skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don’t fill potholes. That won’t fix the economy.

Uh, yes. Yes it will. The workers that fill those potholes will earn wages, which they can then use to pay for goods. By purchasing those goods, they pay other workers' wages, and the virtuous cycle continues.

Listen HN, I love your knowledge of technology and entrepreneurship. But the economics posts on here are deplorable. We've seen disruptive technologies many times before: the cotton gin, the television, steam power, the car. In every one of those instances, our work force has adapted and moved into new jobs.

The Internet is not some all-consuming monster; it cannot universally substitute for real goods; it will not replace jobs that need to happen in person.
One of the few defenses society has against this kind of abuse is the Streisand effect - their attempts to suppress this kind of speech only make it have more effect. Because of that I'm all for giving this kind of story more exposure.
Lavasoft's new owners made their money by pretending to be Lavasoft
The lawyers that come up with these sums don't need a sense of money grounded in the real world. See also: RIAA wants 75 trillion from limewire: http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202486102650
In the industrial revolution, farmers could move to the city and get a job in the factory.

Not true. The Industrial Revolution was preceded (in England) by an Agricultural Revolution that displaced peasants in large numbers to cities where they didn't have nearly enough work. (Many emigrated to the New World.)

Thus the later economic boom was preceded by economic hard times.
For some reason I read this as "Game of Kittens" a la Game of Thrones...
Problem with "silence" and "no news" is they are indistinguishable from many failure modes.

I vastly prefer confirmation of action(s) as default and -q flag. At very lest there needs to be -v flag that provides confirmation of action(s)
This is absolutely right. Average personal savings rates in India and China: 30% and 50% (and that's of their gross income). Average personal savings in the USofA: -2%. We've lived so far beyond our means that it had to catch up to us.

The real scare for me is the potential for another, larger bubble: the "Credit Bubble". A bubble exists when asset price inflation rises beyond what incomes can sustain. A bubble represents people abandoning reason and prudence for hope and greed. (http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse/chapter-15-bubbles)

The Credit Bubble will pop when the sum total of all of our society's debt prices (read: interest) exceeds our ability to pay. Experts think this could happen anywhere between 2015 and 2020. When that pops, the housing bubble will look minuscule.

The prudent should prepare now. Buy food storage. Become self reliant. And get out of debt!
Krizia Robustella Spring/Summer 2012
I wouldn't be too quick to write all cops off as bad. There are definitely a good number of "good" cops. We should make sure not to stereotype policemen because a few of them do something idiotic.

I think a big problem with a lot of government positions or other legal positions are that a noticeable (hence this situation) percentage of the people are power-hungry, or have a chip on their shoulder.

Which results in unspeakable, completely illogical results like this - torturing someone to feel like you have power, and then being able to get away with it because of an obfuscating and broken legal system, filled with good law people and bad law people.
The travel industry is going to crap it's pants.
Well, they're not my bosses anymore. I'm moving into software and applied stats now. :)

I'm torn about QE3. There's little evidence that businesses are waiting on it specifically to make capital expenditure decisions; it seems, from reading the Beige Book and other anecdotes that companies might be waiting for the other shoe to drop. QE3 would just adjust the shoe on the foot a bit.
Sure, a few programmers won't solve it, but that's ok. Given the massive harm software patents do, even a modest refusal to participate could yield significant harm reduction.

And the point of discussion is pretty clear: it's to help shape and propagate the kind of norm that Fowler is arguing for. Namely, most programmers knowing that participating in filing bullshit patents is an unprofessional activity.
Great anecdote; learning and education are often at odds.
I disagree. Technology does not kill jobs in manufacturing or services. It does in farming.

But in manufacturing, and services more technology merely means that people get more stuff. People buy more clothes more gadgets, more of everything. Or if they buy the same amount of gadgets their gadgets are more complex, etc. Thus, when technology results in higher production it is usually matched with higher consumption.

There are two things that are killing jobs in the US right now: the export of jobs offshore, and poverty. The US economy is actually creating shitloads of jobs, the problem is that we are creating them in China. China is still doing monetary tightening to slow down its growth.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14117778

The other thing is poverty. Since the new deal the US has usually had some kind of mechanism to ensure that the middle and lower middle class is relatively protected and relatively well off. This included unions, minimum wage legislation, and various government programs. Nowadays most of these things are being eroded. This means that people cannot buy more stuff, which means that there are fewer jobs, which means people buy even fewer stuff, which results in even fewer jobs, etc.

To determine whether technology is killing jobs, you can ask yourself the following hypothetical question: Does everybody in the world have every manufactured good or service they could possibly want? If the answer is true, then technology has killed all hope of future economic growth. But the answer is sooo far away from being true, that the question itself sounds ridiculous.

