodor dostoyevsky, translated by constance garnett

the first third; neal cassady

the power of pi; stickman lagrou graves

the secret life of salvador dali; dali

the way of a pilgrim; unknown

twelth night; william shakespeare

thing explainer; randall munroe

ulysses; james joyce

women, race, and class; angela davis

if you want a quick description of any i enjoy talking about them, and i appreciate suggestions
Cool project. Would benefit from being on npm/bower so that users can add it to their projects using their existing build systems.
You could probably do it ok if you are not too worried about privacy - log in and say I vote A and they have a ledger saying Tim voted A and can email me to confirm. People who are worried can always go to the polling booth and do the paper thing.
Does the word scientist mean something different if it is in all caps?

I mean, I get it. You would like it for the word to remain some pure version of meaning that it actually never had. Similar to getting upset that people using the word literally in a very figurative sense.

The relevant question on this style of article is not about word smithing.

That said, I'm in a field where we often through the title engineer on people, but we don't know why.
Does anyone want to recommend more things to include in the Showcase? See https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_amiga_showcase. We're looking for items with good screenshots and which are fairly straight-forward to use once they load up.
wow, is the fake Disneyland in bojack horseman based on this?
Show HN: Talented developer? Remote Work Connected in 30 days or less
It is valid to downvote on the manner in which something is said if it's not civil.

In this case, not only is ALL CAPS utilized, it hits the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Exactly, plus there's no way driverless trucks will be allowed onto city streets. Maneuvering trucks in urban and suburban corridors requires the drivers to break the rules of the road constantly.

Automation makes sense for long haul highways, so truck drivers will shift to being last mile drivers.
> Commission analysis of men who suffer from mental impairment, including learning difficulties and mental health problems, has concluded that they are more likely to earn less as a result of working part-time, being in low-paid jobs or having few educational qualifications.

While I empathize with anyone with a mental or any other disability, make no mistake: the goal here is equality of outcome instead of opportunity.

No shit one is going to earn less if they work part time in a remedial occupation.

This is no different than feminists who ignore the fact that their wage gap myth has been debunked time and again.

They simply push the agenda in an attempt to frame the argument away from ability and outcome to obtain more preferential hiring, subsidies, and discriminatory laws that neutralize the advantages obtained from those that typically work longer hours in higher paid fields.
A lot of things are different after the industrial revolution and the information age.

Lots of industries and jobs pretty much disappeared overnight -- it took centuries or millennia for that to happen in the past.
Facebook may have self-interest but Indian elites unilaterally deciding what is good for poorer Indians is far more obnoxious.

The ARPU for telecom companies in India is $2/month. So calling cost of internet really low in India shows you are a part of know it all Indian elites who have no clue what low cost for most of Indians means.
A) people don't know for sure whether Snowden has access to his twitter account. They're relying on twitter to keep everything in order.

B) twitter will know which of Snowdens 2.29 million followers who could have read the tweet, actually read the tweet. Depending on how fast he deleted it and the level of activity of his followers, I'm guessing this number will be in the thousands. Actually, if this was a concerned of Snowden, then it wouldn't make sense to delete it, which makes me think this wasn't a concern for him.
Just spotted this come up on HN New as well, pull requests included: https://opsnotice.xyz/gogs-git-docker/

Another potential I guess, however I've never used Docker or Go so maybe not worth the risk.
I think it credible that some people need stress in order to perform at a high level (in response to short to medium term objectives), and yet others require peace & quiet to develop for longer periods.

These may or may not be the same people. I think it is important we understand in detail how humans become creative before large scale implementation of UBI.

Personally I believe UBI should be earned in some way, with some kind of duty/responsibility (that doesn't require coming into work everyday obviously e.g. having trained to be part of an armed response corp or a diaster response agency).

Presently Israel makes people train for the army for a year or two, which I believe is partially responsible for their high level of innovation. I believe the garages in the US serve a similar helpful function (in my country people don't have them, in the US they seem like a default).

Having people just work together is a very difficult but necessarily task and I believe obtaining UBI should require that.

I say so as a person who finds working with people quite difficult!

