skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can't relate the rodent utopia experiments as a defense of having to keep people in need of basic necessities to survive or they lose the will to live.

Besides the fact you are comparing rats to people, even the study itself considers all the localized factors that contributed to societal collapse:

* You are isolating them in a relatively small space with one another.

* You have uncontrolled population growth.

* You are using a species that naturally trends towards "clan wars" for territory.

* They are rats, and thus have nothing productive to do with their time in the absence of survival.

In the same reason you cannot just compare horses to humans and say that when physical and mental human labor is obsoleted there will be no new jobs for people because horses do not have the capability to invent their own work, rats are the same. Fundamental to our establishment of society is our ability to invent things for us to do beyond the survival every other animal dedicates their life to.

Also, it is incredibly nihilistic to think that human beings need to toil to survive or else life is without meaning or we will collapse society.

We already know that in first world countries people reproduce less. That isn't even a function of economic well being directly but a function of education, which relates precisely back to how humans aren't just animals acting on instinct. If your post-scarcity society is uneducated hairless monkies, yes, they would go the way of the rat colony dystopia. If you have a culture of education and intellectualism, and let people invent their own work, you have an actual utopia. It is the same mind that elevated mankind above all other animals that can stop us from destroying ourselves as we eliminate survival as a daily concern.
As the cost of production falls and demand increases, I'm fairly confident the cost of materials will rise, if we continue to live in a capitalist society that'll be the mechanism that controls the level of demand. The other option that could work is more material wealth in the commons, for example sharing the use of cars rather than owning one outright.
It's natural that complex, evolving organisms have more and more entropy but their decline, as for what you HNers are saying here, is due to the unavoidable predominance of more and more web-idiots, mostly coming from 3rd and 4th world countries, which I however understand in full: they are looking for recognition as human beings in a global world, guidance to make their talents work and opportunities in richer environments while starting from nothing. It's the same reason a lot of web-idiots, me among them, are writing here on HN from 1st and 2nd world countries. That said, noise is reduced by stricter filters or by changing the definition of noise and your attitude towards it. Your choice.
So.....you are someone who prefers to talk on the phone.
> BCP38 is designed to filter such spoofed traffic, so that it never even traverses the network of an ISP that’s adopted the anti-spoofing measures. However, there are non-trivial economic reasons that many ISPs fail to adopt this best practice.

So, it costs too much to run clean internet pipes.

As the internet is a major part of the economy, as well as access to government (as well as government access to surveillance), it's probably time to regulate ISPs and related players for healthy operation, like water utilities.
true, the info has always been there. what SO bought was ux. kind of like slackhq being valued at a bil even though irc/chat has been around for decades. and yep, usenet was great especially for older languages like c.

more recently searching in safaribooksonline.com has become my first step.
Sure, but it's not like all costs will rise either. The question is whether there's a net benefit, and if you can definitively answer that you'll probably earn a Nobel.
On top of what? Help vampires waste answerers time, not readers time. Which is why they vote to close.

No one wants to browse 200 lines of code to find the missing semicolon.
It's not a very good example, because making food halal requires businesses to change the way they do things. One of the things required for food to be halal (AFAIK) is that the person doing the slaughtering must be Muslim. I can see how this requirement would prevent most businesses from "making all things halal", just by itself.

Besides, France's population is 5 to 10 percent Muslim, which negates the "three to four percent" 'dictating' claim of the article, especially because, last time I visited France, most meats I saw weren't halal.
At the same time, it's sometimes a good idea to pay attention to qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) analysis, since certain abstract concepts like culture can only be analyzed that way.
Here is the actual AMA report.

http://darksky.org/wp-content/uploads/bsk-pdf-manager/AMA_Re...

A representative section.

"It is estimated that a “white” LED lamp is at least 5 times more powerful in influencing circadian physiology than a high pressure sodium light
based on melatonin suppression. Recent large surveys found that brighter residential nighttime
lighting is associated with reduced sleep time, dissatisfaction with sleep quality, nighttime
awakenings, excessive sleepiness, impaired daytime functioning, and obesity. Thus, white LED
street lighting patterns also could contribute to the risk of chronic disease in the populations of
cities in which they have been installed. Measurements at street level from white LED street lamps
are needed to more accurately assess the potential circadian impact of evening/nighttime exposure
to these lights."
The whole thing really puts the lie to the myth engineers in the valley are well paid. In the land of million dollar entry level homes, even $200k of income (!!!) means you will struggle to own somewhere to live. That barely qualifies you for a $1m loan, and that with a $100k downpayment.

