skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lump of labor of course grows as economy develops but it doesn't have to always grow faster than automation reduces it.

Given that we automate things faster and faster and economy needs time to grow to increase lump of labor there might be time where lump of labor starts shrinking.

Lots of currently held jobs are pretty much useless already but can't be removed in business as usual mode due to various social agreements.

US economy used crisis as an excuse to shake off lots of them. Output regrew fast after crisis but jobs didn't come back.
I'd definitely say it's coincidental rather than ironic. At least it's not raiaiaaaaaaaaiiiiinnnnn on your wedding day.
With the money from their jobs of course!

Lets think about it with this example: if it takes a worker 2 hours to make product X, but then a new technology comes along which makes it only take 1 hour to make product X, then the value of labor has doubled.

Then the owner has a choice, he can either double all the salaries of his employees and have the same income for himself, or else fire half his employees and double his profit.

This example shows that unemployment is not a result of new technology, but of choices made by people who have the most power in a society.
Where you saw "raw capitalism" in the US? Do you know how many thousands of pages federal regulations, state regulations, regional regulations and local regulations are? How many new ones are created every year?
Interesting. The language barrier seems to be higher than our fence.
3/11/2013 California Money Transmission Act Hearing Video
Sendhub took a chance on me when I was just half a year into programming and one hackathon API prize in. I've been set ever since.
I feel truly grateful for three people who took chances on me. I worked first in the film industry at Panavision with some of the top camera crews in the world because my boss (1) at the time believed in me. After that I decided software was a better future and a friend of mine (2) wanted me to work at the company he worked for...a digital agency. With no resume or cover level I got a job because my current boss (3) two years later believed in me. Now I'm here on HN, have a youtube channel teaching others, and just wrapped up an eight month enterprise website with a great team...and I'm going to buy a sports car this weekend! How big hearts in some people can make such a big difference in someone's life...forever grateful!
User E-mail addresses are not shown by default; you have to put it in the "About" section (along with whatever other info you want to make public, aside from some site stats for your user name).
It just doesn't work that way anymore, especially as we approach the robotics age. I'm pretty sure the jobs everyone's freaking out about are never coming back: 6% unemployment is a vestige of a former world.

My concern with OP's idea of a minimum income and the requisite tax that it would require is the very real possibility that a person would rather do nothing than sacrifice 91% of the pay for their hard work. I mean, logisitically, how do you even determine such a tax structure? And if there becomes a generation of people who can sufficiently live with doing no work at all, how do future generations ever bridge that gap, as it inexorably becomes even more gaping.
I thought "If you think a woman is going to join your company for free whiskey shots, you can stop reading here" was a bit stereotypical.

I'm sure there are women who would love free whiskey shots, and men who hate them.
My thinking about this is that people are both sellers of a product (their labor) and human beings. I think this is what got way too mixed up in the Marxist framing of socialism and needs to be unwound.

I don't think people should have rights qua producers. Acer doesn't have the right to have people buy their products, their purpose in our society to produce a good value proposition for computers. If nobody wants what's on offer, they can and should go out of business. Otherwise they're wasting resources that could have gone to their superior competitors. The same goes for a redundant worker.

But qua humans, I think people should have tons of rights! I think people should have equal opportunities (I'm thinking especially of children and how unfair life is to those with poor parents), and in addition, I honestly don't think someone should have to go hungry or homeless no matter what they do.

A basic income serves not to replace capitalism with socialism (in the Marxist sense) but to work in concert with capitalism to make sure nobody is ever dehumanized by a process that makes us all richer.
It's not really consensus, it's rule by whichever coalition can get 51% of miners.
Sage [1] (which you might say is the birthplace of Cython) makes a very serious use of Cython as well.