Does anybody remember the Decentralized Republic from the Diamond Age making people do random (strange) things together to string their society together?
Airware (YC W13) is looking for a JavaScript developer
We're looking for a creative software engineer to work on our single-page application, mapping frameworks, and visualization tools for drone data.

https://boards.greenhouse.io/airware/jobs/215896

Check out our engineering & design blog to see what we're about:

https://makers.airware.com/
Your rant says nothing of substance other than a wall of text asserting it's "a horrible, horrible idea" without backing it up with any technical merit. React has proven simplicity and performance benefits and its one-way data flow architecture is optimal for developing large, complex web apps as it just lets you focus on what your App should look like for a given state and React takes care of batching the most optimal batched DOM mutations to transition your App into the next state.

Working directly with the DOM means imperatively mutating it in-line that forces you to become a manual book keeper to make sure your App state and DOM mutations stay in-sync. It's slower, forces flow/layout thrashing at inopportune times, more tedious to maintain, harder to debug and visualize your App's state, etc. There's a reason why the world and all major SPA fx's has moved on from jQuery, you're clinging on to the past JS development model.

> Use ES6, look at how to properly use HTTP, browser networking and server-side events

You're dropping technology labels that has absolutely nothing to do whether you're using React or not. I suggest you learn React before asserting it as "the dumbest idea any frontend architect" - it's likely the future development model for any UI fx with React Native the most popular Github project last year and Microsoft and Ubuntu adopting it for their latest native UI fx's. It continues to be adopted by large tech companies which they're using to rewrite their large code-bases for the development and end-user benefits it provides over previous development models.
Still. The idea that it is a service means that you are still handing over indirect control.
I've seen people die without access to healthcare in the US that they would've received in real first world countries, so its hard not to see the irony when people complain about "communism" or "socialism" single payer.

The dysfunction you describe seeing and that I've seen are same coin, different sides.
Why is this even on Hacker News?? Seems dubious at best.
> I didn't mention communism

You didn't use the word, but a centralized economy where the state directly provides goods and services is the definition of communism.

I'm not afraid of a communist boogieman. I don't think your system would necessarily even be evil, just woefully inefficient. If there's no competition for providing services, what incentive is there to improve them?

You point to technology as a means by which we can provide a high standard of living cheaply. Who do you think is going to develop technology without market solutions in place?

I have no problem with the government funding social benefits. I think there's lots of room for that. I just don't think there's any reason to think that the government should be in the business of directly providing such services. It's the difference between SpaceX and NASA: both are funded through taxpayers, but SpaceX has competitive pressure to provide better services at a better price.

I agree that China's growth is impressive. Yet you completely ignored my point that such growth has largely come through increased liberalization of the economy—ie. the opposite direction of what you propose.

> As discussed, potentially a direct service model can offer better capacity to account for the ultimate use of resources allocated through such programs, as well as less waste through discouraging hoarding and providing more efficient allocation.

What a load of rubbish. What do you mean by "hoarding?" People who dare to purchase two cars?

You can't just assert that direct government services would be more efficient without any evidence. We have abundant evidence, both theoretical and empirical, that the market is much better at allocating resources efficiently than central planners.

> Happiness, health, purpose, safety, comfort, wellbeing, education. These are not things you can simply buy on a national scale by giving token quantities of money to people.

Why not? You seem to not understand economics. What in your view allows a government service to provide these benefits (by using taxpayer money to provision them) while giving people the money to buy those services directly would not?

I'm glad you live in China. Perhaps you should move to North Korea to see how effective an even more centrally planned government can be.
I 90% sure that "Volga" means "(Vol) ... (Ga) Water/River", "Oka" means "(O) ... (Ka) Water/River", "Moskva" means "(Mos) ... (Kva) Water/River" in native language of people lived there, because "Kvas" means "Water".
Don't kid yourself. New jobs get created, but fewer. And many of those who lose their jobs don't get retrained—for a myriad of reasons—and end up leaving the workforce entirely. Many just end up on long term disability because it's the only path they have.

Jobs are disappearing. They aren't "coming back" in greater numbers. And the new jobs, by and large, aren't for the previous workforce.

We already live in a world where many jobs are unnecessary. A large portion of government jobs are, essentially, welfare jobs. One of the systematic reasons of for the expansion of government is "job creation". Politicians will create jobs, but those jobs add nothing to society. We've got people pretending to work a job to collect a paycheck. It's welfare.

The industrial revolution replaced muscle with machine, but brainpower was still a required input. There was a clear shift: from doing the work to using a machine to do the same work, but faster. There was enough demand that things didn't collapse.

