skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the article: “The average American works 8.8 hours, born out of the industrial revolution and carried through to the twenty-first century out of routine, rather than active consideration. Robert Owen crafted the saying ‘Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.’”

I just need to point out: it's super wrong to give the industrial revolution credit for the 8-hour day. It took several decades of strikes, protest, organizing against factory owners and legislators of the industrial revolution to normalize the 8-hour workday down from 12–16 hours! Robert Owen didn’t invent the idea either...but he did promote it because, surprise, he was a passionate socialist.

edit to add: in the above passage, the author links to a HuffPo article on the topic that is even worse, implying that the 8-hour day was the idea of factory owners to “run factories more efficiently” — hell no!
Big ticket? Of the abatements, only $500M (the portion related to construction) wasn't available to any business that met the state's requirements. Giveaway? These are tax incentives that are part of the state's tax code -- taking less in taxes to incentivize a particular action is not the same as giving away money that could be spent elsewhere (to illustrate why it isn't the same, that money is not currently available to be spent elsewhere). NYC won HQ2 originally in spite of not giving nearly as much as other jurisdictions were willing to. The polling is much higher than 56% when the question is asked generally, and the polling is highest in Queens which stood to gain the most. The city may or may not "need" 25,000 new jobs but LIC certainly "wanted" those jobs. The proposal was most popular among Black and Hispanic Queens residents and least popular among White Manhattan residents -- suggesting that those who stood to benefit from local economic activity were most excited.
Lisp and the foundations of computing
> Our tools suck because...

Oh, quite the opposite I'd say. Because we are software developers, and we can fix our problems with software, we accumulated quite a rich toolbox to solve our problems better. We're quick to dismiss our ecosystem (everything sucks/is broken), I tend to enjoy such conversations as well, and sure, there are plenty of broken/unfinished things out there, but in all honesty: what other subculture has accomplished such complex projects as the Linux kernel or the GNU toolchain, and gave it away for free? Because a lot of people know that we all are better off sharing our tools, and copying is essentially free? Isn't the brokenness often there just because we went too far, too fast?

I think looking somewhere else for a side project is a good idea, exactly because our own problem space is saturated with good (enough) tools, and deeply explored. And even if something is missing, someone's itch is bad enough so they just scratch it themselves and make it open source. But oh boy, other domain's tools and workflows suck. And often, they don't have the skills to fix this themselves, so that's where we can be helpful with software.
Alternatively: the return of Java to the browser via WASM
It's an opinion piece, not a news article, keep that in mind.
We used to like it especially when management referred to their employees as "resources" .. you know.. "we have 5 resources devoted to this". So we started referring to ourselves as meat bags. "We have 5 meat bags on this project."
That's why I put ??? as step 3. :D

I'm not the person to sell you it. That's just an example where someone might make money.
I guess time will tell. We can track how long it takes for another company or companies to develop the same properties. Hopefully it will be less time than the length of the tax breaks
OMG don't give basketball players this idea. Cities would totally write tax exemptions into law to land LeBron!
Dating is a free software issue
Petition to the UK Parliament to Revoke Article 50
Yep. Both Fed-Ex and Amazon have an interest in preventing theft as well as fraud (false claims of non-delivery), and they see a business opportunity in addition to shrinkage minimization with the perk of customer psychological comfort to boot.
How do you force someone to sell you a product they don't sell?
>are chess players required to write down their moves?

Not at fast time controls, or with little time left.

"If a player has less than five minutes left on his clock at some stage in a period and does not have additional time of 30 seconds or more added with each move, then for the remainder of the period he is not obliged to [record moves]." http://www.fide.com/FIDE/handbook/LawsOfChess.pdf

And smart boards are expensive.
ahhhhh. I need to learn how to code in python first. All these ideas i have in my head need an outlet.
Outsource some of the work you do while you work and commute. Say, outsource 3-4 hours a day, pick up 1-2 hours as you can. Then your project moves 4-6 hrs a day. I do this, using my income for someone else to build by muse.
It isn't an article, it is an op-ed. But I agree, it is low quality.
I’m not sure what your preferred outcome would be? A court ruling patents in general unenforceable is rather unlikely. “Patent trolling” obviously isn’t a legal concept, and would be hard to define. Any definition would actually just loop back to patentability, with exactly the result of this lawsuit.
Hmm. I switched successfully to duckduckgo...
Not all leases are terrible, though most probably are. I have a leased propane tank, it's not a hassle or anything, I don't pay anything to lease it, I just pay the company for the propane when it need filling. It only needs filling like every 3-4 years because it's only used for the stove. I'm not really sure why its leased, but it could probably be replaced easily if need be.

