skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If millions of my neighbors get the same education and are given the same opportunities as I was, whether by chance or other's efforts they too will "get through the bullshit". And as a bonus, they will be less superstitious because they will believe in their own agency and not that of invisible gods or spirits.

My central point is that superstition is not the cause of our relative backwardness in world standards of wealth/health and equality, neither is it a contributing factor. It's merely a symptom.

Superstition is a symptom of poor means, not a cause of them. Therefore the central point of your statement being that "If we can remove one or two of these superstitions, then uplifting African society will be so much easier" is ridiculous.

Take any African child, give him food, shelter and an education (Hello Maslow). See how fast he will drop his belief that his uncle or grandfather bewitched him. I wish I had a better argument to make than saying that I am a product of that transition and I see it playing out everyday in every corner of my country and the neighboring countries with the same start and end.

To expand a little on that, we do not need "truth". An African child in my experience needs food first, then shelter, then books and pencils which in my corner of the world cost $10 for one child for a year. When that child has the basics of education pat down, he will now seek knowledge(truth?), he will now have use and time for the latest rasberry pi powered widget and so on.

One of the best things I have seen to work wonders around these parts are the school feeding programs we have in very few locations. You see these programs take care of the food aspect and the poorest of parents are inspired to take their children to school, chiefly because the child can now have food (priority 1) while also learning (priority x based on the parent's education level/social beliefs and so on).

OLPC atleast from my take on it is the equivalent of throwing a suitcase of money to a drowning man. Yes, once he is out of the water he will love it, but it is of little utility when his priority is just the next breath or the next day in the lives of African kids.
The last time I tried to use Microsoft's support, the only way I was able to contact them was via a webchat, which at first dumped me into a long and infuriating "dialogue" with their support AI - it was the chatroom equivalent of an IVR, and just as useless.

At least, after I managed to get past the faux-IVR, the support staff was competent enough.
"So... do you need a laptop for that or an eReader?"

Strangely enough the first kindle e-reader was released the same month as the XO laptop:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle
UK pubs group JD Wetherspoon drops social media in protest
It's interesting because Marx was writing in a time where automation was considered to even more imminent than it is today. Most intellectuals of the time were of the opinion that work weeks would reduce to 20 hours in a few decades, and people would live in leisure.

One thing Marx got right was this: He said that as long as Capitalism is the dominant system, there will always be full-time employment for the masses. There will be new jobs created in new fields which are far removed from producing goods(jobs like advertising, insurance, etc.). Marx thought that humans as a whole will never work for significantly fewer hours as long as capitalism exists.

Incidentally, Marx was vehemently opposed to things like Universal Healthcare, better Labour laws, Mandatory Vacation and a higher minimum wage. He famously said that if these things were considered Marxist, he himself was 'not a Marxist'. The reason? Because these measures are beneficial to capitalism in the long run because workers are more likely to stay working under a capitalist as their life is bearable. When conditions deteriorate, that is the time that workers are going to revolt and try to own the means of production.

So in reality most of the stuff liberals advocate like better pay and healthcare are decidedly anti-marxist and pro-capitalist. It is opposed by some corporations because they care more about short term profits rather than the long term sustenance of capitalism.
Developers are most definitely free to make their choices.

Look at Windows Mobile.
Thanks writing up such a detailed comment!

I assume "tricky financial stuff on the backend" means referral fees for placing students, and the like. Can you go into more detail on this?

I'm also curious how your online training works. Is it an inverted classroom model (read / watch stuff before class, discuss material and exercises in class?), or self-paced, or what? My experience is that online training doesn't work as well as face-to-face training, but this is in a very different context (training developers who already have jobs == they never do homework).
Hi all! Thought this position may be of interest to some of the experienced developers here...
Beyond the constant delays and overcrowded trains, the biggest impediment I experience is the lack of subways to the airports. LGA doesn't have any train lines, while JFK and EWR have "airtrains" separate from the MTA or PATH.

Chicago's "L" goes directly to both ORD and MDW. My brief time there showed that things could be far more connected than New York's system.
Show HN: Digital Behavioral Design
I stopped buying from Amazon a few years ago, the constant background noise of the way they treat their staff.

When I was young I worked in warehouses and it was hard, tiring work but the management by and large treat you like a human being.

We occasionally use Amazon at work (not my choice) and very often I can get a better price for something from aria, scan or ebuyer anyway.
I've always felt that Google Reader held RSS back by not supporting feed authentication. It was the defacto reader when RSS was growing, so what it supported defined what was possible with RSS.

Feed authentication would allow for a variety of potential services business models.

- Paywalls: Whether subscribing to a newspaper to supporting a blog through
Patreon, it lets user directly pay for content provided through RSS.

