skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it is completely true. In shitty countries, most people have a "job" working for the local dictator. They are exploited by force. It works because most work is just manual labor, they don't need highly skilled, well educated workers.

It is not the case in developed countries. For example, we don't increase food production by just adding more farmers with hand tools. We have mechanical engineers making more efficient machines, chemists producing better fertilizers, scientists studying plant growth, etc... These people need a high level of education, which mean they need the time and resources to study. People starving won't make the skilled workers employers need.

What really enables exploitative jobs is the need for exploitative jobs.
This is too bad. I remember learning about 21.co (later earn.com) and being excited about the idea of using a pricing mechanism to eliminate spam and increase the quality of my inbox. This core idea is a big part of what I'm working on right now [1].

One thing that 21.co never really figured out was a killer use case, or how to best connect buyers with highly-targeted sellers in this "attention" marketplace. It just seemed like a cool way for startup CEOs to get better quality emails and direct the money to the charity of their choice.

[1] https://www.fizbuz.com
Mac button, not Macbook, but you already knew that.

Open standards are good. And we should want them to win, because it provides a safe haven from the abuses of big corporations. And I think right now, Apple is stepping into those waters: they are holding back web standards in order to keep promoting their business, which is reliant on native apps.
> The model of exploitation they have cannot possible account for that.

No, what accounts for that is access to incredibly cheap energy, in the form of fossil fuels and electrification.

Energy is what lifted people out of poverty, not any of that other nonsense. Without coal, oil, and hydro power, most of us would still be subsistence peasants, regardless of whether or not we would live in Communism, Feudalism, Capitalism, Fascism, or some other -ism.
"Neutered" is a weird term. The line is due for a refresh, I think it's got an i7-4578U Haswell in its top-end machine, but that's not "neutered". Yeah, they want you to pay for upgrades themselves and that sucks, but, whatever--my 2012 one has an Ivy Bridge i7 in it and it is still plenty fast for build tasks in my (fairly price-conscious) environment.

If I needed a beefier machine, I would be making much more money and justifying its purchase.
There's also a Netflix series called Manhunt: Unabomber which is pretty good.
Can you post a reference to that $500 number? I find that hard to believe. I was leasing a luxury car for around $400/mo a few years ago. What kinds of cars are average Americans leasing? Rolls Royces?
As is Lastpass/1Password
What you describe sounds like Open Bazaar.
Yeah, I would gladly take an e-ink display or a frontlit lcd. Either one would be great. The closest I've found to what I'm after is the Freewrite typewriter, which is stupid expensive.
I would frame it as lots of interesting theoritcal and PoC things but very little applications that provides value for end-users.
I am a big fan and consider it to have been a success, though not what Negroponte hoped for. Back in 2006 I helped them out (they even gave me a machine as thanks) but the advice I gave them was ignored. I told them at least Brazil and India (and probably other countries) would insist on making them locally instead of importing from China and that if the children themselves could make their own computers it would be even better (see Raspberry Pi and 3D printed cases). I also told them I had experience with children and they normally hated trackpads, preferring (in order) mice, big trackballs, the IBM rubber thing and joysticks instead. The first time a child ever saw a XO-1 was when they were about to ship and wanted to prove that a kid could take it apart and put it back together.
Regardless of his background his analysis states pretty plainly what happened. And he is correct that anyone involved in security research can be falsely caught by such tools.

The real takeaway here is the lack of care and regard that Anet exercised in the implementation of this anti-cheat system, and the callousness and ego demonstrated by the programmer posting his updates to Twitter.
For every good piece of open source software there is an awful lot of crap. For every good open-source organization there are a lot of dysfunctional little groups that work at cross purposes and never get anything done. You're talking about appropriating vital infrastructure here. How do you know your open-source corporation will turn out to be productive?
>there is no equivalent enforcement mechanism on the web.

Sure there is. Apple is already blocking it so its not hard to imagine a world where they only selectively block pages or features.
capitalism takes with one hand and gives with the other
Technology is a distraction in the classroom. I regret even the minimal presence of technology when I was in school, aside from computer science 'lab' work.
Not saying it was the biggest reason, but Microsoft was supposed to kill Windows XP around that time, and it went back on its decision when netbooks started appearing on the market. Windows Vista and even Windows 7 weren't very adequate for those machines performance-wise, but they thrived on Windows XP.
Tips for troubleshooting DNS
This is basically the setup I've been discussing in my articles about a decentralised Reddit alternative. A system where forums are all hosted independently, but can share login data, reputation data, post history, etc.

https://artplusmarketing.com/discussing-a-decentralised-redd...

It would hopefully avert the issue Reddit like sites have where different groups want to control what others can say on the platform, by taking control out of the hands of a large corporation.
> Warehouse jobs have no goal, no end in sight, it's a nonstop churn...