[1] http://sagemath.org
Which is unstable and does not auto update without writing a script. Google wants you to use Chrome and not Chromium.
I guess you're being sarcastic? I'm not really sure. What you're describing is the reason I'm not a "liberal", but I also think it's bullshit that so many of San Francisco's service workers have to live on the other side of the Bay when there's so much money in this city.
You won't find a bigger supporter of SpaceX, and no one wants Grasshopper to be doing operational flights tomorrow more than I do. But it will take 10 years, minimum.

Keep in mind no one has successfully done powered vertical landing from orbit. It's never been done. (Well, not from Earth orbit anyway. The LEM landed vertically from lunar orbit.) SpaceX is getting a taste of how hard this is by trying to recover their first stages using parachutes - their every attempt to do so has failed.

If they could focus the bulk of their engineering workforce on this problem they might be able to do it faster. But they have to massively scale up production to meet the orders they've taken, they have to keep their reliability up, they are constantly working on performance upgrades for Falcon 9's engines, and they have to get Falcon Heavy going to crack the DoD market. Oh, and there's this little thing called Dragon and NASA's Commercial Crew program. Something about launching those living sacks of meat and bones we call people tends to hold your focus pretty intensely.
Yes, you could say that ultimately the miners rule which blockchain grows, but have strong reasons to defer to the judgement core developers.

Even though the pool operators have large discretion, the computational power that makes up their pools can be moved elsewhere... a little like a transferable proxy. Most smaller miners probably trust the pools who they've grown confident in... but a large enough controversy or campaign could conceivably shift the mining-power away from pool operators who make unpopular decisions.
Thank you ever so much. I only had to make a few changes to make it work. Providing a computer verified proof is quite a definitive way of winning an argument.

LEM : (x:Type) -> Type
LEM x = Either x (x -> _|_)

DN : (x:Type) -> Type
DN x = ((x -> _|_) -> _|_) -> x

notnotLEMproof : {x:Type} -> ((LEM x) -> _|_) -> _|_
notnotLEMproof {x} f = f (Right (\a => f (Left a)))

DNimpliesLEM : ((x:Type) -> DN x) -> LEM y
DNimpliesLEM {y} dn = dn (LEM y) notnotLEMproof
Repeat Yourself Differently
So what you're saying is that there isn't a central authority like the Bank of England but there is a cartel like OPEC?
If I were running a company, I think I'd try the following approach to hiring: Every time I received a resume or job application, I would run it through some script that would find the individual's name, store it somewhere hidden, and then replace it with a unique id. Only after the applicants' names were blocked out like this would I read through the resumes or job applications.

I think not knowing a person's name would prevent some of our unconscious biases about the person's gender or race from entering into the early-stage hiring process, and promote a culture of meritocracy. Of course, this only works until you give somebody a phone screen or invite them in for an interview, but it's a step towards a more meritocratic hiring process.
It would be nice next time to direct to a static status page with info on what is going on, if possible, and keep that site up all the time, e.g.: status.news.ycombinator.com.
Fantastic comment. I care a lot about diversity in tech because I fully believe it will make tech better, but ultimately for me in my company I am always going to hire the best person for the specific job being considered - that's never a question and I'm not sure where the jump usually happens between "don't turn off minorities in your process" and "hire with a priority on minorities"
great stuff Schlomi. hit the nail on the head..
Pareto Principle or 80-20 law
If you can get a flat-screen TV for $300 today, you're sharing the wealth - never before you could get anything close to that, let alone for so little money. If you compare the things accessible even to somebody who is considered "poor" today - in terms of quality of food, shelter, gadgets, etc. - it has never been more. 62% of people considered "poor" have two or more TVs. 48% own a computer. Look here:
http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/01/news/economy/poor-income/ind...

The average household defined as "poor" in 2005 had air conditioning, cable TV and a DVD player, according to government statistics cited by Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. If there were children in the home, the family likely had a game system, such as a Microsoft Xbox or Sony PlayStation.

