skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Doubling down on the work ethic in an era in which an increasing number of work tasks can be automated is likely to make things worse for future generations."

Says the farmhand about to be replaced by coal powered engines?

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, there have been wave after wave of automation - and yet material prosperity has exploded and unemployment is relatively low.

Here are some highlights from UK unemployment rates for the last 150 years. Note 2018 was one of the top years for employment - even after 1.5 centuries of automation of various kinds. [1]

There are no glorious jobs, it's all mostly a grind, our civilization depends on people doing their work well.

Whether it is serving coffee, taking out the trash, or writing code - take pride in doing whatever it is well, and do your part.

Of course - we want to make sure we are not abused, we want to make sure we are not 'taken' - but we have it better than anyone in history, and the opportunities we have now are almost unthinkable to someone just two generations ago.

For the vast, vast majority of people, it's not that bad, in fact, relative to most humans who have ever lived, it'd downright utopian.

Within reason try to do a good job, be conscientious and proud of your work, get along and take care of those around you.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoracco...
https://sci-hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-02...
In that case they can do what they do for iOS apps - scan for the use of those instructions in any binary released through the App Store and refuse the update if they are used.

Apple can't control random software people download off the Internet.
You can get a part 107 license in a day. It’s proportionate. If you’re making money from drones, I think a written exam is a reasonable pre-qualification.
I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
You could buy Steam games years ago because Bitcoin volume was low.

Just try some math: How large would blocks need to be to handle just 50% of Visa's current US transaction rate?
> The problem is that the kinds of jobs they often work in — customer services, food service and other forms of low-skilled labour — are now becoming increasingly susceptible to automation. This lays the foundations for a potential ‘cycle of immiseration’: machines increasingly substitute for young unskilled labour, which limits the ability of young people to invest in their own skill acquisition (education) and physical capital (housing etc.). This means they face a double disadvantage: increased susceptibility to automation and decreased capacity to upskill and uplift themselves.

> This needs to be stopped. The economic progress of the past 200 years has brought many unquestioned benefits. But we should question whether compelling humans to work is essential to the continuation of that progress.

The article doesn't say it clearly, but it seems to be recommending a Universal Basic Income, on a large scale. Or at least enough to allow for students to continue studying without having to work.

A common response I've heard about the above proposal, is some variant of work-valorization. "People these days are just lazy and expect a handout. People should have to earn their keep. Working a job builds character, and is essential to a meaningful life." Presumably the author is responding to such statements.
That doesn't answer my initial question, how is blockstream supposed to monetize lightning, or anything for that matter?

>The claim, as far as understand it, is that Blockstream supported this plan, anticipating its failure, while working on its own replacement technology, Liquid.

I took a quick skim of blockstream's materials on liquid, and it sounds like it's something totally different to lightning? They describe it as some sort of ripple-like network for transacting in tokens? eg.

>Liquid uses an approach to consensus called Strong Federations. A Strong Federation removes the need for costly Proof of Work mechanisms and replaces it with the collective actions of a group of mutually distrusting participants called functionaries.
Time it took from pathogen discovery to vaccine for various diseases
Hard problems:

- Poverty

- Inequality

- Racial Discrimination

- Affordable Health and Education

- Old Age Care

The list goes on. We are 200 years into industrial revolution and have made significant scientific and economic progress. Time we start looking for solutions to the really Hard problems.
That is essentially a looking-for-a-job ad. Add yourself to the monthly thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring Not sure if the next one is Friday, it's usually on the first work day of the month, 9am California time.
Yeah, all those dishes looked delectable.
Unboxed integers is no big feat. Many implementations of garbage collected languages have unboxed small scalars (OCaml and Guile come to mind).
What about compound types?
It should also be noted that GCC was not suited technically, by design, for what Apple wanted out of a compiler at the time.

The JIT stuff they were doing with image filters for Core Image and Core Video and the IDE integration they were doing in Xcode could not be done in GCC at the time regardless of licensing without making massive changes, which would not have been accepted upstream.

GCC at the time was intentionally designed and implemented to make it hard to use parts of it independently, such as just using the parser to make a syntax tree for your IDE to use for highlighting or suggestions, or using the code generator in a JIT.

There had been suggestions and patches to make GCC more modular and separable, but they were rejected because being more modular would make it easier for proprietary software to interact with GCC components.

It was only after LLVM and clang started getting widespread use that GCC became more open to the idea of it becoming more flexible like LLVM.
I am totally in agreement with you in principle.

But I've lost count at the number of times all these things have failed me at work and in my personal life, where I've had to resort to "telecom" (just making a voice call, although I do know it's still VoIP, but there are different quality of service considerations and carriers always prioritize these)
> Didn't you learn anything at all in the last 11 months?

