skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gosh. OP made me sad with his thesis.

"1. For owners, work is optional."

... As an owner I wish this were true. For me and most owners I know work is mandatory, and its 60 hour weeks and a lot of sleepless nights. There is no safety net. There is no unemployment. I get no workman's compensation. I have no employment law protections. Its, as one HN comment said some time ago, "a suffering contest" a lot of the time.

"2. ...your stuff will keep on making money forever."

... Again, I wish this were true. Lifetime income producing investments are hard to find where volatility, fees, inflation, taxes and life's circumstances don't erode value. Sure, the truly wealthy are set. But most business owners are not truly wealthy, and the exit strategies just aren't there in many industries.

"3. We can get entrepreneurship without the enormous rewards to ownership we have today"

... Anyone whose dealt with the day-to-day grind of owning a business would be especially offended by this comment. A firehose of pain, suffering and risk flows to the owner in the form of litigation, regulators, employees, vendors, customers, bank officers, etc., etc. I've equated it to a "lazy susan" dispensing aggravation in every conceivable form. Its the reward - if you can get it - that makes it worthwhile. Try just getting divorced as an owner and you become an instant convert to rewarding ownership.

Yes, rent-seeking monopolies are bad. Yes, more needs to be done to create opportunities for wealth creation by employees - to give them the freedom to say "no". No, punishing ownership isn't the answer.

UPDATE x2: I'm really not confusing types of owners. The author's thesis is broad not only in the article, but in his works in general. Access to passive income investments (eg. REIT's) is among the few places small business owners can go to rent-seek. Rent seeking is bad under a few sets of conditions but doesn't deserve author's indictment.
Is the demographic really comparatively narrowcast?
This is a big issue with the CIA tool leaks. The really interesting part is who they're using the tools against and how often; the tools themselves, devoid of context, aren't really very interesting.

If they're using this to track a dozen intelligence officials in Saudi Arabia, it's very different optics from if they're using this to track, say, tens of thousands of "red-flagged" families in the US. (Especially since the CIA technically shouldn't be performing any sort of surveillance within the US.)

The NSA leaks, or at least part of them, were a much bigger deal because they revealed warrantless, widespread, persistent drag-net surveillance of US citizens. So far, the CIA leaks have not revealed anything relating to surveillance of US citizens or even any civilians living anywhere.

The CIA may very well (still) be evil, but these leaks do not even begin to prove it, so far.
Quit! Start your own company that sells your job as a service.

If you do it right your current boss can be your first customer.
If they took any sort of money from their business, it would be taxed as income. But if the money just stays inside the business and is used to buy more rental buildings-- what's there to tax? So the business keeps growing and growing.

Case A: the owners take a paycheck of $100,000. It gets taxed at 30%, they get $70k.

Case B: the owners take no paycheck but instead buy a $100,000 property through the business with the business's earnings. They pay no tax but now own a $100,000 property which will now augment the business's earnings further. Down the road years later, they finally take a paycheck at $300,000, which is taxed down to like $180,000 or something. Still more than 2.5x the Case A payout, and let's not forget they own that much more property now on top of everything else.
It's even worse than you describe. For the part he doesn't sell, no taxes are owed on the capital gains. Only when capital gains are realised, are taxes owed. If he holds onto that stock forever he can keep compounding forever, without every being taxed.
This reads like it came from an alternate universe; I've never heard about any of this stuff before, and I can't imagine how any of the concepts described by these unfamiliar terms relate to anything I know about software development. Always fun to discover that the world is more complicated than it first appeared.
> My boss paid me the lowest legal wage, and I didn't ask for any more.

> What if I can't? In my case, it was anxiety

I'm sorry you have anxiety, but if you don't even try to participate in the negotiation process, you can't expect a lot of sympathy for you when you complain that you're not paid what you think you're worth. Negotiating inherently makes most people anxious (myself included), but you learn to do it because it's a invaluable skillset to furthering all aspects of your life. Frankly, I can't think of a single line of work that doesn't benefit from good negotiation skills. I hope you don't take this as confrontational.
MicroG Project: re-implementation of Google’s proprietary Android user space
Wow that's extremely shortsighted given that there are definitely world class engineers at Google, MS, etc who never had formal training.
The same concerns were expressed about electricity [1] when it was first invented. The usage of the electric chair for executions was sponsored by Edison Electric [2] (now GE) as a way to link rival alternating current (and specifically Westinghouse; Thomas Edison made sure that the first executions were conducted with Westinghouse machines) with death in the public's mind.

The solution wasn't to give up on electricity, it was to adopt basic safety precautions like step-down transformers to household voltage, elevated power lines, and insulated couplings.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents#Safety_concern...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_chair#The_Medico-Lega...
FYI, I'm do technology for the real estate industry, here's some back story.

