skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many years ago, one of the secretaries was on holiday and the big boss asked me to write a program that, unbeknownst to me at the time, completely automated her job away. When she came back she came to me in tears, couldn't believe I had stabbed her in the back like that. Well this story has a happy ending, the boss did it so he could promote her, he just thought it would be a nice surprise! But ever since then I have been very conscious of the power we have and I try to work on new things, not merely automating away old ones. I make the exception obviously for using automation to bring work back in-house that had previously been outsourced or offshored. Those jobs are already destroyed, and automation always improves the quality and turnaround.
It is worth noting for those who don't know yet, the findings of Optical Tweezers has made Arthur Ashkin a laureate of the 2018 Physics Nobel prize, on par with Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou for their work on generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses.
I just want to second Andrew's list. I'm a developer with probably 1/100 as much money as he has, but this is the first list I've seen in a long time that mentions specific low-hanging fruit that has the potential to actually improve lives (vs the mostly vacuous or profit-oriented areas I've seen in other lists).

I look at problems in the world as a series of solutions built from first principles. So if you want a distributed mesh network, you need a supplier that can make millions of boxes for roughly 1/10 their retail price, or you need software that can run on existing phones/routers/computers. Then you need open software with tests for all the edge cases so you know it's free of bugs. Then you need an algorithm for things like web of trust or onion routing. Then you need a compelling use case (easy, no more internet and/or cell phone bill) and a way to prove it's safe so it goes viral. And so on. No one step of the process is insurmountable, or in many cases, especially difficult.

Once we have that box, other ideas like content-addressable memory (things like IPFS) become feasible and we end up with an internet running thousands of times faster than what we have now, because media can be seeded once to each city and then cached by downloaders.

So of course that's a barrier to entry, because few players in the existing paradigm want to disrupt the status quo. But that's no reason to settle for the wildly expensive and slow technology that we are stuck with now. Pretty much every item in his list works along these same lines.
I dunno, what else are most people going to spend bandwidth on? The occasional short video on Facebook, some gaming that is more concerned about latency than shoving bits down the wire, and some web surfing of pages that are agreed to be hefty these days but nowhere near the weight of video.

And, frankly, I dunno what else even I use the bandwidth for. It's not like I'm dragging down multi-gigabyte updates every single day. I rarely do torrents anymore. 4GB of Xcode here, a few GB for some OS updates there, Forza Horizon 4 was 50GB yesterday. But day-in-day-out, it's not the frequent-but-small blips from the IoT crap lying around the house, the refreshing of a web page, or however many 10s of Kbps an online game needs, it's an hour or two of video streaming every night.
Handheld Underwater Scooter?
How do I find a job I can automate away?
Usually optical traps use 1064 nm NdYAG lasers, which is in the infrared. Most objectives aren't designed for infrared light, so the objectives used for optical trapping are usually customized.
That's basically what sbupdate [0] for Arch does, it allows you to set your own bitmap for boot logo (after the vendor logo, of course).

Another benefit of sbupdate (besides Secure Boot) is that it allows running Linux kernel directly as a UEFI executable, no GRUB or systemd-boot needed!

[0]: https://github.com/andreyv/sbupdate
You can applaud them for what they actually do without delving into apologism (“who says Amazon doesn’t pay taxes”)
As the GP said:

> The press release linked by OP doesn't give the full story. For a better perspective see [the random blog post].
Unless you own means of productions, then you can be a person
What? I was assuming it meant a static "white noise" image. And... yeah, I remember them happening. But in modern transmission systems, that is a complete fabrication. There is nothing about getting white noise to transmit to look like that, and it in fact takes more effort to create such a screen.

Last television I hooked up using a digital antenna would simply not show anything if the signal didn't exist. If you had poor signal, you'd get more compression artifacts. Nothing there should translate to the white noise image.

Right?
You're not replying to the substance of my reply. I was saying that analyzing Tesla's sales in comparison to other automakers' declining sales is perfectly fair.

You're right to point out that Tesla has years of pent up sales, but it is still true that, whatever their sales are, they are more impressive in a market where other automakers are declining than they would be in a market of overall double-digit auto sales growth.
Definitely not the UK, but there's enough cultural similarity between the UK and Ireland (where I live) that your comment shocked me. People don't care _at all_ about red lights here and run them constantly. Taxis are especially bad offenders. They also park on the footpath, blocking prams and wheelchairs.
in China you are weirdo if you don't sleep through lunch and don't have pillow in office, people nap on desks even in open space, in some companies they even automatically switch if lights and put some resting music and at the end of nap they slowly wake up people with lightning and music

though foreigners working in China don't practice it usually, you have to live there for some time to get used to it and I would say most foreigners still other e socializing during lunch break
>I'm guessing for many people an Amazon warehouse job is stable employment near their small town that might not have many opportunities otherwise.