I'm aware you can commute eg an hour plus each way from easy bay and find homes for $700k (a bargain!), but something has gone wildly wrong when supposedly well-paid employees can't afford an entry level home in the city they work in.
I want to also add that this isn't an attractive deal for me as an unattached 20-something.
> put an insane value on it

Your declaration that your recording of your epic rock opera cycle is worth eighteen hundred million euro doesn't amount to anything unless you can get the court to agree.

You're going to need some kind of documentation of its "insane value".
Don't forget that the Luddites were substantively correct in their analysis. "Some ups and downs as people adjust" really meant multigenerational economic negative effects in their case, and may be similar for people passed over for automation now. The Luddite families and those like them took 3 to 4 generations to recover fro the blow, economically speaking.

Which isn't to say that it shouldn't be done, but that any assertion that people will "retrain" or "find new growth industries" with anything like their current quality of life is at best naive, and more often disingenuous. The most likely case is that the losers in such economic shifts will remain so. Any society that leaves them to sort it out on their own should at Leastbe transparent and realistic about what that means.

Discouragingly enough , truck driving itself is a rare example of fairly successful transition to a new industry, as it had a low barrier to entry for people needing to leave a rapidly shrinking workforce in agricultural areas - due to some automation and a larger scale mechanization. One generation of that and it is going to fall off a cliff too, possibly leaving the rural US in a dire employment situation.
Calculist, the multi-useful Workflowy/Excel hybrid
Yes, if that's the best a family can do. We were grateful for what we had when we were in that position.

Unless we are saying that the children who were raised in such living conditions in the past were damaged in some way by the experience? Or that human physiology has changed in some way over this timescale?
It makes no sense these days to buy in the silicon valley.

I was talking to some people renting out their house for about 3500 dollars a month. It's a single story ranch house (3 bed 2 bath) that they bought in the eighties for 150k. It's now worth about 1.5 million.

Doing the math, a mortgage + insurance + property taxes on a 1.2 million dollar mortage (less 300k for the down payment) is about 7k. And rents should be inherently higher than house payments. Why would you buy when you could just rent, and not deal with any of the maintenance and stuff?
People that post a whole program that does not work and ask the community to fix it for them...

"Give me teh codez..." etc
Marked as duplicate and closed for being too broad are annoying.
Often, the "duplicate" is actually a different question with a different answer and many of the too broad ones are not too broad, can be answered easily, and can make it easier than reading 10 other threads and pulling the needed information from each.
Except all those jobs are going away with the automation revolution. You can't have an economy based off the equivalent of getting carriage rides in central park where its just a frivolous humor to experience human powered food production or a haircut done by a barber.
Cog: build command pipelines in your team collaboration tools
Subjective moderation is a major problem. You know, some moderator deciding that a question is "off-topic" or "opinion-based" and just closing the thread. It really puts a damper on people's motivation to ask questions or provide answers.
One person has a few bad experience, says it's in decline. I'll counter his bad experiences with my positive experiences of both asking and answering questions - and finding more answers there anywhere else.

There - now the universe is back in balance.
Right, the price of anything is what people are willing to pay, there is minimal correlation with production costs.

This only works if the seller has monopoly pricing power. Otherwise gas would be $5/gallon all the time.

Do we see massive price drops whenever any company outsources their call centre to India?

Massive, no, but the prices of most things other than housing, health care, and education have in fact been dropping.
You mean like almost everyone does in Europe?
I didn't see it in the article, but I recently heard that NIST played a role in the design of this telescope.
Beyond the iphone
Might I ask why you are trying to cash out so quickly? Do you not feel the business is sustainable?
> I am being downvoted because people can't

Please don't go on about downvotes as a rhetorical device. That's a variant of the complaining that the site guidelines ask us all not to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
That was pretty good.
Some people cannot think analyticalally enough to maintain the state of a program in their head. This is why freshman CS classes can see retention rates in the single digits. You adapt your brain doing it over a long enough time, and when you start doing it early in life you evolve your brain to suit the task, but for anyone who lacks the critical thinking and logic to think programatically the later in life you are the less likely to be able to ever internalize it you get.
Good points. Perhaps Luajit does need to be refactored into something more understandable to attract more people if it's going to survive in the long term. The major problem that I see is that we need another Mike Pall but with the added ability of writing code comprehensible by mere mortals.
Almost everyone in Europe houses multiple families in 2-bedroom apartments?
One more important thing about this is that good energy tends to draw good energy. So you might notice that the world seems like a better place because better things happen on days when you put good energy out. The difference is palpable.

