skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our culture of consumption has roots in our biological drives. We are more attractive reproductive mates if we have more material resources. Therefore, a bigger house >> a small house, etc. although, as a side note, we seem to have lost the direct connection between the two -- people continue to want fancy stuff well past their reproductive age.

For the world you want to become true, something else must become biologically attractive.
I stay in New Delhi and visit Bangalore often. Don't remember seeing Sundar Pichai on a single public Billboard or Ad. Go on with your fantasy stories!
Calling something "garbage aimed at the Kardashians" just based on a number of ports and not fitting your usage narrative making you sound like Kardashyan yourself.
My parents use MB daily, it's a perfect machine for browsing Internet and Word work on the go. I don't get the people who go buy a MB knowing that they need more ports and better performance and them starting now complaining, it's not like you expected MB to grow new ports after you purchased it.

What I like about apple laptops and computers is that each of them is aimed at specific work type environment, and when people choose a wrong tool for the job they should blame themselves not the tool.
Interesting, then, that this slowdown should coincide so closely with a period of increasing de-regulation.
> I'm not buying another Mac until they have a new 17 option.

You are in for a long wait. I can't imagine they'll ever release that size again. Apple's definitely shifting quickly to the 2 or 3 options that cover 95% of the market.
I'd be interested in that link if you can recall it.

I would guess, though, that the website was counting different forms of the 'same' word as distinct words - e.g., jump, jumped, jumping is three words rather than one word with several tenses. Obviously counting this way will multiply the same person's vocabulary several times vs the alternate way.
That might be true if the only segment of the PC market left was the low-end, but that's just not the case. There's still masses of high-end PCs sold to software developers, video and graphics creatives, and gamers. And there's still masses of mid-range PCs sold to businesses, government, and schools.

It's not that Apple doesn't play in these markets. The Mac mini is their offering for the mid-range, for example, and the iMac and Mac Pro are for the high-end desktop market. But as the article points out, they have left these products without updates for years, at precisely the moment they should have been capitalising on their brand momentum and the rest of the industry's problems.
Most consumption doesn't involve big houses and TVs. Those exist as signal items mainly because they're paid for with debt, which increases the amount of money in circulation.

Education is now a good that also increases debt, with mixed results. Throwing money at it does not change the predictive value of the standardized tests used to "ration" education.

Without increases in the money supply, there simply won't be growth. There's only so much the central banks and government can do; at some point, people either spend or they don't.

The one thing that can be done is to try to adjust inflation upwards, which increases the risk of lazy investments.
Hey, we're interested! I just sent you an email.
> A close friend of mine just spent $300 on a used G5 iMac from 2006... I told him not to but he didn't listen. He has had to learn the hard way that the computer is slow, won't accept updates, won't run any new software or drivers

Ubuntu Mate 16.04 works on PowerPC Macs, and will keep the machine alive for a few years if need be. It's much slower than OS X 10.5.8, though, at least on my iMac G4.
>> open up OS X to all hardware makers < we tried this, it was terrible.

Maybe you should try it again? Some OS X power users/'influencers'[1] are using and recommending Hackintoshes[2] for the performance boost as you have the flexibility to add heavy-lifting GPUs and add a butt-load of 3rd party RAM (since it will be non-soldered).

1. I forgot the name(s), I'm not into the Apple 'scene'
2. This is without OEM driver support, so the compatible hardware list has to be carefully curated. Imagine a world were OEMs could officially provide OS X drivers...
> misconception that "autopilot" can drive itself arises.

Probably from autopilots in planes which drive themselves.
Anyone have a diff or analysis?
4% would be much preferable to 2%. 2% barely covers increases in productivity and population growth.
> I think it's probably more just a coincidence that England and then the U.S. were such global powers, and not related to characteristics of English

... and if you want to argue otherwise, you will have to explain why russian had such good linguistic characteristics in east-europe between 1945 and 1989, and not so much since then :)
I think Kildall answered the solo coder question here

https://twitter.com/ontouchstart/status/762366275339321344

(I post the images via a tweet.)
Sources about that period of colonization of Eastern Europe by Slavs are Greek (colonies in Crimea, Byzantine), then Arabic (traders), then Slavish (church chronicles, recorded stories). There are very few documents to read (few dozens only).
UBI comes from tax money though. If the idea behind UBI is that people don't need to go work, and won't go buy McDonalds anymore, then tax income is going to plummet. If tax income plummets, what pays for UBI ?

UBI can only succeed if people continue to consume, preferably at higher levels than currently, which would allow others who want to live a life at a higher standard to sell things to UBI recipients, who can then be taxed and support everyone else on UBI.

If UBI encouraged too large a portion of the population to pursue non-taxable income (say, making art and games and giving them away for free because they don't need money), then UBI would collapse from lack of income. Especially so if that art is given away freely to other countries over the internet. So it's a fine line that is probably a lot more complex than people give it credit. There's certainly no guarantee as to what the results of UBI would be, and no guarantee that the medicine won't be far worse than the symptoms.

