skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
QR codes have a couple other problems, maybe open to having some kind of "startup based" solution:

They're too trackable and mostly used in throwaway applications. What looks better in a bean counter organization on someone's end of year review or resume:
"Managed the delivery of 1M pieces of promotional direct mail" or "Managed the delivery of promotional direct mail resulting in 7 QR code accesses". Both can be true at the same time, but only one is making it to the review/resume.

J6P has no idea how to create a QR code. Yes yes all of us on HN know how to use google to find everything from web services to CPAN modules but J6P does not. So using legacy MS Word you highlight a URL and right click and ... Or using modern google docs you highlight a URL in the text and ? So QR codes are a write once by techies technology. Wake me when a girl scout troop leader can put one in her newsletter.

Finally they tend to be pretty ugly. Not a mandatory requirement, but for all practical purposes they're used as an eyesore. Now a decent graphics artist can take a startup domain name like drkoop.com and apply all manner of pretty font and color formatting, and play other style games but QR codes are mostly applied as any eyesore. In theory they can be embedded in a low contrast manner or in a textured area but they you get the epic fail of users not even knowing there's something there to scan, because QR code equals ugly so no ugly means there's no QR code.
Great concept. I've always been a fan of chess but never really played. I think that's going to change.

Feedback: You could use some work on your marketing message/brand. Chess has some much potential for interesting plays on the black/white concept and terminology. "More than just black and white.","Checkmate.". These are iconic chess ideas that I think if executed right, could add a the missing piece to the message you are trying to send.

I think the flat-ui is actually holding you back and with a few more iterations on your brand you could have a really unique presence. If you want to talk more, my email is in my profile. Hope this helps!
The grand parent made a really good point. Lets say I don't want to consume local resources. I still have to pay taxes. As far as I know, this is true in the US and Canada. I believe this may not be true elsewhere. Regardless, the "having to pay taxes" has implications such that one can never completely leave the rat race.

Btw ... I'd be happy to be corrected. Are there places in the US/Canada without such taxes? Since they are levied locally, I imagine they could exist.
Startups Apparently Do Not Care That Android Is Better
Very good ! i also checked http://yoleoreader.com/ which is amazing too.

i'm building my own with nodeJS. As usual my requirement are that it should work without javascript on , so i implemented the static site first ,the rest will come later :

http://feedpress.herokuapp.com/

click on about for the source code.
Google argues it is exempt from UK privacy laws
The core cause of bullshit jobs is not conspiracy, it's political economy. We currently choose (IMO a terrible choice) to have a money based society where "don't work" == "don't eat". And so work must be found.

This is what it means when politicians talk of "creating jobs".
Aww, come on! Just try turning on your "eight year old switch" and you'll find that it's a really enjoyable movie.

I also believe it's a great family movie that's not a comedy or animation movie (or sappy Disney family movie). The setting is smart enough for a grown up to enjoy (the movie has a lot of "show don't tell" that justify, to some degree, some of the more implausible elements) and the plot is simple enough for a young kid to understand.

With that said, I'm a big fun of the Giant Robot genre of anime, so I probably enjoyed the movie more than the usual moviegoer.
This kind of discussion always reminds me of the movie Cube[1]. Since watching it years ago, I have often found it to be a fantastical and exaggerated but useful metaphor related to this topic.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_(film)
> It's stronger than a Nash equilibrium. It's not even an equilibrium actually, ...

An alternative is that it's an equilibrium, but that we haven't hit where it starts to operate as one yet.
The author has a very interesting point. Still he oversimplifies and so I didn't find the article very insightful.

For example lawyers are there for good reason. Modern society needs a way to officially settle conflicts. But our law system creates arms races and draws more and more resources this way.

I think few jobs are as zero sum as SEO from their beginning. The problem is that when we start arms races and pour more and more resources into them, they become almost zero sum.

