skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Programming as a profession is not merely a technical exercise and there is a large social and cultural dimension to it, which should be taken into account, although I think that in the attempt to be inclusive from the perspective of the American cultural milieu, they're going to put off international contributors. That list of minorities seems totally valid to me from an American perspective, but doesn't necessarily make sense everywhere.

And I think they should make an effort to reach out to people of lower economic/educational status or rural areas, regardless of race/gender/etc.
This is a very active area of work.
the only thing one can do now is to change their name :(
You are wrong. The author is very much concerned about the employer-employee relationship. Not only did I read the article, I also read the OPs bio and glanced at his philosophy toward property rights. He appears to have come to the conclusion that the social contract isn't really beneficial, and that Hobbes state of nature isn't a thing, and that left to their own devices - people's better angels will bring about higher social equality.
He's saying yahoo.com is on his whitelist of websites, so he allows JS to run from Yahoo.
can you link me to some of the analysis? be interesting to read about what they chose as sites.

remember when i had some guardian software that blocked trackers. surprising amounts from chinese gov't and chinese universities.
When you get into some routine it's pretty predictable. I like the pzizz app for timing and nap enhancement.
This is not true, but a common debunked claim from the postal union. The postal service gets $18 billion per year in tax benefits including exemption from property taxes and vehicle registrations as well as below-market borrowing costs.

http://fortune.com/2015/03/27/us-postal-service/

http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2013/jul/24/ame...
>A lot of work goes into property ownership

Sure, but the $/hour return is much higher that the average job. 'A lot' isn't a good quantifier. I bet the same people who live in the house he rents work a lot more for a lot less money.

>Very few people are Scrooge McDucks with all the time in the world to swim around in a vault full of gold coins

True, but there are a lot more people who comfortably live off money their investments and properties make. This isn't about the 1%.

>The key takeaway here is that everyone has got their problems and concerns, and in this competitive world, it is naive to assume that anyone can maintain their position without significant effort.

Key takeaway from where? The author point still stands. The takeway from the article is that people don't get paid according to their hardwork, rather it is a lot of luck.

It is naive to assume anyone can maintain their position without significant effort, sure. But it is also naive to declare that without knowing for certain. I personally know people who work less than hour a week and make as much as the average software engineer in the US.

Sidenote:

This whole thread is sad to read. Most comments take a single part of the article then start to bash the author or question the validity of his thesis. Many on here didn't even bother to read the article properly, which I assume the topmost parent of this comment chain is also a part of.

Life isn't fair, and many people have trouble with coping with that fact. I just didn't think HN would have trouble with that too.
Were you sent here by the devil?
This is amazing, I have wanted something like this for over a decade. I check for something like this every few years. Thanks for making this!
You're conflating two different roles: owner and operator. While many owners, particularly of smaller businesses, wear both hats, your responses to points (1) and (3) arise out of wearing the operator hat, not the owner hat.

For the companies that comprise most of the economy (less than half of U.S. GDP is attributable to small businesses), ownership and operatorship are distinct roles. The CEO of GE is not the company's owner; the shareholders who own GE don't face the travails of operating it.
If fly.io is serious about their marketing, this is not the way to do it. Find a really slow website that sells something, give them your service for free and run half the traffic through your fast version vs their slow version. Show me how much money they made in increased sales vs the amount of time it took to implement and the ongoing costs of your service. I'm pretty confident the math won't work out, but I'd be open to being convinced. Trotting out the 10 year old Google and Amazon studies about sub-1% gains isn't the way to do it.

For the vast majority of startups or websites, there should be 50 things on your to-do list that have the potential to increase your conversions more than 1-2%, and your time is almost certainly better spent working on those things than adopting a service like this. I know engineers like taking the same thing and making it faster, it is fun and satisfying, but it almost certainly isn't the best use of your time when it comes to the bottom line. And that is assuming making your site faster actually will increase conversions by any meaningful amount, which is a big if (very old and very specific studies be damned!).
Seriously, why is the parent comment voted down? If you have ever compared Firefox with Chrome on a Javascript-heavy website, there is a clear winner at the moment, which is Chrome. I would love to see Firefox have larger market share, but it will not be achieved by buring your head in the sand.
Thanks for projecting 'threatened' onto me!

You're the type of interviewer I would weed out, so by all means keep asking the question.
Every time I look at listings on Zillow (hey, a person can dream) I see a realtor's photo and contact details, is that not the listing agent?
I assume you didn't mean the Racket implementation being a joke (only the C++ one).