Not with the 2nd highest turnover of all Fortune 500's.

https://www.ibtimes.com/amazoncom-has-second-highest-employe...
But you can improve your expected returns if you get to double down on one of your lottery tickets when you know it has a high chance of winning. You invest little time in the startups that seem likely to be unsuccessful, and a lot more time in the startup that is on a path to success.
Thanks for pointing this out. I've added that fair play note to the first page of the documentation.
Having been both riders in this situation - I'd speculate that you're the one having more fun. I went through phases of recreational cyclist -> competitive cyclist and racer -> back to recreational cyclist.

Training and racing was immensely satisfying for the few moments when I would beat a personal best or place well, but it wasn't necessarily fun. The time, suffering and monetary cost of bike racing even on at the amateur-with-no-hope-of-going-pro level is crazy. The most fun I've had cycling was doing leisurely rides with friends or even just around the neighborhood with my partner.
Maybe car commuters are different but I take the train everyday and the car is packed with people in very close proximity but none of them ever seem interested in talking to strangers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_fund
Come to SRE. We are seriously expected to fully automate our job away twice a decade and still manage to just keep growing.
> if you really want to know "how the computer works".

This depends on what the person is really trying to learn. If they are just interested in learning how a simple CPU does what it does, then, yes, going straight to an assembly language for some old chip from the 80s is a good idea. Writing an emulator is a fun and instructive exercise.

But my impression is that most programmers who want to learn how the computer works want to because they want to be able to write more efficient software. They want to understand how computer performance works. Learning a simple CPU is anti-helpful for that. It leads you to believe wrong things like "all memory access is equally fast".

If you want to learn how to write faster code, C is pretty good because it strips away the constant factor overhead of higher level languages where things like GC, dynamic dispatch, and "everything is a reference" mask hardware-level performance effects.

It lets you control layout in memory, so you can control data cache effects. Without a VM or interpreter overhead, most of the branches the CPU takes will be branches you explicitly write in your code, so you can control things like the branch predictor.
The Netherlands is generally the best or second best place in the world to get around, though, is it not? I've considered moving there just for the bike infra (Utrecht comes up a lot in conversations with my wife, and Zwolle).

My daughter is 1. By the time she starts school I want her to be able to ride a bike to school without dying.
I don't think the colors are the problem, the font is... it's like the opposite of bold it's so thin...
There is not really any such thing as "the" C ABI -- different platforms have totally different conventions, even on the same instruction set.
Good luck to her, its not going to be easy to turn that ship around, I don't work in any retail related industry so I'm not sure how mall-department stores are ever going to be able to be back in fashion.
Articles [0][1] cite a study [2] that people driving cars and bicycles admit to breaking the law at the same rate. I've just now found the study itself, so will be reading it's additional findings.

[0]: https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-07-18/survey-finds-bicyclis...
[1]: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/03/16/busting-the-myth-of-t...
[2]: https://jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/871/875
It does, but it is different from fiscal value used in economics.
The blog post doesn't even cite the source of the news.
Why does Japanese print design look so freaking cool?
Exactly. I wonder how their bosses don't realise that these tasks can be automated.
Nice article, but the rejection wasn't brutal at all.
It might work. B&O taxes are taken out of gross income, but no where near 30%:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_and_occupation_tax#Ma...

So a federal B&O scheme might work if the rate was low enough. Auditing a business would be massively simplified, no need to carefully check expenses and write-offs to calculate net income. Compliance would be much easier. The question is would gross income taxation create a bigger pie, and would that pie be big enough that a low rate would substantially tax revenues.
Some kinds of automation only create more work. Looking at you, Chef.
that's actually pretty clever!
There definitely is, unless there's a hardware heap pointer and hardware allocation and deallocation instructions, as there are for the stack :)
As G.K. Chesterton said: "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

https://www.chesterton.org/a-thing-worth-doing/
Some. Some development jobs. We sometimes forget that the world of development isn't just the WWW.
Google "stack engine". Huge portions of the chip are dedicated to this; if it makes you feel better you can think of it as fully associative store buffers optimized for stack like access. And all of this is completely separate from regular LSUs.

There's a reason why SP was promoted to a first class citizen in AArch64 when they were otherwise removing features like conditional execution.

That's also the reason why using RSP as a GPR on x86 gives you terrible perf compared to the other registers, it flips back and forth between the stack engine and the rest of the core and has to manually synchronize in ucode.