EDIT: Even if you assume that a UBI could survive if it decreased with a fall in taxable income from a policy and livability perspective, if a person on UBI received $100 one week, and then had it drop to $75 the next, he would get a major shock and public opinion of a UBI would fall apart. You could print money to make sure UBI never falls, but if UBI is going out to the entire population, the amount of money needed would be enormous. That much money added to a system without an increase in real demand (people on UBI would still buy the same stuff), could easily cause hyperinflation. So another constraint that UBI has and I've never heard anybody mention - UBI can never decrease, even if tax income decreases. Plus there's no way anybody could trust politicians to manage something that complex. UBI practically demands a complete restructure of government, society and the economy. Instead of being a 'patch' as many have described, UBI is closer to 'The World 2.0'. It would be the most incredible Second System Syndrome ever seen.
Regulation isn't all one thing - some is increasing, some is declining.
How does this contrast with recursive descent parser?
I think there are multiple interesting factors at play here: most importantly downward pressure on prices (brought by technology) and the unequal distribution of wealth/income.

Technology has made a lot of stuff far cheaper than it used to be. Instead of buying a photo camera, a video recorder a tape recorder, etc. you can buy a smartphone for the price of one of these individual items (at 1980/90 inflation adjusted prices).

A lot of services we consume have become a lot cheaper as well. Compare Netflix & Spotify for a few $ months to buying individual movies & CDs. A lot of people spend their free time on Youtube/Facebook/Reddit essentially spending nothing at all.

A lot of younger people living in cities are no longer purchasing cars or homes. Overall travel has become a lot cheaper as well. IKEA has commoditized furniture which used to be extremely expensive a few decades ago.

Cheaper prices mean lower spending & lower GDP.

At the same time a smaller group of large companies is capturing the profits in the low cost sectors (again IKEA, Netflix, Google, Facebook). These companies are making huge profits per employee and they are facing very little successful competition.

A majority of the middle class (that doesn't work for any of these highly profitable companies) has very limited free cash flow, due to the rising cost of housing and education and the stagnation of wages. They can't afford to purchase expensive homes, expensive furniture or expensive cars.

More wealth is going to the highest earners, where each additional $ contributes a lot less to GDP than it would in the hands of a middle class household.

---

I'm throwing a lot of stuff together here, but this is what I'm missing from most discussions about the economy: try to describe trends with the concrete situation at hand rather than with generic theories that have been around for decades yet have mostly failed to predict the economic outlook correctly (it seems like the rise of behavioral economics could help here)
3 years sounds too aggressive of an estimate. I would experientially expect a Macbook Pro to last 5 years. Prior to SSD's, the HDD was the most common reason for laptop failure, but nowadays Macbook Pros come with SSD options, so now I would expect a substantial portion of the most recent Macbook Pro populations to hit the 5 year mark.

In terms of software requirements, I think most people don't play heavy requirement games, and for basic personal and office tasks, the 2/4 threaded CPU's of the past few years have been up to the task of browsing, office suites (with responsive spreadsheets), and media.
> Interlingua is very Latin and Romance-heavy, so if your experience is more with German, it may not feel as familiar, but it's almost sure to be easier than Volapük for anyone familiar with multiple European languages. :-)

Well, if at least one of those multiple European languages is a Romance tongue, sure. But if someone speaks fluent Manx, English, Icelandic and Norwegian, he'll probably have more than a little trouble with it …
> For the major carmakers, [car sharing] could mean catastrophe.

I don't see this. A car currently lasts for 100,000-150,000 miles. Typically, several different owners use it for 10-15 years before it's worn out. If a car is 80% utilized, it will rack up the mileage much faster, and the owner (whether you, Uber, or Ford) will have to buy a new one in a year or two.

Maybe the fleet market will start demanding longer-lasting cars. If so, manufacturers will have reason to charge more. Or maybe cars will move to a two-year obsolescence cycle like phones. In any case, the amount we spend on cars will roughly track how far we travel.

> Starting as soon as a decade and a half from now, large numbers of people around the world will get around by hailing driverless taxis that operate like robots, so ubiquitous that they will arrive an average of a minute after being summoned by an app.

I only partly see this. People who live in city centers already hail taxis. Uber may well displace the taxi industry, but they aren't growing the market (ignoring future takeout delivery plans). Outside the densest cities, it's still not clear that fleet cars make sense unless the price seriously undercuts the status quo (the notorious 10X improvement).
Agreed-- most of the assumptions we've been working on are no longer true, and we're not adjusting to these changes very well.

I've been interested lately in some very old economists who, insofar as they remained extremely general, have become more and more prescient. Henry George's writings on the post-scarcity "fools' paradise"[0] are more relevant than ever.

