skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Any insightful historical books on the impact of automation?
In those troubled time of increased AI-based automation that could threat to replace countless jobs, I was curious to learn more about how similar events played out in the past.

So I wonder if you know of any good book on the subject, either covering the subject in general throughout history, or focusing on a specific automation breakthrough.

Specifically interested in books that analyzes in depth how such event unfolded over time, without oversimplifying the complexity and details.
I buy a hammer from home depot, I don't need to give Home Depot a license for me to use the hammer. I don't need to give that license to the hammer manufacturer either.
Not sure why my GP post was flagged, it was upvoted. I simply stated:

The election was a referendum on the economy and woke/DEI. The people rejected the left's new religion.
Two Republican speakers of the house, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy agreed he probably was back in 2016 or so. He and Dana Rorhrabacher.
They have, AFAICT, the leader in worst "AI" on the market, and are shedding customers like crazy (my company left Google+Slack for MS just to get Teams for free and I wish they didn't, they use AWS but I wish they didn't), and we're suppose to pay more for this?
EU+UK is over 500M people.
Even if I accept your transactional mindset and put all values aside isn’t it still worth it to have them on our side?

They will probably not align with China but will naturally drift closer if they no longer see much difference between US and them.
Too late I’ve installed Librewolf. I’m going to either find a tool this weekend or write one tonight that will keep my bookmarks in sync with ios and that will be it for them from me.

The value is wayyyyyy too low to embrace folding. And perhaps these negative reactions are extreme but are a bit more telling.

Clearly nearly almost everyone wants Firefox out of the hands of Mozilla. They have low market share from being Google’s get out if jail free card. Now the 2.x% that remain are flocking away as well. This exit out is an attempt to “fork” Firefox in some manner. There is an opportunity to swoop in and pick up the helm.

Mozilla perhaps doesn’t see the story everyone else does:

- developed privacy stance over a decade

- updates their policy to state “actually well we’ve been selling data about you”

At this point you might as well have said, “Haha we’ve been lying this whole time about privacy.”

Regardless of truth and nuance of it all, the damage is done. The privacy promise was the only thing holding the rest of the complaints back.
It's only alienation if you refuse to fight back.
I mean, define what do you mean by ACTUALLY poor.

It's very common for people living in traditional working-class neighbourhoods to own a house and suddenly become paper rich when gentrification happens (e.g. Venice Beach in LA). They might find themselves in a situation where, in theory, they have a lot of wealth from the house but don't participate in the economy at the same level.
Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet
In case you don't know, there is also BookBrainz: https://bookbrainz.org/
Not being flat as a pancake could have played a role, though.
[dupe] There's so much discussion on this ongoing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43185909
> Have you ever done the experiments to prove the Earth is round?

I have, actually! Thanks, astronomy class!

I've even estimated the earth's diameter, and I was only like 30% off (iirc). Pretty good for the simplistic method and rough measurements we used.

Sometimes authorities are actually authoritative, though, particularly for technical, factual material. If I'm reading a published release date for a video game, directly from the publisher -- what is there to contest? Meanwhile, ask an LLM and you may have... mixed results, even if the date is within its knowledge cutoff.
Payment or funding models have never been the problem. Those are menus you choose from, not tricky parts you have to come up with from scratch. Thinking of a single product idea I feel has enough chance to succeed to be worth working on, is the entire problem.

After 25 years of never once thinking of one, I doubt that's going to change.
I have a hard copy of Programming Rust by Jim Blandy et al would that slot in nicely anywhere here?
I wish compose keys were more prevalent. There's something nice about typing -> and getting →
What are you working on and how's it going?

I also started a solopreneur gig building apps.
"Everyone else is doing it" is not a defense. Firefox users are often using it because they didn't have that in their terms. Now they do. People are upset about the rug pull.
Agree. I think this certainly applies to the changes to the Washington Post opinion page - a lot of people in tech genuinely value free speech and individual rights. They’ve had to stay quiet in the era of canceling but they’ve finally had enough and are willing to stand up for what’s right.
You’re not alone! I’ve given up the preference on team projects for pragmatic reasons, but the semantics of (string) enums are still my personal preference.
https://archive.ph/mkwrR
Yes. Firefox. The binary that runs on the computer, not Mozilla somewhere else.
Css is a garbage api. Styling things should not be this hard. We are stuck with it because of tech debt. That’s most of web technology today.
So why did they feel the need to make this explicit for Firefox now?