- Customized curation services: Whether manually curated by an editor, or
using algorithms, you could build a business around providing content to
individual users.

- Social network integration: Instead of joining one or two massive Social
networks, I could be involved in dozens of small, focused ones, all
collected in a single RSS reader.

I'm sure there are plenty of other possibilities. But for it to be useful, it
has to be available and easy to use in all the major RSS platforms.
This work (and related efforts like Img and Buildah) is a big deal.

Right now docker images and Dockerfiles are joined at the hip to the Docker daemon.

It works great for local development, but for hosted systems that run on containers, it's a dire mess. I have personally slammed head-first into Docker-in-Docker quagmires on Kubernetes and Concourse. Not knowing the particular arcane rites and having neither sufficient eye of newt nor sufficient patience to get it to work, I like everyone else in the universe gave up.

Not an acceptable state of affairs, given the many problems of Dockerfiles in themselves. Dockerfiles force an ugly choice. You can have ease of development or you can have fast, safe production images. But you can't really have both.

Kaniko is another step in the direction of divorcing docker images as a means of distributing bits from Dockerfiles as a means of describing docker images from Docker daemons as a means for assembling the images. All three are different and should no longer be conflated.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we have a lot of stuff that does stuff with containers.
I had one which I got a "normal" distro running on. It was slow, but a bit better than Sugar, though it couldn't do any of the fun mesh-networking etc. Lots of the most interesting ideas for the OLPC never quite shipped, like the keycombo in to 'view-source' of the app you were in, which would let you hack on the UI nondestructively[1].

1: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines/Th...
I bought a 2013 Macbook Pro for $700. Retina Display. Where there's a will, there's a way.
Your reply was not as clever as you thought it was. Especially not enough to resurrect a flagged comment.
The alternative solution is to build stations "inline" with the bored tunnels. This can be done quite cheaply, assuming modern ventilation/engineering are used. Note that $2bb of the $4bb for the 2nd Ave line came from station construction...
Amazon is about convenience and variety first, followed closely by price. If you want to drive to Costco and buy the bulk-version of the few choices they have then yes they will be much cheaper.
You are technically correct.

However:

> You might wonder, “Why even put your app in the app stores? Just live on the opened web!”

> The answer, in a nutshell, is because that’s where the users are. We’ve trained a generation of users to find apps in proprietary app stores, not on the free and open web.
From what I've seen in Seoul, "cut and cover" doesn't take a year, but more like five years. And Seoul isn't exactly known for slow construction problems, so I think it probably can't be made much faster.

It can still be cost effective, but it can be rather unpleasant during the construction period.
We keep some of the financial stuff close to the chest, but there are ways we use wall street and robust capital markets to help fund student tuition upfront.

Everything we do is real-time, interactive, and absolutely not self-paced. There's supplemental material that's a flipped classroom model, but that's definitely not the main focus.
At least one reason is that the stock has done so well. A typical software engineer hired 4 years ago is incredibly well compensated at Amazon because of this.

Consider a mid-level software engineer hired 4 years ago, on April 16 2014, with a salary of $100k. A typical stock grant at hiring for a mid-level software engineer in 2014 might be $400k over 4 years, backloaded so most of it comes at the end; on April
16 2014 the share price was $323, so the grant would have looked something this:

Apr 16 2015: 154 shares @ $323 = $50k = $150k total comp
Apr 16 2016: 248 shares @ $323 = $80k = $180k total comp
Apr 16 2017: 371 shares @ $323 = $120k = $220k total comp
Apr 16 2018: 464 shares @ $323 = $150k = $250k total comp

But the share price has gone through the roof since then, so things look more like this:

Apr 16 2015: 154 shares @ $383 = $59k = $159k total comp
Apr 16 2016: 248 shares @ $625 = $155k = $255k total comp
Apr 16 2017: 371 shares @ $901 = $334k = $434k total comp
Apr 16 2018: 464 shares @ $1,440 = $668k = $768k total comp

That mid-level, totally normal software engineer is making more than $750k this year because the stock price has gone up so much since 2014. They're likely to put up with a lot of bullshit to get that kind of financial security - that's not just a down payment on a house, it can be the whole thing in cash in the east side suburbs, with great school districts.

Amazon (and Seattle in general) could be in big trouble if the stock price turns around. I don't think that's likely, but it's kind of scary to me.
> Of course, the City Council would never agree to this plan. It's easier for them not to disturb anyone if they want to be re-elected

Oh no, democracy... On a more serious note, boring causes far less disruption to street-level commerce. I haven't seen an analysis which includes the lost tax revenue and economic activity from cut and cover.

Moreover, something deeper is going on as even boring in NYC costs more than in other countries.
Russia Steps Up Hacking, Spurring Rare U.S.-U.K. Warning on Risk
> Don’t make me pay you to make my app available to your users. My app enriches your platform.