We see this today, as the return to scarce natural resources (such as land) and IP is far outstripping the increases to the return of labor.

[0] http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/George/grgPP15.html#...
I get paid to write online. The things I write are typically intended to be published somewhere online. I rarely read paper books or magazines, yet I consume information all day. When a system is infused with information, it often can accomplish the same thing -- or something better/more -- with less material matter.

I think no one is measuring any of that. The fact that I can do freelance work online means I can earn less (gross) and keep more of it (net) because I do not need a car to get to work or clothes to meet dress code, etc. So, I am seeing real gains in my quality of life -- paying down debt, eating better, better health etc -- than I could achieve when I had a corporate job. The "overhead" for having a corporate job meant that by the time I quit, I was far deeper in debt than when I got the job. It was a frustrating, frightening way to live. Now, the money I earn is net gain, not "Oh, my god, I can't eat without a job, but having a job has me barreling towards bankruptcy!"
One option for better feedback is to add indicators for floppy and hard drive activity, like the leds on the original Amigas.

Some emulators even emulate the sound of the physical fdd :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csjqX3bm2lc
'we have hit peak consumption'. I'm wondering - who is the 'we' you have in mind? Folk across vast areas of the planet might be at a loss to know what you're on about.
Using GitHub releases to distribute libraries
I don't know if this was the case here but what happens a lot of the time is that there's a new book or paper or whatever. Press releases get sent out or stories are otherwise pitched and you end up with different writers or producers creating variants of the same story.
Real "creatives" _never_ preferred Macs. Mac, until very recently, didn't have any way to calibrate a monitor (and you had to buy a 3rd party monitor to get a full-gamut display), or 10 bit/channel color. For all our color-critical work at our shop, we _never_ used macs.
There is a great deal of grumbling, dour dissent with any sort of technological change outside of the tech sector - aka the "true believers". I'd stop short of calling it Luddism but it's like that.

I've presented far too many solutions to non-specialists who stared in unblinking misunderstanding at these solutions to think otherwise.
Python has a standard interface just like Go's `io.{Read,Writ}er`: the `send` and `recv` methods as defined by `socket.socket`. The appeal of "sans I/O" protocol implementations is primarily for asynchronous I/O, which requires a completely different style of interface. The clever thing about Go is not the standardization of a reader/writer interface, but the fact that the goroutine I/O scheduler makes these synchronous interfaces nearly as efficient as asynchronous ones, so there is no need to introduce a separate family of asynchronous interfaces.
should coincide so closely with a period of increasing de-regulation

?

The last 16 years has seen little or no de-regulation. The last serious bout of de-regulation that I can remember was back in the 80's when Reagan threw out the rulebook on airlines or when the RBOCs were allowed to reconstitute themselves.
not sure how a functioning economy can exist without consumption of some form.
Technology ( as the term is widely used ) is the principal mechanism by which resources are conserved.
> [...] it will be almost impossible to understand why (3.0/4) == 0.75 does not return true all of the times.

You may want to be more careful with your examples, because dividing by 4 is
a precise operation in IEEE 754.
How will it be monetized? E-commerce or ads? E-commerce would be a better idea, i guess.

p.s. This whole thread has been disappointing, seems like everyone had some angst and needed some venting outlet against fb.
I may also point to a subtle subconscious factor that might be helping Google.

Google posted the free WiFi on Railway stations. Indian Railways is huge and celebrated as a backbone to the countries transportation. On the other hand FB's Free Basic, broke net-neutrality and partnered with Reliance & Airtel, two companies in India that put people's guards up already.

Google's hotspots simply don't seem like a 'scheme', while FB's offer does.
Also, in companies, devices are usually swapped out after a fixed period anyway (3 years at my workplace). When you manage a lot of devices, the increased failure rates near the end of the devices' life cycle can really hurt, so it makes sense to replace devices early and sell the used devices in bulk for a few bucks, hopefully after wiping the drives. ;)

And given that you swap out the employee computers well before they break down, the shorter lifetime of notebooks doesn't matter. What matters is that your employee can take her device to a meeting room, or to a customer site.
At my hospital we have near-weekly cases of patients arriving in cars to the front of the Emergency Department, necessitating a resus crew operating out of the car->trolley->resus bay
This idea has been disproven hundreds of times. It is a zombie idea -- no matter how many times it is killed, it just keeps shambling along.

Also, the context here was helicopter money -- sending money to people, not banks.
You can always call the hospital from the car to tell them your emergency and mention them your plates.
UBI is even worse than redistributing existing wealth. It is a simplistic plan to throw more fuel on the monthly-rent fire, ignoring that price feedback will eagerly consume it.

I had been wondering why it had quickly gained mainstream popularity, but then I realized it is simply the latest way central banksters can conjure money to have it collected by their cronies.