What I've learned over the past 11 months, from watching the numbers wax and wane with the seasons totally unrelated to the severity of lockdowns, the ages of those most affected (and for that matter asymptomatic estimates and the corrected IFR estimates), and the knock-on effects of the lockdowns? While it was good to be cautious initially, turns out for this particular virus we've blown it way out of proportion and ought to be letting up a lot more than we have been.
It's not a fair comparison to put up hard drives (integrated mechanics) against tape drives (seprated mechanics). They do not solve the same problem and have different longevity profiles. If I'm spending $500 on tape storage, it's because I want something that will last a long time, something that portable hard drives tend to have issues with.

LTO5 onward supports LTFS, which exposes the tape to the OS as if it were any other removable storage, with the one proviso that deleting files doesn't reclaim space unless the entire tape is wiped.
Thats why I'm thinking megastructure waste heat and weird planetary and stellar orbits (klemperer rosetete[1]) or some periodic high energy events (drives, fireworks, "disputes") will be how we find out about the more interesting advanced neighbors, possibly missing many closer ones who don't influence their environment too much yet.
Looks like it was a case of mistaken identity. One party named the OP with power of attorney, mistakenly thinking of someone else with the same name. What bothers me is how that is possible, don’t you need SSN, address, signature, something more than a name to do that?
Laws and regulations revolve. When bad things happen, regulations will change. When bad things don’t happen and there is public utility in allowing more things, regulations will eventually change.
Buy Every American an Electric Moped
1) the 'I' in 'AI': Cognitive architectures, knowledge representations and data structures, memory models, neurolinguistics, causal inference.

It seems like the AI field got stuck optimizing a particular (and very primitive) decades old ANN model, which is a dead end in my view.

2) Alternative nuclear reactors & fuels, it seems like the field is stuck in iterative improvements on decades old LWR/PWR designs.
It's not bad, people get used to windows/macos and think that "everything needs to look the same". I've been perfectly content with Ubuntu and KDE for years now. I also use a windows and macos laptop for work and they're fine too. I just think people have built up these psychological blocks to anything outside their comfort zone and poo poo anything that isn't a clone of their favorite system.
"Internet's most important Algorithm" meaning .. Fast Fourier transforms?
I read that as well and was super confused as to the problem. That's the whole point of hosted email.
Internet Archive Scholar
Even if you’re a “independent contractor” for Uber, if you get injured while working, their health insurance will kick in as a last resort.
I was thinking that DNA is a pretty robust storage medium. Perhaps we could use it in coming years to store data for long term survival.

Though considering these comments and the advent of mRNA/CRISPR, perhaps we could store data for future generations in our own DNA. That'd be fascinating if you could read journals or even audio/video of your ancestors from your biological inheritance from them. What if we could engineer an extra chromosome to do just that, then let them remix and recombine segments of memories so everyone's would be unique.
People like that have existed and yet in 100% of cases they’ve been outcompeted by and swallowed up by people who form governments. Funny that.
Water X times a week is generally not good advice, as many factors such as humidity and light can affect soil moisture. You will pretty much always need to get your hands in the top 1”-1 1/2” of soil to evaluate moisture.
Like /r/cyberdeck
That's probably not going to happen. Tapes have high longevities and you can buy used LTO drives on eBay for a few hundred bucks, but the biggest issue in 100 years is going to be finding a device to read the tape, and finding an adapter to hook it to the USB-H 12 quantum optical port on your motherboard.

A better way would be to use something like that to store it for a decade or two, then copy the data onto whatever the newer version of archive medium is (LTO drives can typically read the last one or two versions as well). Rinse and repeat every decade, and it also lets you test if there has been any bitrot.
There's a huge difference between being mixed into a shared pool of IPs where the internet pipe doesn't know who is who, and having your own server with a unique static IP that shows up both as your VPN server and the source of the outgoing connections.
So what would be a non-bullshit job? Animal cafe for lost pets? Handing blankets out to homeless people? Planting trees? How many of these jobs do you think are needed in the world?

I mean, if you are really into this stuff, nobody prevents you from going down this road... If not, then the main concern is this:

Do I like my job? When I wake up, do I think about what I was stuck on last evening and how am I going to tackle this? If you wake up thinking "Oh fuck, I need to work", yeah then that's a bullshit job for sure. But even then, I don't see how more than 1% or 10% of the population could have a job they enjoy. Work needs to be done, most of it is boring, dirty and doesn't earn money.

Until that changes, this is how it will be. No point in crying after it, just think about where you want to position yourself in this system.

