skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Nonetheless, the workers' movement was once dedicated to the eventual abolition of all menial, tedious, grinding work. We have the machines to make that a reality today – but none of the will.

No, we do not have such machines. While we have made big strides in getting machines to do menial labor, the fact is that

1. There are huge amounts of menial labor that we simply cannot make sophisticated-enough machines to do. Humans are still necessary for many menial jobs. (If they weren't, they would have been replaced long ago with cheaper machines.) While we can land robots on mars, we still do not have the technology to, for example, clean our entire house using robotic labor. Achieving that would require solving some very hard problems in robotics, but humans can just do those types of work with hardly any training.

2. The amount of labor required keeps increasing, as the standard of living goes up. People expect more and more. We do everything we can with machine labor, but then we can get humans to do work machines cannot that further improves our quality of living, so we do that. For that reason it seems unlikely that human labor will vanish until robots can literally do everything humans can, which we are nowhere close to.
Who knows what the future holds? FTL travel? Space colonization? Cold fusion?

Yes, we could stop where we are, decide things are good enough, and operate the world at subsistence levels. But who's to say we aren't twenty years from doubling the efficiency of agriculture?

A hundred years ago we could have said, trains are pretty awesome, let's stop here. But then we never would have had flight.

Five hundred years ago we could have said, horse and buggy is so much better than walking, how can I get any better than this, let's stop here. But then we wouldn't have had trains.

Technological advancement has a long track record of being very good for quality of life for everyone, and it certainly hasn't stopped, so why should we stop?
Do you (or anyone else) have a link to this alleged Torvalds rant about PRs?

I have mixed feelings about the idea that all contributions should be squashed. I see the attempt at fastidiousness, but I also think that git makes it very easy and reasonable to keep multi-change history while linking it to only one commit in the eventual target repository.

I do wish it was easier to rebase a branch such that backmerges were pulled out where possible, cleaning up the graph at least, but I tend to look at my soup branch (master, usually) with git log --first-parent most of the time anyways and that's not much different from if they'd been squashed.
It is leading to less work. Why do you think we still haven't recovered full employment from the 2008 financial crisis?

Fewer people are working more hours. Fewer and fewer and fewer people will continue to work more and more hours. As the machines pick up the slack full employment will begin to seem almost laughable.

The problem is, that in order for the wealth to accrue to everyone - to allow everyone to survive with fewer total available jobs - we need to be redistributing the wealth that the machines create. Or else we're going to have a future with third world inequality in first world nations.
It's because of where most people assign value - consumer goods ownership. People are always going into debt for unneeded goods like that giant TV or upgraded car. These things make them feel good because society says you're a success if you have them. Very few people can look past this and get that $3k car by choice when they can afford much more. And until society puts greater social value on things like time with family this won't change and people will seek the dollar for as many hours as they reasonably can. And surely not fight for the opposite.

What I find sad is that almost every politician would say they are 'family orientated' but I never see any fighting to make sure people can spend more time with their family - the most important thing IMO. In my life I have only seen one country reduce official working hours. This was France about 10-ish years ago. This to me is the sign of an advancing society far above the TV screen size I own.
Speaking about computer science - As technology progresses so fast, it takes a lot of time to master them. By the time you master something, another technology comes along obsoleting the old one. So, this is really a long long job race - you have to keep moving learning new stuff. Otherwise, you will be branded into a specific technology (like 'ios developer', 'php coder') and there's no way getting out of it.
The suggestion to file a bug report doesn't sound dismissive. It sounds naive. It assumes that I wouldn't go to the bugzilla and just see, already there, these:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=617875

(2010)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=284511

(2005)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=899861

(2013)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211145

(2003)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=96873

(2001)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=523973

(2009)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=629819

(2011)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=619957

(2010)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=873881

(2013)

Need I go on? I laughed because the problem with gifs is so obvious and painful I couldn't imagine there wouldn't be a pile of really old bugs there already. Gifs on page don't really work right. They're not consistent, predictable, and none of the many inconsistent ways they do behave in is what anyone expects. But this is all well known by anyone but the browser developers, it seems. Filing a duplicate is a waste of everyone's time.

"I'm not joking about changing speed; how often do you want to play a video in slow motion? It's not really the browser's job to do that."

I mean changing speed for design effects. We're not talking about video here. Remember? We're talking about gifs/pngs. Totally different thing. Totally different use cases. Admittedly it's not often I'd need to do that. Really adding play/rewind/pause/seek, in that order, is more important.

"Small details, such as lines 3-4 pixels wide, disappear entirely in spots when I zoom out. They're using algorithms that only sample a couple of points, which breaks down terribly on sizes like 33%."