I think the people these sorts of things appeal to are the people who have poor credit and/or very little equity in their house.
What global outage do you mean ? I havent seen one for 1y of using it meanwhile office 365 just scored a global outage recently
Show me a competing products.

Show me how the market self-regulated to properly treat a customer’s data.
I responded to a particular comment in the thread.
Terraform – The definitive guide for Azure enthusiasts
I think you're misreading Musk's reputation outside of tech circles. If they're aware of him at all, he's more or less viewed as a Bond villain at this point.
Very informative. I'm 3 for 3 on startups (2 exits and one still going for 15 years after the seed round) and have netted a small, long term capital loss for all of my equity, which was close to 1% in one case.
>One of my favorite points in the book is the explanation for why any sort of niche small business software sucks.

Because the author prefers filthy greed and the creation of yet another corporate behemoth over creating something decent, charging people for it, and making a living from that?
Quite right Linux contributed more to commercial UNIXes downfall than anything else.

For example, gcc was pretty much ignored until Sun started the trend of selling UNIX SDK tooling instead of bundling it with the OS.
In our society, I fear that our fear is not that no one would bother to invent the wheel, but rather that no one will buy our automatically-renewing annual subscription to the wheel.
> DTCC has a board of directors

A large business "has" a lot of things. Why bring up board of directors specifically? I'm sorry but this sounds more like fumbling to grasp a point rather than an actual example of something useful.
Can someone eli5 why people keep wanting to make RISC-V happen? I'm not in tech and I keep seeing posts like this.
I think it might become necessary to create an antitrust class for effective media monopolies like twitter and facebook, as well as financial institutions (paypal, mastercard, etc) that includes provisions for aknowledging and preserving first amendment rights.

While nobody likes speech that they don't agree with, or feel is vitriolic against one's own ideology, it's exactly that speech which needs to be protected. PC outrage is maximizing online censorship in ways that should send chills down anyone's spine.
The problem is, right now Facebook and Twitter have significant power. And the question is whether or not you trust the government, but which you trust more: A company with a slogan of "move fast and break things", or a bureaucracy purpose-built to move very slowly and purposefully.
http://arthur-osx.com/
Solar shingles is where it's eventually gonna end up on cost and beauty, IMO.
WTF is this downvoted for? Right up top of the article it explicitly calls out that the author is a woman, yet someone here can’t even be arsed to get it right? Then the person who calls it out is downvoted?!

Shame, HN.
You're contributing to it being so ;-)
1. It's all about underlying incentives. Short term those will always counsel early settlement, if there's enough awareness and collective action to take the long-term view, then we might be able to push incentives in another direction.

2. Some of the existing collectives combine their IP assets to give each other a license to each other's patents or the benefit of any future settlements, which limits the exposure a bit. Not sure if something like underwriters of patent troll insurance could combine the incentives enough into long-term view to make that worthwhile.
and google ...
From the article:

Where are things headed?

There's a growing consensus that deep learning is going to be a centralizing technology rather than a decentralizing one. We seem to be headed toward a world where the only people with enough data and compute to train truly state-of-the-art networks are a handful of large tech companies.

This is terrifying, but the same conclusion that I've come to.

I'm starting to feel more and more dread that this isn't how the future was supposed to be. I used to be so passionate about technology, especially about AI as the last solution in computer science.

But anymore, the most likely scenario I see for myself is moving out into the desert like OB1 Kenobi. I'm just, so weary. So unbelievably weary, day by day, in ever increasing ways.
It's not a thin skin so much as it is submitting on an ongoing narrative. They probably hoped they could do this and end up with the tax breaks, the NYC offices they want, more favorable conditions, and the public would laud them for it.

Instead they got a pretty massive backlash that adds more fuel to the already burning story about Amazon's mistreatment of workers, Amazon's 0% tax rate, Amazon lobbying defeating taxes in Seattle, etc... They have a PR problem already. They are bringing a whole lot of negative attention to themselves. They will have it worse in the future when they try to do the same sort of thing in Washington state.

They folded because staying in wasn't worth it.
I come from Deep reinforcement learning. When considering simulated environments (such as AlphaZero, AlphaStar), can
feature engineering dramatically improve the cpu-requirement or sample-efficiency ?

Or are low-level features the "easiest" part for the network to learn?

Edit1 : I understand of course the academic purity of working from raw data.

Edit2: so simulated means lots of samples, on policy learning, but also very cpu intensive.
How about ‘submit’?
> I wonder how many actually trust this government with more power?

No matter someone's political views, it surprises me when people are willing to trust the government with more power as long as their party is in control, while forgetting that their party will not always be in control. Before assigning a new power to government, consider whether you'd trust the opposing party to wield it.
I just put a line through it and my initials and signed it and handed it to my boss, he flipped through and signed and that was the end of it.