In the 90's Microsoft won market over Apple by, among other things, being a more developer-friendly company. It seems Apple didn't learn any lesson from it: crappy tools (XCode), disregard for standards (Safari), creating barriers...
It matters very much in computational / quant finance
I call these the Bhopal 2.0 problems. Bhopal was a disaster where 32tons of toxic MIC gas was released into the atmosphere and killed 3,787 injuring half a million people.

My premise for Bhopal 2.0 is we automate processes so much and have no accounting for waste and damage that we simply focus on the top number. Ask an ML to optimize for an output and it will, happily, All the while harming people around the process - automatically. Right now Bhopol 2.0 processes are all focused on information systems - abstractions, so it's much harder to point and say "look, this is dangerous". People do very, very, very badly with abstractions.

In some way this already happened with the recent elections. But that was purposely aiming the machines at us.
The website isn't throwing a 404 error, yet.
> Have a look at the rate of growth.

their rate of growth is faked. have a look at their provinces confessing a 20-30% fake revenue

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-19/this-is-h...

> For now they seem to be doing pretty good

Their economy is saddled with debt, and their growth is slowing/stopping so much that Xi JingPing had no choice but to announce dictatorship way earlier (before riots and revolutions), their money is fleeing the country, their stock market crashed, they have demographics crisis, gender crisis, middle income trap crisis, the population's money are all stuck in real estate bubbles which are now deflating, their exports are down, their imports are up, their factories moving to other countries, etc.
I think the conditions apply more to the warehouse workers than the software engeneers.

Presumably both groups are vastly different regarding qualifications, income, ability to switch jobs and freedom to structure their work, so I think they should be taken separately when discussing workplace conditions.

(As an analogy, during the industrial revolution, the people that designed the machines probably weren't the ones that were working 18-hour days in hazardous conditions either.)
Riot KR is really bad. Idk if its a KR thing or if its isolated to Riot, but being in that community for the better part of 6 years now, the horror stories of the shenanigans that Riot KR pulls are notorious. Recently they banned a popular western streamer for criticizing them.
Someone has to provide necessities to society. In absence of government directly providing it, we force companies to do it. What you want is, essentially, socialism, with a little bit of the market carved out for market capitalism. Sounds good to me!
Heh, yeah, I'm not buying it. How long has the "Windows 10 Start Menu stopped working" bug been around now? And the most consistent fix is still to just do an in-place reinstall?
Whilst I take the point that the web has become too centralized (and that the path away from this is in part a UX problem) this piece ignores the fact that having a service provider manage your software/infrastructure is always going to have more leverage to provide a better user experience.

This is what makes the focus on P2P technologies so disappointing. You lose the leverage of the service provider along with the well understood financial incentives for providing a good service.

This is why I am much more excited about federated technologies rather than P2P - the problem isn't that I need a provider to help me share my content, the problem is that if I want to publish content as a social media user that Facebook is the only game in town!
Why the middle tier (including Docker) won't matter to most of us (2015)
User costs for transit were pretty low in the early 1900's. The article says that in 1947 they finally increased the fair from 5¢ to 10¢ -- $0.61 to $1.12 in 2018 dollars. New York's fare is now $2.75, and in my city it's closer to $5.
Agree 100%, which I would summarize as:

To answer the original question, he's lying.

Which is 100% consistent with the career path described in glowing terms. In today's web which is in SaaS social media at minimum, is in the business of surveillance. Lying about that is axiomatic.
Currently working in the EdTech space - I have read figured like ~1.9 million new teachers are needed to teach all the students not receiving an education.

Scale that to the students themselves - if they don't have early digital exposure, they very likely will be excluded from being digital natives.

Add to the mix, needing the same curriculum in many languages. Some of these problems can be assisted digitally.
What's the estimate economic cost of a cut & cover, which shuts down a major NYC street for 1yr, vs the projected cost of a tunnelled subway line x2 (because modern government is always 2x the budget, at least)?

Some shops on the street could very well go out of business due to lack of local traffic... would they be compensated?
Also check out Ellul's "Propaganda", where he says that it's actually the intellectuals who are most susceptible to propaganda, as they feel they have to investigate competing claims and decide for themselves.

Ellul was an interesting thinker. But, to my knowledge, he never advocated violence. I'm not sure where Kaczynski got the idea for using violence to achieve his ends, but it wasn't from Ellul.
Exactly. If you are a Consumer, or want to sell to Consumers, then Apple is where it's at.
I use Spotify web with uBlock. It doesn't mute audio ads, they just aren't there. Not sure how it works.

