skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the author’s central point is that money can be viewed as an IOU for future utility from society. If I view all of society outside the individual as one agent, say a giant company that owns the stores you shop in and still employed you, and that company pays you $COMPANY-BUCKS to be redeemed at the company store, they got utilty out of you for nothing until you redeem the company bucks for something.

The author is saying that accumulating wealth is just, assuming you were payed fairly, showing a debt society has taken on to you. Society hasn’t had to produce something in return yet. And it’s how you spend that debt that can cause problems, not that the debt exists. You can spend it in ways that direct people to create utility that you share with society or in ways that lock that utility up.
Best if you avoid incorporation until you are forced to. If/when you incorporate, do so as a LLC or SCorp (allowing pass-through taxation). CCorps now have a flat 25% tax rate which will be a high double-taxation while you are trying to grow.

edit: assuming you are in the USA. If in a bureaucratic nightmare of a country then you should avoid incorporation until you are extremely profitable. My own experience in Thailand: I incorporated early and was forced to hire a full time bookkeeper plus about 1 month/year accountant contractor to handle the government red tape
Upper class is a bad descriptor, and many working class people do shop there, but I think Costco does have a bit of an upscale connotation. A different one than whole foods or a natural food co-op, but I think it still has one. It's not the "normal" grocer.
Neither of these are difficult to deal with. For battery costs, I posted this recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18808842

Batteries are dropping in cost far faster than nearly anybody realizes, and people seem to think we're paying 8088 costs when we're up to pentium costs for computing.

Space concerns are pretty minor, it really doesn't take much compared to current human land use. In addition to covering land that's already used by humans for parking or building, we will likely see more farm land that's currently producing things like soybeans or field corn converted to solar farms, and solar is more environmentally friendly to those ecosystems than the current farming practice.

Neither of these have significant greenhouse emissions, and as the energy supply chain lessens its carbon use so will all the manufacturing and recycling.
I’m not sure you are correct in that - MRI scanners are expensive to run as they are rarely as low priced as you are suggesting. See link below which is a little old but gives a spread of prices. Note that the prices cited i this thread is less than half the US average.

Another factor that is relatively rarely discussed is the quality. You can do a fast scan or a good scan. That’s inherent in how MRI works.
A good gynaecological, cardiac or liver scan takes about 45mins, and there isn’t much you can do to improve on that as you are limited by metabolic activity (eg liver or heart contast wash-in and wash-out). If corners are cut here diagnosic quality will be reduced.

I regularly see scans that are of such poor quality that they are initially mistaken for the survey scans/scouts that we use to localise the patient in the bore. They are generally from places that you would intuitively avoid for healthcare, but not always.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/312020/price-of-mri-diag...
Okay... no one is making you use Bash. I use it a lot, depend on its features, and I'm glad they are still improving it. I agree it has lots of warts from retaining so much backwards compatibility, but for certain use cases it's still much easier to write (and read) than any "real" programming language, including stuff like Python and Ruby. Since you don't need to deal with those use cases, that's cool. Not sure why you came here to trash it, though.
I can recommend the practice; for the last few years, I've gone to bed around 10pm every night, and gotten up at five before heading to work around nine. (Adjust to taste depending on your sleep needs; the important point is to give yourself a few hours to yourself in the morning.)

In practice, this means moving discretionary time from last thing in the day to first thing, and I think there's great value in that. After all, the things we do with our discretionary time - don't we do them because they matter to us? Certainly I do! And I've found that starting my day with them, when I can approach them with a fresh mind, both improves my ability to pursue those avocations, and gives me a better platform on which to begin a day of work than scrambling to do everything at the last minute has ever done.
This basically renders your point meaningless, since now literally all businesses in the US are servicing the upper class.

There's relative poverty in the US still. Currency still has relative purchasing power. Saying a person living below the US poverty line should be put in the same class (upper class) as Jeff Bezos seems disingenuous as best.
Nice - I've been getting overly familiar with sed recently because it's one of the few tools that we can trust to be installed for our minimal-dependency NBD server. Unfortunately we also need to work across Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. However I've not needed to write anything as large as this maze-solver. It's text hacks like: https://github.com/libguestfs/nbdkit/blob/b8d80d3df90eaa32ef...
That's not a golden parachute though. Those are retention bonuses being paid to management so that they don't lose their entire staff before they are able to liquidate remaining assets and close properly.