I don't have any commercial projects outside of work but the idea that an employer can claim ownership of something that comes out of my head into my machine in my time is bonkers.

If you want to own the other 8 awake hours of my life after the first 8 you have to double my pay.

I've done that on my last 3 employment contracts and no-one has ever even commented.
> Agreed that "simply" scaling up with more compute will result in progress and useful systems, and work in that direction is interesting and valuable. But, while we may not need new architectures or training objectives to make progress, we do need them to approach human level sample complexity.

Yes, agreed. Nothing I said above contradicts that! :-)

> Humans don't need to read through 40 GB of text multiple times to learn to write.

Yes, that's true... but to keep the comparison fair, note that we do need many years of schooling to learn to read, say, at a high-school or college level. And before learning to read, we first must learn to speak, which surely helps. And we also get to inhabit bodies that see, smell, touch, and interact with the physical objects that we read and speak about during our formative years, which also helps. The more one thinks about it, 40GB of data is actually a tiny figure in comparison to the amount of training data that flows continuously to our brain from all senses. I think I read once that our brains process on the order of 10 to 100 GB of training data per second.
IIRC each proof also contains a little bit of the data, so over time the original data is transmitted.
It can be great even if the "acquisition cost" is high, assuming you charge people for it.

It just doesn't lend itself to the "do a business that sells $10 dollar bills for $5 funded by VC money until it has enough eyeballs to start selling ads".
do you know if he ever addressed this part of the country's history publicly?
TLDR: You don't need to quit your job to make, you just need to work more.
This is true, but the bulk of this hyperbolic criticism comes from vegans, and they're going to use terms like "animal cruelty" no matter what livestock welfare standards you set.
Totally. Especially considering that plants are a kind of biological machine which works to turn light into plant stuff. This means that how the plant interacts with light can tell you a-lot about the health and well being of the light.
A pinch of machine vision, and you are pretty much there.
Ouch, Brazilian airports often have problems even with the car parking and transit at the exit of the airport when a 747 lands...

But the in-airport issues we used to experiment are mostly gone after the airports are privatized. It's amazing how the airlines are able to do people's checkin faster after some structural problems on the airport management are solved.
His coffee mug (or something equally ridiculous), would not be out of place in a Silicon Valley office of any kind. Is his coffee mug your objection, or do you dislike the man (and his political views), and hence, ridicule everything about him as an ad hominem sort of attack?

I find this very irritating, and we see it also with Donald Trump, where it suddenly becomes okay to body shame someone, make suggestive comments about their relationship with their wife or children, or attack them in other ways unrelated to their politics, because of their politics. I wouldn't say I'm a fan of either individual by any means, but I think we should aim to do much better, especially here on HN. Can we talk about a corporate-owned bureaucrat and an incompetent president as a corporate-owned bureaucrat and an incompetent president?
edit: didn’t like my analogy

I’d prefer you posted something constructive rather than just saying “doesn’t need blockchain”. Of course it doesn’t. Storing data doesn’t require a relational database, or a key value store either. All have pros and cons.

Saying “doesn’t require blockchain” is obvious and adds no value. It’s like coming into a workshop explain what a saw is and saying “other cutting tools also exist”.

You seem to be making the leap that because I’m explaining what something is without saying whether or not I think it’s the right move that I think it is.

I don’t know whether or not it was cheaper and more effective for JPMC to fork ethereum or to build their own accounting system from scratch and I doubt you have the correct information to make that assumption either. Maybe JPMC doesn’t have a team capable of writing accounting software (seems unlikely). What’s more likely is they are looking for headlines because they know blockchain is hyped technology. It would have probably not made the news if they announced they were adding another settlement system beyond Zelle, ACH, and wire. So, they probably chose this because they think it will reduce costs and move their stock price while building a bespoke software accounting system would have been more costly and wouldn’t have provided as much hype.

Businesses don’t make decisions about technology completely based on its technical merits.

Many times they choose technology because someone recommended to them, or it’s cheap, or they can’t build it themselves, or that’s not their primary business, etc.
They're full of footguns, esoteric behavior, and have arcane names. They're actually pretty awful tools now that it isn't the 70s anymore.
How do you lease oil delivery? Or do you mean the tank itself?

If you have an agreement for an oil company to come fill your oil when it gets low, you just terminate your agreement when you sell your house.
this is a great idea. thank you for making this. -- i just tried to subscribe but your subscription link(s) are hanging. can you add me (email in profile) ?
Well you can presume whatever you like, the bottom line is that it's a JPM controlled network subject to the whims of JPM (including token insurance).
That's not the only question. I don't trust either one, but one I can choose not to interact with, or to limit and control my interaction with.
Ah, yes. "Know how every ARM system boots slightly differently with different peripherals? How about we encode this wacky incompatibility into the instruction set too?"
It seems unlikely that a person who has 8 hours of "me time" every day finds it necessary to spend time taking care of personal health issues or disabilities, supporting friends, relatives, or communities that may be going through rough times, or mitigating injustices that affect them or those around them.
The Best Way to Get Over Social Anxiety Is by Embarrassing Yourself in Public
Yeah that doesn't happen because then they'll just give you more work.