In Real Estate there's a huge concern about "where is my data going" (meaning the listings, photos, etc). This is a big deal to the brokers and agents. I literally just watched an hour long webinar over lunch by Wolf Net about data syndication and every few minutes they were mentioning how they've earned and work to maintain the trust of the brokers and agents by being careful with the data.

Now, a significant number of agents and brokers HATE Zillow. There are entire sessions at the conferences about how to keep your listings off Zillow. The reasons are varied and I won't bore you with the details, largely it is because Zillow doesn't put the listing agent's details by the listing.

Zillow I imagine has to be very careful not to be seen by agents as releasing this information to other sources, or Zillow's lifeblood will cease to flow. They are teetering on the edge here and a perception by agents could cut off a lot of their data.

Zillow probably has to fight this fight. Even if they lose it. They are in a much better position if they say "Hey, we fought this and the courts said we had to", that is a defense against the agents and brokers. If they don't fight it, the sentiment in the RE community could quickly turn against Zillow and cause a lot of damage to their business. This is my speculation, I don't know the internal workings of Zillow.
It's his tool, why give it away for free?
I... sort of have mixed feelings on this.

I agree that the article could do far more to explain what's good, both in content (talking about why these things are bad) and in style (defining all terms immediately).

But holy shit, the MSDN article is bad. It's so hideously bad that I think there's nontrivial social value in bashing it extensively to discourage people from writing docs like this without getting them sanity-checked.

In short, I think this article is largely useless to people reading guides and trying to avoid the pitfalls of the original source, but is aimed at people writing crypto guides who have no business doing so.
An upstream comment menttioned total accounts.

I've some awareness of G+ active users.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq

There may also be other concerns or interests.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
I've been waiting for this for so long... Finally a home grow system that doesn't look like a fridge. Got my pre-order yesterday :D Made in Germany 4 the win
wow, I dont know what to say about your worldview on that one.

seriously get out of your keyboard rage and ask yourself if you or someone you cared about couldnt sell your/their house because a blogger was making money by degrading it. What if the place gets vandalized due to this activity?

hate is hate. there is no 'good' hate.
"Even though the chance of rain was higher than predicted, it wasn't quite so high that it actually rained that day"

(translated from a cartoon by Dutch absurdist/cartoonist "Gummbah")
You're right! Whoops. I have fixed this.
> There’s really no reason why you couldn’t switch it to anything else like tomorrow.

Except backwards compatibility? Something that any user of a supposedly-universal IPC bus requires out of the gate?

> It uses its custom binary on-wire format.

Even better, as we all know that custom binary on-wire formats have been proven to be more secure than any other option. Especially when written in C and exposed to a processes of all privilege levels.
When Raph speaks my ears always perk up.
Firefox's security suffered for a couple of years while attention was taken up by the move to multiprocess. A lot of the security effort in the near future will be adding more sandbox features to the multiprocess code. The situation has already improved over the last year, for example being added back into Pwn2Own 2017.

Also memory leaks have been aggressively fixed and new ones are treated as bugs. It even limits the amount of RAM that add-ons are allowed to hog. If you can reproduce it, please submit a bug report.
Thanks, ultrasandwich. I have fixed this in the OP.
> It proves nothing about the thing for which you have no evidence.

It proves something, though by itself it doesn't actually disprove the phenomenon. Maybe your experiment was flawed; maybe you have to adjust an hypothesis. But when it becomes a combination of many flawed experiments, lack of actual experiments, a field dominated by charlatans who don't know and don't practice the scientific method, it starts to indicate something stronger about the alleged phenomenon itself, doesn't it?

By the way, people do not "believe" a flipped coin landed head or tails in the same way they believe in psychic energy. The equivocation of colloquial and precise terms isn't helpful here. If we're going to pretend we're considering psychic energy as an actual phenomenon, let's stick to precise terms.
> Considering the vast majority of programmers are male, does it really matter if we use male pronouns.

I'm not following that logic - if a reason to use male pronouns is that current programmers are male, then does it not follow that, yes, it actually matters?

(And if it doesn't matter, why care? Why not let the people who want to use other pronouns use other pronouns?)
Recently, I paid two guys $150 to cary 4 tonnes of gravel up some stairs into my garden and level it. I figured it was a days work for the two of them, and that the price as reasonable. But then, they ran the whole time, and did it in half the time I had estimated for the job. And emotionally, I felt really ripped off, because I was paying twice the going rate for workers in my country. But WHY SHOULD I FEEL RIPPED OFF???? It is wrong to feel ripped off in such a situation. Their doing it quickly saved me time and stress as well.
> That is what it is, but if the company is allowed to be driven by profit motive, he should be too. It is within the best interests of his profit motive to continue with the automated work. For some reason when the person is an employee, it's no longer okay to be a sociopathic profit-motivated machine, we're actively disgusted by this type of behavior.

