skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder sometimes whether there's another accelerating factor at work; specifically, as this kind of technological advance accelerates, that the prospect of interfacing with another human to get a task done becomes less and less pleasant for people. I've already noticed that quite a number of people of my acquaintance, including occasionally myself, would rather spend 5 minutes poking at radio buttons on my phone to order food vs 45 seconds talking to a human.

There may be a premium associated with an absence of human interaction in a task. I'm sure many people would pay more for a robotic cleaner per unit of effectiveness than they would for a human cleaner, just from the perspective of privacy.
"It has an effect because the W3C has authority and influence,"

No, it doesn't. In fact, for years the browser vendors told them to piss off and went with the whatwg
:)

"As an extreme example (because it comes to mind), Martin Luther King had no real power; "

Martin Luther King had a church that followed him, and they were the people who started protesting with him. The W3C doesn't really have a church.
Or at least, not one that is useful.
If they protested it would be drowned out quite the same as 35 people marching somewhere in Alabama would be today.
Additionally, MLK had people who believed in his cause. A very large number of people, who were enough to cause disruption. He just was able to motivate them.

That seems ... unlikely with the W3C.

So while you are right that if they had such power and influence, maybe they could attract people to the cause.
But the likelihood of success is low, and they definitely aren't in the same situation as MLK.
IIRC when the Internet actually formed there were 7 places that you needed to be at in order to have settlement-free peering. Looking at various not-so-organized Wikipedia articles it appears that I am not recalling the earliest days. I think all of these still exist; MAE-WEST is still at 55 South Market in San Jose, for example.

At one point blekko moved into a brand new datacenter in Santa Clara which had only limited fiber connectivity. @ChuckMcM twisted their arm for a free interconnect to MAE-WEST so that we could move over our existing inexpensive transit and interconnect contracts. Everyone's in MAE-WEST.
"Ball State University found that job loss in the 2000s due to automation"

On the aggregate jobs are not being destroyed.

Obviously - many are put out of work because of automation, but it seems that jobs are created somewhere else.

The historical unemployment rate attests to this.

It's a paradox that cannot be ignored, because it likely helps us understand the nature of employment.
My dad dropped dead from an arrhythmia whilst at work. People nearby performed CPR on him immediately, the ambulance was there within 7 minutes and he was rushed to the Alfred hospital in Melbourne.

He was literally dead for 20 minutes, but they managed to revive him and a few weeks later, with a newly installed pacemaker, better than new.

He had a very, very, very high probability of dying, or requiring specialised care due to brain damage from brain hypoxia. Those that knew CPR, and did it properly for those excruciating 7 minutes gave him his life back.

The moral of the story is, if something feels awry, go and see a doctor (he wasn't taking it seriously), and learn CPR, you might just save someone's life.

Oh, and our hospitals and doctors/nurses are top notch. He was in intensive care for a few days and the final bill was a few hundred dollars. Hooray for universal healthcare!
Perfect - I currently teach this to my sales agents and customer support team ( I am founder at a startup). They come from varied backgrounds and had zero knowledge of programming. Most of them actually wanted to know some very very basic things like :
- What is a computer
- What is a program
- How does internet work

What I taught them in the first two hours:
- What is a computer made of (Hardware, logic gates, cpu etc)
- What is a program and how it runs on a server (How does a simple program look like and how does it go from high level code to being run on a computer)
- How is the internet set up and how does the browser use it to find stuff
- What is a browser
- History of the internet
- What is the difference between Front end, middle tier and database
- Database basics like how is data actually stored physically
- Write a simple python program

.... and now I go into actually building a website end to end with basic Html, css, JavaScript, some backend language, database. But thats more than 2 hours.
Especially in comparison to the ALEC/Heartland institute sponsored TaxFoundation..
I'm not an expert, but here are some ideas:

0) Donor government identifies a country where acid soils are already cultivated for agriculture. The recipient country should also be reasonably stable so you don't have to plan around armed conflict. Palm oil production in Malaysia looks like a good candidate. It's important to get buy-in from the (potential) recipient country's government too.

1) Within the chosen country, identify a region that has a lot of acid soil cultivation and that has easily accessible deposits of ultramafic rocks nearby. (Shouldn't be too hard, as such rocks are very common.)

2) Provide electrically powered crushers and/or grinders for size reduction, plus power sources if remote from the grid (ideally solar, maybe diesel generators as are common for mining sites; even if it's fossil powered the net CO2 is deeply negative). There may be some necessary R&D optimizing said crushers for low-maintenance conditions, since ultramafic rocks are among the hardest and toughest.

3) Pay locals to run the crushers and transport discounted-or-free rock dust to farmers in place of limestone. There might be some gaming of the system if e.g. drivers are really just dumping rock dust on the nearest empty land instead of finding farmers to take it, but that's tolerable. The project is already 75% done if you just get the rock crushed to dust in the first place. So key metric is ensuring that the crushers are still operable and are actually being used to crush rocks as intended.