Why was the previous state of affairs not sufficient? Hasn’t Firefox been letting me type data into a form for nearly 20 years now, _without_ this language?
In the UK it is before income tax or national insurance (public healthcare), and also before pension saving. However most jobs give you an additional bit of pension on top of your salary (usually 5%).
http://sidecar.clutch.engineering/ — Sidecar, a personal automotive assistant. Sharing dev updates at http://threads.net/@featherless, beta registration is here: http://sidecar.clutch.engineering/beta/
Why do you care if people slack off? That’s the company’s problem
US firm Firefly scores its first moon landing with Blue Ghost spacecraft
Godot is too complicated compared to Flash. Have you ever used Flash? In Flash, you could literally take the brush from the toolbox, draw a circle, and that was your player character. That was it. No importing assets, no creating sprites, no nothing. You literally draw the circle right there with vector art tools, and it can be whatever you want.

And those were THE best vector art tools, because when you drew a shape and the shape overlapped with another, it automatically erased the other shape like you would expect it to in a raster graphics editor. In pretty much every other software I tried, e.g. Inkscape, Affinity, Corel Draw, Illustrator, you just get two separate shape objects one on top of the other. They seem to be designed for drawing the outlines, not to actually paint with brushes. Flash understood what was intuitive for artists.

Honestly, the older I get the stranger I feel about the fact that there was a brilliance in creating interface for people to be productive with back then that seems to be completely gone. I think this may be in part because desktop applications are unusual nowadays, but it's just really strange that the things I remember seeing have been done exactly once and never copied by anybody despite how well they worked.
If you want to checkout duckdb try QStudio. It's a free sql client with duckdb integrated: https://www.timestored.com/qstudio/help/duckdb-sql-editor. Disclaimer: I'm the main author.
Are they easy to take apart? I feel like many of them are made to resemble a single piece even if they aren’t. Are there brands built to be easy to work on?
> Mozilla released a "Terms of Use" document for Firefox, a first for the open-source browser. That might sound like business as usual, but [...]

That's not business as usual, that's a contradiction! Open Source software doesn't impose terms of use. Criterion 6 of the OSI's Open Source Definition document: No discrimination against fields of endeavor. [0]

The FSF's Four Freedoms, analogous to the OSI's Open Source Definition, has a similar requirement: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). [1][2]

It's true that Mozilla's terms of use nonsense was limited to the Firefox executable binary, and did not apply to the source-code, but still, there's a reason the community sees this as a betrayal. We shouldn't have to work around this kind of thing in the first place.

It's not 'confusion', Mozilla. The backlash from your community is because you're betraying your professed values, not because your community is stupid.

[0] https://opensource.org/osd

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43207456
Firefox is not a SaaS. More so, it's Free Software so you literally own the program you run on your computer. You, the end user, are granted all the rights (well, except for the Firefox trademark) to do whatever you please with the binary or source code, under the MPL terms, essentially with the only restrictions imposed is that you have to do the same if you distribute it further (modified or verbatim).

If you legally need some license to type into a program on your computer (I don't think so, but let's say you do solely for the sake of imaginary argument) you can just give the license to yourself, no need to involve any third parties at any point here.

If Mozilla says they need a license so you can fill a form in Firefox, then they must've literally forgotten what Free Software even means. I hope this is not true, but merely a misunderstanding of some sort.
Stopping opioids or alcohol cold turkey can kill you; stopping food will not, for a very long time depending on how much fuel you carry around.
You’ve been wanting to get this off your chest for a while haven’t you.
Even something like foo::<‘_, [T]>() is just not that hard to follow. Again, the symbols involved all compose nicely and are unambiguous. And frankly, you just don’t need something like that all that often (and when you do, there are usually other alternatives if you’re really put off by the symbols.
Sounds like DDoS amplification attacks but in RF instead of network.

I always find it crazy when the information world leaks back into the physical world.
> If you want to convince a company doing RTO why it’s bad, you need to show the negative impacts to the organization.

There is a reason these are the same thing that should already be obvious: If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead.

This before you even consider the costs to the company directly. If employees work from home you need less office space etc. That's not just rent but heat, power, security, insurance, internet, furniture, taxes, cleaning, lawyers and permits. That's a ton of money.
One more gift for you, buddy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_analog_ar...

https://www.anadigm.com/fpaa.asp

https://hasler.ece.gatech.edu/FPAA_IEEEXPlore_2020.pdf
Which 26% though? I’ll bet dollars to donuts that if the fed cut off Florida right now, they would sort it out.
I wonder how this aligns with the protobuf best practice of having the first value be UNSPECIFIED:

https://protobuf.dev/best-practices/dos-donts/#unspecified-e...
That is about as ridiculous as saying it takes 3 years to truly know how the iPhone works. You're talking out of your ass because you don't have any rational refutations to reach for.
Because Mozilla has a dedicated legal team and larger organizational exposure.
Instead they're losing all the advantage they once had by failing to focus on their core.