If you go back 50 years, would any poor person have access to anything like that? Would many middle-class ones? If this is not sharing the created wealth - albeit unequally, but undeniably - then what is it?
The fruit power source made me wonder: Has anyone made a device that is powered by a growing plant? Plant-derived power could be much more robust than traditional solar cells. A solar cell fails if it gets dirty or broken, but a plant will just grow new leaves and branches.
The page says:

> NOTE: This project is experimental in nature. Any representations regarding authentication or authority should be taken with a grain of salt. This project has no affiliation with either the rubygems project or rubygems.org

If it's experimental are there any risks ?
No offense but I think your second paragraph is much too idealistic. You're describing a sort of jury duty, but for doing government work.

"Now the details of how that labour gets applied to building infrastructure for the common good would need to be worked out, it would be a much fairer system than we have now, and much less subject to being gamed."

People already crack jokes about working in the government, doing a minimal amount of work. Imagine if people were actually mandated to work in government instead of paying taxes. Nothing would be achieved, because no one would seriously want to do the work. Or the people who had positions of power would abuse them to no end.

You describe a nice system, but how would it ever be implemented in practice? What kind of media campaign/propaganda would be required to convince the entire country they should work hard at serving each other? Would this shift be characterized by a revolution? Perhaps it would start small, in communes? Would the shift happen nationally or on a state by state basis (in the US)?
I can understand this POV but I don't think it's the case every time. I feel grateful all the time because I was the only person hired in the tech dept that had no experience. Everyone else is either principle or has about 5-10 years experience. I've checked our job boards and the requirements involve standards I was no where near at the time. Yes they want to train you, but they want to train you because they believe in you as a person and what you can do...yes for them...but also for yourself. My boss isn't a cold dude, he's young, has tat sleeves, and was helped along the way by others...just like I am...minus the tats.
Cloud to Butt
JSBin Not working
Why JSbin not working?
The Guile 100 Project
Im not sure how this could be easier than doing it manually. The interface is kind of confusing and unnatural.
Is this site supposed to be for B2B or general purpose? I'm a bit confused since the article doesn't specifically mention this as such, but the homepage invites me to enter my work email.
There is appfog, heroku, nodejitsu, and a few others. Afaik, nodejitsu is the only one with full websockets support at the moment.
Of course it is, there's a reason why they started giving out free invites.
There's never a sure-fire anything in this world, but here are some tips:

* http://stackoverflow.com/a/14599129/178651

* http://stackoverflow.com/a/1029613/1395668
So here's what I thought when I got there:

1. What does it do? Not immediately available from the landing page. I'd use something like "Mistrics is a powerful/simple/fast ... that ..."

2. The 3-word motto (pretty uninspired imo; I'd choose a phrase instead) really doesn't need to take up that valuable space.

3. Choose a main font; if you do feel you have to add another, justify your reasoning to do so (for instance if it were a code editor, you could use a monospace font for code samples, etc.)

4. What are you trying to make me do when I first get on your website? Please just let me find one central thing to look at, your value proposition, and then guide my eyes to a call-to-action. Right now, I'm looking at the log in forms, then the motto, then a very sparse description. Try having a simple textual-pictorial representation of a use-case, such as a person having to file through stacks of paper versus a person using mistrics, maybe some screenshots, and then a nice big colorful sign-up button (with just one font and text color!) right next to it.

5. Find a way to fit the login forms from the login page into the nav-bar and make that the main login-point. Of course, if the login fails, redirect to the login view where you can provide more information.

