skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In recent months, there has been a large number of posts on Hacker News extolling the coming robot (and/or AI) revolution. I've read that we are facing a jobless future because all the jobs will be automated.

All of that might be true, at some point in the future. The future is a very long time. I have no idea how they economy will work 500 years from now. But we can form reasonable opinions about what will happen during the next 10 years.

For all the rhetoric about a productivity revolution thanks to robots and/or AI, we should check in with reality and remember how bleak the present is. Productivity in the USA ran at a high level during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, but it stalled out in 1973.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/20150709...

"Labor productivity in the private nonfarm business sector rose by an average of 2.9 percent per year between 1948 and 1973. Beginning in the earlier 1970s, though, productivity slowed sharply, averaging only 1.5 percent growth between 1973 and 1995. Several factors can help explain the downshift. First, growth in the immediate post-war era benefited from the commercialization of numerous innovations made during World War II, including the jet engine. The early 1970s marked the point at which the wartime innovations became exhausted. Public investment also slowed, and the 1970s oil shocks and collapse of the Bretton Woods system caused dislocations that weighed on growth. "

For awhile, the situation was better in Britain, but since 2008 the situation has been worse. Britain has seen a complete collapse in productivity growth since 2008.

All of this is difficult to reconcile with talk of a revolution in productivity. Maybe that revolution will happen, but as late as 2016, there was no evidence of it in any government statistic, in any of the advanced economies.

It's also worth noting, if we do see uptick in productivity growth (thanks to robots or any other technology) it might simply get us back to the kind of productivity we took for granted during the boom years of the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s. And those were decades of full employment. And that would be awesome.
There's an arbitrage opportunity wherever a person does a better job than is strictly necessary.
Economics. I have started to get interested in them in 2016. Like most topics I get into, I started by looking at the history of the field. I also read Basic Economics. Now I would like to start taking actual lessons, either Coursera or maybe even physical classes at some point, if I can find good ones compatible with my work schedule in Paris.

I also want to get up to date with the most important advances in my field (distributed systems and algorithms). I did follow research in 2015, but not in 2016, so I have to catch up a bit.
The Case for Taking the Giving What We Can Pledge
I once ordered a micro SD card off Amazon.

The box it came in looked like it contained an Xbox: it was huge! Upon opening it and removing all the Air Cushions™, there was a tiny little envelope at the bottom with the microsd inside.

Completely bewildering, albeit amusing.
In one way yes:

Just include them in positive, meaningful ways.
> I'll be honest, traversing a linked-list and implemented a B-tree (assuming someone reminds you what a B-tree is) are not particularly difficult problems

I'll be honest, this is indistinguishable from "I am good at X and I'm great therefore X is a good measure of ability".

Maybe worth rephrasing
Actually web components that are backed by all...browsers won ;-) HN doesn't see it yet though.
We replaced the baity title with a (hopefully) representative phrase from the article body. If someone suggests a more accurate and neutral title, we can change it again.
Vitamin D - https://mega.nz/#!VZBlUTgZ!uEBJgDYUZSocuHBBHLAFvZ8zBNnz4EY3R...

Sucrose https://mega.nz/#!QYBk3KiJ!_72HCKWQwvFnosXpCxmH1fi80wXyLJhht...

Sugar
https://mega.nz/#!kVx0gY6R!nlMy1VqAKGHiEembU1nbTFxCNICgHZEB2...

Carbohydrates

https://mega.nz/#!0M5F1JAQ!NCeWcjurUqhf5lw-ZIeCjBR-9hknt_Ehy...

Fluoride

https://mega.nz/#!JBJEkDTI!lhLPyHnNuLylN6SLETs6rjxBxk4Ho_pPz...

Diet

https://mega.nz/#!tc5RwKLK!gnQ1aN29YK5PLmiVV0mKqGJXshfCEjZgm...
How do you know they obviously need the change by making a decision away from the project management discussions?