Being one half of a duopoly is a pretty stable position. Just about the only way to lose it is to fuck around and quit playing the game. There's really no external force that could have destroyed Mozilla if they had just stayed focused.

Mozilla needed to be a browser company, trying to be an "everything" company was a really stupid move.
One thing to note is that if you think you're safe from having to use csrf due to only serving endpoints you yourself consume by posting json, some libraries (like django rest framework) can also opaquely handle html forms if the content type header is set, accidentally opening you up for someone having a form on their site posting on users' behalf to yours.
Larry Ellison: "I need daily reports until the customer is happy" (2001)
> There is nothing “strategic” about this.

It’s strategic for the administration to throw a bone to the crypto bros who supported its candidacy. It may not be strategic for the United States.
Visa and Mastercard also have limits on what percentage of a bank's transactions can be adult.
Thank you. I was unaware of this.
Nope.

Healthcare megacorps are buying up independent practices like crazy. All because doctors can't keep up with the bullshit IT required for insurance, state mandates, etc and that's in addition to the insanity of even renting commercial real estate for an office these days.

These megacorps set quotas and push doctors to nickel and dime like crazy.
They sure as shit will spend the money to find robots that can give you a prostate exam with a robot dildo.
I've been using GLP-1 agonists since before Ozempic, and by now I have no side effects from them.

My doctor said that she now titrates the dose up slower than the recommended monthly increments and the side effects are less frequent.

Another problem is that GLP-1 drugs seem to synergize with other drugs that can cause GI issues.
Put simply, Mozilla are lying.
So you don't own a house after working for 30 years and you of all people are speaking about efficiency? This is really something to think about for you, mate
Gen Z are the hardest to work with – even Gen Z managers say
Not to be pedantic, but I am legitimately confused about how the babel of tower metaphor is being used here. In biblical lore, the flaw of the tower of babel was that it too successful as a unifying project. Is this what you mean in regards to react? It seems that other comment meant the opposite.
>Anyone claiming a generalized 100x, 10x, or even 2x productivity gain is either delusional or trying to sell you something

I don't understand how anyone who spends a couple hours or more per day coding new functionality couldn't at least double their productivity with LLMs, unless their organisation prohibits LLM usage. Even just limiting the LLM to writing unit tests would still save that much time.
I don't rate books on Goodreads, but I do look at the average rating when deciding to read a book. I won't start anything less than about 3.7 or 3.8.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43228816

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43224107
By definition those do allow you to see the response so that’s not really what is being discussed.
foul: https://letmegptthatforyou.com/stats
> Plus I have money. This book costs about as much as a good bottle of wine or a bad bottle of whiskey.

Exactly.

A few years ago I did a really aggressive weeding out of my bookshelves as things were getting far too cluttered. In the process I threw out what must have been - at cover price - several thousand pounds worth of IT related books.

On the resale market they were all too stale to have any value (though I did manage to give a handful away to friends). In one way it was a bit painful, but those few thousand pounds worth of books has given me a huge (financial) return on that investment!

Cheap at the cost of a good bottle of wine ... for the foundations of a career!
All the eggs in the same basket, at some point all this data will be leaked all around the planet. 3-letter agencies used to pay for this information from other countries, but this one will be shared for free with every nation.
IMHO electron based markdown editors are generally slow, bloated, short-lived, and often platform-limited.

Use this and add sed lines for any required non-breakyness per normal CSS, rules can be specific to @media print as required.