What we need is an end to this many-decades regressive policy of forcing inflation, so that a middle class is once again able to save and thereby gain economic security and bargaining power.
Right, this is about mitigating the damage when apps have a bug -- risk management. Instead of being exploitable from anywhere on the internet, the bug becomes exploitable only by attackers who have a passive network MITM, which, while possible, is a very high barrier.
Of course the S&P 500 has been growing, central banks are buying stocks left and right. What's worth mentioning is that both governments and companies have massively increased their debt during that period, so its really hard to judge what the 250% S&P 500 growth means.
There's nothing preventing you from calling 911 enroute, or coordinating with the operator to pull over for ambulance pick up once you know that they are very close.
You've just made me realise it's possible to use operating system design as a useful analogy to explore the role of governments. Thank you.
Try transferring information between the apps you cited on an iPad and compare that to the experience on a real computer. They are in different leagues still unfortunately.
The video you linked is from five years ago.

There is also a two-hour long play video from a year ago that includes more music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYX9g7z4Av8
I am not a "flat earther", just setting context to avoid confusion.

There are everyday observations which will reinforce the fact that the Earth is not flat. Tides? Movement of Sun/Moon/Planets/Stars across the sky? Satellites? Pictures from space? That's just off the top of my head, probably hundreds more.

But, and just to play devils advocate, let's say the pictures may be fake and there is an elaborate conspiracy. Have I done any experiment myself to prove the Earth is round? There are some very simple intuitive ones mentioned here[1]. The answer is no. So while it is clear from the overwhelming body evidence that it is not flat, I have accepted almost all of that evidence without verifying it myself in any experimental way. And this is one of the simplest topics one can examine.

I haven't tracked the movement of stars across the sky, I have not been to space, I have not measured shadows or the curvature of the earth. I've been in a plane, and it does appear to be curved, so there is that.

Obviously, I cannot possibly question everything, it would be futile and exhaustive and get me nowhere. But I do believe we do not question enough the truths we take for granted because they have been presented to as truth.

And while some topics are barmy, flat-earth being one, there may be others with much shakier body of evidence to back it up, which are today presented and taught as truth. Also, I find myself more and more intrigued by a good conspiracy, and enjoy the company of conspiracy theorists, because it makes me think and re-examine why I take the presented truth for granted.

[1] http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26427/what-is-the...
Yeah I've tried a lot of these and every time I find that I'm not actually doing anything productive, but just linking pieces of text together. They seem like the ultimate busywork tools.
First comment, on HN for 78 days, generic statements about above article....

I question your bias.
Other than spending money, there is only saving and investment. Some believe that our current lack of demand is caused by too much money chasing too few investments.
No one said that it was a necessity. The fact is that Apple software needs more performance over time so they shouldn't skimp on the hardware, or sell "old" hardware.

Why are you introducing an irrelevant tangent into the conversation? I have an old Dell in my closest that has Linux on it. But once again, that's irrelevant to this conversation.
You don't need to work for the big players to get a good resume. I know plenty of people who are in very high demand who have never worked for any of the big companies.
I have McAfee on my work Macbook, but I don't have an opinion on whether it's "less broken". I used a Windows 7 Thinkpad before the Macbook (also with McAfee), and didn't notice McAfee at all in these 3 years. In 2 years on the Mac, I noticed one interesting UI bug where the taskbar icon says "Your Mac is Not Secure", but when you click on it to open the main UI, the window will say "Your Mac is Secure", and the taskbar icon then agrees with the main window from that point on. Just a glitch, nothing that I would consider noticably broken.
Container Orchestration with Kubernetes: Intro and Installation Guide
This. The disconnect from "having a real job" and working is spreading. The corporate sector seems to be rapidly declining in exactly this way.

In my most recent gig, having to be onsite was a huge drain on productivity. It really needed to be roughly 10% of my time. I stayed way ahead of my job mainly by doing stuff at home - just the moronic network filters alone meant I had ... 10x the bandwidth available.

But onsite was still required.

I have two kids around 30 or so; neither has an onsite corporate fulltime job.
Well, the new retina Macbook Pros should be coming out in a few months.

Increased battery life and hopefully a lighter 15" retina Macbook Pro will be a compelling reason to upgrade.

Moreover, now that Windows 10 Anniversary Update has the integrated bash shell, this makes the Windows platform finally much more competitive for Open Source software development.
Software libraries don't have to suck
are the current generation processors much much faster or better, than the ones from a generation ago?
That sounds veeeery far-fetched. How about societies where material resources aren't the main goal? How does that explain poor people having more babies? Is there any known correlation between "having more stuff" and reproduction at all?

If any, the somewhat accepted reproductive drive is "passing down your genes" - and people/animals/any creature that displays more "power" tends to attract more mates. And power doesn't translate to material resources in most cultures/societies/animal races...