skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When will the mainstream consider it acceptable to talk about reducing consumption (without confusing it with lowering the standard of living) and reducing the population (without confusing it with eugenics)?

We waste incredible amounts and a lower population means more goods for everyone.

I'm not saying they solve everything. I'm just asking when we can talk about these issues that are a lot easier to implement than splitting atoms.
My undergrad is in Physics and I took engineering classes in Rickover Hall. I was stationed on a nuclear ship. Even after deploying for the Fukushima disaster, I am a fan of nuclear power. But I have a hard time justifying new investment in an era where solar is competitively priced. The downside of solar is approximately 0 compared to the downside of a reactor accident.

I'll even allow for the high, high likelihood that more people will die installing roof-top solar than will ever die in the lifetime of all nuclear reactors combined. The political capital lost in a reactor accident isn't worth it. The lost of faith in technology, the loss of trust in science. The mass hysteria just isn't worth it.
I understand your concern about regulations being barrier to entry. But it's a hard (certainly not impossible) to solve problem. I can see that making the regulation less costly (e.g. by reducing administrative overheads wherever possible) we can reduce the cost of regulations themselves.

But the regulations the airliners have to undergo cannot be easily reduced. Aircraft manufacturers should have more stringent regulations than airliners. I'd not fly in a plane that has not certified to have passed all regulatory checks.
Can't Linux be fixed. Nothing's perfect. But can't we at least try to make it work as correctly as possible instead of not?

Win ten and osx basically "work" flawlessly. Linux doesn't.
Proposals that are contrary to basic human nature rarely gain much traction.
Try Mercurial. It's mental model maps more directly to SVN.

I have successfully taught it to people like CEO's and CTO's with very little difficulty.

The problem with Git is that it has 3 areas of state (working-index-repo) instead of 2 (working-repo).

That makes things HORRIBLY complicated for the 99% of useful use cases.
Another HN thread[1] revealed that the permit not only costs $150, but also mandates that Uber report accidents. (And other stuff?)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13198277
They probably want to be able to blame someone else (the DMV) for the reasons they're not actively testing in CA. I wouldn't be surprised to see a proposition next year that wants to allow companies to test their autonomous vehicles without permits, with Uber pushing millions of dollars into advertising into it.
The whole point of automation is to increase benefit by increasing productivity, i.e. by either increasing the production output for the same amount of jobs, or decreasing the amount of jobs needed for the same production.

Since we already produce about everything in the amount we need (and sometimes much more than we need), there is no point in increasing production (it would not be sold, consumed), so productivity gains will translate into cost reduction, i.e. less jobs.
Machines took a long time to build and replace people. Software can be instantly copied.

>In 1960 there were 3 channels. In the 1990's 50. Now it's 100's + online offerings.

Exactly, we're already beyond the limits of what we can consume. There won't be jobs producing more stuff when there is no one to consume it.
Yes, useful feedback but the user had been downvoted to near-invisibility. Had their tone been different, that wouldn't have happened.
> If Lisp were acceptable, then we'd all be using it.

What if 5,697 languages were deemed acceptable? Would each and every one of us be using all of these 5,697 programming languages?

There is nothing that we all use; does that mean there is no acceptable language at all?

> Every single non-standard extension, everything not in the spec, is "wrong" with Common Lisp. This includes any support for threads, filesystem access, processes and IPC, operating system interoperability, a GUI, Unicode, and the long list of other features missing from the latest hyperspec.

Portable libraries which make those things look the same to the program are possible and exist in Lisp. (We go from "which Lisp?" to "which Lib?").

Some pretty successful languages do not have threads, processes, IPC, Unicode and other features. C and C++ have threads now, but this is very recent. No GUI, no Unicode, no IPC. Who cares? For decades there have been cross-platform libraries for those kinds of things.