This hits it on the head for me. If the company came across as open to improvement and would see the value of paying this person more to look at other processes and see what could be automated, then I'd consider that as an option, but it doesn't sound like that's the case.
Climate change is an energy problem, so let's talk honestly about nuclear
From industry analysis I read last two years, porn sites tend to be remarkably safe with even low measured trackers. The industry evolved and learned. Churches two years ago had the most malware (since their pages teens to be done by someone nephew who is supposed to be talent but has zero experience).
The OP already addressed this: "This isn’t like a company with tons of IT work - they have a legacy system where they keep all their customer data since forever, and they just need someone to maintain it." The OP believes that there won't be other work for him if his current job becomes unnecessary.
Well the middle man they are cutting out is food distributors. Most farmers sell their food to a distributor, who then sells that food to grocery stores. Blue Apron contracts directly with farmers.
No, the company didn't make the right decision. They hired a programmer to do the work of a data-entry person.

If they hired that programmer to do the work of a programmer, the automation software would be work-for-hire, and would belong to the company. Since they hired the programmer to do different work, in the absence of an explicit agreement saying otherwise, the automation software belongs to OP, to use (and license) as they please.

If the company owned the software, they could keep OP for occasional maintenance work, even as the other analysts pack up their desk clutter. Since they don't, if they let OP go, OP can just license the software directly to all their analysts without further fear of being fired.

They can all play golf or racquetball or bowling or whatever during the 4.5 days of free time each week that OP can sell to them.
Fair enough. Thanks.
Google's argument seems very close to not being theoretical.

For example the US has a law, see https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-111publ223/html/PLAW-111p... for the exact text, which limits the enforceability of foreign judgements within American courts where they impact free speech. This was litigated in Trout Point Lodge v. Doug K. Handshoe and it was found that a Canadian copyright decision is not necessarily enforceable in a US court.

Now given the facts of this case, a US court is likely to uphold the Canadian decision. (That happened in the previously cited case as well.) However not necessarily so. And if not, remanding the decision to a lower Canadian court to decide what should happen in the USA is emphatically NOT the correct course for deciding what legal decision should be enforced in the USA.
For public companies, it can be an easier task:

- If executive insiders are buying stock: a good sign!

- If executive insiders are selling stock: could be a good or bad sign (e.g., they might sell because they are purchasing a house.)

- If executive insiders are selling everything: very bad sign
The problem is systems software is hard and takes awhile.

While HTML/CSS/JavaScript have historic oddities these only go back 15-20 years. x86/IBMPC legacy has 40years of horrible decisions burned into it.

To that end there is a lot of progress in the systems world, but core infrastructure isn't something you just rewrite/replace overnight.

* Redox is a full micro-kernel OS from scratch [1]

* Rustls is a TLSv1.3 compliant server [2]

* Ring is _mostly_ Rust (uses some C for where Rust doesn't work) [3]

* Subtle is consistent time library for building crypto libraries with [4]

* An entire webbrowser (well the JS is still C++) [5]

* A terminal emulator [6]

* A grep replacement [7]

* A non feature complete tar archiver that supports gzip, bzip2, xz, zstd, brotli, and lz4 [8]

The real challenge is Rust has been _released_ for 2 years now. C is approaching 50 years old. C/C++ has _a lot_ of momentum, history, and existent libraries.

[1] https://github.com/redox-os/redox

[2] https://github.com/ctz/rustls

[3] https://github.com/briansmith/ring

[4] https://github.com/isislovecruft/subtle

[5] https://github.com/servo/servo

[6] https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty

[7] https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

[8] https://github.com/valarauca/car
Well.

I'll call it idiomatic form to use OO style in Ruby, which the article (and my examples) were written in. Considering the interpreted and managed-memory model of the language runtime, it is utterly pointless to worry about a few object instances. Heck, this is a language where primitives are objects.

I suspect we work in quite different areas though, which probably gives us very different perspectives of what matters. The kind of applications I build on a daily basis, deal with business processes, and integration with external systems. I/O is going to be 90% of my machines load, if it's ever doing any real work in the first place. Most of the time it'll just sit waiting for a human to do something though.
Jason Scott has archived Commander Keen, playable in Browser via DosBox

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_1_-_Maroone...

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_2_-_The_Ear...

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_4_-_Secret_...

https://archive.org/details/msdos__K6DEMO__shareware

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_-_Keen_Drea...

Commander Keen created iD software.

Also noteworthy for the use of John Carmack's adaptive tile refresh to smooth scroll on early 90s PCs.
TLDR

Guy in financially comfortable position feels guilty, decides his education, willingness to live in Qatar, etc shouldn't really be worth this much, completely discounts the idea that anything actually matters, it is all merely "luck" and that's it.

