skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree completely! I remember having a conversation with my parents about one of those "robots taking all the jobs" articles and I brought up universal basic income as a solution to mass technological unemployment and they seemed very unconvinced that it would be a good world where nobody had to "work."

I think a lot of people equate not working with not doing anything and they imagine massive slums full of unemployed people sitting around being miserable.

I've always felt nearly the opposite. Even doing work like estate planning felt kind of silly in the big picture compared to just spending time with my family, reading, writing, exercising, learning new things.

A person can spend just a couple thousand dollars on a car that works. Or somewhere between ten and twenty thousand dollars on a car that's really reliable. But you can also spend as much as many people earn in a lifetime on a car. Clothes are similar. You can buy decent clothes at Target for cheap, or you can buy similar clothing for hundreds of times as much from designer brands. I'm not saying those goods are all the same quality, but the prices of lots of things can be arbitrarily high based on their social importance.

I think work loses a ton of meaning when so much of the product of your work can be devoured by status goods like these. There will always be another status good to buy.

The end goal can't possibly be for everyone to have a yacht... Even if it were, everyone would just want a bigger yacht. If we don't need more stuff forever, eventually we'll be able to make all the stuff we need with almost no work, and all that will be left is to figure out how to lead fulfilling lives that don't revolve around acquiring yachts.
You can still see the output of your kernel and init system... on the serial console.

Personally, I wish serial-over-USB (and serial-over-Lightning) cables were more common. (I don't mean that they're expensive—they're dirt cheap. It's just that nobody has any idea they exist.)

They used to be a kind of arcane thing—why would you need serial access over USB when the PC already has a serial port? And why are you debugging a PC on another PC—(taking up a quite lot of space on your desk, eh?)—when you could instead debug the PC on the PC itself?

But these days, almost nothing has a serial port, and we have perfect "secondary PCs" to serve as the recipient of the serial input: our phones and tablets. (Heck, they probably have space reserved for them on your desk already!)

Imagine: sit an iPad or some cheapo Android tablet below your monitor. Plug the "send" end of the serial-over-USB cable into the USB hub built into your monitor. Plug the "receive" end of the cable into your tablet. Open a terminal-emulator app on your phone/tablet. Bam: console logs, flowing along below your PC, as needed.

Best of all, it's not unidirectional; your phone/tablet is now a VT100, and you can log into your computer over it, even if the display server or login manager or desktop environment is wedged.

If owning these little cables was common, I'd honestly suggest just turning off the Linux text-console virtual framebuffers entirely for the Desktop versions of distributions. You want to see what's going on underneath the gloss? Tap in.
This is making me really want to either get back into dancing (burlesque and pole, so far, who knows what next) or finally pick up that cheap electric guitar I've wanted most of my life. Because one of the things I really liked about dancing was the room to be an amateur who is not constantly pushing to take her craft further, worrying about publicity and networking, etc - I was just some lady who was learning to dance.

A lot of why I quit pole dance was feeling like I had gotten to the point where I was not going to see any more slow improvement unless I started seriously focusing on it like it was a major part of by life, and I don't have time for that.
Do you know if they're collaborating with the Sway folks? The Sway folks, via wlroots, seem to have their own protocol for surface capturing. It sounds like there is a potential for an adapter that speaks Sway on one side and Pipewire on the other side, and I'm out of my depth here, but I'm also interested in the Wayland + "screen capture/sharing" story becoming more solid, even for those of us that aren't in GNOME.
> Wow, what a nice project you have there.

Thanks :)

> It's a "natural" Some/None in a way.

If we lived in the perfect non-nullable reference world from the start then it's arguable whether Option<A> would ever have been needed - and so going forward it should be needed less, or not at all for some devs. The question comes when you need an optional value, and so you use nullable references instead of Option<A>. With nullable references the `null` still honours the contract of `A` - this is what Option<A> protects against. If the flow-analysis for nullable references is good enough to spot that you're possibly going to use null and then forces you to use a predicate of some sort (if/switch/ternary/...) to validate the referenced value exists then I think we're good. I understand that is what's planned, but it needs to be bulletproof.

There will be devs working in the nullable reference world for a long time (due to difficulties with moving to the new world when it comes) - and so I fully expect Option to be useful for its null protection reasons for a long time.