Going out of business is a process. It is not some sort of overnight ordeal. Especially not for an organization as large as Sears.
AbstractCoachProxyFactoryBean.
Self-driving car object tracking: Intuition and the math behind Kalman Filter
FPGA-Based Accelerators of Deep Learning Networks: A Review
And Sears, like Walmart now, was big enough that they could go to manufacturers and get special versions of products to makeup the "Kenmore" brand. I remember looking at fridges back in the day and the Kenmore version had just minor differences that made it slightly better than the 'same' model from the actual manufacturer.

The difference between Walmart and Sears through is that Walmart pushes manufacturers to build the cheapest possible product so their versions are worse rather than better then the manufacturer's own branded products.
They came around to liking it at around the 20 year mark :)
for german speakers: the best told and most comprehensive story about the rise and fall of sears: https://www.republik.ch/2018/12/25/sears-eine-kapitalistisch...

disclaimer: I work for Republik.
This reads like a creative writing exercise from
the same people who were hurling violent abuse on social media at (ex-)SV people, mainly women and people of colour, who spoke out about abuse and similar attitudes they'd experienced in SV/tech in general.

Zero sources, zero verification: This isn't HN-level content.
It was an entry-level IT support job at a US public school district circa 2005. They had just recently installed the scanners at every building. I believe that part-time and hourly employees like custodians, mechanics, groundskeepers, and cafeteria workers were the primary target, but the policy also extended to the tech support department (which was only me).
Western Digital HDD Simulation at Cloud Scale
Effect of Threads on Application Throughput
Coming from the Midwest it was so bizarre and alien. I'm quite convinced Silicon Valley, and startups in general, have no idea how the rest of the world works. Absolutely none.

Never mind the fact that all 3 people interviewing me, were clearly working on their computers while conducting the interview as you could see them typing way more than I was saying as well as obviously moving to other windows and reading text based on hand and eye movement. Like, hey man if you're going to interview me at least give me the respect of paying attention.
> In 1999 there was an email going round about how ridiculous dotcom valuations were.

Which, while some of the examples sometimes quoted survived, was generally validated by the 2000 crash.
I agree with both of your paragraphs, except that I see them as being applicable in practice not in theory, and I think both things you mention are positive things.

Using pinned / outdated versions to preserve legacy behavior is better than the alternatives for preserving old functionality in a monorepo, where it leads to uncontrollable feature flag growth and an inability to delete code.

Likewise, compelling consumer teams to program defensively around all dependencies is a huge positive, not negative.
I go back a bit earlier, remembering the Christmas catalogs in the 60s and the huge number of pages of toys. I still remember drooling over a James Bond Goldfinger kit with the Aston-Martin with ejection seat and rotating license plates and the laser table intended to cut Bond in half. My parents didn't get it for me, knowing I'd probably be bored with it in a few weeks.

So, it is true we boomers didn't always get everything we wanted.
new? uh yeh.
it takes time and brains so it hasnt been exploited by the skiddies.
title used moderating word[s], should just drop new.
this is something that has been a low hanging fruit for ^years^
Amazon introduced the ability to seamlessly and automatically blend counterfeit goods into their supply chain, from sellers that you never heard of before, and may never encounter again.~

But recall that Amazon started with books. The catalog for books is the size of the card catalog that used to be at your library. A row of cabinets, filled with rank and file of drawers, each filled with index cards. One could not ship out paper catalogs, listing every book, to every book-buying home. But delivering the catalog via the internet--and taking orders via web form rather than mail, fax, or phone--made that mail-order business viable. And starting from books, adding other items to the system was just scaling. If you can handle all the ISBN numbers in existence, adding every other consumer product isn't that much more.

Amazon made a system that allows customers to order every item from every product catalog, from the same interface accessible form every couch, and--most importantly--captured their market share early.

But now that omnibus e-commerce exists, competitors are going to chip away until their early-mover advantage is gone, and all they have left is their innovation since then. Aliexpress and Wal-Mart are going to hammer them from the price side, and individual stores that can actually keep the counterfeits, barely-suitable, and white-label garbage out of their catalog will hit them from the quality side.