Long haul truckers may see things the same. There may be a destination, but there is always another after that. It is all about timing departure and arrival and those pesky reset periods. They are under constant pressure to keep moving, always pushing to the next place. If you push hard and make it once it will be expected the next time too.

For some it is a conveyor belt and list of orders, for other s it is a highway and a never ending list of destinations.
Superman flies. Spiderman spiders. Trolls exist.
I have never used an app to call a taxi. I used taxis for decades, and when Uber came out it was such a night and day difference that I have taken exactly one taxi in the last five years, when my phone battery was dead.
My comment was more of a call to action, but I can see how that wasn't clear. Apologies if you felt I didn't properly comprehend your comment.
Maybe, large pages are such a specialty feature on windows that generally speaking this use case was never supported. I'm not saying the crashes shouldn't be fixed. But VirtualAlloc should fail much faster because there are no large pages to alloc.
that would be odd since the list includes Google Play and Apple Music, which are both preinstalled apps.

Maybe you are overestimating how much people use the browser at scale?
Subsistence farming and coal mining were shitty jobs too.

Most jobs have always been shitty, this is less shitty than most and pays somewhat better (I believe Amazon is harder work than Walmart but pays more). And you can't find Americans to work in the fields, mines, slaughterhouses anymore.

If it was really shitty the US would get foreigners to do it. So much of the stuff Amazon ships is made overseas we almost might as well cut out the middleman and ship it directly from abroad, put a few giant warehouses just offshore or in Mexico. (I kid)
That's a shame.

I liked how GW2 was free forever after the initial purchase. I would come back every now and then to check out the new content.

Sadly, I don't keep any spyware on my computer. No exception. Even if I love the game, that's an instant uninstall for me.
Cryptocurrencies right now are at the point where there has been lots of hype for years now but very little actual use (it's mostly just for speculation right now). I'm just burned out of the hype around it without it really delivering on a large scale.
> I still don't understand why the system performed so poorly, I know a lot of Sugar was written in Python, but there must have been some very fundamental problems with it.

Fundamental problem identified. I believe the Inferno port tended to run better.
I guess as a private fund, that’s between them and their LPs...
npm – new PGP machinery
That wasn't the author's conclusion.
"monopoly on public radio"

If you think about that phrase for a second you'll realize how ridiculous it sounds.
Self-Driving Cars and the Future of Construction
No, that wasn't my conclusion. If you read the article, I offer a summary at the end, where I give a winner. (Winner, meaning best/easiest/simplest/fewest barriers to entry from a developer perspective.)

The winner is Google.

One of the main reasons for that is, Google tries to make everything in the OS available from standard JavaScript. Their platform is web friendly. For example, want to display the currently playing song info and album art on the lock screen? They submitted a new web standard for that.
To some degree isn't this expected? I mean, if real gdp growth is 1 or 2 percent per year why wouldn't some of that go to drug prices? Plus, why wouldn't this just be a preference thing?

I think the underlying assumption is that more money is being spent for drugs that are equivalent. Is that reasonable or provable assumption?
fingerprints and DNA are unique.... you can't fake/plant those /s
I see this quote often, but it hasn't really panned out for Amazon in practice.

I see other large tech companies (Google, Apple, Facebook) with these huge profit margins every quarter, year after year. Amazon has never made a dent in any of them, nor made a sizable profit themselves, despite all of that "opportunity."

Perhaps he's not speaking of tech but of retail, in which case the margins of companies like Walmart are already incredibly tight.
The default search functionality on OSM ("reverse geocoding" in mapspeak) does, indeed, need a lot of improvement. It's actually a separate project called Nominatim[1]. It's on Github and you can browse the issues and see a lot of similar complaints.

It's a daunting problem, parsing a free text query that may be in any language and trying to best match it with addresses that are standardized a hundred different ways all over the globe. In its current state it isn't good enough for everyday use. It's annoying how often a Google Maps search sends me to the wrong state or even the wrong country. But with Nominatim it's almost a given.

This underscores one of the fundamental features/bugs of the OSM project: It's pretty good at attracting mappers, developers, and 3rd-party projects that use its data and APIs, but it's never really been designed to meet the needs of end users. UX, according to the classic OSM schema, is to be implemented by the various 3rd parties in whatever way suits them best. If someone wants to develop and host a Google Maps replacement using OSM data they're welcome to do it (and they can provide their own reverse geocoding solution if necessary) but that's not an immediate goal of OSM itself, according to the current leadership.

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim
It's way more than $100,000 a year too. My treatment alone (Keytruda, every 3 weeks) is around $300,000 a year; about double the price the company will quote you if you ask, because they don't estimate the cost it takes to get blood work, get seen by an oncologist, and then get the treatment administrated to you safely by a trained nurse ready to respond to any adverse events that may spontaneously occur during infusion. However, thanks to current health care law in the US there are caps on the amount of out-of-pocket expenses your insurance can charge you. I have run of the mill bigco health insurance and my personal max out-of-pocket cost (after premiums, deductibles, etc.) is at least two orders of magnitude less than the cost to insurance.
Or maybe you live in a situation where $74 USD is a meaningful barrier to accessing a market.