The story is a bit bigger than just protection against null though. If instead of seeing Option<A> as A|null, you see it as A|B, where B is the single-value type: Unit. Then Option is A|Unit. If you then look at Either<L, R> which is designed to represent one of two alternative values: L|R then it's pretty easy to see that Option is Either<Unit, A>. And then when we look at Try<A> which is designed to return A or capture an exception and return it as a value, then that can be seen as Either<Exception, A>...

All of the types that represent one of two values have lots of additional powerful functionality: Fold, Map, Bind, BiFold, BiMap, BiBind, etc. and have been designed to seamlessly switch between each, which won't exist on the standard nullable reference types. So, there's still a place for Option in the bigger scheme of things.

Personally, I can't wait for non-nullable references to come in. I built language-ext to try and get a handle on a 10,000,000+ line code base that kept falling foul to null reference exceptions (along with other common C# coding world problems). It was 100% to help me and my team build more robust code. Non-nullable references is a feature we will turn on immediately, even if it takes a week to fix up the warnings and errors it spits out, this is going to be one of the most important updates the C# team have done.
Reading that these tweezer beams are focused with a microscope objective raises the question of how much energy is in one of these beams.

For example, what would happen if the tip of the beam made contact with a piece of paper, steel, etc.?

Also, what precautions, if any, need to be taken to get air out of the system you use these in? If vacuum, how much?
Very nice. I'd like to see the video with no breaks or cuts, though.

It's interesting to see this done as a job for which the robot does not have enough manipulators. This would be easier with two hands to handle the board and one hand to apply the fasteners. On a production line, you'd have some way to keep the workpiece firmly in place while inserting fasteners. But they did it the hard way, with a humanoid form and only loose control over the workpiece. Which is what humans do. They often just push workpieces against a fixed object for guidance rather than go for full clamping.
I could not have answered in a better way.

Just adding we love and do open source.
These things will be in prod in 5-10 years. Same with autonomous cars. Goodbye 5-10% of all jobs.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/employment-by-industry-191...
That's not a common definition of poor. This is one that would be more in line with typical use:

> Lacking sufficient money to live at a standard considered comfortable or normal in a society.

From https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/poor
ZDNet just published an article with some more background about this BTW : https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/fast-ais-new-softwa...
Body shops don't work like this. Their purpose is to put butts in seats, regardless of whether or not that butt is attached to anything else that is functional. Functioning in this manner would actually be counter-productive for them, because it would reduce the number of butts that they have to put into seats, and would reduce the number of seats into which they could put butts.

If you know of a development agency, odds are that it is probably a body shop.

The places that do work like this are more like Unicorns. And Unicorns are damned hard to find and hire -- or get hired by them.
>It’s going to be some time before we have the machine intelligence necessary to do enough for this robot to find a toolbox on its own, retrieve the necessary tools, unload the drywall from a truck, carry it to the room in question, install it, and complain about OSHA all autonomously.

I don't think it's necessary to develop machine intelligence to do some of those tasks. The toolbox could could emit EM pulses so the robot can find it, the tools could be put in a specific order and put back the same way by the robot, the drywall could have easy-to-remove arrow stickers so the robot knows how to find it's borders, etc.
I know nothing of economics, but I’m curious how relevant comparing against our own historical productivity actually is. For example, shouldn’t the comparison also be against productivity and productivity/wage growth in other countries we’re competing with? Is productivity even something that can be measured in such a way that useful comparisons can actually be made across time periods?
Facebook's AI is writing short stories and they actually make sense
The article was saying that it's OK to do it in programming because we do it in real life. My point was that we don't.
I am. Much more plausible is an embargoed story.
Strengthen security posture and protect against threats w Azure Security Center
True, but took about much more than a century for that, and for quite a long time tobacco smoke was seen as medicinal!
It cuts both ways at least, those with inherited wealth are just as unworthy as those who never accumulated any.

> The so-called Protestant Ethic
then prevalent held that man was a sturdy and responsible individual, responsible to himself, his society, and his God. Anybody who could not measure up to that standard could not qualify for public office or even popular respect. One who was born "with a silver spoon in his mouth" might be envied, but he could not aspire to public acclaim; he had to live out his life in the seclusion of his own class.
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I submit that having ten thousand node.js/npm dependencies is far worse than any DLL Hell that has ever been experienced to date.
Yeah, in consumer electronics the hardware engineers have knife fights in the hallways over resistors. Well, not that bad. Probably.

