skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> a so-called "robot tax" faces significant hurdles in design and implementation.

To put it mildly.

I want to make litter-bots: Imagine a ladybug about the size of half a beachball. It crawls around and collects litter. It's mostly autonomous, but to really do a good job it needs a minder, a human "oracle" for navigation and trash?y/N queries, etc. (The minders do not necessarily have to be physically nearby to the 'bots.) ML advancements have drastically reduced the amount of human oversight needed but not eliminated it entirely.

In that context, what should the economic relationship be between the minders, the clients, and the robot factory? (Consider that the robot factory is likely very automated, a robot robot-factory.)

FWIW, I had originally thought I would set up a kind of volunteer distributed remote workforce with a UI that folks would play like a game.

Another possibility would be to sell or lease 'bots to operators, who are then responsible for finding their own contracts. The litter-bots would be akin to landscaper's tools (like an AI leaf-blower or chainsaw.) "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay."

I do NOT think it would be useful to for the government to tax my litter-bot-company's robots and then somehow redistribute that to... whom, exactly?

I am in favor of Universal Basic Income, but only when the robots are good enough to seriously impact the average person's ability to compete in the job market and get work. (Like, me. If I wasn't good at computers I'd probably be homeless!) A given economic regime must provide jobs or bread or "you're gonna have a bad time."

I think we're at the tipping point: the hardware is COTS (Common Off-The-Shelf) the software is coming together nicely. There are already robot vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers that work pretty well, etc.

So, yeah, what's the economic program for the automation revolution? Lords and serfs? Or some sort of Marxist distributed ownership of the "means of production"? (Probably not: even the communists didn't actually go through with that in the end, eh?)

Why is Daiso so much more popular than RepRaps?
Let's say that preview shouldn't discourage "buying for the shelf", with the plan to read the book one day even if that never happens. I presume this accounts for a wealth of turnover in the book market.
Strawman. There are many things that, like tossing biodegradable stuff out the window, aren't cool that don't appreciably contribute to ocean plastic pollution.
Going against the zeitgeist, whether you like it or not, is rarely going to win you favours in any social circles.
You're making a lot of assumptions about ownership. "Your" vast financial resources are just measures of debt (money is not personal property) secured by the government. We can always collectively decide that what you did to accrue that owed debt was not worth its valuation and take steps (e.g., taxation) to correct. "Your" automation process is built on publicly-funded research and using publicly-funded resources; the public can decide to recoup its investment, and whatever else it needs to secure its mission of providing for the general welfare.

Feudalism is over, dude. You're connected. You're beholden.
Dave Chapelle's Mark Twain prize show on PBS was littered with N and F bombs. Only Fuck was censored.
I think that writing in public about what has likely happened an insignificant amount of times is what amounts to the ridicule.

Declining a request for non-dictionary pronouns is neither here nor there. Calling someone out on the web for making such a request is another matter.

It seems a very silly hill to die on. I personally save my “look at these fools” blogging for people who make their own novel cryptosystems.
author did not put too much effort into marketing as explained in the posts. the target audience was already figured out and the blog acted as a funnel... hosting is $0 as per author.

so yes, this is totally worth it as a side project.
What makes you think it isn't a requirement coming from their superiors?

There are many reasons your link may not work. Why do you assume incompetence?
It's not that you can't conclude anything from data, it's just that the things you can conclude from data are limited to only two "scientifically-sound" conclusions:

>1). There is a relationship in your data

>2). There isn't a relationship in your data

From there, you can then setup further experiments to better understand why there is or isn't a relationship -- and perhaps find the opposite is true!

It's the same reason you don't assume a theory is "true;" you don't conclude "that higher unemployment in Canada vis-a-vis the US is almost certainly driven by a lower supply of jobs, rather than as you posit a lower demand for employment" (GGP), because that's bad science!

What the GGP did is create an inference -- one based on misread data and faulty assumptions about scientific methods -- and expressed it as de facto. Now, in order for his inference to have weight, he must either support it with further evidence (DIY meta-analysis) or carry out some other type of experiment to test said inference.

Here's a very brief primer: https://socialresearchmethods.net/kb/concval.php
> Not necessarily. It can also actually increase adoption because it fixes friction: there might always be a few tools or docker containers or whatnot which are not ported to BSD, and this provides an answer to that.

It tells developers that users will put up with the compatibility layer. Also setting up these compatibility layers has its own set of complications e.g. random things not working, sub-optimal performance etc.

The only people that have pulled it off has been Microsoft with WSL and there has been problems with that. I for a laugh setup basically a Xubuntu desktop and I had lots of odd errors being reported in the console.
Not only DRY but YAGNI.