Like what situation? To build an app at all he requires at least one computer, which is guaranteed to cost more than $99. He didn't blink at paying $25 to access MacInCloud.

The $99 fee is hardly a big deal. It's quite clearly there to encourage people to report charges on stolen credit cards, i.e. to make credit cards usable as a form of ID verification.

You're excluding people and organizations who want to maintain a single codebase.

There are ways to do that which don't require the web.
This explainantion doesn't make sense. You're alledging a16z funded 21.co with $100M, then took it all back to buy Bitcoin?

If that's the case earn.com would own the BTC, which would mean Coinbase acquired all the BTC held by earn.com

Unless there is something I'm missing, this almost certainly did NOT happen
You can also share these links, for example Pantheon's pricing page:
https://revops.io/pricing-page-optimizer/#https://pantheon.i...
Digital Behavior Design
The software for the initial public release of the OLPC was very rushed. The organization received so many small orders that they took people off of software development in order to process orders. These laptops were shipped (often months late) with beta-quality software. Beta-quality software was a terrible experience on a 400MHz machine with 0.25GB of memory -- there were no resources to spare.

Subsequent OS releases fixed most of the software problems, but the project had lost a lot of steam and goodwill by then. (They also lost a lot of goodwill before the release when Microsoft announced that they'd gotten Windows XP to work on the laptop, and the OLPC project announced that it would be available as an alternative to their own linux-based OS. [0])

As a result of the really, really bad experience with the Give 1 Get 1 campaign, OLPC instituted minimum order quantities of 1000 laptops (or 100 laptops if you ask nicely. The OLPC XO-1.5, a new motherboard for the XO-1 laptop, was also available in minimum quantity 100). The latest version of the laptop, the XO-4, has a gigahertz ARM processor and either 1 or 2 GB of memory. However, there are only 3 ways to get one:

* be in a country or school program that purchased the XO-4

* have a quarter-million dollars to spend on 100 laptops

* convince the OLPC project to give you one so you can develop educational software for it [1]

If you buy (or hear someone talk about buying) an OLPC laptop, it's almost guaranteed to be an XO-1. Unfortunately, most of the software (including the OS) is now developed against the much more powerful XO-4. This means that the XO-1 is now in a similar state now as it was when it was released -- almost everything is slow, and your precious RAM fills up quickly.

Exemplifying the state of the XO-1 laptop is a memory leak [2] in Sugar (the desktop UI). On the 1-2GB XO-4, it is not considered a problem:

> The leak has negligible impact on XO-4, XO-1.75 and XO-1.5. On these laptops we recommend that you restart Sugar at least weekly.

In the XO-1, however, idle memory consumption is easily 150 MB, and you can run out of memory in less than one day. The official fix is:

> On the XO-1 we recommend that you restart Sugar every few hours

I feel bad about the whole situation. The OLPC organization seriously tried to make Alan Kay's Dynabook real, and they produced a really cool piece, well-designed piece of hardware. (Not to mention a very well-documented hardware-software pair. [3][4]) It's a shame that they got in way over their heads by trying to develop the hardware, develop drivers for the hardware, develop a custom desktop environment, develop child-friendly userspace applications, and sell them in single quantity, defend themselves from critics, and also attract sales contracts from foreign bureaucracies.

[0] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/05/15/2320243/microsoft-a...

[1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Developers_Program

[2] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/13.2.9#Sugar_Memory_...

[3] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-1/Software_specification

[4] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specifications
> Technology is a distraction in the classroom.

Pencils, paper, white/blackboards, books, chairs, desks, walls, windows, electric lighting, HVAC systems, and even clothing are all “technology”.
not to lack compassion, but lolol
This was a weapons site; the rules for weapons sites were dramatically laxer than for energy sites. You don't see this sort of problem at energy sites, generally.
"21.co had been started as 21E6, a bitcoin mining company with a sizable data center footprint and a monthly bill to match. The company was set up to return mined bitcoin to its shareholders"

https://medium.com/@balajis/the-turnaround-2d145589d814
My experience with Reddit mobile web has been frustrating, because every page has a secondary loading period that is entirely unnecessary and seems to only be loading styling and JS libraries. The old Reddit mobile (i.reddit.com, I believe) was fairly simple HTML (though to be fair, it didn't look good) that loaded quickly and felt responsive.
"Altstadt" means "Old Town", which in many Germanophone cities also coincides with the "Zentrum" or city centre. But it specifically implies the presence of medieval or baroque-era buildings, not the kind of thing you just throw together on the periphery of a suburban mall in Minnesota...
So you have whatever mental model you have dreamed up for zero marginal production costs. Does this zero cost production include zero spoilage during the zero cost logistics to move the zero cost food, water, and shelter?