As a side note, the web app is hidden -- they want you to download the desktop app, from which you can't block ads. The thing is, the desktop app performs even worse than the web app
I double back and resolve the ambiguity rather than continue ahead to find myself in an argument taking past each other because our fundamental assumptions differ.

That very thing has happened to me enough times to become entirely fed up with it to the point that I strive to stamp out ambiguity when I come across it. Such an approach seems to work well so far, or at least leaves me better off than I would be without it.

All that aside, my approach seems to be clearly different from the norm, and does cause some friction at times (although I would argue less friction than would arise if left ambiguous) which definitely has me wondering if I've not taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way.

I certainly would like to better learn to deal with it, assuming that dealing with it is a means to more effective communication (note here how I avoid the ambiguity trap by including my interpretation of your ambiguous statement)
This sounds amazing and I'm looking forward to testing it. I'm thinking of finally pulling the trigger and getting my first non-Mac laptop in over half a decade. I've been rather impressed with how well Linux behaves on laptops nowadays. This is the cherry on top.
My comment you replied to was a direct response, not in the context of the original conversation.

> I'd argue it's more like *slower growth

Exactly my point, just in a different context. I was speaking on a much smaller scale than Amazon as an example.

If you own a restaurant, and can open a second location and hire more people, you are reinvesting and expanding and bringing in more revenue, which you can reinvest to open more locations. If you pay your current employees more instead, then you aren't opening that new location, and there is no growth (or much smaller growth if your employees do a better job, which would be incremental compared to opening a second location), but people are happier and less taken advantage of.

It's a fine line to walk, and very rarely do companies get it right. Costco is an example of a company that does get it right. There are, unfortunately, far more examples of companies that don't.

The person that replied to me asked for evidence of how reinvestment causes slower growth than paying people more. That side conversation had nothing to do with Amazon.

> Also, I'd in fact argue that making sure your employees have time to go pee wont significantly hurt your bottom line

No one is arguing that. In fact, I agree with it.
The people who whine about systemic causes will never admit that there's elements of personal responsibility in these choices.
Without a fair amount of equipment there isn't that much that's user serviceable in modern electronics.

I was mulling that today as I worked on C# code to talk to a Sony camera over WiFi via JSON-RPC.

The fact that this unit has a wireless adapter, an entire TCP/IP stack and a webserver that can parse/generate JSON.

Basically the camera has processing power hundreds likely thousands of times more powerful than my PC and if it breaks there isn't anything on it that would likely be fixable with a soldering iron.
In OP's parlance, a shit job is an exploitative job.

He is saying that through progress there are fewer "shit" jobs, so there are fewer people exploited.

It never has been and never will be economically viable to pay a ditch digger the same amount as a doctor. So as long as jobs like ditch-digging exists, people must be "exploited" to fill them.
I actually mostly appreciate the moderation/censorship Reddit does nowadays. E.g. banning subreddits like "beating cr-ppl-s" and "r-p-ng w-men". Isn't the world better of, when it's harder for people to give advice about, and encourage, those things?

Anyway, you wrote (in the blog): "independently hosted forums" — I like that, for various reasons.

Actually, I might slightly have built a Reddit alternative minus single-sign-on. Here's an a bit Reddit like discussion:

https://www.talkyard.io/forum/-61859/forum-software-for-the-...

And one can create per site sub communities, a bit like subreddits. Actually, there are improvements over Reddit: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... . Someone is actually emailing with me about migrating their subreddits from Reddit to a Talkyard community at their own domain.

You wrote: "It would be a very complicated forum aggregator with a ton of features necessary to create the combined community side like on Reddit or its alternatives." — I agree. And it'd also be lovely with a mobile phone app, that could connect to all these disparate communities. So one didn't need to type the address in the mobile phone browser. Instead one just clicked in a list of recently visited communities. And it showed notifications too. ... A bit like mobile Facebook and Reddit, but connected to 999 decentralized communities.

I've been thinking a bit about building this mobile app, and forum aggregator / search engine. And initially make it work with Discourse (https://www.discourse.org), Flarum (http://flarum.org) and Talkyard (https://www.talkyard.io).
Mutual funds / index funds / real estate
That product isn't sold by Amazon, but by some other seller. A comparable product (though sans Almonds) sold by Amazon through their grocery delivery service is also $0.15/oz.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IAE91AI/ref=afx_dp_ingr...
KR is ..KR. The people are nice, but the aggregate culture and laws are interesting.

They are equally bad in other companies, other games. For some reason they are horrifically toxic even when publishing a completely Western made game.

Of course, it's incredibly difficult to impossible to "run a game" from outside the country, their structure effectively forces you to open a subsidiary or separate company inside the country and give up control / be subject to those laws.
You don't feel safe "through exceptional familiarity" though.