Unless you are sure you will need to separately evolve the initially duplicated cases, assume YAGNI: You're Not Gonna Need It (the repetitions).

Avoid repetition like the plague; when the new requirements arise that conflict with the reduced repetition, confront it at that time.

It's possible they they are bad requirements, in which case the clean, DRY code can support arguments against the requirements.

Treat the computer as more of an Analytical Engine, and less of a Jacquard Loom.

The special case behaviors for various shapes hinted at in the article:

> For example, we later needed many special cases and behaviors for different handles on different shapes.

This sounds like it might be a bad experience for the end user who has to learn annoying shape-specific handle quirks.
An aside: why do those advocating for ways to improve the environment continue to land themselves in a place where their final answer to a problem is "simple: people should just do X instead of Y." These are not solutions, unless you explain how you are going to shift the behavior of billions of people to a point where it makes a real, sustainable difference. Nearly any other approach is more feasible to solving problems. If you are going to say such a thing, to be taken seriously you must articulate how you can re-align incentives to cause such a behavior change to happen at a large scale enough to move the needle. Your own experience doing so also does not move that argument forward in any way.

A system where people still consume as much fish as they please, and our technological and governmental structures lead to downstream processes that mitigate the environmental impact of that situation may not be a globally maximal solution compared to a world where we end fish consumption. But it does have one nice attribute: it may actually be possible to achieve. Personally, I do hold out hope for an even better solution, where we get to consume the foods we love but they are created without the need for animals to live and die to give it to us.
Does a person working part time who can't afford their own place to rent (i.e. Live with their parents) count as "employed"? If so, then the sharing economy surely boosts this metric significantly when not actually significantly improving lives.
I think the cool factor is mostly gone with SUV's. When every soccer mom drives an SUV, it's no longer cool. Yes, they're cooler than a minivan, but that says more about the minivan than it does about the SUV.
How would that benefit their bottom line?
If you're following the SUV ahead of you at a safe distance, why would you need or want to see through its windshield?

One of the reasons SUVs and pickup trucks are popular here in America is that they're easy to get in and out of. About 1/3 of Americans are obese (far more overweight), and from my observations, many have weak legs and cores. SUVs are part of the same phenomenon that has popularized single-story suburban homes, bottom-freezer refrigerators, etc. I see it as less of a network effect and more of a feedback loop.
If you add nitrite to ranitidine and heat it to 140 the levels of NDMA produced become carcinogenic. The person who made the discovery has a business built around consumer fear about contaminated pharmaceuticals.
> the most fundamental guarantee of an SCM: not losing my code.

Yeah. It's not terribly useful, even as a research VCS if i end up with corrupted repositories.
> It's just that the owner of the training set -- not the owner of the algorithm -- is the one with the valid claim to copyright.

Not all that different from a pop song made by editing together licensed samples, no?

In that case, the song is certainly a derivative work of the samples, and so the producer of the song needs to get derivative-works-allowed licensing from the samples’ authors (which is what you must necessarily get when buying samples from a sample library, for them to be of any use at all.) The produced song is then its own work with its own copyright. Sometimes, larger samples (like reused vocal performances) require payment in, essentially, “equity”—a percentage of the song’s royalties are transferred as royalties to the sample. But in most cases, the sample is purchased for a flat fee, and there is no ongoing relationship between the revenue of the song and the revenue of the sample.

Is anything different if you replace “song” with “news article” and “samples” with “training set”?
>Two-thirds (64%) of low-wage workers are in their prime working years of 25 to 54.

I agree with Eliezer Yudkowsky that this is a disgrace, y'know? Like, why can't that guy get a real job? Am I the one stopping him?

To quote Professor Spock: The answer is, yes and no.
I have one hypothesis for part of the uptick: rear seat room for carseats. I consider myself the SUV hater of SUV haters, and I reject that you need one when you have kids (such is the idea in my part of the US), but...we bought one last year anyway, mainly to accommodate two rear-facing carseats with two adults in the front. There aren’t many cars that make this work, and you’d be surprised how big of an SUV you have to get to get any more rear seat space than a regular car. Not even most of the “mid-size” models.
When applications and services still defaults to dumping full stacktrace and reporting programmer's errors, it's from longer-term experience also.
This, and issues like it, bug me so much. So many keyboard shortcuts are unusable by default on QWERTZ, for example any shortcuts involving /, [ or ]. They require modifiers to be typed, so those are swallowed for shortcut purposes.

Of course, it is (almost) impossible to account for the enormous amount of keyboard layouts that exist, so I wish we could agree to use key positions over the characters they produce for shortcuts, so we can cover a significant portion of the population with ANSI/ISO layouts. I'm honestly not sure what keyboard layouts are used in countries with entirely different scripts, but my cursory Google searches suggest the physical layout is the same as ours.