Fascinating. Maybe I should do some tests. Do you have example images where you'd expect problems to happen?
> We are working less and, more importantly, we are working differently (at least in the industrialised/western world). I doubt that there are still many children around in Europe working 60+ a week in coal mines, nor are people who put in exhausting physical work usually working such long hours – both of which was perfectly common less than two centuries ago.

Yes, two centuries ago, but only very briefly. In human history, overall we work today far more than most humans that ever lived used to work. Farmers and hunter-gatherers for example had and have far more leisure time than "modern" people do (see for example "The World Until Yesterday").
No, but large, divers populations give opportunities for work that didn't previously exist and create an extra overhead in many sectors that requires more staff (not 1 for 1 relationship but it will impact)
I do not think anyone will disagree with you, but what do we do about it? If you look through PG's comment history, you will see that it is indeed on his radar [1, 2], and as recently as a last couple months.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5935190

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5926081
Bill Clinton and the Sport of Hating Poorness
Apparently iphlpapi.dll is a Windows dll that can do things like getting the IP address, MAC address, etc.

"The Internet Protocol Helper (IP Helper) API enables the retrieval and modification of network configuration settings for the local computer."
Some of this is because the HN demographic is young enough that many readers have never seen anything like this before, and thus think it's the Worst Thing Ever. I base this on the numerous counterfactual statements showing a lack of historical awareness in discussions on contentious topics.

Of course, I think this is partly the result of not teaching civics in schools.
I doubt Xerox would be arrogant enough to try shifting responsibility to the victim like that. Do you reverse engineer every product you use just to confirm that the designer didn't cut corners to make it work differently from every other example of a familiar class of product?

It's particularly absurd in this case since it's clearly not easy to learn that lossy compression is being applied or how one would disable it if they wanted their Xerox to work like every other copier/fax they've used.
- Income inequality is higher than before. The rich are getting richer much faster than others.

- I don't know if people are working less on average, but I suppose so. I think I could live quite comfortable life if I worked just two or three days a week as a freelance developer.
We have to support a ravenous State that gives little in return but barriers to industry and inflation (in education and healthcare most visibly). The point is that everything should be cheaper than it is. Yet we're told deflation is such a great evil. We work but we're not productive. All these visions of the leisurely future in the article were during in the boom of capitalism, when the State really was small and unobtrusive, and the standard of living absolutely surged. It's a pity that the US has not embraced these core values in time of recession but have gone the opposite way in directing the economy. Creating jobs is not the goal. You could hire one guy to dig a hole and one to fill it and you wouldn't be any better for it. All slaves had jobs. The goal is to create efficiency, productivity, and encourage entrepreneurship and profit, for they are incentives to best serve customers. You could name too many ways that government make everyday product more expensive to 'protect' and cater to smaller segments of society.
.NET Pills Newsletter - Edition Number 4
this. definitely the reason wikipedia isn't all full of crap spamm.
The thing about healthcare is that the value of healthcare has risen drastically. It would be very easy to earn enough money to pay for 1950 or 1970 style healthcare.

But we want 2013 healthcare, which is far more labor intensive. I have a herniated disk. In 1950, a doctor would spend an hour telling me I'd have to live with back pain for the rest of my life. In 2012 many doctor hours were spent on my MRIs and laparoscopic surgery. Net result is that my deadlift is now about 285 - nothing impressive, but not possible in 1951.

So the short answer is that including healthcare, we work more because we want more. Many of the things we want more of require more labor in 2013 than in 1950.
Minor correction: The article says that the JBIG2 patch size might be the size of the scanned text. JBIG2 actually has the capability to detect regions of text and compress them using a specialized technique that operates on individual symbols.

I suspect Xerox is using this option and their implementation is getting confused (perhaps by the low resolution). Unless I'm greatly mistaken, the patch size for normal compression shouldn't figure here.
Maybe Karl had some valid criticisms, just sayin'...
Part time and "work when needed" contracts for the 20 - 30 year old bracket is growing in the UK and has been cited as one of the ways the unemployment figure has fallen. It is concerning some workers groups according to some of the papers and the BBC.