So no it is not technology. It is something else in the way our society is ordered and run that is doing it.
I, too, thought that the job losses were permanent. Until there was an article posted here the other week with quotes in news outlets from several different eras since the industrial revolution claiming the same thing. Plenty of reasonable sounding explanations are offered elsewhere in this thread for why this time is different, but then lots of reasonable sounding explanations were offered in the past.

I'd say it's 95% that job losses aren't permanent, although I'm not sure 5 years is enough time to settle it. I'm perfectly willing to believe we could be in a recession/depression for the next 10-20 years. That has precedent in our and other economies. However, I'm not prepared to believe that--simply because I can't imagine what people will do--people won't end up doing something. Everyone likes to be productive, and humanity has a really efficient means of organizing labor to trade around everyone's productivity.

I am all for 95% or 100% unemployment, though, if such a fantastical reality can come to pass!
> How about we stop supporting Google and Facebook? That's the best way to make your point.

I think it's a very good thing to articulate what is wrong with things. That way they evolve, at least sometimes.
I came here to post the same.. Which entry level tasks does the most recent wave of new technology require which may be performed by, say, a 45 year old factory worker of 25 years? How do you go about "spreading the load"?
The complete list, idea submission field, and voting mechanism, can be found here: http://www.airbnb.com/safety#feedback. Look forward to seeing your submissions. -Joe
Does this count?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_French_Revolution
I think he's asking about, when we approach a new project, do we go through a lot of deliberation between two or more languages/ways of implementation. Or do we rather go with a standard or convention that we always use? It could also be in contrast to choosing between a wide field of possible languages for any particular project.
You clearly missed the GP's point and the reference to the broken window fallacy: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=broken+window
On the low end it seems.
Much much older than that: http://www.alge.no/ebooks/Optical_tempest.pdf

This technique was used in at least the early 90s
Not only that, but with strongly negative real interest rates, it can borrow money to pay people to fill potholes today for less than it would cost to wait.

In fact, it's better than that:

- That calculation doesn't include the savings in reduced wear and lack of deferred maintenance.
- Construction labor is now much cheaper than it would be at full employment.
- Growing consumption now would more than pay for itself in taxes from an averted "lost decade."

Unfortunately the folks in Washington are still worried about 3% inflation and how interest rates are going to spike any day now. So we end up with spending cuts that will almost certainly worsen the deficit over a do-nothing approach.
I downgraded recently, and it was a hassle for me. (At least when I did it) there was no downgrade button or explanation of how to do it - well there was but it was extremely subtle and hard to find. What it came down to was finding and contacting the customer service address and stating you wanted to downgrade.
Those housewives and Indians will not be out of work for long. They are experiencing frictional unemployment right now; they'll retrain and take on a new role soon enough.

You don't see the happy ending yet because this was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We love to trash finance types, but banks facilitate a lot of transactions--including home purchases and capital expenditures. When they hurt, our economy hurts in some non-obvious ways.
>So, if there are 10 APs and 10 users all within range of each other, then 10 radio signals will sum together at each antenna of each user’s device to produce an independent waveform for each device with only that device’s data.

we all know that using 10 AP devices you can generate desired independent waveforms at 10 or less target positions in space. The question is whether it is possible for 11, 12, etc... Interference result is a linear combination of source waverforms. I.e a task sounds like "find M (with M less than N) vectors satisfying these N linear independent conditions"
The US imports a lot of its creatives, and a majority of its creatives when it comes to math and science. If capital moves somewhere else, creatives will move somewhere else.
Sounds like he's going against all the things that make a startup fun. Reading a 'sales bible' sure isn't on my list of exciting things to do when I join/create a startup.
I also agree that making "lower level" bindings can leave the API a bit shady (Akka's[1] Java version is a bit uglier due to lack of Anonymous Functions, which have to be replaced by Interfaces).

About example of frameworks which more popular in another language, I honestly can't think of few other than Akka. I admit is uncommon for frameworks to support its host language (in a multi-language platform), and host languages are usually much more crowded than their sub-language counterparts.

What happens far more frequently is a complete re-implementation on the host language, example: instead of using JRuby on Rails, people migrate to Play framework[2]

Hadoop[3], however, seems to be getting really tracktion from its other language bindings[4], as writing map-reduce tasks in Java is not fun at all.

[1] http://akka.io/

[2] http://www.playframework.org/

[3] http://hadoop.apache.org/

[4] http://pig.apache.org/
Isn't this part of the Montessori model -- no grading?
Testing Your Web App on a BlackBerry Simulator
I refuse to use Facebook, because they have pursued a strategy of sharing data; multiple statements by high-level FB execs suggest that privacy is not a corporate value. Although I've had to set up a sock puppet to be able to see certain pages. :-(

I see Google as being a company that values privacy, but inherently knows a good deal more than I am comfortable with.