Not to mention that this whole discussion brings us back to the question: Who's fault is it that people die? The arms researchers or manufacturers? The army? The people who are mean to us and own resources we want (I mean they could just surrender)?

Are the people building Facebook responsible for the social decline? Or is it the government, not applying proper regulation/laws? Or is it the people using Facebook (nobody is forcing you)? Or are humans just like this and Facebook shows us their true color?
I am working on an idea in this space. Anyone interested can ping me (contacts in profile), it's in early stealth mode but it is targeting exactly this problem.
The equivalent of a safe word, I'd suppose.
In my ~10 year career so far, I have found that this idealism can actually make things worse.

It seems that jobs in general can at best only offer short windows of time where the stars line up for you such that you can honestly say you enjoy working that job. But for one reason or another the window always closes. (Reorgs, you master the work so it gets boring, people come and go etc ...)

If the baseline level of pay in a field is high enough, it seems net detrimental to be highly engaged.

Who is better off? A checked out Engineer who collects 90-100k and is able to cruise at 6/10 levels of happiness under most conditions or a "striver" Senior Engineer who gets 130k but is pretty much always unhappy at work for one reason or another?
On the other hand they'll never grow if kept in the potter's pot, which is probably desirable in a houseplant, but personally I would rather watch the plant grow.

I was gifted a monstera adansonii in a fairly small (12cm diameter iirc) pot and it remained more or less the same size for a year or so, but since repotting it a couple of months ago into a 25cm pot and providing a new trellis structure it's grown nearly 30cm and sprouted many more leaves (although it has been all vertical growth so far, I'm hoping it will fill out horizontally once it reaches the top of the trellis). Obviously it would be impractical letting it get to maximum height indoors (around three metres, if I recall correctly), so we probably won't provide it a bigger pot once it reaches the limits of the current one, but seeing it grow has been quite nice.

I attribute part of its success to keeping the plant in the bathroom such that the steam from the shower provides a more tropical climate than the rest of the house and helps moderate its water requirements. I'd like to move it outdoors at some point and let it get to maximum size, but I don't think it would do well in the harsh Australian summer.
I assume it's because they said that immediately after a link featuring "dupont-chemistry-deception" making it seem like the previous sentence called them out by name. The link then got shortened when posted, and whether it says "dupont" depends on how you view the post.
There has to be a certain point where maintaining the machines becomes more expensive than the labor they would replace. That's just simple supply and demand, as the very act of automation would vastly increase the supply of labor. The question is whether it's even ethical to allow humans to work for such a pittance.
Man, your post is just full of malicious disinformation, most of it addressed elsewhere in this off-topic subthread.

> EDIT: The Lightning network markets itself as an improvement to Bitcoin, but it is a completely alternative settlement network that just happens to denominate in BTC. I don't think debating the use of the term "alt-coin" is material.

That is just entirely untrue. :( Whoever fed you that idea was confused or outright lying to you.

Lightning is a technique for using Bitcoin's smart contracting ability to pay bitcoin without bringing each and every transaction to the network.

The basic idea is that you take some Bitcoin and set a script on it that says that if there is a disagreement over who owns it, the involved parties will post to the ledger the last record in an external ownership transcript which is signed by the involved parties, and if anyone cheats and posts an outdated record, anyone else can post proof that a later entry existed and all the coins go to the non-cheating party.

With this in place, the parties can then transact back and forth securely as fast as they can sign and send Bitcoin transactions to each other without any global broadcast taking place. Taking it a step further, collections of these transactions can be made mutually atomic so that they're all successful or all fail (essentially by making them conditional on a common secret). This is how lightning makes it possible to pay people you've never transacted with before, by routing on a graph of these pairwise payments (that's what the 'network' in lightning network refers to).

All the transactions exchanged between participants are Bitcoin transactions-- which could be posted at any time to the network at the participant's whim, they refrain from doing so to save fees--, the system is built from the novel programmatic ability of Bitcoin, and it is completely ununsable without Bitcoin (or some clone that copies the required functionality, of course).

This kind of channelized usage of Bitcoin was foreseen by Bitcoin's creator and enabled by the consensus rules of the protocol from day one (particularly: nlocktime and sequence numbers which were explicitly added to support channels).
You can cut a potter's pot with a pair of scissors.
Please don't continue this thread. Whether you agree with me or not, it has devolved into personal and character insults by the other poster. You can continue the discussion with me somewhere else in the thread just not under yowlingcat. Blood has been spilled (figuratively) and tensions are extremely high.