Sounds like an existential crisis, not really a good commentary on the concept of basic income.
Google could comply with the Canadian court. I hope someone in the US sues them for it. Deliberately removing a site from US searches, or from searches hosted in the US is clearly an abuse of its position and unlawful. And then we can have the US Supreme Court decide whether or not the US Constitution applies to Google, or if Iran's does.
>So, we start off with talking about the multi-site critique, I respond to that, and you... switch topics to the $19 cut-off? Is this Calvinball?

I'm sorry, is that not kosher? There are multiple things wrong with this study you know... Besides you pointed out something that wouldn't be affected by the multi-site problem so I pointed out that it was affected by the $19/hr problem, that's just a normal back and forth. Really if I'm going to be honest, I think the UW study reaffirms your pre-existing views so you're unlikely to admit that it's a bad study but come on. If people want to make the point that increases in the minimum wage are bad for workers and they want that point to hold up to reasoned critique then I suggest they find something other than this study. It's not good, no matter your political beliefs about the subject.
He's saying for some simple jobs you don't want to use a more complex too because there could be consequences. In this context, you don't need to use a fancy exploit that could get into the wild, lead to discovery and be blocked from other targets, or whatever else, when you can use something as simple as this exploit.
I bought a license about a year ago. When I logged in today, a message came:

> License Expired

> [my email address]

> There is no time left in your license.

> License activated on [date]

and an offer to buy another half a year for 25$. Here I openly say: No, thank you.
OReilly stop selling individual books on their site
I'm the exact same way. There is a very scientific and analytical aspect of cooking that people miss out on and I think would appeal to many more here on HN. Baking is the ultimate example in my opinion of you must get everything perfect -- measurements, mixture, consistency, and cook time. It's applied physics. Plus, the best part is you get yummy treats to enjoy afterwards as your reward.
I think there is a huge problem with the student loan method of funding college in that it causes much more inflation than simply funding public universities who in turn would supply low or no cost tuition.
because the ip belongs to the company because presumably he developed it during working hours using the company's resources.
Lisps have been doing this since at least Common Lisp (c.f. http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_eq_s...), and probably a lot longer than that. It's the natural way to do it!
Apache Zeppelin - A web-based notebook that enables interactive data analytics
The world "value" is always confusing. Oprah Winfrey is a billionaire presumably because she is valued for her ability to interview people (she basically talks into a microphone for large sums of money). If she left society and shacked up in the woods tomorrow it wouldn't impact my life in the least. On the other hand, my garbage pickup person does harder work and makes a lot less, but if there was a garbage collector strike I would not be happy. I value my garbage collector more than Oprah Winfrey and I would assume the average citizen does as well.

Using the phrase "They provide more value" as an umbrella phrase for why people get rich is understandable, but something just doesn't seem quite right about it.
Why conference speakers suck
I'm not an expert in these topics either. So I'd agree if used responsibly there's certainly room to abstract something away. So long as the sophisticated theory it is derived from and simplifies does not. And that's my problem.

My only point in my original comment was that the deliberate rejection of empiricism isn't reserved just for the dogma of the rightwing in the USA. The leftwing is just as guilty. And this concerns me a lot.

Seriously, if you find time read the book I recommended. Or at least the NYTimes or NYMag's review of it.
> It's impossible

This was actually my point. Wages have a large random component (negotiation might help the randomness but doesn't fix it). We need a decent lower limit, or else the lower tail of the random distribution leaves too many people as working poor.
Nobody but you is having trouble understanding the observation made by ohyes that the Algol syntax is a fragment which can be embedded into a larger scope which could declares more variables. Whereas the parenthesized let is a complete construct which opens and closes its scope. We know where the scope begins and ends, and its full content.

The crystal clear point of ohyes's observation is that the token count is unequal, in a sense: the Lisp expression is defining variables and delimiting the scope, and includes tokens which establish scoping, whereas the Algol-like snippet is only defining variables, letting an unspecified surrounding program delimit their scope. That program is going to require some syntax in order to delimit that scope; that syntax is not shown and so its tokens are not counted.
There's no implication the fireman did this during working hours. Nor did they try to contract out to their boss - it was a private citizen.

Lost of engineering contractors do work on the side.
You are clearly doing something more advanced than the vast majority of developers who are coding interactive self-validating forms with React or Angular and are still swearing by Chrome, even though they do not even touch those edge cases where they would see something not working on other browsers.

And that makes me sad because they, and their family members and friends, are giving Google this market share which could be distributed to other browsers which are as good and better than Chrome.
Engineer explains why every tech worker needs a humanities education
For me, it's the dinosaur game you can play when the internet is down.