Personally, the Racket idea is good except for the hassle of typing in the borders (emacs-orgmode could help with that though).
Yes, that's the crux of the matter. Is his arrangement for time, or for the results?
This seems similar to the way the at-exp language is implemented.

at-exp adds support for S-expressions based on braces, and is the foundation of the Scribble markup language.
Ah, the sweet memories from CORBA, Usenet, Token Ring, Gopher, PHIGS, Taligent....

Stardards are only relevant as long as the industry cares to use them.
> Except backwards compatibility? Something that any user of a supposedly-universal IPC bus requires out of the gate?

You can put DBus server behind a proxy that handles that for you. The XML format is very simple and it doesn’t change.

My point was simply that XML use is very limited, not exposed by any high-level APIs and can be easily ignored.

XML is only used for introspection, a debug protocol on top of DBus.

> 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.

DBus is a message-passing protocol. You can write it in anything you like.

You could have DBus server that talks Protocol Buffers or JSON if you like, as long as you provide gateway for legacy clients.
Good designers and programmers do care about people of all ages, colors, orientations, genders, and ability. If tech is to make the biggest positive impact possible everyone must be on board.
> but what about the other end of the spectrum, where baseless claims are leveled on a person.

You are confusing imaginary baseless claims with matters of public record. The potential danger of abuse is in allowing individuals/entities using the law to keep potentially unfavorable public records off from the Internet as a matter of public good, as with the right to be forgotten cases in the EU.
Manufacturers of Linux IoT devices need to update their kernels
#Elsa #malware allows #CIA to locate users via WiFi-enabled devices
Just wanted to thank you, Mz, for continually expressing patience in the face of arrogance and condescension whenever the conversation on HN turns to homelessness. Your experience and perspective are hugely valuable, all the more so because you are able to use it to educate folks about the complexities/challenges of the homeless.
Wow, thanks. Comments like yours are why I keep coming back to Hacker News.
I think the point of this post is: You can use https://cloud.google.com/spanner/ to work with a CP model (typically much less of a headache than AP), while sacrificing so little availability that it's essentially CAP.

The big concern I'd have (assuming using a Google-hosted database was practical) is the SLA. Unless I'm misreading https://cloud.google.com/spanner/sla, it seems like the SLA is...not very strong. Given how they discuss availability elsewhere, it seems like they're totally unwilling to put their money anywhere close to where their mouth is.

That said, it does seem like going with Spanner to have the ease (and power) of consistency while also having reliability and scalability would be something to consider in a whole lot of situations. (Though I'd be reluctant to jump on it this early.)
What law would he be breaking?
Better GitHub code search and browsing with the Sourcegraph Chrome extension
The EFF is apparently on the side of ElGoog:

https://www.eff.org/cases/google-v-equustek

"Such a broad injunction sets a dangerous precedent, especially given that it is likely to conflict with the laws of other nations."
So donut returns quite different results than doughnut. Is this just the script writers using their preferred spelling for doughnut, or does this come from transcription data (thus indicating a preferred spelling for transcribers)?
"Not guilty" is a common enough phrase in English that you can use it like an adjective and native speakers will know what you mean. Pedantically, you might want to spell it "not-guilty".
How would inter-operability differ from sharding? Is the difference that sharding only works with a specific blockchain technology, and inter-operability could connect multiple, technologically different, blockchains?
I'm not mixing anything together. The intellectual property, real property or personal property you are referring to is the product of all the risks and costs I'm talking about. And, the rent-seeking from that property is the reward. And, that rent-seeking is very much taxed, contrary to the author's contention, at multiple levels and in many ways.
MINIX 3 or OC.L4 would be candidates. QNX could use it as an extra differentiator. For now, the only things like that that I recall off top of head are Muen done with provably safe SPARK language and Redox done in Rust language.

https://muen.sk/

https://redox-os.org/

There's also a project to essentially wrap seL4 in Rust to build apps on top of it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10848890
Americans went from riches to soup lines (living in slums/squalor) over various periods of time. Though their IQ did not vary over that same time period.

A strong signal IQ is not, maybe a nice tailwind, but that doesn't help much if you are born in the bogs.
Agreed. I have tears in my eyes after finishing this one. I cant imagine living through it myself. My mind is my everything... I would likely consider suicide, and I don't know whether that makes me weak or silly, but I can't see much of a way out with a disease like this.
Definition of "well" is where people will disagree. And good luck resolving that disagreement...
You're the creator of that website, right? Thank you very much for it, it's great, helped me a lot.
A few interesting trends: Fox, McBain, Poochie
They receive $100 million in tax dollars per year to subsidize blind and overseas citizens. They also get $18 billion per year in tax benefits.

http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2013/jul/24/ame...

http://fortune.com/2015/03/27/us-postal-service/
I still can't get my head around the logic that a garbage collector gets paid next to nothing relative to someone who is paid millions to talk into a microphone and the reasoning is that the latter "provides more value". "They provide more value" just seems like a very partial catch phrase to make this all look less absurd than it actually is.
Adam Smith began his wealth of nations with a description of the division of labor and an essay on how this division leads to an increase in productivity. Specifically, he gives the example of a worker who's sole job it is to make pins, and who devises a way to make them by machine, while previously, each pin was hammered out by hand over a matter of minutes, the new machine makes them in seconds.

