skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wealth, generally, is destroyed with time.

Much of what's seen as wealth production is instead liquidity production -- turning natural capital into financial currency. In the case of any production chain founded on fossil-fuel energy, the transformation requires a draw-down of natural capital worth many millions of times the market-price and wealth "created".

Activities founded on renewable or sustainable processes are less fraught, but there's still the accounting for potential disruption or reduction: soil loss (rougly 100x the rate of creation), sink-exhaustion (waste and pollution factors), biodiversity loss (rates of extinction > speciation), and the like.

There's little accounting for any of this within conventional economic theory. Ecological, biophysical, and thermoeconomics address parts. Steve Keen is starting to write mathematical descriptions of production factors in which the role of energy is taken into account.
Some greenhouse farmers use geothermal energy, but this is far from a common energy source. It's been suggested that this might be our way to get off of natural gas, though.
(After small earthquakes in the province of Groningen, the extraction of gas has been greatly reduced. Seemingly of less concern politically in NL, gas isn't sustainable.)
But if the goal is to use evolution as model for generating AGI, then the problem is narrowing down all the surviving species to the ones that result in AGI, as opposed to a thousand other successful traits.
Technically, North Korea fired a missile at Japan and this could have been a good enough reason but wasn't. North Korea could erase life in South Korea, at cost of its own desintegration, but this wouldn't be good to anyone. NK is climbing as higher as it can to get the best deal available, which probably is keep their nuke capacity and the lifting of the sanctions. Other than attacking, I don't know if the US has other option than accepting NK demands.
This doesn't quite go to the substance of your question; but it is relevant. At this point the US debt is pretty staggering at both a personal and national level.

The 'average Joe' is, by the numbers, consuming more than they are producing. There are two ways this can be sustainable:

1) Transfer from economically productive to economically unproductive individuals

2) Net economic consumers become net economic producers. In practice, this would almost certainly look like spending less and investing more.

The argument of my grandparent seems to be that incentivising the _reverse_ of (2), ie net producers to become net consumers, is a terrible idea that will make the fundamentals of the problem worse. That argument is good as a matter of principle. It is particularly relevant in the current context of America.
Courts should have the legal power to "dissolve" a company, and this should be mandatory for some crimes. Workers would scrutinize a company's history a lot more closely if it were possible for their job to be dissolved for someone else's illegal activity.

Or maybe that creates too much risk for the average person to accept.
I'm not the one who you are asking, but I've seen it happen so I know the answer -- because even when you're sure the contract is in your favor, it's going to cost you a heck of a lot of money to litigate, and you _might_ still lose even more money. Cut your losses (and write em off on your taxes), get back to business. And think about how you can be better at picking clients next time.
Conquering land is no longer necessary since capital has global mobility and is usually no longer tied to any particular location.

Even before there is a slight chance of a territory becoming unstable, there will be capital fright and thus all incentive for waging war in the first place will have been snuffed out.

Modern capital (on industrial scale) is extremely risk averse, hence seeing so little foreign investment into unstable countries and territories and capital following the path of least resistance - from least stable to most stable.

It's why Saudi and Russia are investing hundreds billions into foreign markets and not the other way around.
Taxing wealth may be counter-productive. The way our economy should work is that you get rewarded for the wealth you generate. If you cannot store the value for the things you've done, there would be no incentive to produce.

A janitor working as a contractor may not have the chances the people in Kodak had back in the day. But at least he/she still gets to work a shift, gets paid for overtime. There is nothing stopping that person from pursuing their passion and create wealth. The reward of the wealth may be monetary or not.

On the other hand, let's think about the "privileged" workers. The more you get paid, the less life you have. In our current state of capitalism, if the employer pays you a lot, he/she wants to own you and use you until nothing of you is left. The current system doesn't care about long term, it's all about the short term. The people who break are replaced, and because people break, the workload gets heavier. But there is an unlimited demand of new workers fresh out of school willing to work under the same conditions. The work starts in the morning at 9 am, you can't be late, but you can't leave until the work is done. You go home, sleep for a few hours and start again. Sometimes you work on weekends and you definitely take a laptop to your holiday (if you have one).

If you work this hard, generate wealth and you know that if you stop working, all that you've endured would be for nothing, that would be inhumane.
Seems like forensic analysts did not do such a good job the first time. I wonder how could 1.4M fake accounts be missed when you do an audit looking for ... fake accounts?
Or like The Times: No online cancellation, really small telephone service hours, "As per standard industry practice we will charge you an additional month, two if you are cancelling in the last week/two of the billing cycle".