Perhaps a solution has been discussed and is incoming from a regular developer?

They could deprecate the module where the change is "obviously" needed in a larger fix.

Frame it a different way: You're basing the needs of a project on your view of it, which, minus discussing things with project mgmt beforehand, may be incomplete.
If you're accessing mutable data from multiple goroutines, then you're not only using channels! :)
Postmarket Management of Cybersecurity in Medical Devices [pdf]
agreed. my worry is that even if people decide to ethically develop AI, there will be those who disagree with those ethics and/or willingly ignore their conscience. I don't see a way out short of a political revolution / bloodshed.
React isn't a framework.. not sure what you're bitching about.
That's only true for the first year, and only if you fail badly (ie. stop doing any work at all) -- unless they changed it very recently.
I think Economics is a fairly big outlier though. There's quite a good book by Economics Prof. Steve Keen called Debunking Economics, which is very accessible and goes over how most of the core tenants of neoclassical (mainstream) economics have been known to be flawed for decades, yet it's all still taught as fact.

It's not a scholarly work, but references a great deal of scholarly work.

It's fascinating to read and imagine how the profession has not been reformed in light of these known flaws (and the fact of the huge failure of mainstream Economics to predict the Great Recession).

There is some hope though in some student movements that are starting to challenge how economics is taught (like Rethinking Economics and the Post-crash Economics Society). It may be that like some times in science, the profession will advance "one funeral at a time" as the new generation comes in.
Ask HN: Trying to get back into the tech industry and need advice
I recently graduated from business school and took a job in finance. However, I've quickly realized the finance industry is not for me I miss working in the tech sector. I spent 5 years in the technology industry prior to grad school. However tech companies won't even interview me anymore and all I get is rejection notices without even an interview despite 5 years of experience in tech.

Any advice would greatly appreciated.
Packages from the google/Apple App Stores are signed
When I went to "high school" in Sweden in the 90's, you could choose between a few theoretical, three-year, "college-prep" programmes, or a multitude of vocational programmes that would pretty much land you a job straight out.

But in the 2000's sometime, our glorious politicians decided that it was "unfair" that students who chose the vocational programmes couldn't go straight to university, so they were all changed, a lot more theoretical subjects were added, such that everyone would be eligible for college.

Naturally, a complete disaster, because the kids who previously chose vocational programmes because they were really tired of school and wanted to do something else, didn't do well in the new programmes and started flunking out en-masse instead.

I hear there's talk of going back to the old model again, but that's a decade or two "lost", because of political short-sightedness.

Yes, it's better to get your population college-educated than not, but you can't force people to do it. If people want to quit studying after elementary or high-school, let them! And if they want to go back to school after a few years, take them in again!
On the media jumping on it like vultures, I think plane accidents can give us hope.

When there is a plane crash, medias will be all over it for weeks. But at the same time they will repeat again and again that aircrafts are incredibly safe, and that you are more likely to have a crash on your way to the airport, etc.

The opposite is done for terrorism. Every time someone is killed in a terror attack, the message is "it could happen to you".

So not sure what makes them behave either way but it could still turn out to be OK.

On car ownership I agree. I don't really buy that all cars will be shared when fully automated.

For sentimental reasons, people like to own their car, they like to invest in it, they don't like to find a car that looks more like a mix of dumpster and toilet after 20 party-goers used it before you.

For a very practical reason, the same reason farmers own there heavy equipment when they could just rent it: because they all need it at the same time. The primary purpose for cars is commuting from home to work and everyone needs to do that at about the same time. So the only guarantee you will have to have a car available when you need it at peak period will be to own it.

What I think could happen is that when self driving cars have become mandatory in large cities, you won't really need to park the car near where you live or work. It could go park itself in some large underground car park 5-10 min away. Without parked cars on both sides of the street you increase the capacity of most cities (at least in Europe) massively.

That plus smoother driving could go a long way eliminating traffic jams.
Yep, it does much more, imho too much more.