Sticking a GUI into a language is risky. Suppose ANSI C had standardized a GUI interface in 1989. Would that be of any use today? Likely the API would just be a dead-weight that is ignored (if not an outright hindrance to innovation).
I don't understand what you mean. What consumption shall we reduce? Less oil? Working on it (see: solar). Less food? Working on it (see: /r/progresspics, and all the science and journalism on this, soda bans, etc). Less cars? Working on it (see: Waze, Uber, Lyft, public transit, et al). Do you suggest that China didn't try population control at scale for generations? (1)

What, exactly, do you mean?

(1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-lift...
In the abstract, I agree -- there are many situations where low res is better than none.

But given the amount of interpretation and reading (it truly is an art, not a science) that goes into reading an EKG and more importantly, a tumor x-ray, I think in this situation, low res is worse than none, because it's worthless (you can't tell anything from it) and it still cost you something.

If you do try to do a cancer diagnosis on a poor x-ray, you are basing cancer treatment on the flip of a coin.

no cancer? Well you might fill them up with expensive chemotherapy, which itself is carcinogenic. Actually has cancer? Well, you've just set them loose with an organic time bomb in their system.
> I just can't fathom an angle where this works out to their advantage

Trump appoints Travis Kalanick Grand Moff of Western US

Kidding! It will be Peter Thiel of course. Also always amusing when I see articles like this artificially flagged down the frontpage.
People often dislike signing up to something they might not continue using.
For me, 'expert' wine recommendations are rarely useful. But, crowdsourced reviews have been remarkably consistent. A vintage with a mean score of 4.1 of 5 (over, say, 100 reviews) is almost always better than a wine with a mean score of 3.4. But, it's still subjective. For instance, I like Zinfandels and Petite Sirahs, so reviews of Pinot Noirs are less useful to me.
Self-driving cars and robots replacing factory workers are obviously just the beginning. How about computers that can program themselves? How about machines that can think and create like we do (and better)?

We approach 2017, we know climate change is a real threat, we know automation is going to be a big problem, we know we're consuming the world's resources at an alarming rate and there's 7.5 billion people on this rock...

I get the feeling the future won't be this Utopian scenario that some people are dreaming of.
'Basic human nature'is a phrase that assumes a lot of things. How would you characterise this phrase in more detail, as it pertains to this topic? And how would you justify such claims?
I am wondering if anybody knows of an open-source project focused on designing the hardware and software for “recreational” ultrasound machines. I think like 3D printers (reprap etc), there would be a sizable group of hobbyists and tech savvy individuals in the medical community who would be interested. I don’t know quite enough about the electronics to initiate something like this but would definitely pitch it.
People = economic power. Consumption = economic power.

It's very likely that China and/or India will eventually be the most powerful countries in the world. Why? The simple fact that they have the most people and will have the biggest markets.

And anyhow, if we can sustainably support double or triple the current population, then why not?
You're linking to CNN, who told us that it was illegal for anyone but CNN journalists to read Wikileaks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X16_KzX1vE
Are you familiar with potlatch society in the old Pacific Northwest? With wealth readily available, the "big men" of a tribe (roughly chiefs, but not hereditary) competed to see how much they could give away to their neighbors and rivals; all you had to do to eat well, or make it through a bad winter, was to admit that your neighbors were led by a great and glorious chief.

This system didn't work very well at the time (it bred slavery and warlordism, and produced a lot of waste, especially towards the end, when trade goods were abundant and population was running out); but it'll become increasingly more doable as capital becomes more productive. Magnanimity is a human instinct, and people already compete on status and prestige; just persuade holders of capital that supporting the unemployed/unemployable is a good thing, make sure they get personal feel-good-ness out of it, and persuade the unemployed/unemployable not to run up the red flag, and you've probably got a stable system.