I think if you want part time work in the UK it is easy enough to come by (engineers at many companies I know can go part time until management level if they wish) but there is a growing trend of only part time positions becoming available in some sectors and you either have to like it or lump it sadly.
You forgot to add the [citation needed] at the end of that sentence.
I completely agree with you. However, let's not forget the inevitability of game theory: people will always take advantage of the system for their good. France made their rules and it really did not solve the problems they were trying to solve e.g. unemployment. And a jobless family may end up worse off (family-wise) than a family whose parents work 5-10 more hours a week.
I've been reading about Docker, Flynn and CoreOS on HN for the last several days. Would anyone care to venture how these technologies might work together? That is, could Flynn load CoreOS VMs/AMIs on a cloud service which hosts Docker containers? Does CoreOS etcd allow these VMs/containers to self-configure?
I think someone was working on an extension that filtered out stories with certain keywords.
A much-maligned engine of innovation
Landing page for innovative printing
> The headline implies that the "compromise" is an inherent failure in the protocol

Personally, I didn't read it that way at all. My first assumption was a hack, because it's more likely that a website was hacked than that the Tor protocol was so severely compromised.

> or else how could "half" of all sites be infected?

To me it sounded like a possible major law enforcement operation against 'rogue' sites. If someone was able to compromise Tor so completely, the idea that they would turn around and just hack half of the hidden sites doesn't make sense. Such an exploit would be worth major cash on the exploit market (mostly due to governments bidding against each other to get it).
I don't think increasing Dropbox's space by 10x is going to make a dent.

When Gmail launched in 2004, Hotmail and Yahoo offered 2MB. Gmail offered 500x as much at 1GB. They made a splash with that.

Fast-forward and we're now in the same place, although space is multiplied by a thousand-fold. Dropbox is offering 2GB. So launch something that offers 1TB and you're set.
The landing page for this site is simply amazing
>BREAKING: In a surprise belated April Fool's joke, Google revives Reader, according to former CEO Eric Schmidt, "just to fuck with everyone who spent money developing a shitty alternative."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5976363
Voters that think like me live in a multipolar democracy that currently has a minority government in power. It's a tacit weakness of the US system that there can only be two viable parties. "If everyone changed and voted for a third person" is not a retort, because it still requires everyone jumping on the same bandwagon to effect a win; it'll just be a different brand of wagon.
If all (for any reasonable definition of all) belief systems are in agreement with the concept that "Putting innocent lives at great danger just so that somebody can experience some sense of excitement", then that behavior being "shameful" is closer to "Fact" than "mere" opinion.

There are many, many things that people find shameful that are more a reflection of their personal belief systems than they are of universal applicability - That 10 minute drive through the streets of paris was not one of them.
Both problems would be caught if you had some kind of testing server (even a VM) and had updated it first. Frankly, you're wrongly blaming the tool.
This WSJ article from 12/12 explains in some detail where TOR came from and what it was supposedly developed for.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732467720457818...

"Created in part to hide the online activity of dissidents in countries such as Iran and China that censor the Internet ... [Tor] gets about 80% of its $2 million annual budget from branches of the U.S. government ... [It] began in 1996 as a project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory called Onion Routing ..."
Even ignoring the fact that these are not exactly the same... How does introducing a new interface necessarily "obsolete" the old one? Particularly when the old one is part of a standard, and the new one is not.
What if it's not a machine replacing the man but another man who will do the same work for less?
Im tired of sentiment like this. I havent been here long but ive had the same feelings about multiple communities as they mature. Its part of them growing up and has a lot to do with the members growing up.

In this situation however i get the feeling it has more to do with the industry than anything else. I dont think tech can be what it was or at least ever will ever again. On the sidelines you see the news changing i believe the industry changing has more to do with it than the community.

If you have these feelings about the industry and no longer want to be part of it either take a break and come back like i did or start thinking about a new career. Tech computers and internet going mainstream is exactly what we all aimed to do. I get that you dont like the current state of things maybe you should become one of these activists you mentioned?

As for the rest of us i think were just fine being advocates of how it was and should continue to be.
The examples are not enough to explain factory pattern and in python we can create class dynamically using type http://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#type.
What sort of feedback are you looking for?

I like the design, it's simple. The app seems to work, all good there.

I have to ask - do you think start ups want a risk management app?

I've worked in both (corporate & startups). This is well suited for corporates.

From looking at the app, its not really clear on what to do. Is it a tool to teach me (or my company) about risk management? Am I using it for risk management on projects?

I've seen tools used for risk management monitoring - is that what this is?

Eg (In Australia) for Occupational Health & Safety, there's all sorts of compliance issues. Say mining - they have issues regarding safety training. Once you have a team that hasn't been trained on the latest procedure, these tools escalate the alerts to the relevant personnel.

Good luck with it!
Is this a joke somehow?
I realize you're just replying to cgag and danenania, but I want to point out that this thread is running the risk of a bad conflation:

Work != technological advancement.

