skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that there is just not enough work do to anymore to keep the entire population employed clearly points in that direction.

The average American spends 1.74 hours/day doing household activities. Most of the middle and upper class would be willing to pay others to do some of those tasks, provided the price were sufficiently low.

http://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a1_2012.pdf

There is plenty of work to be done. Unemployed Americans are just unwilling to accept those jobs at a price low enough that people are willing to pay it.

To put a technological spin on it - if you had a humanoid robot, would you be unable to find tasks for the robot to do?
zsh can be set to automagically track directories (like using `pushd` for you when using `cd`), so all that's needed is `popd`. No scripting required.
DuckDuckGo (Paoli, PA, USA) - LOCAL OR REMOTE.

We would welcome 1-2 additions to our small core search engineering team. This team works across our full architecture (https://dukgo.com/help/en_US/company/architecture) though does more back-end and data algo than front-end and dev-ops, which are primarily handled elsewhere.

Previous search experience or extensive experience with our particular architecture is not necessary, though this is not a junior level position.

https://dukgo.com/help/en_US/company/hiring
> I want my house cleaned for less than $80.

A consideration: can someone who earns less than $80 for a day's work afford to live within driving distance of your house? In India, definitely; in a US metropolitan center, definitely not. (This reduces the problem to the much-better-studied, "people really don't like relocating thousands of miles away for a job, even if their life currently sucks.")
PirateBrowser Hits 500,000 Downloads, Tor Traffic Surges
I'm being detained because -

A) I'm not the right skin color.

B) DHS and U.S. Customs and Border Protection are evil.

-or-

C) I work for a group that has been classified as an eco-terrorist organization. And due to past terrorist events my org was involved in, they want to find out what I'm doing here.

Doesn't C) explain this so much better than A) and B)?

But then there wouldn't be a story here to report on.
Thanks for this (and the others posts). Any other recommendations (papers or videos) ?
> Except your granddaughter isn't providing services to society.

I think it's arguable that she does. By doing what she does she relieves the system from taking care of her grandmother, and thereby making whatever small amount of taxpayer money usable for something else meanwhile taking that economic burden on herself.

(Edit: It can of course be seen that whatever wellfare money she gets is the equivalent of her service to grandmother/society, but in that case it's still at worst a zero sum scenario.)
We need a BIG because it is becoming a required human right in an information society. More and more, power and opportunity are determined by access to information, and we're making strides in democratizing that and thereby decentralizing power. But to actually realize the benefits from increased access to information requires freedom from existential fear (and education and a mostly discrimination-free society). If we do not fix these problems, we're not improving the world with all our wonderful tech tools but establishing a digital elite.

We need a BIG because it encourages risk taking. Society is built largely on the backs of low-wage laborers, but actually benefits most from free, educated, motivated people chasing not just a living wage but a fulfilling occupation. The ingenuity of human minds is our greatest, most renewable, still hugely untapped resource. It should be society's goal to enable and tap that potential. YCombinator sort of pays smart people BIs for a summer not as a reward for work but to ENABLE them to work, to great benefit (though not entirely unconditionally, obviously). When and why have we given up hope of expanding such concepts to all of society?

We need a BIG because markets are made of people, which means there can be no free market without free people. Many people today are not free but under economic duress. Only once people's livelihoods are secured, the labor market will produce win-win situations and exploitation will be eliminated (giving everyone a benefit most of us techies already enjoy). Finally, jobs will be paid what they're actually worth to us rather than what employers can get away with. Unpopular tasks will have to be fairly (=highly) paid or automated. A BIG actually perfects capitalism, rather than undermining it.

We need a BIG because it's not possible to "live off the land" by your own labor anymore in our society. An income is required for survival.

We need a BIG because progress is eliminating (the need for) many low-wage, manual labor jobs. "Full employment" is becoming less and less necessary or desirable.

We need a BIG because many tasks society benefits from aren't paid: Caring for the elderly, raising kids,... but even writing open source software or contributing to Wikipedia. People doing such work today are either privileged, dependent on others or in precarious living conditions. All of these strike me as things we should work to avoid.

We need a BIG because it is fair and simple – paid not just to the jobless, but everyone. It is empowerment rather than a bureaucratically administered handout with all kinds of social stigma attached.
>This essay makes a fallacy case, "it is this way, therefore it must be this way"

That must be the case that some other article is making. This article is making the case that "it is this way", or more clearly that "it's a myth that entrepreneurs drive new technology; for real innovation, thank the state". Hint: it's in the title.
Probably total number of people sleeping at Couchsurfer vs AirBNB places per night. In this sense, AirBNB is introducing more people to the concept.