It's the obvious things such as I'm less likely to experience rudeness from others but some far less obvious changes that seem out of reach of my energy, such as I'm less likely to be cut off in traffic type of bad experience. I'm not sure what if understanding how this process works even matters. It just works consistently.
I'm not impressed by this response to some very valid criticisms.

> No matter what choices we make there will be upset people.

Of course no matter what you do, people will complain. This doesn't this this a valid reason to dismiss criticism out of hand without engaging with the complaints.

The correct response is to look for ways to address the very real problems that are being brought up in a way that increases the value the site provides to as many of your users as possible.

> Do we allow only english? Do we allow SO in other languages?

Make questions and answers be done in english to avoid fragmentation, but perhaps you need a community translation service to translate valuable questions and answers to other languages to increase the availability of this knowledge to those who don't speak english?

> Do we reduce moderation? Do we keep moderation as is?

Perhaps you can introduce a mechanism to sideline 'help vampire' questions, but still allow new users to build up reputation (currently very hard) by assisting with or improving those questions.

Many of SO's problems do not have simple or easy solutions, that doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to look for them.
Biographies shouldn't be read as a manual to learn what made those women and men successful.

Read them as a lesson in understanding people, personalities, traits, follies and to give an occasional spark to the fire within you. You'll never be able to replicate success by following what someone else did, but you can almost always find something inspiring about how they went about doing it.
I'm the author of the SKH/SO article (Link was right here: https://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/09/stackoverflow-i...)

So far. I still haven't participated in SO very much. For the most part it isn't even worth asking a question. (It's a good thing and a bad thing) Also I have noted that they try to prevent you from deleting. After you click that submit button it's their property apparently.
Merlin: Flexible Deep Learning Framework in Julia
> "people need to feel they are needed in the society."

That can be achieved in different ways. The health of communities does not need to rely on earning money, there are plenty of other ways to build a vibrant society that still values the contribution of individuals.
I initially thought the same thingabout happiness, but the problem isn't in their 20s while they're relatively healthy and have their whole lives ahead of them.

Will they still be happy and fulfilled bagging groceries for half a day and going home to play GTA12 on their MagicLeap...rather than going to the doctor for that weird shooting pain or the cough they couldn't shake after being sick half the summer?

Will they simply opt not to get married? What about having kids? Both would be hard to reconcile with such a life -not saying anyone must or should do those things, but some might feel differently at 35 or 40 and find it hard to switch gears.
As I've said before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422420#12422841):

My biggest problem with this Taleb piece is that it doesn't really take into account the probability of success from a particular intolerant minority. In practice there's a kind of signal-strength effect where the further up the chain you go the less effective any one person becomes. (At least for the extended GMO example.) Once you factor that into the model Taleb's argument falls apart.

eg. Let's say a given family has a 25% chance of their intolerant child swaying food preferences. (This is very generous, because I'm fairly sure in practice it's under 5%.)

And we'll assume that going up the chain you need at least a 25% threshold to accomplish anything. Then you're looking at multiplying probabilities that get increasingly small the further up the chain you go.

The cool part of this is that you could probably write a quick model in your language of choice to explore it.
Don't think automation will get rid of these jobs - have you seen the cronut? Don't think a computer would have been able to derive that creation... (not sarcastic)

Also, as we create more time, we'll have to spend it on these luxurious that currently seem frivolous.
It's quite ironic that in a race to be the first to cover a story we now have articles without the central piece of information they are about. It's like click bait with a 2-day wait, but somehow with bigger acceptance.

Well it's actually PR exploiting this race, not just the newspapers themselves.
What's the median price of a 2bdr condo in SFBA right now? Because if you're planning to raise a family in SFBA, that's what you need. You can't rent it, because you can't routinely move small families --- changing school districts is incredibly disruptive for children --- and you would be somewhat lucky to keep a good 2bdr apartment for 5 years, let alone 12-15.
GitHub Expandinizr
And then there would be malware running in your browser that uses the API to expose your IoT devices. There is precedent for that where Javascript in the browser was accessing your router's web interface (with default credentials) to change your DNS server.
On the opposite end of the "new user" perspective that is trying to ask a good question, as someone who is seeking to sometimes answer questions, it is pretty hard to actually find a good question. The vast majority of the questions I run into _are_, in fact, duplicates, poorly worded/incomprehensible, far too broad, etc. (one example that has stuck with me is "how do I install HTML/JavaScript on my computer?").