I have accounts on LinkedIn, G+, and StackOverflow that are strictly "professional persona", for the purpose of networking only.
If you're going to do sales, you need some kind of sales religion whether you read a bible or not.

If you're not doing sales...
From the title I thought "give 100%" meant putting in your full effort, rather than the mark you got. Maybe change it to something less ambiguous?
When I met Jeremy at JSConf (this was at the end, during the super-loud party), I asked whether such a patch would ever be accepted, and he said, "no, probably not." Obviously that didn't stop me and I'm glad to hear that it would be considered once it has matured :)

If it were to happen, then yes, it should certainly be an option, though to clarify, you can use the Library without the Compiler, and the way things are written now, the only file from the Closure Library that your generated code would depend upon is the bootstrapping base.js file. (Though it may also depend on array.js down the road -- see the section "Leveraging More Closure Library Built-ins" on http://bolinfest.com/coffee/features.html.)

But I think it's completely fair to wait until it's "finished" before trying to upstream it, as Jeremy suggests. It will likely take a bit of refactoring for the CoffeeScript code to support "plugins" such as these. As you can see, I'm just spraying "if o.google" statements in https://github.com/bolinfest/coffee-script/blob/master/src/n... to get things done right now, which would not be acceptable to upstream in its current form.
Software as a service renders the manual organization of information obsolete.

A great deal of human labor in general is spent organizing information. Every industry from construction to tourism. Every scale, from villages to corporations.

It is fundamental to the very concept of "work", and it is being rendered obsolete very quickly thanks to high internet penetration rates and mobile computing.
But they already have my (and most other peoples) real name. My Gmail account is registered under my real name. Everything they'd have to offer a checkbox tied to the "Nickname" field under "About". Ticking the box only shows your nickname on Google+.
Awesome, thanks. I was getting annoyed trying to click on the comment link on my phone.
I wrote about this earlier: http://bitoftech.mkronline.com/2011/08/05/the-information-ag...

(HN submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2850520)
Decent illustration of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_paradox
Probably it is not happening now, but it should happen in a few years.

Historically technology has displaced humans, but there has always been something that is cheaper to retrain humans for than it is to build machines for. For one thing you can explain to humans what to do, and they could turn an incredible amount of computing power to figuring out, following, and filling out your instructions. Computers simply have not had anything close to a human brain.

However as the complexity of our machines goes up, and the costs of automation go down, eventually we'll come to a point where it is cheaper to design and build a machine for a new job than it is to train someone to do it. At that point humans will be displaced and new jobs won't show up for it.

By a back of the envelope estimate, we're perhaps 10-15 years away from having computers with the raw computational power of a human brain. Software will follow, and the successes of things like Watson suggest that it won't take that long for software to catch up enough to be economically useful.

Once it is possible to train a machine faster than a human, the cost of buying and running that machine puts a cap on what that human can expect to be paid. Given Moore's law, that cap will descend painfully quickly after it first becomes an issue.
425-430-7500 option 8 is the number for the police department in question. I think that people tend to act differently if they know they are being watched so I called and talked to the person who answered to (a) confirm the story and (b) express my concerns about the abuse of power.
The latter basically. Technology wiped out the work of horses, so there's no reason it can't move up the "skills ladder" and wipe out more skilled employees.
No, I didn't. Maintaining infrastructure isn't breaking windows!

Public works is not the equivalent of a glass-maker breaking the baker's window. It's the equivalent of hiring people to maintain the roads that allow the glass maker to get to the baker, but instead of the glass-maker paying for the road the baker and glass-maker distribute the cost through taxation.

It's intellectually dishonest to even compare highway maintenance with breaking windows to create a job for yourself.
Or you could provide Google with some constructive feedback and some arguments and perhaps they change. After all they say they want feedback and that the service isn't gold master yet.
I wonder why some people end up being intellectually curious while others are not. I think intellectual curiosity is very important, especially now since the majority of the world's information is available for free online.

The person who grows up being intellectually curious will have a big heads up in the job market since they will have acquired more information than the other applicants. Plus, I think a lover for knowledge can enrich an individuals life as well.

I don't know exactly how schools and parents can instill intellectual curiosity into their students and children but I think the subject matter should be researched and prioritized.
A downgrade is probably going to make a lot bigger dent in the credibility of S&P than it will in the borrowing costs of the US. We just saw negative nominal interest rates the other day, for crying out loud.

Where do you suggest we put our money instead, S&P?
The secret origin of "log in"
1. Regulatory burden in which fields? Low-skill trades have suffered the most recently, but I can't think of any new regulations against them.

#4 is inherently untrue, as the lower US dollar entices other countries to buy our stuff. As for "made in the USA" stuff, well, the Tea Party has ignored America's position as the third-largest exporter [0].