I have used both, and AirBNB is much easier in cities, where Couchsurfing hosts probably get way too many requests.
I don't really have that much to add, this just stood out to me as slimy:

"...the contract should have said: If and when the beneficiaries of the grant make $X billion, a contribution will be made back to the NSF."

This by definition would not be a grant. If you want to eliminate grants then by all means say so... Sometimes I look at the State as just another modern deity, and it demands worship and tribute. Especially for things it claims to have done in the past.
Haha, you can do that already. Disable that feature that restores your phone after x number of failed passcode attempts, and keep inputting wrong passcodes until it's locked for x hours.

I don't think it has an upper bound but I could be wrong.
"Things that only take 7 or so years to develop just cannot be that hard to do."

Interesting perspective.

I know a company that just completed the development of a new ultrasound system. The system, when deployed, will benefit hundreds of thousands of people around the world. And it was built by a for-profit corporation.

Building that system took about four years. That's four years of 150+ individuals working directly on its design and realization. That means writing code, doing industrial design, laying out PCBs with 20+ layers and thousands of components, working out soldering processes via electron microscopy, ensuring regulatory requirements such as IEC 60601 3rd Edition are met, managing complex schedules, debugging extremely difficult problems, etc.

Now, go even one level deeper and think about the tens or hundreds of thousands of people involved in developing the components and systems used to build this new ultrasound system. How about the software used to design ASICs? Systems on a chip, like the TI DaVinci series? And what of the businessman that starts a reliability lab so customers can get dye and pry services to analyze BGA soldering problems?

Is this the kind of innovation that you choose to label so derisively?
Sounds like zsh

http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/workshops/zsh/cd.html
Really? What's the point in explaining a standard language function that they should know, and can just Google if they don't remember?
It is clearer, but uses a fixed number of arguments, so may be unsuitable for some applications.
Used to (I don't know if it still is, I switched banks) be similar for Sparkasse online banking. The website closed some time in the evening and reopened at 6am.
IMHO the primary reason is for the heck of it. It is the most exciting thing to say that you develop an OS. The second reason is that some OSes serve a particular niche like ROS http://wiki.ros.org/ and they are obviously specialized to ease one form of development.
FAO: iamgopal - your account has been dead for over a year for no discernible reason, only people with showdead on can see your posts.
SEEKING WORK - Computer Programmer. Remote or onsite. Based in Georgia, Europe (UTC+4). Long-term contract or employment.

Interested in projects involving:

C++, Prolog, Erlang, Haskell

Games, AI; Systems programming; Complex desktop or server systems; wxWidgets, Qt; Mobile apps; Logic and functional programming; Compilers/Interpreters/semantics

E-mail: zura.jobs@gmail.com
If you only ever need to chunk a list into 3-tuples, sure. If you want a general solution for chunking a list with zip and an iterator, this solution doesn't scale (look at hartror's and bjourne's posts for something that does).
It's an interesting problem. All the cream of the crop 20 somethings now will be 35 one day. Even people like mark zuckerberg will be 35! But I guess the question is relative value.

In baseball or basketball, a younger age does make a difference (since performance is proportional to athleticism). Veterans are still highly regarded for leadership, and sometimes pure skill (setup man, utility infielder, 3-point shooter); Though they're called on less and usually earn less then their heyday. Would we ever see something similar in the code business?! I don't know. In the case of coding, experience goes up, but perhaps desire to not work like crazy goes down (family, done it before, etc).

Maybe we should pay even higher salaries to bright youngins with huge signing bonuses? And let them know that their expected prime is 21-34. And they should manage their money wisely and open a carwash or burgerking or two.... :P
It is to be expected, after all, the internet is a new thing for all of us according to our chancellor.
The U.S. doesn't have much real poverty, at least as long as you leave out people with mental illness or veterans with psychological issues.

Bottom decile personal income in U.S. is above $5,000 which puts people in that bracket above the median person in Mexico and not terrible far below the median person in Poland: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/04/median-earnings-hi... (note the chart is in PPP-adjusted dollars).

Poverty in the U.S. means subsidized housing, terrible schools, food stamps, etc. But survival is guaranteed.

So the issue with basic income is not eliminating poverty. It's about changing the mechanism by which we have eliminated poverty.
Setting up a new linux server
In your opinion, if doing step 5 is cheap enough, do you still need 1-4? (That is, is it "okay"--in a pragmatic sense--to have sloppy thinking, if you can just throw numbers at the wall to see if they stick?)
It's a service to society if the grandmother would otherwise be taken care of by the government (at enormous expense probably)

I can imagine other fulfilling activities like helping less fortunate people get back on their feet, which could provide a giant boost to the economy but aren't really directly profitable (as the poor have no money)
I said that he built that editor on Ace. I'm using it and I know it's OS.
1. Get free users

2. Cut free service, converting some users

3. Make a condescending blog post and fire it at HN for publicity.
Do you mind creating a gist? It would help anyone reading this and you could just post a link.
Show HN: Call Ring Duration, my first app on Google play store built in 2 days
Call Ring Duration is an Android application that shows you exactly how long your phone was ringing, for incoming and missed calls.
Well, if you'd like the anti-statist take on state innovation, how about this?