6. Some things are center-aligned, some are left-aligned. I'd choose to stick with left-aligned, since that's how English-readers read.

tl;dr: make sure I know what it is, and guide me in doing what it is you want me to do.
"Likes" expose politics, religion, drug use, divorce & sexual orientation
Not sure what this has to do with San Francisco service workers. I personally wouldn't want to live in SF, even though I visit from time to time - I think the city government should be committed to the mental hospital, but SF people are apparently fine with it, so who I am to tell them.
I'm pretty sure that wasting time with your partner/children/family/friends IS the whole point of life :)
This is essentially what these PaaS services do. Appfog for example gives you 2GB of ram to deploy your app with for free. You can deploy an app to 8 separate instances with 256MB of ram, or you can adjust it differently. With heroku you get 1 "dyno" for free, and for each additional dyno it's another charge, etc. etc. They do all the work of load balancing and making it "just work"
Sometimes I wonder how many extra tons of coal have been burned simply because of the existence of bitcoin.
This is well understood; Peter Wuille detailed this in his first e-mail about the issue. Thanks though!
Howdy, Neighbor New Twin Stars Are Third Closest to the Sun
I just want to register my interest for what nvr219 said above. Upon completion of the site if that was an option I would have bought it by now. If you introduce that feature for somewhere between $5-10$ and I'll buy the source code.
> I'm baffled.

I explained myself.
> New and useful ideas - not detected.

If you ignore the author's prescription, their analysis reads quite well.
Automation does not reduce available labor - it reduces only the number of specific workplaces available, but since it frees the resources by doing it and produces more value, this value can - and will - be turned into buying work of somebody else. Maybe instead of buying services of a clerk, the owner of the company would buy services of a Ford dealer and Ford workers by buying a new car. So what? I have no reasons to prefer clerk's job for Ford dealer's job - the only difference is that people apparently need the latter but not the former. Transition can be painful for the individual, but beneficial for the economy as a whole.
This is part of the design of our templates - the content of each section can certainly be taller than the height of the screen, but we still keep the arrow key controls so viewers can navigate quickly through the page.
I bought my rMBP this week specifically to take note of how my site looks on high res displays. I'm shopping for photographers and surprisingly few have "retina support".
Why would you shop local? That just biases in favour of people who already live in high wage San Francisco vs, say, poor labourers in China or Vietnam.

Similar to the roommate. That's just helping one random guy.

That's all fine. But there are better uses for your money to help humanity. Give to Doctors without Borders, or so.
I think arrow should be replaced with raw css, or converted to base64, since it's very small image, it won't be big as base64.
It seems then that your scale is not what people of the paleo era could get (in an abstract sense, because until 500 years ago, no one on the planet could have had a slice of tomato with a leaf of basil on top), but rather that you want to minimize the number of processing steps involved in the food you eat.

That latter goal is much easier for me to understand, and even support, though I wonder if corn, being the result of 5,000 years of directed evolution, is more processed than beer.

Take for example alcohol. There's good genetic evidence that humans have evolved to better handle alcohol. Eg, "The studies on human ADH (alcohol dehydrogenase) gene have suggested Darwinian positive selection on the genetic variation of ADH1B His47 [52–54]. Alcohol consumption is a recent agriculture-related life style, and the adaptive selection has begun about 10 Kya" http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijeb/2011/484769/

During the Babylonian era, "a daily ration of beer was provided for all citizens, the amount depending on one's social status" and "it was sometimes used to pay workers as part of their daily wages." During the Middle Ages it was safer to drink than water.

And that's the point of the linked-to criticism - 20,000 years is long enough that our genetics are different than humans of the same era. We've evolved to better handle starch, to better handle drinking milk as an adult, and to drink alcohol.

To choose a paleo diet on the belief that it better fits our genetics sounds like it denies the evidence that our genetics have changed since then.
Author's prescription - which is basic "let's have the government rob the rich and feed the poor" is neither new nor interesting nor working. It was tried many times in many forms. It fails. As a software engineer, one should know better than propose using something that spectacularly crashed so many times before.
Software Testers experience with 99tests Crowd Testing
> Your ideal solution has been tried.

Who has tried basic income and failed?
The fork is now resolved, sites like mtgox should begin processing deposits again after a couple more blocks.
The developers have influence in that they are relied upon to a massive extent to keep bitcoin running.

As far as I can tell this sort of centralisation of influence is a common emergent property in most anarchic human systems.