Amazon's innovation was bigger catalogs, easier ordering. And their early patents are expiring now. They didn't build the other pieces they needed for a 120-year business while they had the protection--like searching and filtering; honest, scam-resistant ratings; and advertising and recommendations. So they have this huge catalog that presents as a giant wall of useless crap that might have the thing you actually want somewhere in it, and not necessarily at the best price. Unlike Sears, they still have enough money in the bank to turn it around before it's too late. Probably not the leadership, though.
You have to think of it at a higher level: My job isn't coding, it's clarifying ideas. Programming languages can get higher-level, and more automated, but nothing is ever going to free us from the burden of clarifying our ideas. I believe this makes my job (the interesting parts, at least) pretty safe in the long-term.
RIP Southwest's Herb Kelleher: Five innovations that shaped U.S. aviation
I like the list although I disagree with it some. I think luxury goods are still a status symbol (iPhone X?) and I think she/he left out experiences. People want to look they're always having a good time and living life to the fullest.
Yeah, me too. They were one of the steps on the pathway of enabling users and blurring the line between user and programmer. Sadly, the industry lost interest in personal computing in favor of turning users into a resource to farm and feed to advertisers.
It is very relevant otherwise one might indeed draw a parallel with the police and the military, as already said.

As also said, health are is a productive service that has the potential of being 'socialist'.

I'm not here to argue for the sake of it and I don't see any actual argument on the original points in your replies...
For many it is here. If I can get the same product from walmart I do because returns onstore are easier and the product comes quickier without prime. Products always come at the very end of the fullfillment date but with walmart they fill the order before the expected date.
I'm almost there now.
My hope is that smaller, more focused online retailers and marketplaces emerge that can compete in specific verticals. For example, I already go to non-amazon sites where I prefer to buy music gear and computer hardware.
> My guide to being GDPR compliant: don't do business in the EU.

> Much simpler.

As an American, could you please tell me what businesses you run, so that I can make a note to avoid dealing with them in the future?

Thanks in advance.
Maybe an "omnirepo"?! (Though risks connotations with "omnishambles" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnishambles
> A lot of startups (and small companies) aren't on the 'SV Unicorn Track'

Yes. My willingness to work for less pay if the work is interesting enough only applies to those sorts of companies. The stereotypical SV-style business has no appeal to me regardless of what sort of work is involved. Been there, done that, learned my lesson!
I've heard repeatedly if you have some side project you really care about, do it before work, not after.
"If anyone knows of a shell which meets my criteria of being lightweight but with command history and tab completion (paths, command names and command arguments), I'd really appreciate any suggestions. Otherwise I may have to look into extending dash or something."

I would also love to know the answer to this question. I am a big fan of shells and shell programming in general and POSIX shell in particular.

Only suggestion I currently have is ksh, of which there are a few implementations, ksh93 still developed (https://github.com/att/ast), pdksh from OpenBSD (of which there is a portable version here: https://github.com/ibara/oksh) and MirBSD ksh (https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm).

Otherwise of interest is mrsh: https://github.com/emersion/mrsh which was recently mentioned by Drew DeVault in a blog post linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18777909.

EDIT: And by mentioning mrsh, I meant it as a better/easier base to extend to get what you are asking for.
Don't Reply to Your Emails
> Uber doesn't buy and own the car, which means it requires much less capital.

That sounds the same as all cab companies I know of that have operated in the UK for years.
Not sure how I feel about MS hijacking 7-10GB of a system as a “reserved space” to download Windows updates to.

I mean, if that’s what they need to do to get Windows Updates to function with any degree of reliability then their OS is truly fucked.
Yes, but the upper class - which is who this story was guided by - exist because their rate of return exceeded their rate of labor.

The only other commonality is that they distributed risk so that they dont have meanginful losses of money.

The way this is done has nothing to do with prosperity in business, it is always value extraction, not a donation towards the nation’s jobs report. Understanding the set of rules they play by will make a lot of things make sense without the perjorative terms for the participants.
Thank you, your comment is validating.

I've had to suppress myself in past roles and simply don't want to do that anymore (physical toll).

I really want to build relationships (with healthy boundaries) with the people I work with and am tired of the freelance run'n'gun life. Years of continual disappointment in opportunities is killing my morale.

Finding work removed from the tech scene is a good idea. It's where I sell most of my services. I've had issues with 'relevant experience' for full time roles (but not so much with selling as a freelancer). It's weird how the relationship changes when taking on the role of interviewee. Also I prefer blunt honesty which has worked against me.

Thank you again for the comment.
Costco is Sam’s Club, without the tattoos.
Hmm, I could be misremembering, but I think there was almost a decade between the point when Sears had all the legos but didn't know how to assemble them, and when Amazon really started using fast shipping as a differentiator. And I think the "Prime" account branding came still later into the picture.

Before shopping at Amazon ramping up, right around 2000, I remember Sears logistics starting to break down with kafkaesque calls into Sears service and parts departments. I guess the point is, I think the decline of Sears mostly had to do with internal complexity and breakdown of effective management than anything directly to do with Amazon.
I'm on the Dart team.

> when i look at the dart language itself compared to today's language (rust & swift for example) i feel a bit underwhelmed.