The current shift is replacing both muscle and brainpower. Outside of creative jobs, what is left for the human to do? Make the brain smarter? We are already entering into a time where the machine makes itself smarter without the advent of the human.

New jobs will be created, sure. But those jobs will not be for the 1.8 million truck drivers. Instead the government will likely end up soaking it up through one program or another. Tens of thousands will end up in welfare jobs. Hundreds of thousands will end up on long term disability. The numbers aren't small.

UBI is an inevitability. You've got some 40 million people on food stamps, about 9 million on disability. Millions more working pointless government jobs like directing people from one TSA employee to another. At what point to we recognize that the future does not look like the past?
Around 40% of American adults are on welfare, unemployment or disability pay now.

Typically when people run out of unemployment, or approach retirement in the case of emergency services people, they find a sympathetic doctor to sign for disability pay.

There is no transition available for them to the "knowledge economy."

This only makes the press occasionally now, but wait until it inverts to an unsustainable 60/40 welfare/taxpayers.
It's no longer considered premature optimization when you have 100,000 DOM elements on a page, like Facebook conceivably would. It's not surprising that this project comes from them.

Does a run-of-the-mill JS app require React? No, there are hundreds of alternatives from direct state mutators like jQuery, all the way through full MV* frameworks like Angular, Ember, Backbone, or newer.

React is cool and innovative in its problem domain, but not all users of a technology will use it solely on its merits. This is frankly a risk with any 'popular' technology.
Wizard's Apprentice – GUI dialogs from Windows batch files
They probably mean they could have used the tech early on to gain an advantage over their competitors. But if they waited till it matured then they are no different than anyone else.
It's a tightrope. Their are plenty of arguments to be made for having a large build system that makes development easier/more conventional. Their are also arguments to be made for minimalism and sticking to the fundamentals of the web with plain html/css/js.

What we can all agree on is that its good to at least have the CHOICE of development environments, build systems, and ecosystems. And I personally always fall back on: "this complexity is why I get paid more then most people".
It isn't so much pre-mature optimization rather than having the next step of the evolution of modern webdev.

Let's go back 6 years in webdev land. jQuery was king, Angular was the up-and-comer. You have a fairly complex jQuery site probably rendering most things from ruby or php. The only way to debug it was with console.log and refreshing the page.

Angular comes around introduces modules and unit-testing, cool! You hook up grunt and protractor, you install angular batarang. Everything is good. But you end up building this huge angular app. You try to debug this edge case when you have this panel open under this tab. You get frustrated that you have to click on the same things over and over again. Livereload can inject css but not js. When you change the html of your angular directive you have to reload the page too.

This is where React comes in. React + Redux + Webpack makes it such that you can apply livereload to _everything_. The css that your component imports, the html it renders, what actions happen when you click a button. Everything. It's not necessarily the new shiny rather than just the next step to making things easier for devs. It gets out of your way so you could focus on styling, structure and business logic.
> . Automation is going to keep going, no matter what

This is a lie.

Sooner or later progress will stop, it is just a matter of when, not if.

All of human history illustrates this point. We are not about to be the exception.
My account vanished about two hours ago too!! I was so confused, I really hope I can find some answers (maybe on here even)
You're probably disconnected from limited data plans. The average web page size may be 2.2MB, but this number requires a source. I find it hard to believe that 2.2MB is the average for mobile websites or the actual download payload that mobile phones actually have to pull.

The reason is that for mobile websites bandwidth is not the only bottleneck. I assume you're talking about a gzipped payload, along with images. Feed a megabyte of compressed HTML, CSS and Javascript to your average feature smartphone and you'll find that the phone's CPU and RAM can be an even bigger bottleneck than bandwidth. Therefore webmasters have a serious incentive to cut down on the download size. Also popular Javascript libraries, like JQuery and Angular get served by Google's CDN or cdnjs.com and thus cached locally and reused across websites. Even more, static assets on a website get reused between visits, and if say, you're vising a news website regularly, you're not going to receive the whole payload every time, just the HTML.

The reason for why I object to your claim is that I've lived with a 500MB data plan for the whole of last year, consuming between 10 and 30 MB per day chatting, reading/writing email and yes, visiting a lot of websites. And I still experience what it's like to have such limitations when in roaming, as I do a fair amount of traveling in Europe. As long as you don't stream videos or music or download apps, it's totally fine.
Well, USSR had it that way.