skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reality is that you can never know where the new jobs come from. But any growing (either in the sense of population or productive output) society will need more work done.

Consider the factory robots from the article: they automate a bunch of people out of a job and just a few people now do what 100 did before. But now the machine shops that make the parts to build that automation have more work to do, they need to buy more CNC machine tools to keep up and (a few) more people to run them. So the CNC tool supplier sells more machinery and now needs more sales reps, field installers & repair personnel. The company importing the CNC machines from Japan hires more people to handle increased demand, etc.

You have to look at the entire value chain of a process to see the ripple effects and even then it's only visible in hindsight.
For 1, I don't know of any good workarounds. I think it might be wise to have an intermediate page that says: "You are about to see a dialog box that looks like this, click on 'Trust' when you see it". That way fewer people will be scared off. Having a "tutorial" page is pretty common in other websites that have some kind of trust/installation process.
Project Euler is fun if you can not think of something new to create. Here is the trick though you should look at solving the problem using the idioms of the language. Instead of for loops in python try using list comprehensions.

http://www.projecteuler.net
Come on, Butlerian Jihad? Please tell me that was a humorous quip and not a real opinion ;)
Long live Hypercard. My first exposure (Macintosh SE)

Check out this unique yet subversive 1994 press release from Rand and Robyn Miller:

http://www.wordyard.com/dmz/mail.html
Ah, I didn't know they spoke Portuguese in Brazil.
Hey Zed, it's mystuff.pop(4).
He is speculating, and some of his speculation is interesting. At this point, I think you are rationalizing your intuitional dislike of the article. It seems more likely that some of his speculation just rubs you the wrong way.

We're a long way from being able to tell why animals developed the traits they did through evolution. We're a really long way from being able to empirically prove it. That doesn't mean speculation isn't fun in the meantime.
I concur; which is why I mentioned a PEP to solidify some of the idiosyncrasies "out" - akin to PEP8, propose an API style guide.
Manuals: The Smart Way of Promotion
I've been exploring Python over the past few weeks after a few years of intense Ruby immersion.

There are definitely some very nice things about Python. I highly recommend that all rubyists do a nontrivial project in it asap.
I wrote one http://teh.appspot.com/ many months back. The source is here: http://github.com/btbytes/teh/tree/master
Aha, I hadn't realized PEPs were that far reaching in their scope. Apologies, fine sir.

(I liked your article.)
If Ghandi was killed @ the same age as MLK or Malcom X no one would know, except as a lawyer -- Not be belittle Ghandi, but understand that sometimes things take a long time.

These people are fighting perhaps a greater struggle since the injustice is not as blatantly obvious;and by greater I don't mean that the injustice is worse, of course segregation etc is worse. The fact that the injustices are less obvious, less in your face, less outright atrocious, makes it harder to fight back.
Is that intuitively the orthogonal method to append()? Not in my view. If I appended something, I'd want to remove it or delete it, not pop it. If I push'ed, then popping would be obvious.
Announcing Alchitect
In the spirit of Ship It! (http://blog.socialmedian.com/2009/05/ship_it_now_is_the_best_time_e.html) today I am announcing a project called Alchitect which helps you build web applications with unprecedented ease. Check it out! http://alchitect.com
I'm going. I'll be happy to meet up with any other HN denizens for beer/coffee/chat/whatever.
Already considering ways to employ this with my children. Will discuss with my wife when I get a chance.
Arguments won via "Argument by The Stick" will work only as long as our institutions of learning continue turning out more sheeple than rational humans (once upon a time, this was not true in the U.S.; I know because an elderly friend of mine was required to take a "Critical Thinking" class in high school).