Probably. I don't think we need to worry about slavery much, but warlordism could become a serious issue. Where potlatch-like culture exists, aggressive bids for the throne (or equivalent) tend to follow; the Earl of Warwick in the War of the Roses comes to mind. Still, even warlordism has potential to be less bad than Communism (more room for ambition, better management of capital) or Fascism (you can be a minority and not die) -- the Wars of the Roses had roughly zero impact on the common people of England. (See A Farewell to Alms for a detailed discussion of how England's wars, starting from a pretty early date, avoided messing up England's people.)

This is all hypothetical, though; I'm not saying that a potlatch orientation is the only possible solution, nor even that it's necessarily a working solution at all...
If LibreOffice is interesting to you in any way, it has a solid organization making it easy to start contributing.

For triaging: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA

For documentation: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation

For marketing: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing

The technical docs in the wiki could also benefit from stylistic improvements.
reducing consumption (and) population

Those goals don't conflict with a shift to nuclear.
Assuming nuclear can slow it, we needed it 20 years ago, not now.
True or false: a nuclear reactor can create a nuclear explosion? (the answer may surprise you!)
I've been using 1Password and a multi-process Firefox without any issues.
Reentrant, read/write pthread mutexes
I don't see any reason to think totally privatizing and deregulating utilities would be any safer.
Top 3 sugar exporting countries by US$ volume in 2015 were Brazil, Thailand and India [1]

[1] http://www.worldstopexports.com/sugar-exports-country/
The human drive to reproduce.
It's worth noting that nothing on github suggests that the person who made that comment is a contributor/maintainer for Bootstrap.
The desire to breed is pretty hard wired, species die without it. Sex is only fun because it rewards our desire to breed.
Add this to the "Nature is Terrifying" list...
Basic human nature is to further the species through population growth. It's literally the only thing that everyone can agree on as being "why we're here". Every instinct ingrained in every living creature is to produce offspring.

Telling people to stop producing offspring goes against basic human nature, and requires a pretty educated populace in order to understand why they have to stop this instinctual process.
I would expect a significant percentage of people know that nuclear explosion is not a risk of nuclear power.
You're basically proposing to make consumables more expensive and to make reproduction more difficult and/or costly.

Countries that experience high costs for food and essential consumables see significantly higher rates of social unrest, riots, and revolution [1].

Not to mention that being able to reproduce is a fundamental goal of all sexual reproducing organisms because of evolutionary selection.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...
I feel I have gotten too used to Material design and I hardly ever use bootstrap. Do anyone of you feel the same?

What are the advantages of Bootstrap over Material Design?
All good examples!

I need someone to burst my bubble from time to time.

Also, as a side note, I for one would be delighted if the future included people brewing delicious beer for one another as an important part of the economy.
Make codes more scale like Redux with MiddlewareJS
Try Vimfx, I switched to take advantage of e10s, and it's been worthwhile.
If web developer's budgets were as large as their egos and aspirations, I would listen to them...
Show HN: tmuxp – tmuxinator clone I wrote in python
We've been splitting atoms for 70 years. France has run its electric grid on 80% nuclear power. What's our track record on reducing consumption and population?

Not saying we shouldn't do them all, but I don't think nuclear is the most difficult of these three.
To put it a little more explicitly. Ubuntu names their releases for the YY.MM of release 16.04 was released in the year 2016 (16) in April (04). So those are date based releases rather than semantic versioning (semantic is x.y.z with x major, y minor, z patch).

They release a LTS version every two years in April: 12.04, 14.04, 16.04 and the next will be in 2018, 18.04. They do add a "patch" version after that, but the YY.MM are the major releases. 16.04 is an older version than 16.10, but it will be supported with patches for a longer period of time (major versions of individual software packages will stay the same).
it wasn't edited
> But what happened during the industrial revolution? Unemployment went down, wages went up. In fact the cost of human labour rose dramatically.

It should be added that wages going up and the emergence of a middle class was not a direct result of increased productivity. The labour movement had to fight hard to ensure that those productivity gains were shared with workers.