So the interesting question would be how to avoid arms races. But that is not even mentioned.
For freelance consultants, in the RAK Free Zone, a company license + the Flexi office rental costs $5k and needs to be renewed yearly. A work visa (your 1-man company can sponsor you), costs $2k/year. You could think of it as tax (although it really isn't) -- and it's still a lot less than what tax you'd be paying in Europe.
Forgive me, I only meant to say that he was supposed to help injustice, a world he claims to have come from. Now, he "sits in the front seat" so to speak and makes a mockery of what Rosa Parks endured. She really created change
There are people living on that island that really don't deserve what you propose to do to them.
Nobody on HN seems to want to address it, so I will. It's pretty obvious: Notch is incredibly wealthy and no longer is interested in programming. Can you blame the guy? Most of us would probably stop programming if we had his never ending flow of income. Minecraft is like milk: It's always selling and he hardly has to think about working anymore. Mojang doesn't even have to update Minecraft, the community drives it. The mobile version has reigned the iOS store for months. It's the holy grail of perpetual passive income we all wish we had that Notch has obtained.
Red Gate also offers free licenses for its products: http://reflectorblog.red-gate.com/2013/07/open-source/
I do something similar, but I live in the rat race. I have a job that keeps me going on part time hours nicely, and I just built a house (largely with money).
I wasn't talking about diversity, rather about how much people are needed to sustain and industrial civilization. Perhaps this number is much greater than number of people you need for diversity (several hundred people populated the whole pre-Columbian americas and they didn't have terrible problems with diversity)
Rearview: Real-Time Monitoring & Alerting for Graphite
Rearview is a Scala monitoring framework for Graphite time series data. The monitors are simple customizable Ruby scripts which are run in a sandbox to prevent I/O. Each monitor is configured with a crontab compatible time specification used by the scheduler and can alert to PagerDuty and/or email addresses.
Michael Grunwald and the Assange Precedent Problem
In rural areas, 1930's living did not include amenities like plumbing or electricity in most places. In urban areas, you're looking at an interior room in a cold water tenement or a boarding house type situation.

It would be tough to do it in the city without becoming a victim of crime, but you can pull it off in many rural areas. Note that the 10 hours of work would be paid work. You'd be doing all sort of tasks on your own behalf. If you lived in the northern US, for example, right now you'd be chopping wood and preserving food in preparation for winter, for example.
Ask HN: Is it possible to discuss old submissions?
I submitted something a few months ago which I think is rather interesting now, not only for the original content but also for the HN comments on the submission. If I submit the link to the HN story directly it is killed. Is there an accepted way to do this, or am I just to let bygones be bygones?
Disclosure: I work for Excelsior.

Excelsior JET (http://www.excelsiorjet.com), a Java SE JVM with a native code compiler and deployment toolkit, is free for non-commercial use. Note that "non-commercial" != "open source", both ways: there is commercial open-source and closed-source freeware.

http://www.excelsior-usa.com/jetfree.html
hmm, i like 'Excession'and 'Use Of Weapons' the best among culture series....
Thank you. I was waiting for a telephone sanitizer reference.
Nokia Releases Asha SDK 1.0 for Java App Developers
A few african males from different parts of africa.
It's not aimed at the suicide bomber. It's aimed at the person convincing them to strap the vest on.

As any organisation, you don't survive very long by detonating your leadership class.
It bears saying that working hours have gone down, at least here in Europe. But it took unions and laws to make it happen, and at every stage employers have screamed blue murder - "oh noes, we couldn't possibly maintain productivity with only a 60/50/40/35 hour work week". Of course, once the law is introduced it turns out the company can remain just as productive.

I don't know what the figures are for the US, with its hatred of organized labour and social legislation.
I personally use https://www.inoreader.com/ and found it to be a simple and brilliant Reader-like replacement.
SideProjectors - a marketplace to buy and sell side projects
MicroOffice: Chances Are, They’re in a Neighborhood Near You
Moqups[1], our HTML5 based mockup/wireframing app, is completely free for education, non profit and open source projects. To our great surprise, we get a fairly large amount of requests each week from many universities and from open source developers. Aaaand we're happy to fulfill all of them :-)

[1] https://moqups.com
Or get some serious skillz and a good gig.
What I find bizarre about this is that where I live, India, this seems more prevalent than anywhere else I have traveled in the world. Its as if the vestiges of British bureaucracy have left behind a middle class with such a sense of entitlement that they seem to have no problem with the obvious fact that their job is meaningless.

Apparently the official policy is that government employees cannot be fired so are simply given something, anything, to do until they retire - don't quote me on this.

The strange thing is that you have a non-english speaking, poorer, class beneath this (of around 600 million people) that simply MUST make an economic contribution in order to survive because no one will pay them anything unless their economic contribution is undeniable.....
I think that almost everybody can do that - cut down a bit on the living expenses, save some money, quit your job and look for something worth doing. I am currently doing it and wasn't such a trouble
Sometimes the senses are not so discrete
Water, sanitation, road or port facilities usage, etc are probably still 'local'.
I live and work in Washington DC. If you ever want to visit a living museum of bullshit jobs, come visit this city. One of my favorite anecdotes is when my friend worked for a defense contractor who hired a "requirements manager". On her first day of work, she popped into my buddy's office and whispered: "what are requirements?".
There are negative sum jobs as well. Pharma people, promoting harmful drugs, soldiers or criminals.
Acquire as little information as possible

This is an often overlooked opportunity. Learn as little as you absolutely need so you don't get mired in the dogma. Some of the best solutions for problems come from people who have not yet become indoctrinated in the "standard" methodology. They approach problems with a fresh perspective and can come up with new solutions that everyone else who's been there a while missed. This opportunity is short lived, since everyone inevitably learns all the standard ways, so it is very apt for when you join a new company.
Thanks for that! I myself always had MurmurHash (https://code.google.com/p/smhasher/wiki/MurmurHash3) in mind, mainly because I liked the touted benefits (from the possibly biased main page) and it's worked out for me. Seems like I need to educate myself a bit more.
This looks like so much fun. How much time does creating the maps take?
Linux Containers: Creating Your Own VPN
Poker is definitely an easier sell for that business model, since you can make money immediately by improving your poker game. Since chess doesn't have nearly the luck component, making money by gambling on chess is much more difficult, making the video lessons market a bit less lucrative than the poker sites (who I believe generally made decent $).