As for the "advertising immunization shots" the author of the article talks about, the authors experience is beautiful confirmation of what C.S. Lewis writes in the first few chapters of "The Abolition of Man".
I woz there and the article is right. Desqview was GREAT, but wasn't much of a shell, it was a shell for the shells. OS/2 was on everyone's lips, and many people thought it was the next big thing. Windows 3.1 was just okay. Windows 3.11 turned the page with the workgroups stuff and that captured a lot of imagination, even if others were going the same way, it was just easier to grasp.

And people were ready to stop doing "Reveal Codes" in WordPerfect 5.1, so Word started driving a lot of Windows adoption.

And like the article alludes to, OS/2 ran like a slug, even after I upgraded to an astounding 4MB of RAM. In my case I was a bit of a diehard though and usually ran Windows 3.11 inside Desqview, with a double tap on the Alt key I could jump between running copies of Windows, as well as DOS and whatever else I can't remember, maybe OS/2 Warp as well.

Microsoft was most certainly NOT a monopoly. They beat OS/2 fair and square.
If the product's built and you have a small happy/excited community, how do you market then?
>Complaints around infelicities in the Python stdlib are fair enough - I don't think anyone would defend them, but what can you do? You can't change published APIs.

You're absolutely right, but that doesn't mean Zed isn't on to something. How many different ways are there to open a subshell in python? There's popen, popen2, popen3, popen4 (I think), plus more (subprocess?). Yes, the past can't be changed, but it's still a good idea to stop and ask why there are so many mistakes like this.

Why is there a time module, and a date module, and a datetime module, and yet all three are broken?

The main question is What factors allowed the stdlib to get so quirky, and what can be done to fix that? Pointing out the stdlib is quirky is the first step in fixing the problem.
Similar but not the same. With dynamic scope, the variable lookup is performed up the chain of environments that the function was called in. The only way that you can influence this is by calling the function within a certain scope, you can't explicitly set the scope so it isn't as flexible as Io's scope and it isn't as fast as the lexical scope of most Lisps.
And make sure to demphasize the importance of the "idea." Sure it's important, but not nearly as much as newbie entrepreneurs think.
At this point, I think you are rationalizing your intuitional dislike of the article.

Maybe you're not understanding me, and maybe this is partially because you're new to the community...

But when I visit HN, I don't want to be presented with the 99.99% of speculative trash that fills the internet. I can go to Digg or Reddit for this sort of junk science that gets us intellectually nowhere. I (and everyone else) want to see that quality .01% that presents legitimate scientific inquiry, regardless of whether we agree with it or not.
I just remembered, I was also running GEM with Ventura Publisher, and I'd use Desqview to flip back and forth between GEM and Windows. Was major pain relief because I had to use Ventura like that for awhile.
"But some say the tactics have taken on a menacing hue, such as when Free Staters have gathered on the streets of downtown Keene with holstered guns on their waists, visible on their waists."

This is hardly menacing. It's legal in NH to carry a firearm. You don't even need a license to carry unconcealed weapons, and a concealed carry permit is very easy to obtain. This is only news to a Massachusetts news outlet like Boston.com.
Microsoft puts Bing on a truck
This might sound crazy. I used to hear voices as well, and I thought I was losing my mind.

In my experience, the voices were not random chatter. They tell you where your mind is at. Listen to them and get to know yourself. Maybe try talking to them. You may not be "broken", your mind may just work in a slightly different way. Respect it.

In my case the voices were paranoid. As I worked on my self-esteem, they slowly transformed into positive voices, and then disappeared.

See a doctor if you wish, but you might end up on drugs and not learning about yourself.

Read Jungian writers for more on this perspective (Robert A. Johnson "Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth" might be very relevant, the voices could be seen as different aspects of you).