Sure, you might lose some mnemonics on layouts that aren't QWERTY, but at least the majority of shortcuts would be usable by default compared to having to remap them in every application. The application could even resolve what keys are actually mapped to the physical keys and display the correct shortcut in menus.

Destiny 2 actually seems to do this and does, as far as I was able to tell, an excellent job of it.
Not for functional ones. Only for tracking / advertising cookies.
I worked at a major quant hedge fund for a while, and my duties involved working with these data sets.
This is not the case - there's plenty of civil societies that have existed over the millennia that are subsistence economies. They aren't wealthy, but that isn't the point.
So from the FRED series you link to, the current market is the second best for employment in history. How is that "NOT very low"? It's better than any point in history other than a couple years when the dot com bubble was inflating.

BLS labor statistics are phenomenal. It's some of the most trustworthy data available. Please don't call them "fake" just because you want to use a different time series than someone else.
Saying "women code less than men" does not have an implied "therefore you can just ignore any individual woman that codes" after it.

Do you think it would be impossible for the perfect uber-individualist to ever make the statement "men play more basketball than women"?
Why not go the other way and encourage changes in society that reduce the cost of living?

For example, here in California there is a severe housing shortage, and it is widely agreed that the difference between us cheaper places are the restrictions placed by our own laws. Supply is therefore artificially limited.

This is on my mind because I am unemployed and living off of my savings. I don't want to be told what to do all day, and I don't want handouts either. I just want to have the option of going my own way, and to get a square deal on the things I buy.
The path forward is to be economical with hardware resources. I always try to imagine a physical character performing a task that i'm trying to code. How far does imaginary character needs to travel, how many trips do they need to make. Is everything they do is absolutely necessary. If they delegate work, is their sub-contractor efficient?

There isn't a single place to learn how to be efficient, it is better to start being extremely curious of how things actually work. Scary number of people I've met do not even attempt to learn how a library functions they use actually work.
If you're not offering an opinion through the kind of hair-splitting that elides the immediate and generally permanently life-wrecking consequences of not having health insurance, then that hair-splitting serves very little purpose. On the other hand, if your opinion is that the status quo is acceptable, it allows you to rhetorically minimize those consequences because, hey, at least they're not dead, even if the best way out of that debt can seem to be suicide[0].

If you believe that, you've bilged a test of basic humanity. If you don't, perhaps re-think what drives your well-actuallies in the future?

[0] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elderly-couple-found-dead-in-ap...
The funny thing is people confuse recycling with reducing ocean plastic. I've had conversations like this "Why do you recycle?" "Because plastic kills birds." "But only if it gets washed out to sea, right?" "Yea, sometimes it blows away from the landfill or an abandoned landfill erodes into a river.".

Then a newspaper report of volunteers cleaning rubbish off the beach has them complaining that it's mostly plastic items people put in their recycling bins that got blown out and washed down the drain into the sea.

People see news about the ocean plastic and somehow assume the moral thing they've been taught about recycling is the cure. They don't want to know that it's mostly fishing gear and rubbish from S.E. Asian cities where people directly drop rubbish into the rivers on purpose.
The author suggests that Microsoft try to build a developer ecosystem on ARM, forgetting that Microsoft already spent a ton of money on developer evangelism and sponsoring ports of apps to Windows on ARM for Windows Phone and the early ARM based Surface/Surface 2 to no avail. It really makes no sense for them to continue to flush money down the drain.
Forcing people to pay for things at gunpoint that they do not wish to buy is pretty far down the list of acceptable trade-offs, in my book.

It’s absolutely not an extreme view. We already do this for food, for example, which is also required to support life. Being hungry does not entitle you to steal from a supermarket, under our system.

Forcing hospitals to treat anyone regardless of ability to pay is really just forcing an unfair tax onto everyone else who happens to use that hospital in the form of increased prices. That’s not a reasonable system.
Changing the system default GCC version, like it seems you did, is not good practice in environments with conservative package policies.

There's also no need to do that, since nobody prevents users from installing newer versions alongside old ones, and invoking them directly.

Even not considering the fact that different GCC versions can coexist, complaining about this breakage in absolute terms doesn't make any sense. Releases changing default compiler versions inevitably cause more breakages with packages who haven't been updated to be compatible with newer GCC versions. So ultimately it's a matter of choosing the distributions with the appropriate release model, not a matter of Ubuntu/Debian breaking stuff.