Somehow, though, they managed to stop my service when I cancelled my card.
The two of you are saying the same thing with different definitions.
Information is also amost certainly bounded. In humans it's limited by the rate of transmissibility -- if what the next generation has to learn is greater than what the present generation can pass on, knowledge will be lost.

Given various inefficiencies of educational institutions, this is all but certain to be occurring as we speak. There is a notion of a "forgetting curve".

And, as you note, information can at best asymptotically achieve some maximum theoretical efficiency. It's not a limitless fount of potential.
Is the bump in Linux attributable to Chromebooks/Chrome OS? There's this thread from a year ago speculating about NetMarketShare's methodology with regards to Chrome OS, but nothing was confirmed: http://www.omgchrome.com/chromebooks-fuelling-rise-linux-os-...

If true, it's incredible that this seems to be biting directly into Apple's marketshare: the Generation Z "I'm a teenager/college student who just wants to use Facebook and do all my homework" demographic now has an alternative to the millennial's "I need a MacBook to be cool and work effectively." Tremendous ramifications for those of us who still make desktop software, especially in the professional multimedia space.
Can there really be a solution for this? If you think of your designed web site as a 'platform' for content (text, images etc) to be slotted in then unless you can ask your portfolio viewers (is this who you care about thinking the site looks poor?) to specifically ignore the content it will dominate what they see. YouTube and a pornography site may have a similar 'design'/ui but it's the curated content that separates one from being safe to share and the other not.
The original capital was. The returns are already taxed. Are you proposing that returns are taxed at some other different rate? At some point the market won't be attractive enough.
Raped, beaten, exploited: the 21st-century slavery propping up Sicilian farming
Depressions have also worked.
Hunting has huge image costs where you live? Are you sure it's not just inside your specific bubble?
You may be right - I was basing that information off statements that it was only some users seeing the attack. I wasn't aware of a historic data source that could show otherwise.

Your analysis looks pretty good but I disagree that DNSSEC would have stopped the attack, because many users don't use validating resolvers.
I think they're both pretty happy. Musk is doing what he wants to do. Trump is doing what he thought he wanted to do.
Let's be clear about a little factual detail first: the UK is 76% self-sufficient at producing home-grown food (DEFRA, March 2016). While we also import a significant amount of food, and this is useful for both variety and the security of the food supply, the majority of what most of us eat most of the time was grown in the UK.

But even if you can give that up and you have enough supply to import all your food from elsewhere in the world, how are those imports going to get into London? There's limited spare capacity for freight ports on the Thames. Even if you could finish the London Gateway -- which isn't actually in London anyway, and you probably couldn't build anything like it further in -- and significantly expand its capacity from what is currently planned, you'd still need the warehousing and logistics to go with it, and then you'd need all the staff to build and maintain and operate all of this, and then the supporting infrastructure and services to go with those staff. That's an awful lot of new space and new relatively low-paid workers to fit into your hypothetical newly-independent London, just to make up for not having land-based supply of food and drink.

So again, as I have said repeatedly, London is only disproportionately strong economically because it is primarily based on high-margin service industries and relies on the rest of the UK to supply much of the low-margin infrastructure it needs for the basic operation of a city that size. You can argue over whether that beneficial financial arrangement is literally rent-seeking, but certainly the economic effect is similar: London currently benefits disproportionately from the UK's public spending and government-supported infrastructure, but that spending and infrastructure development is only possible because of what is also going on elsewhere in the UK.
No it didn't. I've been actively reading/commenting on HN for 5 years. Bitcoin got a lot of hype 3-4 years ago. The only difference is it gets massive amounts today.
I'd be shocked if Disney isn't on that list, though I have no idea what commercial pressure their imagineering team is under. I'd love to see eleVR continue at Pixar, though I'm not really sure if Vi and the team see that kind of destination as a viable option given their goals.
Mouth clicks used in human echolocation captured in unprecedented detail
Taxing capital itself, rent-generating assets, and inheritance.

Providing for a living working wage. Providing for labour unionisation or equivalent functions. Curtailing the capability of the wealthy to seek self-serving concessions from legislatures. Supporting a vibrant programme of public schools and works.

Pretty much Adam Smith's prescription in 1776.
you are behind.
And yet, the Janitor in this piece can't afford to take a holiday, so is it a stretch to assume she doesn't have much free time either?!?
Yes, absolutely. Based on the number of conversations I have had in the last 72 hours, I can assure you that the illumos community will be gaining some terrific talent over the coming weeks and months!
The current status quo did amazing in attacking extreme poverty. Don't get deluded into thinking the world has growing poverty and that everything is going into the can, because it isn't.
UTF-16 is a variable width encoding that is also more convenient to process compared to UTF-8. For example you don't have to deal with invalid code units, non-shortest forms, etc.