Of course I dont know your situation so please take this with salt.
Fantastic essay by Manuel Delanda on the importance of materiality:

http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/matterdl.htm
Family Guy: So you have something to look at, when you are talking to them
Facebook Revs Up For Payment Platform With Updated Terms
For the record I am against psychiatric drugs, since they appeared to play a big role in my mothers suicide.
Outrageous Canadian research study on Internet piracy is itself pirated.
The trick to building something real for me is that it has to address a real problem someone has, that is addressable in some way in a relatively short period of time. If its a theoretical problem, or enormous, I will obsess over silly details and get lost on tangents that are most interesting to me but not integral to a solution... whereas if I have a clear vision of my goal, things just kind of flow into line and get done.
Oh, I just don't think that we can say that the bad software has been a good thing. Yes, they've made some creative minds produce some really good software, but I still think it would have been better if the first software was awesome right from the start.

After all, the creative minds would still search for unsolved problems…
I think you are correct about the deskview stuff, and yes os/2 was a pretty big deal. But prior to that my vague recollection was that ms-dos was the thing.

I worked at a company that produced an editor for os/2 for the publishing industry, and it was pretty slow as you say.

However, I know at least one exception to the reveal codes urgency. My Mother, who is 79, would still be using reveal codes if there was a way to do it on her current xp laptop. She never cared for the windows version at all.
wouldn't women who were very fertile be able to become pregnant while lactating? Such women would appear to have permanent breasts because they were always pregnant or lactating, thus signalling their fertility continuously and in that way having what appeared to be permanent breasts and permanent fertility? That would be very tiring for those women, but it would give them the advantage of being demonstrably able to become pregnant.Perhaps the bumps evolved as a leveler of the playing field, as it were...
Facebook's New Home
Existing factories that aren't yet automated and employ all 100 workers already depend on upstream providers. They already need parts and processes, they already need the tools the human workers use, they're already courted by sales people. Not to mention, they depend on uniform services, on-site nurses, healthcare providers, maybe cafeteria workers. Because their spaces have to accomodate humans, their factories have to have certain sized doors, passages, have to meet a bunch of safety standards. They have to lease land for parking lots, hire security guards to make sure cars aren't getting broken into, etc.

I think its kind of naive to just point to a shifting supply chain as if that addresses the problem.
Yahoo! Answers is really big down here, maybe isn't that too late to catch up users that probably never heard about twitter.
"I think the real question is, how are we going to restructure to deal with high levels of unemployment, so that we stay stable and productive? ..."

The real issue - social issue at least, is how will the people support themselves. As more an more jobs are automated away, it becomes unfeasible for everyone to rely on a paycheck to feed themselves. I am not seeing a Welfare State heavily taxing profits to provide for an increasingly unemployed population. There will be plenty of suffering from the ones whose services are not needed anymore.

For this reason, it is increasingly important for common people to own their means of production. The only job you cannot be laid off is the self employed one. This is more and more an strategic issue for the household economy to have at least one bread winner working on their own venture.

Seems like this century will be very entrepreneurial, or won't be at all,
Why Affiliate Marketing Is Such A Lucrative Business Model For Beginners
When a business is operated between merchants and sales people and marketed by an online process, it is termed as affiliate marketing. It is a kind of marketing where the person does not have to manufacture the product.
Picking a fight would have been writing off $10,000 in publicity expenses and then filing suit against Google for infringing on your IP. Alternatively (and also not recommended!) would have been to pick a fight with Jeff Bezos by claiming that 'Amazon is making people lonely and exploiting their isolation for profit'. You would get nowhere, of course, but it'd get you lots of free publicity.
Ask HN: Single-page Apps... What's your experience with GWT?
I am recently beginning my search for a good library to make a single-page application. There were several options including: sproutcore, cappucino, extjs, and GWT. Of all the ones I've reviewed, GWT seems to have stood out. Cappucino is great, except the one component that I'm looking for (a rock solid TableView) is not available.

Sorry for the long wind up, but my questions are: - What is your experience with GWT?
- Have you run into any "leaky abstractions" while using it?
- How easy is it to customize/skin the UI?
- Any ideas how this project was able to skin the UI: http://vaadin.com/

Thanks for your input in advance.
You say you want 6 topics...