#5 is conceptual...I cant really speak to it.

I would put my money on #2, if only bc this fits with the anecdotes I've read from the Beige Book (credit conditions are high even though banks have money to lend). This is such a relatively boring story (relative to "the Internet has consumed everyone's jobs NOM NOM") that I'm not surprised that it isn't espoused more.

[0] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
The 2nd Global Economic Depression and Collapse of the State
Or, don't give a '100%' until everything is learned? If they've giving up before the work is done because you told them it was done, don't tell them it's done?

I get the moral of the story. But if there's more words to learn, how could they possibly have mastered the test?

There's more wrong here than just the grades.
The Yellow Turban Rebellion was pretty much entirely caused by a loss of jobs -> massive wealth disparity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Turban_Rebellion
As a support for your claim that new classes of jobs are not created , see pages 67-68 in http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/LIGHTSTUNNEL.PDF

There's a table called "U.S. Occupations with at least one million workers (2006)". Every type of job there has existed since 1948. There are no new job categories created with over a million workers.
Perhaps the future is just one where more of us end up on welfare and the government keeps us going on the spoils of the extremely smart and/or powerful.

I think that's essentially correct. The non-singularity non-fiscal-collapse endgame is that everything we need and almost everything we want can be produced by a small fraction of the population, and most people don't have sufficient skills and knowledge to be economically productive. When you're trying to cure cancer or build self-driving cars, 10 brilliant PhDs beat 1000 average high school graduates.

Prediction: the idea of a universal guaranteed income (e.g. Milton Friedman's negative income tax) will steadily become more popular.
I think you're being harsh. This is no different from someone making people read Steve Blank's book when they join or some other book (a very common practice). Sales is hard.
Chrome and Firefox Working Together to Make Web Apps Get Along
Technology has been killing jobs for a long time. Why do you think it hasn't before? Do you find your self blacksmithing, or does a machine do that for you?
Here are a couple of things:

• If it only persists for minutes, that's a tenth of a joule per few minutes, if you have some way to capture and confine it away from the corrupting influence of matter. That sounds a little bit more practical than a tenth of a joule, total.

• The big deal with antimatter is that it has a high energy density. Even if you have a very small amount of it, it still has a high energy density. A hundred joules can accelerate a one-milligram spacecraft to 5000 meters per second, which is almost enough to stay in low earth orbit. 10 kJ can accelerate a one-microgram spacecraft to 1.6 million m/s, or 0.5% of the speed of light. And 10kJ of matter/antimatter reaction works out to 5.6 × 10⁻¹⁴ g, so it's easy to imagine containing that much in a one-microgram spacecraft. If you can gather a tenth of a joule of antimatter per hour, you only need 11 years to gather enough antimatter to launch your one-microgram probe toward Alpha Centauri.
marking their work prepares the children for the next thing which will be even more cooler shower upon their curiosity and enthusiasm - money/salary/financial incentives distribution system in the economy.
No, the French Revolution occurred because of active exploitation and abuse of the lower classes. The French people were not sitting around debating whether to spend the evening playing with their PS3s, going out for pizza, or mailing out a few more resumes. They were sitting around starving.
Sorry, I have this truly bizarre habit of trying to account for both the benefits and the costs of a given policy.

It's a fast way to Total Political Unpopularity, believe me! But alas, I'm an engineer at heart.

Creating jobs is trivial. It's not even remotely interesting. Creating net jobs is the interesting question. And you can't prove you've created net jobs until you look on both sides of the ledger. It's a bizarre, crazy, foreign idea, I know, but it also has the virtue of corresponding to reality much better.

If more politicians (and dare I say, even economists) did this more often we'd be in a lot less trouble right now.

And yes, you seem to have totally missed my point.
Want your team to be more creative? Anger fails. Sarcasm works.
The Montessori model is a particular 'no grading' model.
While this is a legit perspective, there is a meaningful difference in that Google can throw out their failed hardware without any real risk of having it return to haunt them, but broken toy trucks means either handing materiel to the enemy or having extra useless weight to carry around.

You might be able to tweak specifics to account for this, but you also might not.
That sounds nice. Martial arts always had this real woo woo feel to them. If I want to learn to fight, I want to learn to fight, not to meditate. (Perhaps that's simply a brash Western attitude, though).
Not likely. The special thing about antimatter is its spectacularly high energy density, not its abundance and easy extraction. Solar energy is tomorrow's oil.
Like the French Revolution example, this was caused by exploitation and abuse rather than the simple fact of someone's bank account being fatter than someone else's.
if you're going to speak on complex law issues, how about learning the difference between then and than?
Oracle v. Google - You Name It, You'll Find It In This Story