My personal opinion is that Dart right now is a very mature implementation of an OK language. The original language designers were very conservative in the design of the language. In their hearts, they really wanted to make another Smalltalk — a very minimal, dynamic, object-oriented scripting language. But they felt that to be successful, it needed to be painted in a veneer of Java-esque syntax and have some sort of static type system. I don't think the designers ever really loved either of those aspects.

This is a big part of why Dart's original type system was optional and an unsound. It was intended to be just enough types to satisfy people who want types, without cluttering up the VM implementation with concerns around static types. This made sense when the initial goal was to have a VM directly in the browser that ran Dart programs from source. When you run from source on the end user's machine, there isn't really a good time to run a static type checker.

A lot has changed since then:

* The initial designers have moved on to other things. Lars will tell you he's a "1.0 guy" and shepherding a long-running language committee isn't his thing. I think the projects they're working on now are much closer to their hearts. It's hard to do a great job on something you aren't personally enthused by, so this is good for everyone.

* We aren't trying to get the VM in Chrome. I think this is overall a good thing. It means that all execution paths for Dart involve a compiler running on the developer's machine.

These two pieces make it much easier to move Dart to be a modern, expressive, statically-typed language, which is much more inline with what users have been asking for. The biggest example of this is Dart 2, which replaced the old optional type system with a rich, sound static type system with generic methods and type inference.

We also have a really good (I think) language team that is excited to move the language forward and make users happy. We're working on non-nullable types. We're making collection literals more expressive with spread ("...") and control flow.

Now that we have a real static type system that's part of the language, it enables us to hang language semantics off the types. For example, we're adding set literals right now. Those use the same curly brace delimiters as map literals. That makes an empty set/map ("{}") ambiguous. Fortunately, we can rely on the surrounding type context to disambiguate in most cases. We couldn't do that in Dart 1. This also puts on the table features like extension methods that rely on the static type system.

So, my hope is that over time, we'll be able to catch up and get to a point where the language itself is really positively exciting for people. We have some work to do to get there, but I think we're moving in the right direction and faster than we have before.
This aphorism is older than dirt. Often formulated in terms of the California Gold Rush: the only people who made money were the ones selling shovels and wheelbarrows.
No, this was true when Sears was viable retailer. They owned very valuable properties in malls. But the process of destroying the retail portion of the company to extract value from the real estate actually devalued the property. Sears was the anchor that made a lot of that property valuable in the first place.
Most people in my circle already won't buy anything they put in their bodies from Amazon, because the risk of Chinese counterfeits is just too great.
We are in the strange situation with these emulators that all code ever written can be executed today, no problem. Have some Fortran-II code for the IBM 1401? No problem. Want to run some Analytical Engine code (a machine that couldn't even be constructed)? No problem:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/emulator.html

Can you really say that this early code is obsolete? I think not, it's just different.
15 Writing Resolutions for This New Year 2019
Yes, like those. They are big on a European scale, but not internationally.

I think Deutsche used to be pretty big, but it's been going downhill for a couple of years now.
Ahh thanks!
>The revenue stream won't remain intact. This lowers the effectiveness of ads in the long run, reducing the price of ads

This is a good thing.

>and reducing the revenue for content producers.

They'll just have to be creative in finding ways to monetize.
Whether or not programming can be completely automated is an interesting question.. when I think about what would make it unecessary for a human to be specifying the behavior of a computational system the only phrase that comes to mind is "general ai".
Yea it sounds like the kind of corporate slogan you come up with when you have to prove you're not just a real estate company and that your company has exponential growth potential rather than a slogan expressing something anyone wants.
U.S. Rep Thomas Massie's Tesla battery powered house and it works
IMO Amazon and most other dotcom companies were waaay overvalued at the tail end of the dotcom boom and many companies with hefty valuations from those days do not exist today.

What made Amazon survive (and achieve valuations way in excess of those in 1999) was not the fact that it had something super valuable then, but that it relentlessly innovated, stayed flexible (an online bookstore offering a computing cloud services, what a weird idea) and executed well enough. And had enough money and controlled costs well enough to reach profitability. For every Amazon there are hundreds of Enrons and WorldComs.
Not every artist makes art to make a living if it, nor do they need to. Some can’t (e.g. because they don’t have and struggle to aquire the necessary business skills) and some don’t even want that... they just wanna make some art and are happy to do it just as a hobby, no business, no chores... There’s nothing wrong with that , it even has some upsides, because you really absolutely never need to do the slightest sacrifice in your works for economic or marketing reasons.