"The economy relies very heavily on the state sector. There is a lot of agony now about socialization of the economy, but that is a bad joke. The advanced economy, high technology and so forth, has always relied extensively on the dynamic state sector of the economy.

"That's true of computers, the internet, aircraft, biotechnology, just about everywhere you look. MIT, where I am speaking to you, is a kind of funnel into which the public pours money and out of it comes the technology of the future which will be handed over to private power for profit. So what you have is a system of socialization of cost and risk and privatization of profit. And that's not just in the financial system. It is the whole advanced economy." (http://www.stwr.org/global-financial-crisis/the-financial-cr...)

That's from Noam Chomsky, an anti-capitalist who favors forms of anarcho-syndicalism. Obviously, it's hard to bring up such opinions in polite company. Much easier to quote Mazzucato, who'll present the truth in a more politically correct way... :)
Its not illegal, but can get the company legal trouble if they out-right lie. They can however bend the truth, or use difficult to disprove accusations.

Most large companies send a form that refer has to fill in. Rate 1 to 10 on attention to detail for example.

If the person giving the reference does not like you, there are many ways to bend the truth. Mark you down for lateness, when it was in the companies culture for implied flexitime for example.
SEEKING WORK / remote or local engagements throughout Europe.

I'm specializing in

- web app prototypes, MVPs, and proof-of-concepts

- scalability consulting, refactoring, and bug hunting with PHP or RoR

Languages: PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Java, Delphi, C (and more)

Environments: LAMP stack, Node.js, Android, OS X, Linux, BSD

Web Tech: HTML5, CSS, jQuery, MySQL, JSON message protocols, WebSockets, WebGL, mobile web development

My current pet project is a toy programming language called np: http://np-lang.org/

Random facts:

- started my career at an advertising agency
- ran a web startup for a couple of years
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- I love the web :)

--- --- ---

My profile: http://udos.name or contact me at udo.schroeter@gmail.com
You misunderstand the nature of public debt. We still haven't paid off the Civil War.
At the risk of offending some people.. Mega.co.nz gives 50 GB free storage.
Apple is always hiring. But you generally have to live in Cupertino.
It's $80 for 2 hours. You can survive within commuting distance of Manhattan on $15/hour. You might need to commute from NJ and suffer the indignity of having roommates and black neighbors, but it's quite doable.

I lived within commuting distance of Manhattan during grad school on a stipend roughly equivalent to a $10/hour x 40 hours/week. Prices have gone up a bit since then, but only enough to push me 15-20 minutes further out.
Why do supposedly professional, competent organizations choose to use worthless voo-doo such as polygraphs for any reason whatsoever, let alone important functions such as hiring? Sounds to me like anybody helping illustrate their ineffectiveness is doing the world a favor.
Ask HN: Why people are developing their own open-source OS?
I fairy savvy in technology, but I've never fully understood this. After reading on HN about new releases of ReactOS and MenuetOS, I had a look at the list of Linux distributions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions . There are lots, I'm sure it's not a complete list and I believe there are many which are not Linux-forks.

A few noobie questions on the topic:

- What are the reasons people decide to start a new OS development project? (assume they are not backed by Google, Mozilla or other big organisation who can build commercial products with it)

- Why to maintain your own open source OS, and not to adapt or contribute to an existing OS?

- Who is behind these non-mainstream open-source OS? - What is the end goal of having your own open-source OS?
That's interesting, I'll look into it if I'll ever have the time ;)
Which is something which might happen, or perhaps not, and is entirely under MS's control and discretion.