After years I closed my account and moved on to Dropbox paper. Works much better for me for primarily note taking, has a decent web interface and is free. For other stuff I use other apps.

Evernote should rethink their value proposition and what kind of app they want to be.
The ribbon has it's upsides and downsides. I would argue it would have been much better if you could place it on the side not just the top due to a decade of wide screen laptops. Office needed larger icons and lost a lot of functionality. But, they clearly needed larger Icons.

My problem is more when the UI is changed without any benefits.
You completely misunderstood who was needing the fix. In this case, it was the person who spent time fixing it. They likely fixed it because they need the fix.

Doesn't matter if the entire module becomes deprecated. They'll stay back with their fix (likely). Doesn't matter if another solution is inbound, they needed the fix now and not when a patch lands.

And since they already took the time to fix it - little time is lost sending a PR, regardless if it gets merged or not. If it is merged? Sweet you helped the project out (most likely). If not? Well a small bummer that you'll need to maintain your own patch(es).
They don't need anyone to buy their wares if they are self reliant and can produce everything they need. We're not talking about making more and faster cell-phones with less labour, we're talking about a small group of people making everything they need without the need for any labour at all.

That might not be a "handful" of people, but it's certainly a smaller number than our current population.

Who needs coal miners if we have all the cheap solar we can use? Who needs farmers if we automate farming? Who needs drivers, maids, schoolteachers, cooks, etc. if we can have the machines do it for us?

Who needs lawyers if our disputes are simply settled by some AI judge? Who needs cops if our streets are patrolled by security robots and we have a Minority Report style crime-prediction system.

In a way, it's paradise -- if you're at the top.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure they suggest democracy as we know it is dead. One person, one vote? Only in an age of massed human warfare. If you can take out a million or a billion people with high-tech biological warfare (and those people aren't producing anything anyway) what good are they and why do they deserve the vote?

Not saying it's right, but the logic of megapolitical violence is cruel and unyielding. It's quite the lens.
These articles sadly derive from institutional press releases that invariably oversell the underlying work.

We have an unsustainable systemic problem arising from the need to convince governments filled with anti-science politicians to fund expensive science. The institutions therefore feel the need to oversell every tiny paper so voters and politicians believe we're getting somewhere fast and won't kill funding, but the pace of real science is always fits and starts. You see a lot of people who have somehow figured out how to search the literature and cherry pick a paper they don't like as evidence of wasteful spending, and the system believes (falsely in my view) that overselling and oversimplifying results in a language that voters and politicians can understand.

Edit: I should have also said that the other big motivating factor for institutional press offices is to market the institution to other potential donors.
I make and sell low-cost robots, and business is great. :) But you don't see them, because I'm in a niche where I sell to companies with huge pressures to cut costs and go faster. (You don't see this kind of pressure for robots in the home, but I wouldn't be surprised to see dishwasher and service robots appear in chain hotels and restaurants, because of the scale they are at.) Having one dishwasher to unload is not a profitable problem to solve for most people in their home, but if you had 1000 dishwashers, it would be worth it to investigate your automation options.
Most of the code you write, has probably been written before. Why not reuse it?
Would love some feedback on a feature I am validating for a startup.

The feature "Code Seeker" finds the code you need. It shows you real code from your, your teams, your organization or even public repositories. You can navigate the code by selecting next or previous and zoom in or out to see more of the code.

The benefit is code reusability as well as learning from existing code.

Any feedback is welcome - thanks
Given the scenario that I am using open-source software X, and that I have made changes to the software to suit my requirements, and that I believe those changes might be useful to others, I can either:

1. Contribute those changes up-stream, by sending a pull request.

2. Publicise the changes, by keeping my fork, and/or talking about it in a blog post.

3. Keep quiet, and say nothing.

4. Send an email to the original developer, suggesting I may have some useful changes, and asking whether I should send a PR.

If I start working on changes without notifying the original maintainer, well, I might do work that's useless, that maintains no value, that isn't sustainable. But that's my loss.

