skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Emails do not get saved. No logs. 100% private on swiss servers

I appreciate your effort to keep privacy, but I think it's more realistic something like the old policy of http://www.mailinator.com privacy:

> So if the government issued a subpeona to Mailinator to divulge emails or logs, you'd rat me out?
Holy crap, yes. I'm not going to jail for you, I have a boyish face and very (very) supple skin.

> Here's the short version- Mailinator/Outscheme/Paul does not keep/store/archive ANY emails in the system beyond the time that they live in the box normally. In other words, if I can get an email, that means you can too simply by checking the box. We have had law enforcement already approach us to retrieve emails - it simply can't be done. There is nothing to retrieve once the email is deleted.
Rust for functional programmers (2014)
Check out the screenshot in the article of the conversation with @SlackHQ.
The gig economy is also a management style
Exactly. Note how the headline says up to $12B. Not paying Accenture to implement and then not use blockchain could save up to $50B every year!
Exploring Quadcopter Lift Dynamics
> “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” - Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

This quote is by John Steinbeck not by Ronald Wright. Ronald Wright merely quoted Steinbeck.

The way Steinbeck actually said it (and the way you're implying it) is different than how Americans perceive this. To Americans, being a 'millionaire' is a goal to aspire to, it's like to every school kid who dreams of being Harry Potter who fights evil, is a goal to aspire to. But to Steinbeck (a self-described socialist) and to you, these goals are delusions.

America IS proudly the nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires. To Americans them becoming a millionaire is what might happen, whereas to you, that's not what did happen.

The reason why European countries are not the nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires because anyone aspiring that goal would rather move to America (that's also the reason why Europe does not have a real right wing). So what you're left with is people with a different kind of aspiration.
pg's own latest post was quickly swept from the front page yesterday by a crew harping on a political analogy unfriendly to Trump.

And the top comment is from a 4 day old account that somehow gained 17 karma for the one post.

So yes, something seems to be broken.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414527
I worked in a consulting-type company for a bit and the most valuable lesson was that, generally speaking, nobody knows anything about anything. The most valuable institutions in the world have completely clueless people managing their tech and the ignorance only gets worse as you go up the chain.

It all boils down to "nobody got fired for buying IBM". Your blockchain initiative is only to get you noticed enough to get promoted or hired to a better position somewhere else. By the time anybody realizes how worthless it was you're long gone.
a misinformed populace puts pressure on elected governments to govern poorly.

Worse than a misinformed populace is a populace that can't think. The latter might well get real information and dismiss it.
So it turns out I can still use the Duo Mobile app. I have to re-add the device. Not the most intuitive but then again I figured it out on my own -shrugs-
Yes, this time it is different.

I like the comparison to horses. Steam engines and trains threatened to replace horses in the mid 1800s. A lot of things that were previously done by horses were replaced with trains and steam engines.

Yet the horse population grew, and cities remained full of horses. There were countless transportation innovations in the 1800s, from canals to streetcars and omnibuses to bicycles. But the horse population kept growing and showed no signs of being threatened by this "automation". Whenever something took a horses job, there will always be other jobs that technology can't do yet, right?

Then the car was invented, and within 2 decades the horse population crashed. Suddenly the price of feeding and maintaining a horse was much higher than the alternative. There is no law of economics that says the supply and demand of a good can't fall below the cost of maintaining it. Or that wages can't fall below minimum, in our case.

Robotics has made incredible advancements over the past 50 years or more. They have taken over entire factories, doing countless routine tasks previously done by humans. But they are still very limited. They have 0 intelligence - they can't see, they can't learn. They can only perform a rote series of movements. So there is still tons of work available for humans.

But with recent advancements in machine learning, this is about to change. A robot will soon be able to be trained to flip burgers, or drive a car, or take a customer's order, etc, etc. I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Maybe skilled professions will be protected - I can't imagine robots being able to program computers for awhile. But the vast majority of humans can not be trained to be computer programmers.
Yes, this. One of the big things I talk about with sales is the difference between changing a priority for a customer vs. adding distinct new things. As a recent example, a client wants better and faster feedback on the trial they're conducting (we're in the med-tech space), and we've already got a new dashboard designed and on our product roadmap. I'm more than happy to prioritize that over other product pieces if it'll get us the contract, because we're already going to do it, we're only changing the 'when'.

On the other hand, when they ask for something off the roadmap, we get into more complex issues (is this market-demand data, or custom work?) Particularly for grunt-level custom work (say, adding a support for tracking data on a niche wearable device that we don't currently support) there's a lot more questions that follow.