I think you're right that older languages use UTF-16 and newer ones use UTF-8. But it also seems empirically true that UTF-16 languages do better at grappling with Unicode's subtleties, compared to UTF-8. The temptation of UTF8-is-bsically-C-strings is hard to ignore.
Why should education be privately financed? Why should there be a need to privately pay for your children's basic (or university) education?
There's not option to pay for anything, so I couldn't pay even if I wanted to. IIRC, the registration screen even said it's be free forever.

Given that they have extremely little metadata too, I actually wonder if they have any revenue stream.
i did not come from educated elite and i did something with my life. cry me a river, fuckboy.
> A simple homework assignment will do much of the same and allow them to do it at their own pace and having full access to any tool, instead of during some arbitrary time limit with someone else breathing down their neck.

Who is paying for that time?

As someone who has interviewed a lot of people; if I am going to ask someone to perform some coding, I offer them the fact that my entire TEAM (5+ people) will be there for them to ask questions of.

That is us being serious about hiring. It isn't just a single person who is interviewing - but a large amount of the engineering team.
> ... why would IBM have been a better fit to buy Sun?

IBM Services do a lot of support work for Solaris around the world.

But yeah, other than that it doesn't make a lot of sense.
My point is that there's no obvious harm implicit in denying people an inheritance. They did nothing to earn it. There's no inherent right to be bequeathed wealth; that this is evident is that it is nigh on impossible to sue one's parents (or their estate) for not willing their wealth to you (in the US; under Napoleonic law, there is a right to inherit).

Many people spend inherited wealth frivolously. Business acumen isn't known to be genetically determined, whereas political influence is certainly affected by wealth and pedigree, see George Bush the first and the second.
I was present for training at Informix headquarters in Menlo Park when it was announced that IBM purchased the company (I believe around 1999 and 2000). I can still recall the deathly pallor of the trainer as well as the shocked silence of the employees. A couple months later I barely located the new Informix webpage on IBM.com; it advertised for DB2.
In the place that I live in, Medical Tourism is growing . It is a place named Kerala, the southern most state of India, with high literacy rates, and relatively high human development Index compared to other parts of India. Most health tourists are from middle eastern countries, though.

I wouldn't be surprised if a term like Keral'ed come up in health care sector, like Bangalored in IT.
Seems to be an "intro to ML for economists" type deal. Should discuss some Bayesian ML though, would be of more interest to them it seems
> once it becomes as big as you say it will, it will be regulated.

How? You can regulate the borders of the system, and indeed most jurisdictions do. But how do you anticipate government controlling who can or cannot make transactions on the chain?
I don't know, my friends from Croatia would disagree, as would I, but I'm not in the EU, only in Europe (Serbia), you get a black box modem/router from the provider which they can access in any way, and it has open Telnet and HTTP admin with credentials like "admin/ztonpk; admin/tzlkisonpk; admin/telekom; telekom/telekom; and let's not forget admin/admin"... I think this is just in large EU countries that you don't get shitty modems full of security holes... But I'm not even sure of that anymore...
When it comes to tech meetups, I’m a three-a-day guy
Ansible has disclaimed theirs[0]:

> #!/usr/bin/env python

# (c) 2012, Michael DeHaan <michael.dehaan@gmail.com>

# This file is part of Ansible

# Ansible is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

# Ansible is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with Ansible. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

###############################

[0]https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/bin/ansible
I was living in San Francisco when Fucked Company was very relevant. Was a regular reader (unpaid, sorry). I'd say these days there is a place for a comeback...
You'd probably be hard pressed to find a home for less than $250K even there today. And I've seen more than a few wetlands filled in with dirt to build apartment complexes and neighborhoods on in Florida. To be fair, there are several huge over-sold neighborhoods in Florida that never met the hype, but for every one of them there are real success stories too.
It's funny that facebook is amongst the biggest on that list, when they don't actually seem to provide anything of use to the end user.
Mark Karpelès's crappy PHP code full of gaping security holes lost many people a hell of a lot of money ($450 million), and earned him a year in prison.

http://themerkle.com/mark-karpeles-twitter/
Investment is what produces more wealth in the long run, and all investment is foregone consumption. If you buy less coffee but invest in a coffee maker, eventually, more coffee will be made in total, which is the real riches of a society.

Saving is paramount to growth in the classic economic model.
> Everything from beverages to cheese is really limited

The UK produces more varieties of cheese (about 700) than any other EU country. A lot of that is from small independent producers. Obviously, you'll find a narrow(ish) selection at the supermarket, but it's pretty easy to find a wider variety from specialist or online retailers.
That's pretty meaningless - in that case the word goal doesn't have a meaning because everything is just as random as evolution, which isn't very random but whatever.
>How is C-like syntax a plus?