"Can't you do that in software?" 50M units later you understand the reason why that hardware guy made your life a living hell for two weeks just before release, because what he did saved ten cents on the motherboard and at scale that's real money.
OS X /could/ do that on a random PC - Windows 8 and later already do so if your firmware provides appropriate functionality, and Fedora is making use of this same functionality. The firmware exports information about its bootsplash in an ACPI table called BGRT, and this allows the bootloader and OS to draw stuff without overwriting the firmware's artwork. This is how recent versions of Windows draw the boot animation underneath the vendor firmware logo. Right now Fedora doesn't do that, but it wouldn't be super hard to teach Plymouth how to.

UEFI graphics drivers usually support much more fine grained modesetting than VESA, assuming you have a native UEFI graphics driver rather than one that's thunking down to a legacy BIOS option ROM. They're also (usually) capable of reading and parsing EDID and will set a native mode if possible. The number of people not running their desktop at their display's native mode is sufficiently low that it's not really worth worrying about.
Well the smart money sees massive inflation ahead. Combine a enormous deficit, a very tight labour market, rising tarrifs, and now large pay rises for workers, and we are in for a time of high inflation.
How to Live an XS Life on a 5c Budget
Sorry, what is the evidence that there is a genetic component to intelligence?
> is that it allows running Linux kernel directly as a UEFI executable

Like rEFInd?
Apollo landing computer fit the bill? https://opendsky.com/
Are you sure you didn’t want pillow, which provides the PIL import and is the follow-on from the original PIL?
That is a larger societal question, though - how long should you be able to live off work you do? Is it fair for a worker to work for a few weeks, automating a job that used to be paid year after year, and then earn that money forever?

Obviously there is a balance - a company shouldn't get ALL that savings (although in the long run, that savings would need to be passed on to customers, since competitors will also be able to automate the same tasks).

At the same time, I don't think it is fair (or sustainable as a society), to expect to live forever off of work you did over a few weeks (no matter how valuable that work might be).

If we allow people who automate things to live off the work of that automation FOREVER, then we are creating that sort of distopia that anti-technology people claim; that WOULD be taking jobs, because ALL of the benefit for the automation would be going to the automater and none to society. Society would still be paying the same amount for the resource, it would just all be going to the person who made it.

Obviously, it shouldn't all go to a company either, but if ALL (or many) companies in the same field also automate, they will HAVE to pass on the savings to customers to compete. This will provide a net gain to society, since the resource is now cheaper for everyone (at the cost of the people who used to do the job).

The cost decreasing with automation is REQUIRED to make it a net positive for society, and the automater taking all the rewards for the automation in perpetuity ruins that.
The humans who found jobs at those recycling centres might not cheer on you for automating away yet another job opportunity for them. Eventually there won't be any 'simple' jobs left while the supply of 'simple-job' people is unlikely to dwindle. What are they going to do then?
Would it be possible to build your own, e.g. something like the one shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=104&v=Sq7GaO8iqu...?
Nah, amazon is planning on investing in robots.
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If you're riding for very long, though, you will probably want padded shorts. I used to think they were silly, but after a couple of rides where my butt was seriously sore afterwards and one where my junk went numb, I swapped out my old saddle for one with a split down the middle and started wearing padded shorts and now I can bike for 40+ miles without getting sore.

I like my cycling tunic/jersey thing because it gets really good airflow, but I've gone on long rides in just a plain old t-shirt, too.
sure, if you want to learn how von neumann style architecture inspired programming works.. but some folk I know would curse it and stay you should start with Scheme or perhaps Haskell if you truly want to learn programming :). The truth is probably somewhere inbetween.
Without population growth, big parts of many national economies become unsustainable. They're like MLM, Ponzi Schemes, or other pyramid schemes in this way.
Intel ME Manufacturing Mode: obscured dangers and MacBook vulnerability
Reminds me of this story about a better construction crane that was killed by the existing industry:

https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160515/REAL_ESTATE/1...
I wouldn't expect prices to rise significantly as automation kicks in. We will see a lot of competition and wage stagnation for those middle class jobs as efficiency eats away the margins they live on.
Hopefully we find a solution before the pitchforks come out.
Nope.

Operations is a pure cost center. Cost centers only exist for the express purpose of being compressed twice as much this month as they were last month, so that you can make them half as expensive.

Developers are valuable. They create value.