The problem we face with automation is that there is not much of a collective 'working class' to fight that fight.
Population would be declining in us w/o migrants entering the country. So the US is doing its part on population reduction.

https://www.census.gov/popclock/
"Exactly, we're already beyond the limits of what we can consume. "

No, because in 1960 everyone had the same thing.

Now - you get programming for your niche, which is different than that of the dude next door.

Take clothing: even in the year 2000 people did not really wear fashion. We had 'the Gap' and not much more. Everything else was expensive.

'Fast fashion' has changed the world. Young people can now afford an absurd variety in fashion. Nobody 50+ ever thought you needed a 'new pair of pants' every season. Now it's normal. Clothes are almost disposable. That's a consequence of increased productivity and adapting demand.
I've never met anyone else using Pony in production, so I'll try and give the best answer I can.

> What made you choose Pony?

We wanted a Type Safe language to run a REST API frontend. That is to say, we wanted to have something that could redirect requests to the appropriate servers, at scale, whilst maintaining Type Safety in the server itself. We got hit by so many issues from JSON's weak/absent typing causing runtime errors, we wanted something that could sanely prove that we wouldn't crash.

Whilst we were at it, the same language seemed great for the backend for a couple languages we develop in-house. For example, Owlang is a language developed for teaching with a group of teachers. The first iteration was written in Scheme, today, it runs on top of Pony.

We considered three languages:

* Rust

* Pony

* Erlang

Erlang was a bit odd to throw in the mix, but we couldn't ignore how amazing BEAM is, especially with recovery by dropping and creating thousands of processes without effort.

However, we found Rust was making too many breaking changes, and there was sort of a culture of using Rust Nightly, which doesn't give off a nice solid feel, or didn't back then.

Erlang has this sort of huge cognitive overload with it's syntax, making it take longer to learn, for no obvious benefits.

Pony's Philosophy[0] however, felt damn good, and we investigated their mathematical proof of safety and the like.

> Can you talk more about using Pony in a production environment?

Pony's got a few gotchas. Thankfully, they spell them out. [1]

We have been burned from long running procedures when we've had to tap out to an in-house C library. We went from using around 400mb of RAM for a group of processes, to running out of memory on a 16GB RAM machine.

That was a stupid mistake. However, using a Timer, like the docs tell you to, obliterated that, and we dropped back down to 4-500mb.

The non-preemptive nature of Pony's scheduler has taken a few people, myself included, some time to get used to.

> How do you find writing 'non-actor' code - like just doing some string manipulation?

If you try and avoid the fact you're using Actors, it'll bite you. Pony is designed for concurrency.

However, if we're just talking about methods and classes and so on, and how they feel... Pony feels simple, and easy to use.

Traits and interfaces make subtyping a breeze, especially interfaces.

But, being interested in Erlang, how about some pattern matching?

fun f(x: (String | None), y: U32): String =>
match (x, y)
| (None, _) => "none"
| (let s: String, 2) => s + " two"
| (let s: String, 3) => s + " three"
| (let s: String, let u: U32) if u > 14 => s + " other big integer"
| (let s: String, _) => s + " other small integer"
else
"something else"
end

One more bonus for something Pony has, that proved unexpectedly useful, is the ability to have multiple, or generate, Environments. In terms of Pony, that means argc, argv, argp. Being able to isolate environment variables between processes has been useful for making some configuration easier.

[0] https://tutorial.ponylang.org/#the-pony-philosophy-get-stuff...

[1] https://tutorial.ponylang.org/gotchas/
Second this. Our cat was clearly able to outlast my patience. At one point early-ish into our cat's tenure in our home, during a particularly persistent meowing session I said to my wife (jokingly!), "holy shit I'm going to kill this cat." To which I quickly had the sad realization that some people probably do abuse or kill their pets. So I decided to check for advice from the ASPCA.

All the kitty guides on webbernets say, "be firm and don't give into kitty's demands." Whereas I read on the ASPCA website, "buy an automated feeder."