Definitely some possibilities though! Makes me want to try and actually get decent at chess, but it's so much work...
The sad state of affairs is that so many people assume native languages (C/C++) to be so complicated when in fact it is the environments and API that are commonly used with these languages that should bear the greater blame.

I'm putting together a backend webserver and frankly, there is nothing complicated about using C/C++ syntax over PHP or JavaScript. Using my own objects and data abstractions is simple. However, as soon as I need to use someone's library, that is when the complexity, confusion, and bugs begin.

I encourage anyone who wants to use system languages (for performance or academic reasons) to take the time to find a good library (libuv on which node.js is based for example). Program procedurally for a while to get a good feel for things before endlessly wrapping logic in object or functional abstractions.

Should you ever expose your API to others you'll do the world some good if you make it enjoyable for others to use. Perhaps make two abstractions: one for performance and one for simplicity.
Ask HN: Upcoming e-commerce solutions for small yet ambitious businesses?
I'm curious to know if there are any upcoming hosted e-commerce platforms targeting small yet ambitious businesses that embrace complex inventory management, web analytics, APIs and quick development cycles. I've been checking out Tictail and it seems too limiting.
For me the end of Google Reader meant that I could finally stop using my Google account altogether since Reader was their only service I was using. It's a shame that so many of the Google Reader alternatives want me to sign in with my Google account again. In that case I simply won't use them (I'm looking at you, Feedly).
FSFlow: Social Engineering Call Flow
front dev will always suck since Microsoft decided an entire generation of OS will never have a modern browser by default. And yes this is MS fault.
Google, Groupon, Yelp And A “SoLoMo” Strategy
I agree. If anything, the explosion of digital libraries and thus of available information would tend to make librarians and supervisors with deep domain knowledge even more essential to sort through all the noise.
Rents are only zero-sum because somebody figured out how to price-fix realty. In a healthy world you will have lotta new beautiful towns and affordable rent everywhere (but a select few historic places).
Using git bisect to automate bug-hunting
HTTPS URL is https://go-read.appspot.com/
Then they should have voted for a different government.

Sorry, but “there are people in a country with a democratic government that don’t deserve what their government brought upon them” is not a particularly good reason – and even then, I don’t think it’d hurt to allow immigration into Europe for a while, so there’s even a perspective for those that “really don’t deserve” the results of their (in)action.
Alright, I understand the argument now, thank you.

I still disagree that anybody is trying to make this occur through nudges, a plan or any sort of action - considered or not. I believe it is the result of human kind's base urge to find meaning in themselves and their lives. I'd say that even if people in power were to try and push people into jobs, the people being pushed out of jobs would seek to find any job they could do regardless of how useless it may be. Simply to be doing a job and satisfying themselves.

I fully accept it's a plausible argument that people in control are pushing us, though.
Ah but that analysis assumes the only cost of retail area is initial purchase price of the undeveloped land. I would theorize the cost of construction is "more or less" the same and certainly the cost of labor to maintain and clean it is very high. Also energy costs to heat, light, cool, ventilate... all "about" the same.

Another failure of analysis is the cost of a sq foot at a reasonably constant level of development. What I mean is a sq foot in Tokyo needs to be compared to a sq ft in Manhattan, not a sq foot in New Mexico 100 miles from the nearest Starbucks. What I'm saying is it doesn't matter if land in Wyoming is cheap, if its empty and shopper-free.

There is also the inventory aspect... assuming a stable scenario (admittedly unlikely) my annual purchases have to subsidize the annual costs of 50 sq feet of "stuff" both inventory and maintenance whereas someone in .jp only has to subsidize the annual costs of 10 sq feet of "stuff", therefore their standard of living should be higher than mine because they don't have to support so much deadweight.
Very interesting... I think I just found a great way to describe myself.
Country property taxes are generally pretty low in rural areas. Not zero mind you, it's the local gov's primary source of funding barring states sales tax, and gosh forbid if there are kids in the county to be schooled. If you don't want to pay property taxes, move to a fourth world country like Somalia.