When all the good Operations staff has left because they're tired of being treated like mushrooms, all the Operations stuff gets thrown over the wall and then the Developers get told that they are now DevOps.
Most uses of the word powerful in this context actually refers to the expressiveness of the language and not the Turing completeness.
Folding Pocket Tool Multi Knife Swiss Army Stainless Steel Pocket Knives Hunting
I love overtaking cars in the city going uphill on a bike - the look on faces of those drivers is well-worth pushing hard ;-)
This was a tactical move, i suspect. Restless employees at Wal-Mart type stores can generally get on with another nickel on their paycheck and an angry-dome presentation on how unions will destroy the world. Not so here.

When your employees are filing for food stamps and urinating in plastic bottles, things are only a few war-boys away from Mad Max. No amount of safety meeting shilling is going to convince these people...many of whom source Amazon as the only major employer in the region...that a union is bad. Amazon likely raised wages to prevent the larger thread: mass unionization across its warehouses that could spread to managers, programmers, SRE teams, etc..
> platform and OS combo that could continue to run their software from a few years back

So, here's a thought for ya: MS Excel from back then won't run on anymore, 16-bit apps aren't recognized by modern Windows, etc.

But a .XLS created back then sure will. And lots of business logic is codified in Excel spreadsheets.

I posit that .XLS is a more stable platform than Windows itself.
It would be really slick if they could fade in the blue background of the login over time in the boot process, so the only thing that changes in the end is the bios logo swapping out (or a faded swap) to the login entry.

It might require storing the target color as a kernel param, but it might be worth it for the wow factor.
I think Japan's emperor is a lot different than an emperor in traditional usage. I think they are descendants of the Sun God and they are not involved in day to day affairs of men.
> Is productivity even something that can be measured in such a way that useful comparisons can actually be made across time periods?

[Inflation-adjusted] GDP is held to represent the productivity of an entire country in a way where one can make historical contrasts.

Therefore, [inflation-adjusted] GDP per capita (a.k.a. PPP, Purchasing Power Parity) could be a valid measure of average individual worker productivity.
It is hard to make someone understand some fact when their continued existence depends on ignoring the fact in question.
> It's easy not to care how good you are at your hobbies when you're already really good at something else.

I've seen that at play, and it can be a very significant effect. The clearest instance from my personal experience was in self-studying mathematics. I began my regimen of study literally the day after finishing my CS degree. I'd had a 'repetitive strain injury' related to computer usage for years at that point, and had figured I would never be able to work as a programmer again (did a brief stint as a teenager). I needed to find something else and had been searching for a long time without luck—but now I had something: I'd just earn money doing mathematics somehow!

It was grueling to work on at that time because it seemed like my last option for being able to do something that used my creative/technical abilities as a career (I was working at a grocery store then to put things in perspective)—and I just had no idea if I was going to be good enough with math for it to be a realistic possibility. So it was nerve-wracking anytime I attempted something that would test my ability.

Several years later, after figuring out the computer use issues—I didn't need mathematics anymore. But I'd spent a lot of time learning, gaining proficiency, and developing interests in various areas; so at some point I got back into studying again. The difference is night and day—I'm far more productive, and it's just, by comparison to before, no big deal.

Highly recommended if you can settle it with yourself that you're okay with things however they turn out in relation to some hobby/skill/whatever.
> Examples: The buzzer for restaurants, why can't it have a screen to display menu, or let your preorder?

those things are dropped, lost, chewed on by children for 8 hours a day, etc. they've got to be as cheap as possible. also who'd stare at the shitty little screen that's nothing but ads, when they could stare at ads on their expensive slightly larger screen that they carry around all day?

if you want really a menu, the host will be thrilled to hand you one. there's a box of them under their station.

> At a restaurant, why can't I see the most ordered 5 items and have to go through pages of menu?

because then they'll have fewer opportunities to upsell you on more expensive dishes, and alcohol.

> Similar idea for supermarkets: why not have a giant screen at the entrance showing most bought products, interesting product pairings and other data that may be useful?

who cares what's most bought at the grocery store? knowing that my store sells ramen by a truckload doesn't get me buying anything the store wants to actually sell.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018
More powerful as in the expressive power. Sorry if that was not clear.
The Wheel of Time TV Series Gets Picked Up by Amazon
Now that everyone has a cell phone and keeps the same number forever, your phone number is the new social security number. Think of all the places social security numbers were used because they were a fixed identifier and how we now think that that was a bad idea. Laws were passed against companies using them. Giving out your phone number is the same problem except many companies have some legitimate reason to collect it (see the article) and then what do you do?