If I send a PR, the net loss is the maintainer's time to review my PR (if they choose to).

Many open-source contributions stem from sending PRs out of the blue. You're right to say that it can be an inefficient mechanism in some circumstances; it's just that a lot of developers are OK with that.
> (Well, maybe one more option came to my mind that might actually help. If the autonomous cars would be able to increase the capacity of crossroads by somehow communicating with each others like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pbAI40dK0A )

How do cyclists and people walking handle that type of intersection?
I know it's not best practice, but I leave them open. For years.

They may be fixable, they may be useful to someone. I've no need to reject them unless I really think they're a bad idea.

I'm sure this can be frustrating to users and contributors, but I also see it as a way of encouraging forks. "I haven't had a chance to review this, but you might try PR #NN..."

The most useful ones get replaced by better versions by other people, and eventually merged.
SpaceX just teased a photo of its highly anticipated Falcon Heavy rocket
> It's the liberals standard reply

What an odd thing to say.
A somewhat related tool is Vault SSH Helper:
https://github.com/hashicorp/vault-ssh-helper

It provides an audit log (without session history/playback) and one-time passwords for login. It avoids copying of ssh certificates to every host, similar to teleport.

One nice advantage with Teleport is the recording of sessions. On the other I like how Vault's tool use standard ssh on the client-side.

Some type of merge between the two would be a dream :D
My Presentation about “Writing Maintainable, Modular and Scalable CSS”
It sounds like you have rare skills. You certainly could learn to be just another web dev, but I'd take a shot at seeing if you can use your current skills remotely - you are likely to earn more.

I'd probably learn Python/Django and numpy. They gives you the ability to do solid backend web dev, and should open up plenty of jobs. Python is also often used to tie together high performance c code, so you may be able to find work that uses both your new skill and your old.
It depends if they went hungry at some time in their life.
I'm actually interested in pretty much the same thing, but for someone with walking and balance issues. I've pretty much figured that at some point I'm going to need to get a delta trike (balance issues) and find a way to cobble something together behind the seat.

Maybe a project for spring/summer.
I re-use mine when I sell stuff on ebay, etc.. (I also re-use boxes and other stuffing supplies).
Thanks Pablo, appreciate the post.
I conducted this presentation during a meetup in Egypt. There is a video of me giving the talk but it is in Arabic. I will probably caption it :) Be gentle please it's my first time to give a public talk :)
Link to the YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJNMdjtaaaY
Monetize GRE blog?
The 40 hour week was a compromise for labour regime that doesn't grind people down into a physical wreck. Remember it wasn't office work but production jobs where your pee breaks were regulated. There hardly was a technological difference with immediate pre- and post-unionization periods.

Regulating the workday had the extra effect of labour appreciating in value. One couldn't run factory on two 12-hour shifts anymore, so had to hire for third shift. It pent up the demand for workers, who could command better terms. This certainly helped establishing blue collar middle class.
My brother's girlfriend is making a blog with silly memorable stories about GRE vocabulary words. Think it could be monetized?
And guess who always had to fix my parent's computer in the end... Finally my interest in computers was useful xD ;-) they are very proud of my career now and are a bit of envious when I can travel the world for some SAP events :D
tl;dr - the policymakers who made the decisions were not economists, they were politicians who ignored economists' advice. Namely, they refused to embrace fiscal measures (deficit spending, including through the self-triggering methods of the welfare state) and relied entirely on "confidence-building" measures and on the monetary tools available to central banks - which were, as economists' models predicted, ineffective in the prevailing circumstances.
Why is education never discussed in the context of robot / AI automation? It is the solution. If not the ONLY solution. We've been here before with the industrial revolution. 50% of the population was working in agriculture and everyone feared the factory would automate everyone's job. But we managed. We managed by creating the current education system to produce educated factory workers.