This division of labor is often cited as the thing that makes capitalism great.

This kind of optimization can be incentivized by way of piece work. Piece work is when workers are paid per piece rather than by the hour. Piece work is outlawed in the west. In the US, it was outlawed during the great depression when the minimum wage was instated. In Europe, I'm not sure when it was outlawed, but it is illegal here as well. In Asia and India, it is still legal. I feel that things like Uber, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk, are rejuvenations of the illegal piece work payment method.

Would it be unethical to apply AI to solve Mechanical Turk tasks?

I don't know if I think that piecework should be legal or illegal. The reasons for banning it were very compelling at the time.

Edit: spelling
Pornography (and prostitution) have existed for the entire history of human civilization.

Again -- I wasn't referring to porn, per se. I think that's pretty clear.

I don't see why sex is the one thing you think is more important than the thousands of other violations of privacy and humanity that happens online.

I guess because sex is (orders of magnitude) more important than most other activities we put "online", and more to the point, into corporate (and SIGINT) data warehouses? For who knows how many weird, lonely men to tabulate and analyze?
The core fallacy here is believing that we can all agree to supersede biological imperatives and everything will all go fine. The challenge of society is the establishment of a system that cooperates with biology to create a peaceful, prosperous environment for all members of that society.

Humans are naturally competitive. Humans have tribal instincts (which include a default hostility to known outgroups). Humans have a fundamental tendency to hoard resources to ward off the mortal dangers of scarcity and decay, visible in our dietary inclinations just as much as in the way we handle the abstraction of money. Like most other successful animals, we have an instinct to secure resources not just for ourselves but for the generations that will follow after us.

These are inborn instincts and impulses, installed by millions of years of evolution. They cannot be hand-waved away. As a species, we are stuck with them, for better or worse.

Throughout the 20th century, we see the rise and fall of economic policy that refuses to acknowledge these realities. This willful blindness inflicts a large amount of suffering on the populations that fall for the delusion that we are now superhuman.

The argument is not that physical impulse does not need restraint, nor that society shouldn't have structure and authority. It is merely that our social systems need to exist as background processes that optimize and refine our basic natures instead of trying to pretend like they don't exist.

Just as denial of the underlying structure of computer systems will, at best, seriously impede performance, denial of the underlying structures of human psychology will, at best, bottleneck any society.

Hardcore socialist redistribution systems are so denialist that they result in the equivalent of a nation wide Blue Screen of Death shortly after bootup. Let's take notice of the blood and agony of the 20th century and not install SOCIALISM.DLL anymore.
I'll add that there's already tooling in Frama-C, SPARK Ada, and some proof assistants to prove safety of some of those operations. So, if they can't be safe, then a mock-up of them can be done in something that can prove their safety externally with proven component integrated into Rust. Eventually Rust itself might have such a capability but the external tools can work intermediate.
Legal precedent.
Most of the time, employers are savvy enough to write employment contracts which cover this eventuality and lay broad claim to all work products and require the employee to do any sort of work.

My guess is that most programmers are employed under contracts that give them no additional recourse if, for an extreme example, their employer decided that they should now spend their time on janitorial duties.
Monetizing, Selling WatZatSong
Hi HN,

I founded WatZatSong (https://www.watzatsong.com), with the help of some great folks in 2006.

On WatZatSong you can hum / sing / record a tune and the community tells you what it is. When Shazam cannot help, WatZatSong does.

WatZatSong has been online for 11 years. We had worldwide press, won the TechCrunch Pitch contest in London, subscriptions of hundreds of thousands of members and there still are hundreds of songs identified daily. We get thank you emails everyday and small donations quite regularly.

We've been pretty bad at generating revenues and I'm missing time to keep on working on it today.

Do you have some great monetization ideas I could put in place? Is anyone potentially interested in taking it over and developing it? Or would you think of anyone that could be?

Many thanks in advance for your help.

TheMoutch
https://www.watzatsong.com
The Petya ransomware is starting to look like a cyberattack in disguise
Well, at least "identity politics" are two proper English words, not just some weird abbreviation like "cis".
Pretty much the same thing. I recommend SWPPX for several reasons:

1. Schwab is pretty much the best bank in the world for many reasons. Most professional service, no fees for banking, and minimal fees for trading.