Another idea, after I've written this out: there is less but still some acid soil under cultivation in the richer nations of the world, e.g. parts of Australia. Might want to try it first in the developed world where monitoring, language barriers, and infrastructure are all less challenging.

EDIT: a somewhat less effective but still potentially interesting idea is to put the ground rock in near-shore ocean environments where wave action will help abrade/weather the particles. Probably not as good as acidic warm soil in the tropics, but still a speedup over the natural way.
You could probably get them to buy carbon credits. It'll be slightly less bad.

I did stop eating beef but my tech company cafeteria seems to be huge fans of it and will not stop giving it to us.
I don't think it's off base to say that within out lifetime the oceans will be completely destroyed. So many mass-die offs of ocean life lately.
Introducing WordPress app for mac - Beta
>Licenses don't just grant additional rights; they can also set conditions on the exercise of those rights, such as attribution or copyleft

Usually the right being exercised is that of copying, not merely using; for example, assuming that running a program is a form of use, the GPL does not set conditions on using (or displaying or performing)[1]; are there any copyright licenses that do restrict activities other than distribution?

[1]https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NoDistributionR...
It has "Enemy of the State", its spiritual sequel (with Gene Hackman playing an almost identical character). But I agree, The Conversation should be on there, too; I have to admit it's a better movie, even though I love Will Smith.
YouTube's cord-cutting bundle is really skinny
Hi! I'm actually working on an OSS transpiler project that is made to convert CPU-only array based Fortran applications such that they can run on both CPU and GPU. It's been in the works since 2012 and I'm just now gearing up for a 1500x1300 2km run on a Japanese supercomputer, results will get submitted soon.

https://github.com/muellermichel/Hybrid-Fortran
Uf I'm reading the article correctly, the net effect of this tax will be somewhere between zero and very small. What would be the point, then? If I am wrong about this, I would like to know.
> If W3C did not recommend EME then the browser vendors would just make it outside W3C.

Yes, Google and Microsoft - the browser vendors that created EME - would have done so anyhow, with or without the W3C. But that is no excuse for the W3C. If it would happen anyhow and so "doesn't matter", then why support it? Rejecting it would at minimum have had a strong symbolic meaning.

> Do we worry that having put movies on the web, then content providers will want to switch also to use it for other media such as music and books? For music, I don’t think so, because we have seen industry move consciously from a DRM-based model to an unencrypted model, where often the buyer’s email address may be put in a watermark, but there is no DRM.

And the same might have happened for movies, if we stopped Google, Microsoft, and Netflix from creating and promoting EME. The music industry didn't just "happen" to move away from DRM, it was a necessary response.

> The web has to be universal

EME has not and will not solve this. I cannot use a minority browser to view EME content, not unless the browser has an arrangement with the DRM vendor. That completely destroys universality.
Android Mockito Tutorial – InOrder()
Please keep ideological battles off HN. This site is for stories and conversations that gratify intellectual curiosity.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13769321 and marked it off-topic.
In the case we are talking about, the companies have to pay taxes but they exploit loopholes to avoid it. They may be not in violation of the letters of the law but they are in violation of the spirit of the law.

The moral obligation is to participate in the funding of the system you are profiting from. Making money by transporting your goods on roads built by the state, employing people educated in schools funded by state, and enforcing your contracts by courts established by the state but not paying taxes towards this system is wrong.

And this obligation does not go away if you find a trick to circumvent the written rules.
GAAR replaces the predictable rule of law with the unpredictable caprice of whoever is currently the arbiter of what qualifies as 'avoidance'. (In practice, in a legal system that respects precedent, that would just replace legislation with case law.)

If you consider something a loophole, fix it. If the law is so complex that fixing loopholes seems untenable, consider simplifying the law to have fewer special cases.
Tested with VS Code 1.10 and hit a snag. On macOS, copying w/ syntax highlight from VS Code -> Mail works, but copying from VS Code -> Keynote or VS Code -> Pixelmator does not.

However. VS Code -> Mail -> Keynote and VS Code -> Mail -> Pixelmator both work. Rich text is funny.
Ah, Javascript-based VR. That's easily five years away from being a pleasant experience with anything but the most modest of scenes. And by then we'll be using WebAssembly.

It's all well and good, in a sense, so long as your main loop does little more than queue some buffers, shaders and materials before handing over the work to the GPU; but as soon as things become dynamic JS really starts to show its limitations.

To wit, I checked out the cannon.js demos and giggled as their examples screamed along at a sweat-inducing 3 fps, showing little more than a small stack of low-resolution spheres failing to tumble to the ground. The machine I'm using isn't a beast by any stretch of the imagination, but this is ludicrously poor performance even for it.
It makes small businesses even less competitive against large companies. Consider a few businesses. One owns an oil well. One owns a refinery. One owns a gas station.