1. The Problem Statement

(who needs a solution, why do they need a solution, what do they do now: breakdown the value by time-cost and money-cost, what is the TAM, what subset of that TAM do you focus on first (does a subset of that TAM pay more or at all?))

2. The Solution

(what options for solutions do you have, what is the cost of each of those, what is the value of each of those to an end-user (is that value able to be reflected in revenue), how do you implement these, which do you choose)

3. The team

(what roles are needed, what are good qualities for these roles, what should YOU focus on, how do you focus, what is the motivation, other (morale etc...))

4. Business Strategy

(how do you market your product, how do you make customers screaming happy, do you develop a partner network, how to utilize big players, when to change gears, how to change gears)

5. Money

(what do you need and for how long, how do you obtain it, what are appropriate milestones for your industry...(there's a lot on this topic))

6. Getting started

(how to vet ideas, when to incorporate, when to patent if applicable, resources (marketing tools (software and services), financial tools, seeking advice), how to hire, what to outsource, how to outsource)
Video: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings On The Economics Of Movie Streaming
This is like the old joke about how convenient it is that all the nice cities in Europe are right by rivers -- being written up by TC or Mashable gives a site instant credibility, but as far as I know they won't turn someone down because they'd be the first to break a story about a cool new site.
Do we just let their salaries languish and let them be impoverished on the streets?

At some point, we will not need unskilled labor. This is the point at which machines can produce everything we need at little cost, and we have more goods and services per capita than we do today.

In this post-scarcity future, socialism/welfare/etc is cheap. You want 2% of my income to prevent 100 people from starving? Eh, go ahead, I don't really care.
A bunch of people did that last year on Twitter if I'm not mistaken. You could just start following a bunch of wwdc attendees.

(edit: live-tweeting the keynote, not the nda'd sessions, that is...)

That being said, I am going to be attending WWDC, and I'm sooo excited! so many events going on during the week though...
You're joking, right? Defend your work? One of your sources of revenue? I've never heard of your work, much less said anything about it. Ever.

As I recall, you blamed Google shafting me on my "syntactically sketchy" JavaScript code samples. In a PDF. You said that must have conflicted with the Checkout engine.

That was the weirdest comment I think I've ever gotten on HN.
JQuery Homebrew Flip and Scale Effect
Well, it exists, which is what he was complaining about. One step at a time. :)
This is something to be proud of, and github is great work.

It's not really accurate, though because this lists every user's fork of a gem as a distinct gem. Here's a script I put together to get a different count, which I believe is more of a "real" count.

http://gist.github.com/120207

It's 3140 as I write this, not 4766.
A related thing that's been bugging me: Why do guys have balls? Specifically, why is such a sensitive organ placed in such an easy-to-hit place? I know that balls are hanged outside the body because they need to be at a lower temperature, but there must be another reason for it.
"A normal person will eat everything in front of them, but a person with neglect will happily eat only the things on the left side of their body (emphasis added)."

It appears that this condition is more serious than we originally thought.
Yeah, conquistadores such as Fernando Cortez didn't have any sort of overwhelming combat advantage against the Aztecs...
Does that mean we can't build something that would be useful for you?

You can always do something profound and useful. Just make sure you don't get carried away with your own excitement. Browseology and Wave share real-time features, but that doesn't really mean they're the same "idea".

Remember that the wave idea and online shopping are completely separate things. I think your mistake was in not realizing this. Real-time editing, which is the similarity you mentioned, has already been implemented in apps like Google Docs and Etherpad.

And you're right, it's not a good idea to try to get attention by taking the spotlight from someone else (although it could be said that Google's partial Wave release was a response to Microsoft's Bing announcement).

One thing you could do right now is write an analysis of the technical aspects of what you did, comparing yourself to Wave and other real-time apps. Make sure you talk about both the similarities and the differences, especially what makes your app different.
The article is in the context of a website I built for workatplay.com. But the ideas apply to any site.