2. With a Schwab account, buying and selling SWPPX incurs no trading fees -- since they own the fund.

3. The fund expense ratio is ever-so-slightly lower, 0.03%. VOO has 0.04%.

..but if that doesn't work for you for whatever reason, VOO is great!

My main point is that too many people are either afraid to invest at all, or they get robbed blind by investment managers like JP Morgan who take 1% of your money every year, regardless of their own performance.
I'll save my $25 for some time when I'll be not too busy to play all the way through. So, maybe at Christmas (if I even remember).
In my opinion, something is wrong with your value set when you're actively destroying productivity solely to seek alignment with your personal values.
Shebang: Linux shell as a http service, in Node.js
I doubt they have a clue.....disillusioned into idea that we are in a utopian world.
You know... I re-read my post early this morning and I thought... "that was way more hostile than necessary". But it was too late to edit. Sorry about that.

I think digging my heels in further at this point is making my opinion appear stronger than it is.
> Anyone could think of malicious uses for all sorts of things, the only noteworthy revelations would be actual proof of misuse.

Does this same logic apply to the vault7 trove itself?

The entire leak is basically "Spy agency has capability to spy. Yawn." once you take away the angle of "Oooo! Spooky! They might target you!"

So we're already in the case that Wikileaks is trying to editorialize the content for an agenda, which we know is to cause damage to the US intel community. (They haven't been friends for a long time, in well documented ways.)

We also know that Wikileaks is withholding the full extent of what they know or not, and are choosing what to reveal (which is a tactic well know to be used to shape narratives).

Why should we care what Wikileaks has to say on this matter, for the exact reason you so helpfully pointed out?

They're a biased source, not disclosing their full knowledge and seeking to manipulate us, who haven't actually shown any evidence of wrong-doing.
Isn't that a bit scary that Firefox can simply import the passwords from Chrome?
This isn't a technical problem a framework choice will solve. You need to have a better idea of what you're building first. If there's a leadership vacuum, step up.

If you're in the position of choosing between Drupal, Laravel, etc. you are probably in the position to evaluate other solutions not based on PHP.
Surprisingly exactly what the title makes it sound like. Very cool!
Poor choice of wording -- in the simplest sense, you are correct. However, labor markets are far too complex to be modeled as a single commodity with a supply and demand curve, and contrary to popular belief, both supply and demand can change in the wake of a price control.

This is because there is no single supply and demand curve for labor -- instead, there are dozens of curves for specific labor markets. For instance, the minimum wage does not really affect the SDE labor market in the US, but it can literally wipe out certain markets (farm labor, for example) that typically pay below the new minimum wage, resulting in a complex new supply and demand profile, automation, etc.
TL;DR: use probabilistic logging (x% chance of logging, with x chosen by dev for each log statement) instead of importance levels (ERROR, WARN, INFO, etc) to keep common events from flooding log files. Is that it?

edit: misclick
So we are discussing dApps on a platform that talks about making unicorns. Yes most ICOs are pump-and-dump at this stage but if similar study is done for unicorns valuation, we are going to find many examples of campanies that are 100x more valued. It is true that some people would be burned by ICOs sooner or later but that's what fair markets are for. I see this as process that democratizes ycombinator like companies. Eventually the process will be mature enough that the 'value' that yc or 'angels' provide would be available to more and more companies and angels replaced with everyday people.
While there is a market for those txns the reality is that most adopters, and they recognize themselves as early ones, today, buy bitcoin as an inflation hedge. It's hard to argue against the theory either. People scream 'but the volatility!!' but for people who only six months ago have seen their bitcoin holdings over double in value, they are probably thinking 'sure. But that's a trade-off that seems to be meeting its use-case'

At what market size do people who have criticized it in the past as only for those things, admit that perhaps that categorization isn't reflected in actuality? 100 billion? 500 billion? One trillion? 10 trillion?
> let's have Tomcat and Groovy or something on WebAssembly :D !

Not sure if Apache Groovy is a good example of software that might benefit from a WebAssembly target. Somebody already tried creating an edition that compiles to Javascript, but I guess it doesn't get used much because its Wikipedia page is being considered for deletion on the grounds it's "Not a notable software library". [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
This inconsistency and the overall social cognitive load on customers to recognize which things 'deserve' tips and which ones don't is one of the top reasons I'm anti-tip-culture. Just raise your damn list prices, pay better wages, and tell your patrons no need to tip (but it can still be appreciated if they do, just don't pressure them into it).