C-style syntax is fairly popular [1]. If it had lisp syntax or haskell syntax most people would complain that they can't figure out what's going on without learning all that syntax.

>that to comapre strings you often have to use strcmp

For equality === works just fine. For < and > there is no one obviously correct order, so it's entirely reasonable to use functions for that.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_C-family_programming_l...
Is your implication that the US is socialist simply for having an income tax? If not, you're going to have to quit the snide remarks and actually explain your opinion...
Really cool, I really like that binary data, with all it's abstractions, still creates visual meaning. Also reminds me of pixid [1], which sadly never got any traction on HN. Plus the common example, in which CBC encryption fails [2], is definitively something to throw in.

[1]: https://github.com/FireyFly/pixd
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation...
What makes you think that professions other than law and medicine don't have mentorship or oversight?
Certainly the first thing that's apparent when watching pros play is their speed. However, after playing years of Tetris myself (though nowhere near pro level), I've really come to appeciate that speed is only a small fraction of what makes pros pro.

* Many multiplayer games give bonuses for combos (multiple consecutive line clears), T-spins, and Tetrises. Setting these up efficiently can require reading several pieces ahead and takes a ton of practice. An example where both players do a fairly elaborate setup, one with combos and the other with T-spins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mASSHXLTuU4

* 20G mode, made famous by games like TGM, drastically reduces the ability to manipulate the pieces. Even surviving takes new strategies (you're forced to play a lot of strange moves), much less making tetrises like the pros do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoU0DQh7zdU

* Some multiplayer games give difficult garbage, I'm thinking of Cultris 2 specifically. Clearing garbage efficiently, known as "downstacking", requires much more careful piece placement than regular play. It's hard to appreciate from video, but if you compare pros downstacking to a normal person, you can see they use fewer pieces to clear the same amount of garbage, which is a real competitive advantage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgK4aJ_3zCw
TBH, in Serbia, Telekom does give you a modem that you have full control over, it's just a shame that everyone else who types in your IP gets the same control too... Basically they can change any setting that you can, but you can request they give you xDSL config params and buy your own modem which doesn't have routing functionality...
I won't disagree that this could be an upside, but it's interesting that the US is one of two countries which allow this kind of advertisement.
What accelerated it even further was when Linux went 64 bit and hardware improved to the point where it was a suitable replacement for big iron Solaris (the SunFire 6900 for example). That was around 2005 from memory.

And the 6900's features with regard to HA in the field fell well short of advertised.

Now you can get a Linux box with 4Tb of RAM so no-one should buy Solaris over Linux.
"not least of all, the variety of form factors and new players such as Chrome OS, which isn't included here for logistical reasons."

From the article, no the chromebook is not the reason for the bump in linux. It would be interesting to know exactly why chrome os is not counted.

My guess on Apple's dip is that Apple's current offerings are not that great compared to where they stood 4-5 years ago.
I don't think everybody finds all of their growth and meaning in their job, but I do think that everyone would like to have at least some growth and meaning in their job. Even if all you're doing is getting better at the job itself, people value mastery and expertise.
Ask HN: Are there any tools to find similar YouTube channels?
Similar to Spotify's music recommendation algorithm, are there any third-party YouTube tools that show "people who have subscribed to this channel are likely to have subscribed to this other channel"?
I've had an enterprise vendor offer to drop money into my personal account to make sales. Not naming them, but the sad thing is they actually did have the best product in their space by a long shot. The ones who sucked were probably even better at bribes.
Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain
I got the chance to talk to Gosling at a discussion about adding closures to Java a while back. You could tell immediately that he was an amazing and incredibly friendly guy. I have a ton of respect for him.

That being said, this is a really boring article. If there was anything meaty, he said he couldn't really say. The rest of it is that Oracle didn't pay him well and effectively demoted him. I feel like that is really unsurprising given Oracle's stance with Java and Sun stuff. They bought it strategically, not because they liked Java. Same for them with MySQL. They don't care, it's just another line item on their corporate acquisitions. The fact that they aren't taking the people they acquired seriously, even a fantastic guy like Gosling, is just another day at a mega corp.

Edit - grammar.
Can you explain what is Uverse and how does it work?
This. I feel all help would already be self service if it weren't for fraud vectors like this that would be exploited en masse if publicly exposed. Redditors would devour these scenarios.
That's not what socializing means. Socializing means using government to redistribute costs to the population at large via taxes. Entering a voluntary private agreement where you have some obligations is not "socialization".
1) ABI issues and compiler incompatibility hasn't been a problem for 5-10 years (using two compilers for a single binary is relatively rare).

2) Being "header-only" is no impediment to code reuse.