Now the current education system is out of date and failing us. IMO programmers are just the modern day factory worker; leveraging machines to do more with less. Imagine if we had ~30% of the population working on the next abstraction (software / robots / AI) instead of the current 2%. We'd be living in the real Utopia. I'm of the opinion that there is an infinite amount of jobs; as we as a species always want our current situation to be better than it currently is. But that only works if everyone can produce relatively equally. The problem now is we have a class of society which can not compete against another class who is benefiting from automation; not just programmers, but anything tech.
Rust doesn't have any significant runtime startup cost, but it certainly is an issue for Java (and presumably Go as well).
Anyone know what the Radiation Mixing Method joke is about?
http://imgc-cn.artprintimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/90/903...
You might consider a browser extension like Stylebot which lets you bring your own custom CSS.
They took the course to pass the interview; is that surprising? :-)
Unions can and have negotiated for sharing the benefits of automation with workers and for compensation to workers whose jobs were automated away.
> It's competing with damn near everything that touches data at your company.
MSSQL for data processing? Really? I think only huge legacy projects still using it. We're using Hadoop with some C++/Hardware acceleration.
> Nothing is wrong with Poland. If something is wrong then your ability to read presented data.

This is, unfortunately, what nationalistic pride clouding otherwise smart people's judgment looks like.
There is a difference between wanting equality of outcome and equality of opportunity. Don't believe me? look at some documentaries about communism!

You also brought up #BlackLivesMatter, after 3 seconds of googling I get things like:

https://occamsrazormag.wordpress.com/2015/11/22/extreme-anti...

There is a lot of irony in this type of racism.

Why "#BlackLivesMatter"? Why not "#AllLivesMatter" or "#StopPoliceBrutality"?

All these things do is foster tribalism.
Could you recommend a particular dentist there? Do they have the Solea 9.3 µm laser? From what I've been able to find, it's the only one that directly removes enamel and dentin. The other kind is erbium lasers which vaporize a water jet which then removes the material, but it's vastly less precise.
Hey Jon,

Not Steve here, but I was wondering if you were being sarcastic here:

> Make rust playful.

Why am I asking if you're being sarcastic?

> Make a game framework

http://www.piston.rs/

> Make it build on a mobile device

https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/building-an-ios-app-in-rus...

> Make it build on a Pi... without diarrhea

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

> Make it build for the Arduino

(An ARM based Arduino, AVR [which powers the original Arduinos] support is being worked on now)

https://github.com/jamesmunns/teensy3-rs

> Cross compile it to Javascript

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/12/22/Rust-1.14.html
Traversing is a linked list is far simpler than implementing a B-tree.
What Are the Real Benefits of Plus Size Dating?
The big button does say "fork me on github" after all.
Where was this "University of Applied Sciences" and how do i get in.
Sounds great - where is it? Can I test it? I'm not sure what you mean by "next" and "previous", or what you mean by zooming in and out.

How do I specify what I'm looking for? What level of granularity does it work at? What languages does it cover? How is this different from using libraries? How can I trust the code I find?

Does it exist yet?
> We just need to be better to each other.

I believe that the fundamental problems of our time are ethical, not technological. If we can figure that part out, the technology should take care of itself.

I would love to live in a post-scarcity utopia where we all run around self-actualizing. I don't think we need to give up AI to get there -- in fact, I think technology will be the key that unlocks the gate.

But we have to have the wisdom to pass through it with style and bring as many people as we can on the way. Otherwise we might find ourselves fighting for our place in line and possibly even annihilate ourselves in the process.
I like it! but I really wish this would allow you to borrow chords from other keys or modes. Even a song as simple as "The House of the Rising Sun" (which The Animals famously arpeggiated) borrows chords - it's in A minor but uses a D major chord, which you can think of as borrowed from the parallel major.
I thought that it was somebody who has recently discovered the existence of
UDP protocol and brags about that to the world, but from skimming the article,
it actually has some non-trivial remarks about UDP and TCP.

BTW, the article's view angle is multiplayer game programming.