EDIT: Also, the stack is different to the OS generally too. On Linux you throw in the flags MAP_GROWSDOWN | MAP_STACK when building a new stack.
I was saying that Chicago and Montreal could stand as an example for those cities.
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It's weird to me how we tend to talk about whether worker protections are harmful in hypothetical terms, when we can actually look at history and see that society improved as more protections for workers were implemented, and inequality has gotten worse has gotten worse as worker protections have waned. I love a good philosophical exercise as much as anyone else, but the real world has shown us the answer sheet for this question.
>I'm guessing for many people an Amazon warehouse job is stable employment near their small town that might not have many opportunities otherwise.

If they do their research, they'll realize they probably won't have a job for that long [1] and it would be preferable to stay in a position (that likely pays better with your examples) that is reliable.

[1] https://www.ibtimes.com/amazoncom-has-second-highest-employe...
Free ARM Cortex-M Softcore for Xilinx FPGAs
I haven't used fast.ai yet, but extensively use pytorch for anything to do with deeplearning.
(it is so much better than tensorflow)
It's great to see a keras like higher level abstraction library for deep learning.

A few questions:

1. what is the benefit of using fast.ai to someone well acquainted with pytorch (for academic use)

2. how well does fast.ai interface with pytorch itself ? Can parts of program be in fast ai and other parts be in pytorch ?

3. Am I correct in assuming that despite being very fast, fast.ai is still slower (even if marginally so) than pytorch itself ?
Station finally getting some HN love. That's great to see. I use this everyday at work for Slack, Outlook Pro/365, Salesforce, DataDog..

I would like to see the ability to specify jira.mydomain.com for the main Jira app (eg kind of like how you can do custom domain login to the Salesforce app, but I do understand that that is actually accomplished by Salesforce WebUI functionality itself there). Having Jira accessible within Station would really complete the circle for me.

I know we can request custom/private Station apps, but not sure I want to request that, as I'm really the only one at the company who uses it... I've shown Station to co-workers and they think it's cool, but they love all their individual apps I guess... :)

I wish the Station team continued success and all the best!
Installing drywall is unsurprisingly easy. Just that just needs a driver, a jack and a bucket of screws. And the sheets are large enough where you can cover a room with just a dozen. What eats up time is the taping and mudding. It's what sets an abject amateur from a pro.
> I'd argue that given special purpose registers exist on most platforms to support a stack, and instructions dedicated to manipulating them (x86 %sp, push, pop) that the stack is in fact a hardware concept.

True enough; however sometimes access to "the heap" (in C terms) will use those instructions, and sometimes access to "the stack" will not. Learning one or two assembly languages is well worth doing, since they offer a coherent abstraction that is genuinely relevant to the implementation of higher-level languages. Not so C.
I saw it as an issue that both progressives and conservatives would eventually agree upon. Amazon is an extremely easy target to focus upon when it came to wage issues.

It doesn't really matter who owns the White House in 2020. This issue wasn't going to go away.
> Well, no shit. That is what the job of a programmer is - to keep automating things.

I think that many of these scenarios are occurring when NON-programmers realize that their jobs are automate-able and they set out to automate them. It means picking up new skills, practicing them and putting them to use without the consent nor permission of management.

It is not necessarily an easy path, it takes time, and there's going to be trial and error involved and although the discussion is about automating 100% of a job away, there's many other possible outcomes such as effort-multiplication, getting rid of the grunt work and gaining more time to focus on deeper problems.

This is effectively "out-of-band" work that is a great experience for the individual but which _many_ organizations do not condone. A LOT of workplaces don't tolerate workers doing stuff that they're not being "told" to do.
I hope to see robots like this - or not humanoid at all - at the recycling centers sorting. There is no reason for humans to work there.
Reptiloids from DARPA just want to have a flight to Home.
Can the open source version of HAProxy also be used to achieve what is described in this tutorial?
Indeed we know few users have this specific issue you are referring to. We are looking into it.
I’ve seen this stuff on some Windows laptops and always wondered what unholy magic this was.

Glad to hear this magic is coming to Linux too, although as a Ubuntu-user I guess I’ll have to wait a few releases before this is the standard.
iFOIA.org – Generate and Submit Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Requests
I submit that we have just focused on the top in terms of systemic gov't policy.
While her research career was much shorter, I think it's worth pointing out that Angela Merkel was an accomplished Quantum Chemist before entering politics: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=2443252700...
look for excel heavy data entry jobs
C will teach you how computers used to work. Nowadays there are lots of hacks to make C code from decades ago still work but the fact is the hardware and how it manages memory is completely different.