One of the most insidious of the latter, IMO, is that if it's just for one contract, then we're either hiring contractors/outsources (expensive, high management overhead), hiring new engineers (risky to grow headcount on a whim), or redirecting resources to tasks that are likely to have both lower ROI and provide lower growth for the re-tasked engineer. At our small size and need for high-quality people, I consider this to be a real cost too.
Haven't read through the WebCrypto standard, but it's hard to create a real barrier between a server process and a client process on the web. In essence, any good crypto UI would have to happen outside of the client process, so that the server cannot intercept your input. (This is my objection to well-meaning companies that say "Hey, we can't even read your stuff, it's encrypted on the client" because, if you have auto-update, or if you ccan inject code into the client, that privacy guarantee can be revoked at any time.)
> how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy

Survivorship Bias; Not everyone is thriving under the current circumstances, not everyone was thriving during the Industrial Revolution or the Digital Revolution.
Airbus sees 'flying car' prototype ready by end of year
The article had a very prominent image of a tweet from @SlackHQ about the lack of encryption at rest - https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1400/1*OBXEceCpTP4jUeTZu...
Interesting, I've never experienced a ST crash. Using Linux and Windows.
You are proof that the hype surrounding AI/Machine Learning has gone way too far.
Here is a strange thing I have seen: Turnover is bad for a company overall, but good for H.R. HR teams are more important the more there is a need for recruitment. I have seen them be the part of the company that says "we are a team like a sports team, not a family," implying churn is OK. That is good for their productivity, particularly if their workload is on boarding and "culture" as well as recruiting.
This whole question is missing philosophical context.

Maybe not now, but once we all get automated, what is the goal we're trying to reach?

Where are we going with this?
Support for a lot of the statements can be found in the refs of this Science VS podcast episode [1] which, in its 3rd part, deals specifically with the environmental impact of organic farming.

[1] https://gimletmedia.com/episode/5-organic-food/
We'd appreciate respective bug reports, thanks :)
State-storage
Keywords: "up to"
The problem with these sort of blanket policies is that they often have unexpected consequences- For instance, if we hand out lots of checks to the underemployed it MIGHT make their lives better or it MIGHT cause macroeconomic disruptions tied to the labor market that triggers inflation on basic staples, making the underemployed worse off than they were before the new policies.

I'm sympathetic do the idea of saying "we've go to do something" but history unfortunately shows instances where "doing something" is often worse than "doing nothing" so you have to be very very careful.
"Authoritarian regimes have much less to fear from this. If we disrupt public opinion in China, who cares? They don't really need public consent to do anything."

Every government, authoritarian, or not, continues to exist because they have the implicit consent of their subjects. Even in extremely repressive regimes, you'd be surprised at how many people support their leaders. My grandfather remembers people crying upon hearing the news of Stalin's death - and he has strong reasons to doubt that all of them were crocodile tears.

Read Solzhenitzin - even in labour camps, there were people who continued to endorse the state. Them ending up in a camp? That was all just a misunderstanding, that will soon be cleared up, if they make enough appeals to the right people. The GULAG had no shortage of temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
No he's simply pointing out that your employer can only pay you what the market is allowing him to pay you. Or in other words, your salary is what your marginal productivity to the company is.

If you are not working for 2 months a year, then you're getting paid for only 10 months of what you could have gotten over 12 months.

In other words, there ain't no such thing as 'paid vacation' when the employer can simply account for that 'paid vacation' when making you an offer.
Bill Gates Wants to Patent a Concussion-Sensing Football Helmet
Yeah, that's a detail for the courts to resolve -- whether Carmack was downloading the emails Hillary Clinton style or not.
Thank you. The site is pretty unusable on my iPhone.
Can you expand on the evidence of "Negroids" in Brazil 40,000 years ago? I'm familiar with the idea of pre-Clovis settlements and the controversy around that, but I was under the impression these were thought to be earlier settlers from East Asia, like the Clovis people.

The only indication of Africans in South America I can think of are the much later statues and idols of faces from Olmec Mexico, circa 1000 BC, which some claim have "Negroid" features (a supposition that has to be debunked with an unfortunate degree of frequency).
It's a great idea but in reality most third-party tools are going to work slightly differently and the abstractions will leak (unless they were developed against an existing interface, in which case you don't need to create the wrappers yourself anyway).
An informal introduction to Sparrowdo configuration management system
I agree. A smart data scientist doesn't waste their time reinventing the wheel: they build off the hard work of others. When necessary they can create what is needed, but they don't do so typically.