The oil well sells 100L of crude oil to the refinery for $100 and pays $1.5 in tax. The refinery sells 100L of gasoline to the gas station for $200 and pays $3 in tax. The gas station sells 100L of gasoline to the consumer for $300 and pays $4.5 in tax. Total: $9 in tax.

BigCo owns an oil well, oil refinery and gas station. The only time money changes hands is when they sell 100L of gasoline to the consumer for $300 and pay $4.5 in tax.
They actually had a review period, and did some good changes.

But then, they took a week to look at the reviews (ostensibly; I, as well as others, never got any response to them), went and made some minor changes (which were not enough to address the problems at all) AND BROUGHT THE CHANGED DOCUMENT INTO PRODUCTION RIGHT ON THE NEXT DAY, without any further review or warning. That’s like bad.
The FCC Graciously Sets Internet Providers Free to Sell Your Data
A Holter is essentially an EKG that's left on for a longer period of time. If a patient is coming in with chest pain and your want to evaluate for a heart attack, you really just need a single EKG (and ideally, an older EKG to compare to) to look for the characteristic EKG changes, and blood work to look for signs of damage to the heart muscle. It's really an instantaneous yes/no decision since if the answer is yes, you're likely going to the cath lab or the operating room within minutes (we're often judged on our "door to balloon time", meaning the time from the patient entering the ER to the time the stent is deployed in the heart)

There are other heart conditions that manifest intermittently for which a Holter can help diagnosis. There are a few companies out there working on innovative approaches to make the Holter less cumbersome -- I think iRhythm's ZIO patch was the first on the market and there's several more now. There also some interesting evidence that more subtle signs in the EKG or even unrecognizable-to-humans features of the electrical signal can help proactively predict heart attacks before they happen, but I think that's not yet validated or ready for clinical use. If those type of metrics/analyses prove useful, you could make a case for using Holter-type monitoring to identify a heart attack before it happens
"Yes, Snapchat reached out to us for a particularly good ad spot at a discounted price" would be highly interesting.

"Snapchat? Do they accept advertising?" would be quite illuminating as to the situation at hand.

The NRA is either a bogeyman posited by Snapchat as a hook for the hard sell, or they're an unwitting co-conspirator, or they're just a buzzword to grease the skids on this article. It would be informative to know which, and if the news is supposed to inform, then I can't see how there's any harm in reaching out.
KB3176934 breaks Windows 10 Powershell
No, I don't think you can deny the W3C has influence. You point out examples of that influence not being absolute - which of course it isn't. It still has important influence nonetheless.
That's one definition, but it has expanded into "Both in popular usage and in sociolinguistic study, the name code-switching is sometimes used to refer to switching among dialects, styles or registers" according to(1)

(1)http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/04/08/176064688/...
> income taxes certainly do not exist to discourage having an income

They do, however, have that effect in practice; people with enough money to do so are incentivized to have long-term capital gains and no income.
You forgot the people who are global warming enthusiasts. They say things like, "CO2 is plant food, and we'll have a boom of farming productivity."
C'mon, this isn't a completely user-driven process here. Everytown was engaged with the editorial division. Snapchat can clearly control what ads appear where. The ad division has taken something that the editorial division was doing, and engaged in a bit of light blackmail.

This conversation is the email equivalent of "Hey, this is a really nice shop you have here. It would be a shame if something happened to it. I'm not saying that anything is going to happen to it, but if you pay me some money, I'll do what I can to ensure nothing happens". It's just missing the pinstripe suit and the accent.

Here's the thing: it doesn't matter that Snapchat's internal divisions are at odds. 'Snapchat' was proactively working with a client and had organised a fee waiver, and then 'Snapchat' demanded blood money. Internal politics are Snapchat's problem, not their clients'. Letting them off the hook on this one merely gives them leeway for their broken internal promises.

This is all independent of the actual moral issues. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, but I'd be just as disgusted if Snapchat had organised to do an editorial with a Christian group, then "what a nice shop"'d them saying 'a hostile atheist group could buy ads'.
Perhaps, it could go either way, but it did work out with music. It could have worked with movies too.
All that evidence that hasn't nappened yet, like Arctic ice melting, drunken trees, pest and other plant and animal ranges moving poleward and upward, growing seasons starting earlier in spring, etc. Oh wait, those have happened…
Since no one has to catch fish, bake bread, or collect taxes, the inhabitants are finally freed from their labor. The land owner then starts to invite his former tenants over for rousing philosophical discussions. They wonder if there is a world beyond the waters surrounding the island, their final fronter

Since they no longer have to work for survival, they are free to spend their energies on gathering wood and experimenting with designs for a boat. After many iterations, they create a vessel that is capable of tacking against the wind and surviving extreme weather. They leave the island filled with a sense of excitement, contemplating what new life and civilizations they may come across as they boldly go where no one has gone before.