More to the point, while good things come out of work, so do a lot of bad things. The more selective we can be about how we work, the more capable we are of filtering out the bad effects while retaining the good ones.
The Party You Missed
How to self-publish a bestseller: Publishing 3.0
How would you plan on simulating all the variety of states, reactions and solutions involving plain old water without worrying about hydrogen and oxygen atoms?
This is similar to the design of the dynamic language runtime under Microsoft's CLR, which is able to accomplish this with bytecode by objects that implement IDynamicMetaObjectProvider.
It's annoying that EACH input field in BS3 should have class .form-control and that requirement to be inside span<row<container - very high coupled. But Foundation 4 is unacceptable ugly, despite of awesome grid...
I've never had an easier time getting karma, so that certainly drives my latest interest in HN.
It would be interesting to know who remembers the days when Slashdot was good
Re: Linus' rants against PRs: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17
Hacker news has never been 100% technical; part of why I'm here (and involved in the Hacker Dojo) is to hang out with those skinny-jean wearing hipsters who have, you know, social and business skills, as well as some technical skill. Broadens my mind, you know? but the thing is, there is something of a filter there; you need to be 'this technical' to enter, as it were.

How do you enforce this? I don't know. It seems to be... subtly enforced in person. How do you enforce it on a website?

I think we have a broader problem with politics; There are many people that I have a lot of respect for technically, who have political ideas I can only describe as 'kooky' - I mean, that's okay, but I don't really want to hear about it, you know? I /really/ don't want to get sucked into that discussion.

I am just as susceptible to the siren song of a political discussion as anyone else; I often find myself writing two-page rants, only to save myself at the last minute by hitting the delete button.

But this might be part of how this is enforced in person. In person, well, the level of vitriol that political discussions have is just not acceptable.
That is an interesting take on what happened to Slashdot. I guess I just assumed that the world passed by Slashdot's cohort, that the currents governing our industry changed but they mostly didn't. The "iPod lame" post gets harped on, but it's a good illustration of that dynamic, I think. But you were probably much more familiar with it than I was.
> No matter what, you don't have to work 100 hours a week to survive.

Assuming this is talking about Americans, that's sort of an entertaining claim, since most of the modern policy discussions have been about deciding whether or not you are allowed to survive if you don't work enough.
Which recent topics do you have in mind? I agree in respect to quite a few namely the nsa spying and aaron situation to name a couple.
If you were a simulation, you might not have free will. To even propose that you'd have a decision beyond state-machine-dynamics is a world away.
One suggestion is to reduce the influx of new users. Maybe keep new registrations closed except for a few days every month or so. It allows older users time to help the new users adjust to the community, and prevents opportunistic/anonymous-trollish comments. Just an idea.
I left slashdot for exactly the same reason. That and I was tired to sift through trolling and countless slashdot memes like "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these".

HN still has a share if engaging technical news that is big enough to keep it interesting for me. But another thing that differentiates it from slashdot is that discussion is intelligent and no nonsense.
How about a designated "policy" section, up there with "ask" and "jobs"?

It might be nice place to discuss the legal ecosystem for startups, too.
SSL Forward Secrecy tutorial by Qualys SSL Labs
Only forums on which there is no point in activism, of either sort(1), can survive their own prosperity. Forums are conversational; activism is the antithesis thereof.

PG is trying, and you have to tip your hat, if the 4-hours-per-day stories are true, but talk about Sisyphean.

(1) "I" or "We"
As I see it from my own programming experience, the main value of "everything is a file" philosophy is in the unified namespace. Except sockets are file descriptors but not in the filesystem namespace... except when they are "unix domain". The process identifiers aren't have their own namespace but they are sorta in the filesystem via the linux specific /proc. And of course there's the sysv shared memory which comes with it's own namspace (except if you mmap an actual filesystem node and just... ugh... open it from two different process). Sigh.
It is a very good start, and it's good that it's a clearly labelled 'beta' option. It -might- eventually make doing cites easier (especially ones that involve minor changes in existing cites), but already anyone who comes along and sees something wrong can fix typos, clumsy phrases, even repair some vandalism. It enables tens of thousands of reader eyes to do that. Major plus.
It depends what you mean by "full MD" too. That term can cover a multitude of sins. Truly accurate MD would be even more computationally expensive.
Relevant link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_september
>Tech computers and internet going mainstream is exactly what we all aimed to do.

Do you remember the first dot-com boom? In 1999, it sure seemed like we were going mainstream. Nerds were cool!

Of course, once the money stopped, we were thrown aside like a sticky sock.
Laser Cannon 3 Game
There is the argument that eventually automation could make universal social support so economically viable that it is politically hard to avoid.