What tech job has work that can be "finished" anyway?
> I would much rather let the market produce alternatives products when companies do things customers object to.

Why, though? This line of thinking does not work in a modern, connected society. You can not any longer choose to avoid these services, and you will still be affected. Personal consumer choice may take decades to play out in the market, as people take time - a lot of time - to identify and address risks in a rapidly changing environment like tech and social.

We all have Facebook profiles whether we want to or not - and this means that individual choice no longer means anything about whether or not the company survives. The market reacts very slowly. Are you willing for humanity to suffer from consequences we can identify and fix, but choose not to while we let the 'market' decided?

Externalities are not priced in to the price of pollution and the damages done by climate change. The 'market' does not select for an optimal solution by anyone's definition here or with social/web.

By letting the 'market' decide, you are directly allowing and accepting that billions of dollars of propaganda, meant to shape public opinion through the use of logical fallacies, scare tactics, etc, would end up being the deciding factor in how social media works. You'll end up with billionaire interests being 'market-encouraged' while the regular people will have no voice.

> The best thing about the internet is that it is so easy for another product to spring up to serve a new need or compete with ensconced businesses.

This doesn't seem true to me at all. If anything, the Internet is the most intrenched-money-takes-all platform we have. I think you are mistaken when it comes to your optimism about how the web works.

> Regulations increase cost of business

I think this is false. Regulations increase the sustainable lifetime of a business by providing a stable market to operate in for decades.

> and dissuades other companies from competing.

I think this is also false. Regulations create opportunities for sustainable business, and do not dissuade from real value creation.
It's New York City, we don't need to give the largest company in the world a huge discount to do business here. It's not like the economic development of NYC is dependent on Amazon. It's a central hub to so many industries because of its infrastructure, talent, connection to capital markets etc, not because of handing out discounts.
Moving from Ruby to Rust
@ianjdarrow from the linked thread here. To clarify a little – the idea isn’t that Filecoin would ever tell anyone they have to remove data of any type. Filecoin is open-source software that tons of storage miners will use across diverse legal and moral systems, and it’s important that those miners can make decisions about how what they store and to whom they serve it.

Of course, you have to do this using incentives to avoid breaking the protocol. This is actually one of the reasons it makes sense for storage and retrieval markets to be separate. If you’re being paid a fee to serve a file you have, you should rationally want to serve it unless there’s a compelling reason not to.
> NYC won HQ2 originally in spite of not giving nearly as much as other jurisdictions were willing to.

Because the entire "competition" was a sham. Amazon was never going to park the future of the company into a place lacking talent.

> The proposal was most popular among Black and Hispanic Queens residents and least popular among White Manhattan residents

That's a good point, but the counter is that the Black and Hispanic residents are the ones who would end up pushed out by Amazon's white and asian workers.
The case against trolls is so clear and obvious, why does it seem so difficult to craft legislation to prevent this? I imagine a simple addition to patent laws invalidating a patent if the holder does not commercialize it after a certain period should get rid of NPEs. Is it not that simple? Also do you know if there's anything like patent-troll insurance that covers legal fees in cases like this? If not, why not? It seems like this has been a problem for so long not only for small businesses but for major players (with vast amounts of resources and clout) that I'm baffled why the problem continues to exist. Is there something about the US legal system or business in general that my simplistic mind is not understanding?
>But I have music I want to work on, novels, etc. Places I want to see.

I'd like to do all of those (and have made some movies and music beyond software work), but one has to ask: does the world really need (or could use) more music, novels, and SaaS?

And why would it need mine? Do I have a 1 in 10 million unique take on those things and unique talent? Or am I piling to the rest of the noise?

At some point I think for most the motivation is not some primal urge / can't do without (else they'd be doing it already as their first focus), but just "it would be fancy to write a book/make a movie/release an album".
Look at page 7 of the RFP: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/Anything...

A good portion of all of that is stuff Amazon could compile, but they got cities across the country to donate probably tens of thousands of hours of taxpayer salaries to do it instead.

The nature of special incentives each proposal offered - custom ones for Amazon-only, or unusual ones - will also have told them which cities they've got extra leverage over if they come offering a smaller project like a distribution center.

https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/11/the-extreme-amazon-bidd...

> The most jarring incentive reportedly comes out of Chicago, which, under state law, could redirect between 50 and 100 percent of the income taxes incurred by Amazon employees right back to Amazon.