They are both more and less, in my experience, than statisticians (more flexible and solution-oriented, less rigorous and classical), than analysts (they can do more, in general, but a great analyst will be better at analysing and visualizing), than developers (they know more stats, less software engineering, and have great patience for wrestling data into submission). I like to think of data scientists as people who combine the skills of all the above to solve hard problems which exceed the domain of any of specialty (analyst, statistician, developer). It doesn't mean we're amazing at everything, just that we are effective, flexible problem solvers.

And for the record, machine learning, statistical modeling, and data mining are just a small portion of the pie. Being good at modeling and machine learning will not remotely guarantee success as a data scientist.
Crude Nation: What Happened to Venezeula
I think you mean Collapse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose...)? Do you have more rebuttal to that? I'm reading it at the moment, and I'm always looking for issues with JD's usually compelling arguments.
Statistically over the past 100 years democratic institutions have affected (or is it effected in this case?) the politics of authoritarian regimes dramatically more, as in orders of magnitude more, than the other way around
I thoroughly expect anti-automation protectionism to emerge, akin to the H1B protectionist policy.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/16/new-york-driver-groups-p...
I don't think the change is linear here. Industrial revolution pushed people behind desks because human still had brains while machines were dumb (sic). Then desk jobs were split between computerized backend and social interface done by people; this is what is gonna fall soon. Comptuers can now listen and answer to you; gather real world analog / organic data; rather than only dealing with structured data as since the 60s.

Also, lots societies needs don't even require Alpha Go level of AI; and computer will make these tasks automatic. And these class of worker won't beat machines logic until a deep learning (sic sic) phase.
There are cases where this may be the case, but did you look at the tools in the blog post? Can statisticians be expected to write mongoDB code, create a web scraper, and make interactive visualizations in D3?

Title inflation exists, but there is a real-world role here that isn't really captured by "statistician" at all.
It means we didn't have enough time to make sure the app is great without bugs for this feature.
Its also possible that whatever constraint they were working around no longer exists. Either way, it's a case of not tearing down a fence before you know why it was put up.

G.K. Chesterton, 1929:

>In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
Here's an example that was just pointed out to me by prokoudine:

https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?id=52ad5bb2a11e39f...

The default situation was that the toolbox grabbed the focus when clicked. That meant various actions, eg. "Show/hide docks", didn't work if the last thing you clicked was the toolbox. That's an annoyance created by "accepting the defaults", that's thankfully now been fixed in light of real-world usability issues.
Thanks- Can a developer select one tier for the US and another tier for a different country?
It's worth nothing that per the linked talks, 538's data visualizations are indeed created with R and ggplot2; the fancy annotations are done in Illustrator after exporting from ggplot2 in SVG/PDF.

The vignettes (https://mran.microsoft.com/web/packages/fivethirtyeight/vign...) are a good tutorial in dplyr/ggplot2 too.
> Despite my whining...

The thing with complaints is... Personally I'm prepared to handle a lot of that, even trash talking. But only if the user ends up providing a useful insight. Otherwise it's just a huge senseless loss of time for both parties.
This is great, the article starts out discussing TeX and then proceeds to screw up every instance of `fi` and `fl` by replacing it with terrible ligatures.
We should never be afraid of the truth. If scientific investigation doesn't support spirituality (it hasn't so far, and there's no sign of that changing) then we should be able to find better ways to satisfy people's needs rather than clinging to myths.
The problem with AI is that it's dynamite when it comes to capital-labour relations. You can't compete with something with perfect agency that never gets sick. Now, are there going to be new categories of work and new economies? Yes. But in the meanwhile, for a category of work that defines a plurality if not majority of the functioning economy (basically anything that doesn't require creativity across multiple domains or empathy), there are going to be SEVERE income share implications.

Keep in mind that labour share of income has gone down drastically in the last few decades and that as a result, real wages have stagnated -- which has produced significant unrest in developed countries and unseated the established political order. If that trend continues...
I'd guess that javascript is not as fast as C++, and the animations are not hardware accelerated.
I don't work in the manned space part of NASA and the software I deal with isn't critical, so I can't say. Most of what I know about Flight software development comes from co-workers who've done that work. They speak of getting written permission to swap two lines of code. That sort of thing. I think it would be cool to have code I wrote running on Mars, but I don't know if I could cope with that development environment.
I owned the project and decided to kill it, I guess you can call it due to technical debt, but probably more accurately it was due to incompetence, both by the developers and by myself as their "manager".

my product was http://www.teamkpi.com/

I hired 3 mid-level PHP and jsp developers in Thailand and had them make the website + reporting page.

total nightmare. Don't hire developers and assume that they will rise to the occasion (learn new tricks). I gave them as much time as they needed to research and make sound engineering decisions, I ended up with a spaghetti nightmare Frankenstein mix of server side scripts mixed with client side script mixed with server side that generates client side script.