Suffice to say, I'm not talking directly about category theory, that's one possibility of formalization (that seems quite unlikely). Other parts that have successfully made it into programming (and have changed programming for the better) including complexity theory, type theory and the Rust borrow checker. Two theories automate correctness and one is helpful in analysis of execution speed. My proposal is about one for modular organization and while category theory is a great candidate, it does have an incredibly high learning curve and to me that is why I agree with you that it is an unlikely candidate. I mean it does sort of exist already as a type checker in haskell... I'm more saying that I don't expect people to actually try to learn CT.

Either way, I believe more formality can be done and we don't have to force the entire industry to use monads and FP (FYI I prefer the style myself). If a formal theory about modular organization ever comes into vogue my guess is that it will exist more popularly as a "design pattern" in the industry rather than a programming framework or formal method. People can choose to use a pattern, or bend the rules... the main point and the crux of my entire effort is to say something along the lines of the fact that we need design patterns that provably improves "design." Without proof most of our efforts seem like steps to the side rather than forward.

If you have a reply, please place it directly under my parent post, not here.

edit:
That github link is picture perfect mirror of what I'm talking about in the industry. Thumbs up for bringing it to my attention.
Really interesting way of thinking about it, especially with index funds. I tend to abstract away thinking about them in my finances but there is a general comparison between the rules-based index fund and this rules-based investment library.
I'm still not buying it. We can all agree that UNIX should be relevant but, apart from Mac, when was the last time you used a bona-fide UNIX system?

You've assumed that your perspective is the correct one without justifying it. Sure, standards are important, but UNIX doesn't seem to be a successful (or modern) one.
Check one of the Oort cloud repeaters, they should have a copy. Yeah, there is likeky one as the "other" HAM club has too much energy credits to spend and really likes to steal interesting QSLs this way...
For what it’s worth, I bought bucatini at Zabar’s a little bit over two months ago — but I had to ask! :-)
I miss Lik Sang.
I was expecting an HN worthy submission but it seems very hollow - you shouldn’t work because AI
> Zoom "happy hours" pretty much get dominated by two or three voices (usually of the most senior people) and everyone else just listens, because you can't have 2 conversations at a time.

They tried to do “zoom happy hours” where I work, and this was exactly what happened. The two people who were usually the loudest in the office, just ended up talking to each other.

They would quite often stop and say “it feels like we’re the only one talking here”, and then go on talking.

Of course you’re the only one talking, you never stop talking. It’s impossible to get a word in. If you want others to participate, give them a chance, there’s often a small delay, so giving them 2 or 3 seconds to respond would help.
I like my job. I'd probably do it for free; and indeed, I programmed things for free before entering the workforce, because it was fun.

There's a difference between general work ethic, and the specific belief that paid commercial work is the only ethical kind. It is self-evident to me that, personally, I should be writing computer programs or drawing for at least some of my time instead of playing video games and posting on HN. It is less self-evident that I should pick only one computer program to work on based on the needs of my boss, and then do it for 40 hours a week between the hours of 9am to 5:30pm with an hour for lunch.
I see, fair enough. Thanks for the explanation.
Uhm... holiday reporting.
My super-simplistic take on this:

1. Universal basic income: in the longer term, this is more or less unavoidable if we don't want total chaos and social unrest; also see below.

2. Bigger objectives: As automation grows in terms of its prevalence and the efficiencies it produces, we need to divert more resources on bigger projects that are focused towards long term goals for humanity like scientific exploration/space/energy/medicine etc BUT instead of relying fully on automation to achieve them, we should have a balance of both human and automated labor to ensure that people who want to stay engaged, have the avenue to do so. If that makes things less than fully-efficient, so be it because i) the gains from automation elsewhere offsets that ii) the aim isn't to increase shareholder value.

This probably produces following groups (and there likely will be overlaps/grey areas):

a. Those who are driven by monetary goals: they can continue to pursue their ambitions in profit driven ventures that relies on automation (though automation itself might eat their jobs so this will be a constantly moving target)

b. Those who are driven by humanitarian goals/recognition etc: this is an area that is underfunded and more investment of effort and resources will both help humanity and bring satisfaction to people in it. These problems are so big that even with more and more automation, we can practically throw the entire humanity behind them and still be short of the goals.

c. Those who are unable/unwilling to participate in either corporate or humanitarian projects: I'm sure there will be a significant lot of people in this group but they should/will still have a reasonable standard of living because of #1. People in groups a. and b. shouldn't complain about them because they can join this group too (though based on human needs, I don't think suddenly everyone will jump to this even if they are able to). Similarly someone who is in this group can get inspired and move to a. or b.
Hilarious writing, and a very intriguing investigation into this mystery!
Same origin policy bypass technique