Though perhaps there are good, legitimate questions out there, it is also conceivable that some frustrated new users think that their question is appropriate for SO when it is not. This most often happens, from what I've seen, in the "far too broad" category. Just looking at SO right now, for example, I saw a question that was asking how to pass data on an iOS app from one place to another. In that user's mind, he/she has probably been trying to figure out the basics of making an iOS app, and this seems a legitimate question. However, this is an incredibly broad architecture/design question. SO isn't a resource to hand-hold you when you're learning something new. It's a resource for asking specific questions when you can't find the solution anywhere else (and you've actually tried).
Ethereum Classic Roadmap
The solution that is more likely to be implemented is a culling of the herd. Sad but true.
Because those people you talked to are renting their house out at way below market rates (probably)?

You can easily rent out a single bedroom for $1500-2500 anywhere near the more central SV hubs.
What products and services Google killed
> You are confusing ...

I have spent 10 years studying color science. I know what color temperature is. I’m just explaining why the moon is a poor analogy. I have an issue with bright short-wavelength light sources at night, regardless of lamp configuration. It knocks out night vision.

There is a wide literature (dozens if not hundreds of research papers) on this topic. It’s not exactly some deep mystery.

The lamp configuration just makes things worse (and the use of fewer, brighter lamps provides much of the economic incentive to install the new lamps, along with federal subsidies).
I'd recommend watching this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
"Help vampires" aka people with a question that's been answered, are only a problem if you don't have proper search tools to show that a question has already been asked (or answered). If you provide those, and people still ask, maybe their question actually is different. If you provide similar question tools for answerers, let them link to the other question/answers but there's no value in closing the question. That's just hostile and kills the opportunity to generate actual content.

Also, let's be real. It's not the marking dupes that's problem it's all the "off topic" closures.

Side note: you work at SO and call your users "help vampires". I think that elitist attitude is a huge part of the problem we're discussing here.
I was actually thinking it would be awesome to combine the two. Inject a phone number on one/some of the random responses and let Lenny pick up the phone and take it from there...
Europa changed how we saw the solar system
Unfortunately just increasing people's salary (even 3X) without an accompanying increase in housing supply won't help; that will just exacerbate the situation.

The best solution is to align people's incentives to create more regional housing. The two major classes of people are existing home owners and renters.

Although there is a hodgepodge of solutions, one way to do this would be to phase out Proposition 13 and rent control. Of course this would be really unpopular but should in theory lead to more market efficiency and create incentives for both groups to want more housing.

Existing home owners would want more housing to keep property taxes down. Renters which were previously protected by rent control would also be more vocal about creating new housing. People might actually work together to change zoning laws to increase density and improve transportation solutions.

In the current situation, there are some perverse incentives. For example in SF, if you are in a rent controlled apartment but can actually afford to buy a house, it makes sense to rent the house at market rate while you stay at your rent controlled apartment.
Why is that a model to aspire to? It makes me angry when I have to pay a doctor $100 for something stupid and trivial like a prescription for a vaccine.
It's funny, because many of the points made about SO in this article remind me of my experiences with HN. My first couple of comments were downvoted, as I did not yet know the HN etiquette and unspoken rules of discourse, and that can be pretty discouraging for newcomer. I'm still pretty reticent to comment for fear of being downvoted.

There is also the familiar rush to be the first to post some news story, which is almost impossible.

All that said, I've had extremely overall positive experiences on both SO and HN. The breadth of collective expertise and depth of comments on both sites is really awe-inspiring. I view the strict rules of engagement as a feature, not a bug.
Help Vampires are users who incessantly ask simple and/or previously-answered questions and provide nothing of value to the community. Over time, they can drive valuable contributors away.

http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/
We need better handling of surveillance after the fact. Now that everyone knows that massive surveillance is going on, that's no longer a secret. So most surveillance requests should be be released.

How about declassifying 75% of surveillance requests after 3 years? The Government gets to pick the 25% that stay secret. That provides lots of info about who's listening to what, but narrowly targeted ones can be kept secret. Then, every 3 years, release 75% of the remainder. After a decade or so, only the really important ones are still secret. This would make it clear who's spending time listening to what, without disrupting investigations.

A Federal judge just released 200 surveillance requests.[1] They're from 2012, and even prosecutors didn't claim they still needed to be kept from the public. Maybe the time for this has come.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/meet-the-...
Do most people own their own home in New York, London, or Paris? I don't think so...

Where are you getting the idea that it's normal to be able to own a home in a major desirable city and global economic hub?
Hi,

Wondering what you feel is lacking about search. I have a product that sits on top of Dropbox (and other cloud services) and provides slide-level (as opposed to file-level) search for PowerPoint files; I'm thinking this could be expanded to other types of files and would love to hear your thoughts.

Email in my profile if you want to go off line.

Thanks!