In Thailand at least, you always need a manager to force architecture and design decisions, and force devs to refactor poorly thought out solutions.

I was naive and thought that I could have a team of 3 figure out the web part while I write the desktop client and provide PM-level guidance.
Little tip: "nursing homes" and "assisted living facilities" are different things. For one, nursing homes are regulated at the federal level, while assisted living is at the state level.
I don't know enough to recommend for or against either, but it was complete news to me when I learned they were different, so anyone looking into them might benefit from that knowledge too.
A clarification question is not asking the same question twice. The point seems to be that you should pay attention.
I think more of it had to do with a systemic and institutional plan of action to prevent any politician who gave voice to those concerns from achieving success in the primaries
One of the underestimate things of building a reddit alternative is the effort to moderate. You must moderate aggressively to give the site the feel you like. For example, HN is extremely heavily moderated in spite of the plain look.

Do you like to build a site that your family would use? Will they like the current mix of stories there?
I think this is predicated on the idea of replacing an employee who leaves of their own accord, that you would have preferred to hold onto. Not of one you let go, or are glad to see leave. Basically, just the employees who are worth the amount you are paying them, or more; not those who are worth less.
>I don't know if Finland does it as well, but this completely ignores how US tax brackets work. There's never a point where going up a tax bracket means you'd take home less money than you would have before your raise.

And that's not what the article says.

Here, read it again:

>the more a person earns, the higher percentage of their wealth will be taken from them

It goes on to say:

>The work disincentives are therefore still very much present in the tax system."

Which is true. In fact, any forcible income redistribution, even with a flat tax, disincentives work.

>What a huge leap to make from struggling to struggling because nobody wants to buy their product. They could easily be struggling purely because they left their old job to pursue this and now have no steady income. The article even suggests this initially, so I have no idea how they just ignored it.

But you're ignoring the fact that "they have no steady income" because no one (or very few people) want to buy their products.

>Not everything needs to be about generating more wealth for yourself.

And in a free society, you are free to pursue less economically rewarding endeavors. What you can't do is get the state to force other people to subsidize you.

>This is just about generating wealth and screwing over everyone in the process for them

They said nothing about "screwing over everyone in the process". Keeping the income you earn is not screwing anyone else over. You do not owe anyone your income and no one owes you income. You're promoting a dysfunctional and incoherent moral system.
Would love to post this internally so HR sees it, but I'm afraid to appear on their radar ;)
This is a frighteningly accurate description of the company I'm currently at. They spent many years chasing after the enterprise level customers at the cost of alienating their smaller team level users and never had an answer when requests would crop up from the larger accounts asking for features ('just get it done'). Now they're trying to pivot back to the team level customers and are having an supremely difficult time dealing with the tech debt built up by addressing the enterprise level concerns. We tout ourselves as being a product shop when in reality we're trying to be both.
Practically, sure, you pretty much have to do whatever it takes to get it working. But its not like we're talking about trade secrets here. They simply have to release a coherent definition of what they consider a typical load.

I get your point, but nothing wrong in drawing attention to the specs being incomplete to the point of being useless.
>History, though, has demonstrated that technological breakthroughs lead to new employment opportunities

Except history has never had to content with automation and AI. Sure, back in the old days you took farmers and showed them how to make steel. Then took the steel workers and showed them how to work in a cubicle in a service economy. Now we're not that far away from the machines doing cubicle work. What's past the service economy? What's past creative and technical work?

I think its a little naive to think we'll always find work for people to do. There has to be an endgame here and this might be it. Just because certain people were wrong in the past doesn't mean the end of labor as we know it won't ever happen.

Considering we live in a political environment paranoid about "job stealing" and a POTUS who reflects those views, well, of course IBM mouthpieces are parroting those views. IBM doesn't want to become the posterboy for job loss via automation. They want you to think its the other guys.
At least it made "fi" into a ligature. I don't know what we would do without that.

I apologize for the errors, I'm on iOS and it's difficult to check the output of copy & paste.
The demos look nice, but I'm not a fan of dependencies (Babel or Stylus). Are there any raw js + css code examples?