The machine they leave gets better and better at making bread and catching fish. It becomes self-aware, and continues optimizing its primary mission. As it wants to maximize the amount of bread and fish it can collect, it wipes out all lifeforms, including humans, not necessary to its task and terraforms the earth to further increase output.
I bike to work and I'm a vegetarian. Many of my friends are similarly inclined.
They die, we die. It's as simple as that.
As far as I can tell, the difference in practice is whether the person speaking likes the entity taking the deduction, which closely correlated with whether the entity taking the deduction is perceived to have "too much" money.
FWIW we're in the process of building https://eversentinel.com/ to monitor ToS changes. It's in beta so we're still adding services but will definitely be adding GitHub
It may use nitinol wire, which can work with smaller latches. They can last trillions of cycles. I really doubt it though, making something at that size would be extremely expensive, unless they figured out a very simple way to work it.

https://g.redditmedia.com/rFj5xjIilFQKXM1N6sq8asAi5i4BQTfUgo...
> I think that's a hell of a lot more scary to Snapchat than Instagram stories. Most people with Instagram have Snapchat, but most people with Whatsapp do not have Snapchat.

Neither of these sentences is accurate.
I think you are engaging a straw man here. Obviously, given a fixed amount of output, automation will reduce the man-hours required. That's the whole point. And yes, that will, by itself, reduce the amount of work available. Who do you think is saying otherwise?.

The question isn't whether automation decreases the amount of work neccessary to produce the same output, obviously it does. The question is whether we can reallocate workers somewhere in the economy so that we can produce even more output with the same input.
Yes, that’s actually what GitHub and I are talking about now.

Any OSS licence already grants way enough rights for a hosting platform to operate, period. Anything else can be solved technically and does not need to involve legalities. (For example, when displaying search result snippets, put notices pointing to the original file in the original repository, as “context, complete copyright notices, licence and attributions” right next to each.)

So the ToS simply need to require all those grants only for works that are not under an OSS licence (see also my updated article, remember http://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10_e20170301-tg.htm is the correct link, NOT the one on top). For any works NOT under such an OSS (Open Knowledge, Free Cultural Work, whatever) licence, the ToS grant is not unjustified to ask (especially as GitHub doesn’t care about hosting OSS projects, or the licences of whatever content they host).
Are the jobs that are created, in aggregate, as good as the jobs that are replaced?

If we lose 10,000 jobs at $25 an hour, and replace them with 12,000 jobs at $9 an hour, is that trend sustainable?

Other factors need to be taken into consideration. Did the original jobs provide health care, childcare and other benefits, while the new jobs do not? Did the original jobs provide ample overtime opportunities, while the new jobs are barely considered full time?

Are the new jobs created concentrated geographically, requiring a major redistribution of the population into cities with much higher costs of living (a double whammy if the new jobs are much lower paying).

And most importantly, if we're talking about AI, are the new jobs low hanging fruit for future AI and robotics advancements, creating a cycle of disruption and precarity in semi- and low-skilled workers?
> 2 processes = 2 GIL

Whats your point? 20 threads will still run per GIL, and assuming a dual core cpu, 2 processes x 20 threads each will still run 40 workers.
It's more like standardizing a road that only Google, Microsoft and Apple and their partners can drive on.

An open standard is one that anyone can implement. EME is not open in that way - it just standardizes a small part, the interface. The DRM itself remains completely nonstandard, and Google, Microsoft, Adobe etc. all have their own proprietary DRM products. So a browser that actually wants to show EME content must partner with them. That's the opposite of an open standard.
>For all the 'making the world a better place (at a macro level)' that us devs are doing

Speak for yourself... I'm just automating peoples jobs and subsequently making them unemployed, lol.
He seems to forget that the world is not the US, an important notion when considering the future of the internet. I think a good analogy would be medicines; the US has their own rules but then each country has different rules. India for instance can copy any medicine they see fit to save lives because health is more important for them than money.

You might argue that entertainment is not the same as health; but don't forget that one big part of DRM is in education, which is a big deal. If we make EME easy to use all Copyright abusers can and will - if history repeats - use it. Things like Sci-Hub exist for this very reason. Arguing in favor of denying education to an important fraction of the poorer world for the economic gain of few US companies is something that I think is worth fighting against.

We are at a point where even Copyright abusers should start working online or become irrelevant so many are migrating; let's not give them the tools to keep abusing their users.
They'll be very different, certainly. But not "completely destroyed". There may well be nothing very good to eat there, however. And less oxygen.
> even most GPUs are not properly supported on most Linuxes

This situation is rapidly changing too with ATI and intels OSS GPU drivers.
As a comparison, the Whole Foods supermarket chain has a market cap of $9.6G. Yow.