Guess which worked? Happy automated cat feeder owner, and our cat mostly doesn't drive me insane around feeding times.

For reference, I also own this model of cat feeder and have not needed to harden, though I do have it wedged up next to a wall to lessen risk of tipping.
The fact that it's somehow considered an insult to link to a CDN, rather than installing a gigabyte of tool chains that take years to learn, in order to achieve the exact same result... would be the reason nobody takes front end developers seriously.
I am 26 and just graduated college 3 years behind my high school class. I have accepted a software engineering job, but will be living at home commuting 3 hours per day until I can save up enough for an emergency fund to be able to move out and afford a 12 month lease in case I get fired. I'm planning on getting my own place in the beginning of Q2, 2017. Unfortunately, I'm a little behind salary wise.
> metric-driven companies can go off the rails

Any publicly traded corporation (save a small handful with a non-traditional governance model) are metric-driven companies.

Modern corporations are paperclip maximizer functions executing on a network general-purpose biological computational engines tied together with powerpoint and email and excel spreadsheets.

Want to know what the AI of the future will look like? It will be a lot like Comcast, because it will be built by Comcast and harnessed to the corporate goals of Comcast and thus will have the same value system as Comcast.

The only thing it will lack is Comcast's institutional incompetence, as it will be Comcast's goals executing on dedicated hardware and not semi-autonomous employees. And it will build a dedicated model of every man and woman on the planet, and use that information to build a personalized profile that will determine exactly how many illegitimate charges it can cram on your bill before you'll suffer through a customized cancellation service that is calibrated to your personality and mental state to be just painful enough to drive you to the brink of suicide. And the only reason it's merely to be brink, is because a dead customer is an unprofitable one. (and if you think that's hyperbole, you have a far brighter view of the future than I do)
My thoughts too. I would go further and say that at our current point in time, splitting atoms is easier than reducing population, and maybe easier than reducing consumption.
"It should be added that wages going up and the emergence of a middle class was not a direct result of increased productivity. "

I fully agree that the labour movement was essential.

BUT - wages did definitely rise far before labour got going - and wages could not rise as they did without underlying productivity gains.

But yes - the labour movement was essential.
They don't, but if we met those goals we may be able to get away with not using nuclear. Nuclear produces a lot of power with relatively low side effects, but solar and wind produce a smaller amount of power with no side effects. If we can globally bring our power consumption down to that smaller amount that can be met by solar and wind, we could get rid of the economic and political arguments that keep nuclear from taking off.

Nuclear has such a bad name in so many countries that it'd be nice if we could consider it a dead technology. To do that, it would really help if we could cut consumption to not need the massive glob of power than nuclear is designed to provide.
Cost of tuition continually grows, most graduates are not falling into extremely lucrative salaries and average salaries are not keeping up with inflation. This is far from surprising but is very concerning.

Another avenue to pursue this discussion from is the % of income allocated to retirement savings. I have a sneaky suspicious most of my peers are saving less for retirement than the same demographic 10, 20, 30 years ago.

What happens in a few decades when all these adults who lived with their parents and hardly saved for retirement due to lower salaries and student loans are too old to work? It seems our tax dollars will be supporting them and this looks like a big problem. Curious what others think or if I am looking at this problem from the wrong perspective.
Yes, yes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best is today. Is nuclear any different? I am unaware of anything about nuclear energy that would have worked 20 years ago but is a bad idea to do today.
Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (2015)
That would be my interpretation, yes. To be fair Searle would say that it proves the opposite, but his argument isn't much more than "isn't that crazy?!" (Ok that wasn't very fair.)
What (if any) progress is being made on producing nuclear power via groups of much smaller reactors, instead of larger reactors that are more failure prone?

What are the latest trends in the nuclear power industry?
What makes you say they'd be easier to implement?
We lock our cat out of the bedroom at night (and have since day 1), and own a cat feeder. Cat ownership bliss.