Cheers!
Just to be pedantic, orthogonal means perpendicular (i.e., 'at a right angle to'). It seems like you meant opposite/complementary/inverse, etc.

Sorry - people misappropriating math jargon into the mainstream is a little pet peeve of mine. I agree with your main point though.
hey yahoo, if you want a social network of chatter, just bring back the one you killed - yahoo news message boards.
Actually you are wrong about the price tag issue:

--the whole point of these screens, is that they can be made using existing LCD screen manufacturing technology, with some number of tweaks. There have been billions upon billions already spent on LCD screen manufacturing facilities.

The e-ink process on the other hand, does not have that kind of scale and ability to spread costs over a very high number of units.
What nice things would those be? I'm struggling for an obvious example of something I miss from my Python days (which ended in '06).
I agree, but I would prefer they push ahead with the puppet show and gardening angle.
Sweet! It is easier than I expected.
Even today the mafia is still deeply involved in garbage collection in Italy. How long before we get mafiabots?

P.S.

I couldn't resists the Futurama punchline, but please do not vote me up for it.
But now you are putting your own ethics on the concept of manipulation.

If we are taught manipulation is wrong, we never learn how to use it and we are less able to defend against it, and it puts us at a disadvantage when we have to deal with a less scrupulous person who doesn't have a problem using it.

Instead if we are taught that manipulation is a tool, and like any tool can be used for good or evil depending on the tool user, maybe we would get less upset at the beer commercial with the twins in wet t-shirts, but also we would be less affected by it.
Ahhh, I didn't realize all the talks were covered under NDA. Thanks for crushing my dreams.

(Seriously though, thanks for letting me know why I haven't noticed much in the way of substantial coverage.)
Atwood thought cryptography was easy and screwed it up. Then he thought teaching people about cryptography was easy and screwed it up.

I, for one, am terrified by what the third derivative of his ignorance might be.
Wow, you need to relax. This is hacker news, not research news. Why don't you set up a parallel site? The code is open source. Someone already did that for business articles. You're trying to take your personal preferences -- which, as you can see, other people don't seem to agree with -- and decide that HN should follow them.

Besides, initially you said this was about HN, and now it's about saving the average person on the street from their own stupidity? Because surely, people on HN are aware that this is not a theory. If that's your problem, I think this would be the least of your worries -- half the people out there still think "because the Bible said so" is a logical basis for validity.
> For our site http://browseology.com, it's unclear if the idea is just not clear and understandable enough for PR to write about...

Before you solicit more PR for Browseology I would tighten the story focusing on the homepage. You have a pleasant, simple aesthetic but IMHO the homepage contains too many words and options. The result is an unnecessarily confusing first impression. My notes: http://idea.s3.amazonaws.com/browseology.png

You might want to gear Browseology more toward women. Women love shopping and they're more social about it than men. I can imagine your app serving their sensibilities better with a little wordsmithing. This might make PR easier for you because it would focus your messaging on benefits rather than features.
That is so sick. (in an awesome way)

It's like evolution in action. The defensive crypto guy's carapace has been pierced by the hacker's slow methodical leverage.
The only "harm" she shows pornography as causing can be summarized as follows: sometimes people get fired for watching porn at work, and sometimes people get divorced over it.

Neither of those are endemic to porn itself. Divorce can be blamed just as much on prudishness on the part of the non-porn-watching spouse as addiction on the part of the porn-watching spouse.
You're right, I should have been more clear. "High levels of unemployment" isn't right; I should have said something like "increasingly rapid dissolution of the current employment model". I certainly didn't mean to imply I thought the answer was a "Welfare State", though I'm probably not as opposed to the idea of socialism as you seem to be.

Dramatically increased entrepreneurialism certainly counts as restructuring.
How do they deal with theft?

Aside from that and a bunch of other questions, I'm still really excited to see stuff like this. I can't wait till we have robots rolling all over the place.