Of course, we can build all of those things because we'd like it. Zero marginal cost world peace awaits us!

I encourage you to chase this! I also encourage a backup plan.
I'm watching Hawaii Five-Oh on Netflix at the moment, and the show regularly uses that prefix when a phone number is required for the plot. Makes me smile every time they do it.
The Future of College Looks Like the Future of Retail
Sorry for being a small tribe, but if that was their stated goal then I guess it had no real use for me or mine. It would be nice if some folks would take into account their own backyard.
There was a whole push for netbooks like the Asus EEE PC that happened around the same time as the original XO.
I imagine the point being made might be more along the lines of owning software versus renting it.

If you purchase software that your company relies on, it belongs to you. Regardless if that third-party disappears. You still have use of the software until you can determine if you need to replace it or if it'll still work out for your needs.

Now renting the software as a service is a different matter. If the third-party goes under, well then you have problems. Problems you may have to solve immediately.

As an individual who is trying to build something, a disappearing third-party may not be detrimental if you still have the software at hand. You would not be locked down by that third-party's SaaS.
Ah, cool. Well for what it's worth, I agree with what you said. Becoming a behemoth at the cost of human suffering should not be acceptable in a civilized society.
Good stuff, but if Barlow's publishers want to compete with Jordan Peterson, this list needs more anti-socialist paranoia and dipshit manichean framing about how chaotic women are.
B2B Pilot program payments with personal bank account?
Hi, I'm an international founder who is in the process of validating his startup, while in a full-time gig (trying to get validation to get into an accelerator like Techstars or YC).

It's a B2B model, where I'd be selling a product for universities to enhance their students' career-building experience.

Since I can't form a company & set-up a business account yet, I was wondering whether it was possible to receive payment for the pilots on my personal bank account?

Side question: How do people process payments for pilot tests anyways? (e.g. check? wires? PayPal?)
Automatic default reply whenever I see "can't find Americans to work..."...

...at the rate of pay offered.

Speaking as a software engineer, if you offered me double my salary and secure employment for a couple years to work in a field or mine, I'd do it. Test me. Make me an offer. Slaughterhouses I don't know if I could do, but I'll bet plenty of people would for my current salary or less.

About a decade and a half ago I probably would've done the same for maybe $50/hr.
> I’ve taken to yelling “get of your effing phone” at drivers obviously looking down at devices while I’m driving, walking or cycling around; I think the phone doing that would be more efficient.

My iPhone does do that. If it thinks I'm driving, it makes me tap a button that says "I'm not driving." in order to continue.
Do you have a Display port monitor, by any chance?

After adding one, I found out that when the display goes to sleep, Windows sees it as a disconnection, and 'helpfully' wakes up to reorganize all the windows onto one display. That wakes up the Display port monitor, which triggers another reorganization, and the cycle begins again.
How many home routers are there in the world? 65,000 actually sounds like a shockingly low number to me.
See also smr.c from http://www.ioccc.org/years.html#1994 (the world's shortest quine!).
10 years ago was JQuery, Backbone and KnockoutJS. There are still millions of lines of all three of those in production today. The churn in popularity is high, but there are MOUNTAINS of legacy code out there.
Thank you, in any case I enjoy speaking with anyone that is able to understand me... This is lately becoming a nightmare :)
> Many HN users (myself included) dislike Electron-type apps because they feel slow and bloated.

How much of this is the fault of the Electron runtime and how much is fault of the developers?

When one looks at the sheer amount of code that popular frameworks (or, as I call them, crapworks) like Angular require the browser to load, compile and run, plus the resources that these apps end up gulping down... it's madness, compared to how far plain old jQuery will get you while running at a quarter of consumed resources.

Sure, using only jQuery requires lots of thinking about your code structure and it will undoubtedly be more complex. But also: orders of magnitude faster.
Judging from some of the comments here, software engineers working in Amazon must either be stupid or irrational to continue working there, given the market for software engineers. Amazon is a highly successful company with significant anticipate growth still to come. All that success doesn't come without talent. So maybe not stupid, maybe just irrational? Tech companies in general, and Amazon in particular, are highly data driven and people are constantly challenged to make design choices and decisions based on data--they are being constantly asked for hard evidence on why a certain choice is better than another. In a way they are optimizing for rational people in their recruitment. Could it be that they are more rational than average? Could it be that they are qualified to look at their work experience and weigh it against the compensation, and make the choice to instead go work for Microsoft, or one of the many tech companies around the Seattle area? Maybe they are all just masochists?

(Disclosure: I am a software engineer in AWS, and I love my job. Sorry, can't speak for non-tech jobs. Opinions are my own.)