Anyway, you'll learn some useful fundamentals regardless.
There's a reason 32-bit ARM has 'move base register down and then do some stores' and 'do loads and then move base register up' (stmdb and ldmia) rather than just plain old ldm and stm, and I'm pretty sure it's because it makes the entry and exit sequences for function calls with a stack shorter. (The ARM ISA doesn't privilege a downward growing stack, so you can use stmib and ldmda if you want your stack to grow upward; the Thumb ISA, however, does want a downward stack for push and pop.)
This... resonates strongly.

Also, the Internet is both blessing and a curse here. On the one hand, you have
free access to all the information and educational material you need to quickly get up to speed with pretty much any hobby imaginable. On the other hand, you also get to see so many people doing so much better than you. I find it subtly intimidating.
It's interesting how people expect workers to "earn" their salaries through suffering. It's almost religious. At the same time, lots of businesses charge their clients a percentage of their earnings and it's ok.
Google Announces TPU Support for PyTorch
I'm a grad student in a lab that specializes in using optical tweezers for single-molecule biophysics research. I'm out sick today with nothing better to do, so feel free to ask me anything.
It's probably been such low priority in the Linux community because most of us are big nerds and we like seeing different technologies interact, it can be nice to be able to see the boot sequence bios>bootloader>OS>Desktop.

OSx does the same thing, but hides it all behind a single load screen, as if all of those elements from hardware to DE were a monolithic "mac".

It feels like lying to the user to me. Bios isn't in control anymore, why is the motherboard logo still on the screen? How do I know when the OS takes over from grub if both are hidden under the motherboard logo?
There's also

4) Manage to not be a semi-random false negative

There's still the issue mentioned in your GP that there are not that many of those jobs out there to begin with. Also, there are more people who want them then there are slots.

Note that I agree about not needing to get political to get these roles. I just disagree about how easy it is to obtain them.
I also noticed this -- clearly, not a lot of love in the dept for her. A bit awkward now, and I suspect soon, she will be a full prof, perhaps at a different university....
FWIW, riding in jeans gave me folliculitis, and a well maintained & fit bike is more pleasant to ride. Don't let the desire to separate yourself from the spandex crowd drive you to torture yourself.
What was even more fun was that the old finance.yahoo.com page (which I still miss) would let you create a number of portfolios which you could then track and measure. I made a tech portfolio, energy portfolio, and consumables (low $ retail) portfolio. You could compete in their contest by submitting a portfolio and having it 'ride the charts' and be ranked right up there along other choices.

Way more fun than anything Zynga has ever published as far as I am concerned.
Looking at revenue is completely meaningless. You need to look at margins to see the effect on a company. Imagine you take a loan of $1000 to buy $1000 of gizmos and then sell them to me for $1300. You don't have $1300, you have $300 after covering your overhead costs. And in the case of Amazon you have far more overhead costs than just the costs of goods. And the government also attaches significant tax increases when you pay employees more -- paying an employee $10 more is substantially more than $10 in cost to the employer.

Amazon's 2017 financials showed a final net income of $3 billion. They do reinvest aggressively in their company so a fair chunk of their costs are going to be 'voluntary', but that voluntary expenditure is the very action creating all these jobs. In any case, this is going to be a very substantial cost to them.
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I wouldn't consider an obfuscated 1 line C program simple. Thats how I look at unintuitive proofs that simply evaluate to true but appear to lack premeditation. Might as well just replace the proof with a brute force computer assisted proof.. I get that people want simple... simple and small is nice..its a challenge for any mathematician. But the beauty is really in something other than the proof - its origin and creation story. Every "challenge proof" should come with an addendum. Kinda like Obfuscated C or JS2k contest entries usually come with a write-up.
My god when I saw the title I thought how awesome it will be to see mudding automated. I was disappoint.

I'm just starting on drywalling a repaired section of my basement. I'm only at the "get the drywall from the hardware store to the basement" phase, already that was hard enough and that was the easiest part. Ugh.
Kaitai Struct: A new way to develop parsers for binary structures
Yep, these common assumptions are not always true if you read deep enough into the spec. Even though they may be true in practice, only as a side effect in most implementations...

I taught myself C when I was a teenager (on an Amiga, back in the 80's.) It is amazing that almost 30 years later, I'm still learning new things about it.
Sounds like a monopoly that needs a little breaking up.

https://i.imgur.com/IC8Ehgh.jpg
This makes Japan's evil attitude towards marine life even worse in my eyes.
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Don't think that's how villainy, accomplices, or tips work.
Kinda off-topic, but I feel like they could gain a lot by opening their graphics stacks or simply by letting FOSS devs work on them, instead of making their work more difficult/impossible (see: history of the FOSS lima driver).