Luckily if something particularly egregious occurs in this case, the community can easily fork the codebase and start a rival blockchain.
> Productivity increased steadily throughout the 20th century and while in the short term that may have eliminated certain (mostly unskilled) functions, it didn't lead to widespread unemployment

It certainly has lead to widespread unemployment especially among younger people.

Look at eg. ILO's outlook summary: http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_1...
Would on-orbit refueling work with cryo? I imagine the fuel/oxidizer would boil away too fast for that to work well, unless you sent everything up at once perhaps.
NT File System Tunneling (...is stupid ... and wrong)
Not quite. There's one sure protection from DDOS actually: scale. For example, Facebook or Google are practically immune from DDOS, since you cannot really overwhelm an infrastructure of that size, even with 100,000s of bots. If you have 10,000s of servers, IP anycast to multiple datacenters, multiple 10Gbps uplinks, you are immune from most DDOSs- they are simply handled like normal traffic fluctuations.
I don't see why he's basing his calculations on electric cars that only live for 90,000 miles. Electric cars might not make it to 200k - the new models are new enough that we don't know how long they'll be driven - but 90k seems crazy low.

I don't like how he derides the 8.7 tons of CO2 emissions prevented. The average household directly produces 12.4 tons per year - 94% from our cars.[1] If we converted all ~200 million cars in the U.S. to electric, that's 1.7 billion tons of CO2 over the vehicles' lives. To put that in comparison, that's 30% of our TOTAL CO2 use in the US annually.[3] I know these savings aren't going to be yearly, but the point is that 8.7 tons is nothing to scoff at.

The author also totally glosses over our reliance on fossil fuels, rising oil prices, improvements in manufacturing for electric cars, and the lower cost for fuel to consumers.

[1] http://www.thehcf.org/emaila5.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unite...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dio...
It's not so much that you're too deadpan, it's just that it's Poe's Law for anything Marx related around here.
A 7660?!?

For gaming?!?!?

For $1000?!?!?!?!?

Is this a bad joke or what?

You can have a system with two 7950 GPUs for that price.

It seems to me these guys are obvious scammers.
It is discriminatory, but that's a pejorative term in the US. It's generally called affirmative action and is somewhat controversial, especially on HN.

Personally, it just makes sense to me how valuable diversity is to a healthy company. If everyone comes from basically the same demographic (say, [upper-]middle class white male?), then you're most likely restricting your market, but also internal culture.

People often forget that there are other benefits people bring to a company aside from skills directly related to product development, so it makes sense to take that into consideration. It just so happens that it's currently accepted in the US to discriminate benefiting minorities or under-represented groups, so you might as well take advantage of that to build a more representative and diverse work place.
Do you have kids? What's your lifestyle? How much is your house worth? What kind of car do you drive?
I would read the core documentation (maybe takes 4 hours), then find a project you to do in node and do a lot of googling on ways to get certain aspects done. It is an unstructured way to learn and can be slightly inefficient since you will go down a few rabbit holes, but I think you will learn a lot more and have a lot more fun.

When you are in the docs make sure you focus on stream, callbacks, and event emitters. Once you have those down start gluing NPM modules together.
To extend the metaphor; Google and Facebook have 1000000 bicycles, and you can't take them all down with a single truck.
Sure, but supporting femininity with significant paid maternity leave would be welcome support.
We used Clerky for several agreements while they were in beta. Not only does it make the legal agreements painless, the founders are really good lawyers AND are really helpful.
Sure, we can’t destroy all the non-Job Destroyer jobs… yet. Burger King and Starbucks still need human subjects employees to make Whoppers and skinny lattes, but how long before these jobs are deskilled to the point they can be done by machines — i.e., by software?

Interestingly, there is a robotics company in SF (Momentum Machines) that is trying to automate fast food (burger) assembly.

http://www.businessinsider.com/burger-robot-could-revolution...