Libav has also been deprecated in Ubuntu long ago, so it's not clear what you refer to. If you happen to refer to the transition from and back to ffmpeg, that's very old history.
Deep Dyve?
What is an "OOB whois search"?
My primary point was that these were not highly-paid, white collar jobs.
I suggest you check out git-imerge, it's a quite handy tool for making complex/big merges simple.
Not in the sense of a "C" surrounding a larger number than 10. Instead, you get a card marked with all of "C10", "U3", "A2", "V60", or some crap like that.

Give me 4 numbers: Read and write speeds, each in terms of minimum sustained transfer rate and minimum random IOPS.
Pretty sure having kids is worse for the planet than driving an suv. The rest of your post makes sense though.
Startups Should Hire Offshore Developers
Sure, but stuff like plastic bottles are everywhere and they're essentially completely pointless. People use them because they can, but if they didn't exist, it would be no great loss at all.
Many Christian sects have the same belief.
You have overlooked a key part of my argument: Costs are low because the lower half cannot afford to pay more. Vendors have to keep low prices to compete for the hard earned Dollars. Give the lower half more money and things will simply cost more because they are able to spend the money.

This alone will start a demand for higher wages which will end in a situation where everything will cost proportionally more for everybody. The only losers will be those with bonds and cash because inflation will eat away the value.

Additionally, I don't think that you can ignore the supply chains. If you have a maid and you have to pay double, do you stomach the increased cost or are you going to ask for a rise yourself? And don't forget that you have to pay taxes. So you don't ask for her increase but you double it.

Low wages are not for those who operate machines, where the wage doesn't matter because the value is created by the machine. Low wages exist where a huge part of the value is directly created by the person. So double that cost and you increase the prices of those goods.

I don't know how big the low-wage part is relative to the entire economy. If it is minuscule, increasing minimum wage doesn't matter. But as the article says, it's almost 50% of the workforce, so I doubt that costs will only rise a small, proportional factor, if at all.
off-topic but omg he is kevin spacey's lookalike!
It's much cheaper to prevent plastic reaching the ocean than cleaning it up after, so that's where the focus should be. It's not a matter of the damage "already been done". All additional plastic that ends up in the ocean is still bad. Estimates are that 10% of all plastics produced annually ends up in the ocean, about 10 million tonnes annually. That's a staggering amount.

The great pacific garbage patch -- as mentioned in the article -- is twice the size of Texas, but the garbage density is low: only 4 parts per m3. And only 5% of the garbage is at the surface (10 meters deep or so). That's what makes the cleanup fiendishly difficult. So let's focus on the low hanging fruit first.
Good article, but FreeBSD top-managers don’t want(or can) to change anything.

So, where FreeBSD can be used nowadays:
1) Desktop/Mobile - no, drivers/sensors problem.
2) Network/Web service in SOHO? Linux is much way better.
3) Network/Web in medium/large company? May be, for special network services. Well-tuned FreeBSD can beat well-tuned Linux easily, but requires skilled staff.

There is a very little chance for FreeBSD to come up Linux and be useful for the masses.

P.S. Worked with FreeBSD since 1996 as default OS, in 2008 switched to Linux(RH/Debian/Ubuntu).
Would part of that bastardization since 1776 be the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863?
The standard macroeconomic approach is to keep inflation low so that wages will ‘catch up’ to costs. This isn’t working though, low wages seem to be sticky. This implies that there aren’t enough new jobs, and there are plenty of people who will take whatever they can get.
It’s the equivalent of running an experiment and then looking for correlations. The likelihood of it being chance is drastically increased. There’s an important reason why you are supposed to come up with your hypothesis before. Social science has the issue that theres lots of data to review ex post facto and it’s hard to run rigorous experiments. This means you need extra rigor to avoid spurious correlations.
I don't understand this. Are there 14 states where nobody gets Medicaid?
Yep. And I don't see it being fixed in the US, because the anti-single-payer crowd erroneously believes that US healthcare exists under a "free market". In truth, the budget per capita for healthcare in the states is actually _higher_ than in Canada. So Americans pay more for a lot less.

It turns out a few turn-your-head-and-coughs in your 30s is a way better deal than waiting for it to become a trip to the ER in your 50s.
As a Canadian, who's been unemployed in Canada...just what??? Being unemployed was one of the most stressful times of my life. I had to hustle for odd jobs to pay bills, and the ≈$700 every two weeks for about 4 months I got from ei wasn't even enough to cover rent. I barely made it through and kept my place. The only reason I didn't end up homeless was finding a job within the last few weeks of my ei. There were days I didn't eat though.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG

Here's hours worked, shows a clear decline over time.
Families of four have comfortably taken even long journeys in VW Golfs in the past. I know, because my parents used to take us from northern Germany to Italy or Spain every summer.

Not to mention there are plenty of towns and cities where families get around by bike. Americans need to expect more from local governments!