China doesn't have property taxes, but the schools are underfunded and local governments are addicted to condemning farmer property and reselling it to run the cities. Not to mention the bubbles that result, since you can just sit on property as a static investment if it isn't taxed annually. Property taxes are good, trust me, the alternative (being priced out of the market by speculators) suck.
The art of peeping: photography at the limits of privacy
The Cryptopocalypse
A simple way to implement Retry Support For Akka Future in Scala
Replace:

"Next time a hacker will just sell the exploit to somebody else, cash upfront, and wont bother reporting."

With:

"Next time a hacker will make sure they follow the Terms of Service when reporting"

For a much more likely scenario.
Kayak co-founder Paul English setting up startup incubator in Boston
I disagree that the answer is moral and political and that the "ruling class" sat down to decide most people should work bullshit jobs. The phenomenon is more elegantly explained by pure economics: as less time is expended extracting resources and producing things, more energy is absorbed by the zero-sum, gimmicky game of selling and marketing them.

To give credit where it's due, I first saw this credible argument on michaelochurch's (now sadly inactive) blog [1], and he may well have originated it. Here it is, in a better explanation than I could provide:

"The Marketing and Sales Treadmill

In the modern world [...] there are no unexploited resources and no surplus jobs to be had processing those resources. [The worker] needs a job, but their labor is surplus and unnecessary.

[...T]he most common path is that our prospective worker enters the sales and marketing business. [...] Even engineering focused companies like Facebook have more sales people than engineers. [...] So everyone’s energy is focused on imagining some gimmick – a six bladed razor, a beer can that turns blue when [it's] cold, a funny talking gecko – that gives someone a reason to give you money when there is no real differentiation based on product value.

The sales and marketing economy is zero sum. Each business must work harder and harder at new tag lines, gizmos, tricks, and jingles. And when sales guys at the other company work harder, you must work harder too.

Past writers who imagined the future thought that as machines saved our time, we would have more time for leisure. That has not happened. Instead [...] we must work in sales and marketing to convince someone with money to trade cash for our trinket, so that we can have purchasing power to access the natural bounty of the land. [...] The future is here, and it is the sales desk at Dunder Mifflin."

[1] http://intellectual-detox.com/2013/04/14/rent-seeking-econom...
He uses "technocratic" as if it was a bad word.

"Web definitions
(technocracy) a form of government in which scientists and technical experts are in control".

Surely he will not find any supporters here on HN :).
Managing Tier 1 Apps on Linux
If this is beautiful, I would hate to see ugly. I wish we could take the power of C++ and just start over syntactically with a brand new language.
Asteroids & Netwire
Coffeescript saved JS dev. It proved we did not have to wait for TC39 lto get new language features.
I tried fever http://feedafever.com/. Its a nice selfhosting feed reader.
But after a while using online feed readers i still use Operas build in Reader.
Activist claims Google Russia is blocking gay content
Monitoring: A Constant in Continuous Deployment Environments
Videos that make you think
The phrase "inverted totalitarianism" describes this phenomenon.
To be fair: You do build lovely, functional houses in one of the most beautiful parts of Europe.
Making the Time for Mastery
If Woz had a little more Jobs in him, he'd have told Jobs to go fuck himself when he sold Woz's work to Atari and paid him a fraction of the money.

There would be no Apple.
The only thing an IP ban alone conveys is that that IP is no longer allowed access. It does not by itself convey that that user or even that client is not allowed.
You realise that such speculation is more immoral than the acts carried out so far right? You're ostensibly describing trying to blackmail the most powerful man in the world.
If you are a UK voter, please remember to write to your MP:
http://www.writetothem.com/

Whilst it may feel like it does nothing. Its still an important part of the process. They get to understand the public mood regarding certain issues.
In other words, you're substituting your own time for money.

That's no different than working and paying someone else to do it, economically, but I imagine you enjoy it. More power to you. :-)

Actually, my family owns a country home (far from anywhere; land tax is ~zero) that's also next a fjord. As in, a meter and a half from the water. We've got a floating dock.

I've been wondering about how to maintain it, now that our patriarch is getting too old to do so. The main issue, really, is how to get back and forth - I'd love to live there semi-full-time, but realistically can't do so in the winter, and the roads are getting worse every year now that all the farmers are gone. Using a suitably large boat seems like an interesting option, and would give me the choice of living closer to some town if I need to work closely with people on some project.

If you have some figures - how much it actually costs, etc. - that'd be great. I certainly wouldn't mind doing maintenance myself, but I expect it still won't be free. Also, what model boat do you have?
It's a bit more than a just plausible argument. There's a whole cabinet department devoted to it:

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/sep/09/cameron-nudge...

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/behavioural-insi...
It was heaps of fun! We both got really absorbed in it. I'd made the map the day before, off and on during the day and evening. Maybe 4-5 hours work.
Inventory Services in London
Professional inventory services in London!