IMNSHO, this is a very unlikely scenario - the (misguided) reaction of the general public would be something like "oh look, XP had its antipiracy protection disabled by MS, which means it's now free to use; who needs Win8 anyway?" I can't imagine MS essentially undermining one of its core cash cows (Windows) anytime in the near future, especially as the "meh, just get a new computer with new Windows" line has proven effective in most cases. Also, as I have yet to see this to happen to any deprecated and truly obsolete MS product (Altair BASIC? MS-DOS? Windows 3.11?), I don't see that happening to a product which is anything but disused.
"Mexico's war on drugs is one big lie"
Ask HN: why Google Plus has no built-in RSS?
Is it one of the reasons behind the shutdown of Google Reader ? Amazingly, there's no official way of getting even community posts served as RSS.
The dynamics behind hiring and age are not about passion or salary or any of that. No one ever asks candidates whether they study outside of work or are passionate about their jobs. New employees are usually paid more than existing. It is strictly about power and control. The only question that managers are asking themselves is "will this person help or hinder my stature and quest for power within the company." Yes, it seems shortsighted, but most people would give too much credit to those doing the hiring. People over 35 are undesirable because that is the point where experience and political savvy begins to threaten the legitimacy of the org structure rather than to reinforce it. Companies rapidly devolve into simple, dumb classical political systems once the money starts flowing. The only thing that's confusing is why people seem to think companies exist to reward experience and innovation. If someone is hired on at a company, the only reason is because someone at that company thinks that the person will help them politically to gain more power and thus compensation, product be damned.
I think there are many, many problems with this concept.

Children have vastly lower living expenses than adults (or more correctly - the basic marginal cost of adding a child to a household is negligible).

There is no reliable way to ensure that income is actually spent on that child.

It is apparent that some parents (for want of a better word) already see children as a benefits-magnet.

This gives a viable alternative to working a productive job and earning a good wage: pump out 9 kids by the age of 21 and enjoy a sweet $100k salary until they come of age themselves. You may safely neglect them in the meantime and pass any costs thereof, such as incarceration or hospitalisation, onto the state.

I think a much better approach is to limit a basic income to adults (or those financially independent of guardians) and give every child a Finnish-style baby box.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22751415

Limits the financial impact of a child, and has very minimal opportunity for abuse.
Some of those jobs will be probably transitory and some are not worth doing in the u.s. even at minimum wage.

There's a lot of automation going on in agriculture[1].

Regarding maids: Roomba's and alike might be starting to become popular in india[2].

Regarding a driver: The average wage for a taxi driver in the u.s. is $12. Not that far from minimum wage[3].

Regarding a cook: I suspect that , a least at current wages cooks make(and even at minimum wages), it's more economically and varied to order food than to have a cook.

[1]last paragraph , http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21567202-...

[2]http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-07-22/peopl...

[3]http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes533041.htm
I've always thought that this would have some interesting effects on society.

Sure, there are some people who would be content with basic subsistence. Some of those people might turn to crime to get their jollies. I'm not sure there is any social system that can prevent this.

A guaranteed income that paid a basic subsistence would drive up the cost of goods. Some of that would be because people at the lowest end of the wage scale can now be picky about their working conditions, driving up the cost of delivering goods and services, and generally improving working conditions. Employers would have to make mundane, dirty, low-skill work a more palatable proposition. Garbage men's wages would increase. Some of it would be because of opportunistic business practices seeking to maximize profit from goods and services and especially off of the people at the bottom. An equilibrium could be reached, but prices for goods and services wouldn't look like the do now.

Why some action is necessary:

Whether you like the Basic Income or not, something has to change. Technology, especially automation, is currently and will continue to displace low-skilled labor. At some point it will also begin to eat some skilled labor. And why shouldn't it? I can't blame industry for automating labor away. I also can't blame them for the effect that will have on the displaced labor; but, it will have a terrible effect if nothing is done. Nobody can expect those people to starve themselves. This is actually a great opportunity for humanity; if this 'surplus' labor can be directed toward further advancing society (in a positive way).

What are the alternatives?

A fragmentation of society into: Aristocracy, Worker Class, and a Loafer Class. I doubt this would be stable without an oppressive authoritarian State.

Something else?
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. The only downside is that it isn't generic for variable length chunks.
"Many employees are getting payed for months of work to recreate a product--work that upper management would probably disagree with if asked. In what company is that even allowed?"

Yes, I was wondering about that as well. And the significant loss in revenue - in my experience that usually leads to lots of questions.

The office isn't overlooking the London wheel by any chance :-)
If being attacked with a DDoS why not set the source of the attacks as the address to resolve your IP address to?
Okay, admittedly, earning $40/hr at any job is well above "marginally-employed", so we're both being a bit silly here. It's more those who expect people earning minimum wage to somehow survive in a city that I was aiming for.
Yes.

They helped reduce the cost and increase the performance of a well understood system with a variety of incremental innovations. Well done. I hope that company goes on to make a lot of money from the spread of their reduced costs, and those of the costs borne by the grateful public.

But they didn't develop ultrasound. Governments funding massive universities and militaries did.
Regarding the FBI and their "profilers"... isn't being able to read people very fast pretty much the very definition of the job?

No. FBI profilers don't even interact with suspects - they examine crime scene details and then make up a profile of the perpetrator that other agents and police then try to use as a lead.