$ cat ~/bin/mdview
#!/bin/bash
# markdown viewer
tmpfile=.mdview.tmp-`uuidgen`.html
# start html
echo "<html><head><style>img{margin:20px;max-width:100%}@media print{img{max-height:90%;max-width:90%;page-break-after:always}}body{margin:6em;font-family:sans}pre,code{font-weight:bold;font-size:110%;font-family:Ubuntu Mono}</style></head><body>" >${tmpfile}
# duplicate markdown for modification
cp ${1} ${1}.mdtmp
# add extra newline after trailing :
sed -i -e 's/: \*$/:\r\r\n\n/' ${1}.mdtmp
# generate HTML from markdown
# note the --html-no-skiphtml --html-no-escapehtml allows the preservation
# of <a name="blah"></a> anchors within text to allow [link][#anchorname]
lowdown --html-no-skiphtml --html-no-escapehtml -thtml ${1}.mdtmp >>${tmpfile}
# remove the temporary markdown file
rm ${1}.mdtmp
# add newline before images
sed -i -e 's/<img/<br><img/' ${tmpfile}
# view result
firefox $tmpfile &
# sleep for a short moment
sleep 1.25
# remove the temporary file
rm ${tmpfile}
Hooked 2.0: How Scams Are Evolving and How to Avoid Them
2025 Hiring Pause
> Today, everyone's dad work at Nintendo. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I just so happen to run an old online fan made Pokemon game where people can be banned for misbehavior (e.g. cheating). Let's just say I can confirm this sentiment.
I've said it here many times now, but Robert Sapolsky identified inequality as one of the highest causes of stress in any given primate society. Even for those at the top.
What people did before was simple in my childhood case: your grandma/grandpa, who live downstairs in a multifamily home, drops you off or picks you up.

How that's supposed to work with just 2 parents that work 8h/day - idk.
Big fan of QStudio! Thanks for building it!
> Because they do things. With their hands. That no one else does

That's only true of surgeons :) What if your specialty is nonsurgical (internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, etc)?
Thank you; I didn't know that Brave has a peer-to-peer sync.
I guess at this point if you want to do something new/modern, go for 4- or 8-star rating rather than 5- or 10-star rating. It'll force people to choose something other than middle. I hate to find 3/5 book which really deserves 2/5 but people didn't want to leave somewhat negative feedback.

Maybe out of context, but the real value of Goodreads is the sheer number of content (books, reviews, lists, users, etc). If something _works_ there's not always a reason to break it and/or update it just for the sake of updating. Look at hardcore Salesforce tools, they look like they're from 90s, but they work perfectly fine. If that's your only motivation, it's impossible to win me over as a user.

Side-note: create a new book list and call it DNF, add the books that you didn't finish to that list and get it done with.
It’s a sort of luxury disease. It used to be that life entailed so much material suffering that people needed to rationalize that they were suffering for something, and so human beings got incredibly good at that coping mechanism. So good that now that we live in a world where we have material abundance, we cannot believe it, and then we go out of our way to impoverish ourselves just so we can feel good that at least we’re suffering for something.

All of us can have high flow showers and toilets like we used to. The world isn’t going to end if we do. Even regions that have water shortages can solve them with technology that’s existed for the better part of a century by now. But if we do that, we will end up standing in our hot, high-flow showers thinking to ourselves—this is wrong, we don’t deserve this, this is too good to be true.
At the last place I worked I assiduously filled out those surveys. Twice a year the executives would do an all hands meeting and talk about the result of the recent survey. They would make a big deal out of all the changes they were making.

After a few cycles, I noticed that the top problems from the surveys always stayed the same. Then I noticed that the changes they were claiming to make were either half-hearted or were gross misinterpretations of survey results to push their own agendas. Of course the survey results stayed the same, nothing was done to address the problems.

After I noticed this, I still filled out the survey, if only because they would track me down and tell me the complete the survey (wait, I thought this was anonymous...). One year I answered 5/5 on every question. The next year I answered 0/5 on every question. The next year I quit.
Looking forward to next few years when we can finally abstract away all the back-end techs.
Congrats to the team. Disappointed there was no stream of actual touchdown or maneuvers.
Yes, a lot more discussions today:

"Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after reneging on promises to not sell their data" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43229668 182 comments

"Trust in Firefox and Mozilla Is Gone – Let's Talk Alternatives" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43229378 189 comments

"What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43229267 129 comments
It doesn’t necessarily change the scope, but it definitely changes the scale.

Just one example. In a country of 3 million people you can probably get away with having one office that handles visa applications and passport applications.

In a country 100x larger, you’d need to hire so many employees for both that each sub department will grow so large that they are effectively independent from each other and have separate physical infrastructure, separate digital infrastructure etc…

Then once you have all these separate sub departments you have sub departments that pop up just to service other sub departments.

It’s just an extension of graph theory. The number of connections between nodes grows non linearly with the number of nodes.

Take any organization. The percentage of support staff vs direct revenue generators increases with the size of the company.

The number of support staff vs front line fighters grows non linearly with the size of the army.