skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just my thoughts....

"For example, if I walk into the local corner shop for a bottle of water, and can only find one brand, not the one I want, is that a voluntary exchange?"

Yes, it's voluntary, you can either buy it or not. The shop owner has no obligation to stock any particular brands.

"How about if I am in a desert dying of thirst and a man offers to sell me a bottle of water?"

If you are actively dying of thirst, then the shop owner should do what he reasonably can to save your life, on the principle that, absent other considerations, it's rational to extend basic good will to others.

If your life is at risk and you cannot pay his price, then you should do whatever you have to do to get the water. At that point, it's either you or him and in such a situation, the concept of rights goes out the window.

"Or if under some bizarre regime I am ordered to buy a particular bottle of water to prevent my family being shot?"

Again, you do what you have to do to protect yourself and your significant values. So you buy the water. This is obviously coerced, not voluntary. Coercion implies a disregard for your rights, and so there is no obligation for you to extend rights to him.
It's also interesting that whenever the subject of losethos is brought up, the discussions take a strangely reliable turn. Someone (or several someones) makes a comment that includes the words "mental illness", racist/racism, religous/religion, medication.
When you replace someone with a machine, the cost of creating whatever object or service they worked to create goes down.

Either the customer gets a better deal (and has more money), the shareholders get more profit, or some combination of the two.

Either way, the customer buys more stuff or passes the benefits onto their customers, and the shareholders buy more stuff. All of a sudden, there is more demand for labor, and over time, the displaced humans get hired again.

You are invoking the luddite fallacy.
Man Builds His Own Helicopter - Bulawayo, Zimbabwe (1994)
Also you can tell it whether you need it for a long drive or a short one, so it can know when to send you an electric car or an internal combustion car. Or whether you need a big car or a small one.
We have dozens if not in the low hundreds of SQL tables.

So, while we do have a huge pile of legacy code not using SQL you can map your NoSQL data structures to SQL tables and you can also later on convert to a more efficient format that gives you bitmap indices and so on, while still using the global storage backend.

So, it may have been NoSQL until some point in the nineties and after that it was really NotOnlySQL.

There's something a bit therapeutic about seeing the indices, including bitmap indices, and all the data on disk in a format that's intuitive and usable for humans that you can use without going through SQL, but either by accessing it directly or through the built-in ORM system. You don't get that with PostgreSQL or MySQL, or conversely, MongoDB or CouchDB. It's both worlds. Sure, there's a lot of stuff from PostgreSQL that I would kill for - any volunteers? - but as a compromise between the two worlds it works quite well indeed.

Edit: Here's more info:

http://docs.intersystems.com/cache20131/csp/docbook/DocBook....

The awesomest points are the %ID pseudo-column, implicit joins, embedded SQL (which compiles SQL down to native MUMPS code, including cursors and all), near enough complete SQL-92 and DDL compliance. And the ORM stuff.
Ask HN: Is there an HN for finance?
Anyone know a good community site for financial news (stocks, ETFs, Mutuals etc)? Years ago I used a site called clearstation and it was a good little community focused on investing in the open markets. Then it was bought by Etrade and turned to shit. Is there a good community out there?
Rich people behaving rich
The problem with "general taxes" is that they don't fall from the skies.

In the economies with large percentage of makers and small percentage of moochers things work out decently, as the moochers category includes babies and elderly, so the work by makers is almost a social contract, a "thank you" to the society for support while being a baby, and a rainy day fund for one day when the maker himself will turn elderly.

Having a large population of working-age moochers violates the social contract, and creates incentives for the makers to optimize their revenue generation, if not quit altogether, Atlas Shrugged style.

The perverse incentives are apparent in post-Soviet economies, where under Soviet ruling government-owned enterprises frequently supported a vast infrastructure of company towns - everything from kindergartens to hospitals was included in the balance sheet of the local plant or factory.

Fast forward a few decades ahead, when the government-owned enterprises are now privately-owned, and typical pattern you see is profit-less plants and factories now selling their products at cost, avoiding profit sharing, to a Cyprus or Cayman Islands affiliate, with affiliate (incidentally controlled by large shareholders and top management) pocketing all the profits in tax-efficient manner.
I think it's more likely that there will be a massive war and the survivors will be peasants again.
Add Muni bus stop times to your Mac menu bar
Github Repo: https://github.com/adviceadam/Muni-Menu-Bar

README is on imgur: http://imgur.com/a/4pmRM

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/GMWnmiG.png
"Speaking of garages, any reason you can't build the garage on levels 1-2 and put apartments on 3-5?"

Most cities regulate building heights, so then you're choosing between parking space and living space. Here in Austin, some downtown land is zoned for more height than the market demands at this point, so you do see parking podiums with residences or offices on top. It's the cheaper option when it's allowed, but it usually isn't.
Not solely related to the Nintendo-on-iOS idea, but I really hope the gamepad support catches on in iOS 7. Just one or two really good gamepad implementations would make more in-depth or "traditional" game experiences on iOS so much more appealing.
Hard to understand what you mean. It's not like the current resource managers are trying to maximize happiness, but just lack efficiency. Just the opposite - the majority of ambitions, rich, powerful people in the world are putting tremendous efforts into extracting as much resources from the poor as possible.
That's probably because there's no good reason things won't just work themselves out.
Yeah, but then again there are services like Siri that do a phenomenal job at understanding complex user input. I don't think I've ever experienced Siri not understanding my intended query and then giving me a generalized response that has nothing to do what I asked for, so maybe people in roles like this woman's can be easily automated. It's probably trivial to encompass every function that she performs. Maybe a weekend project!
It prevents a straight forward tracking and forces anyone wishing to track you using a cellphone to throw a lot more resources at you than before. Inside the case it doesn't get any simple tracking info, the only thing it really gets would be physical orientation (gyroscope, accelerometer, and compass) and audio.

In order to turn the first into tracking the phone has to either do the inertial tracking itself (possible but computationally expensive and it diverges pretty quickly unless there have been some major improvements).

The second requires some luck involving an identifiable sound marker some where in the recording then the processing power to cross reference everything.

It's a mistake to confuse imperfect with useless.
It is not that bad, at least in China. Have you heard of Taobao villages [1]? Basically, e-commerce is reaching rural economies also.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2013-08/20/c_13264...
Nissan promises to sell self-driving cars by 2020
This is my partner in a nutshell. Some of the scenes are a little over the top (bowling example) but it makes the point.

I had the same impression with digital cameras, seeing visitors to my local botanic gardens wonder through and look at everything through a small lcd screen on the back of their camera, they weren't really seeing what's there or experiencing it, they were just trying to frame a picture so they couldn't see the subtleness and feel the peace that's at this place.

You see it all the time at concerts too. I'm guilty of it myself.

Because it's new in the scheme of things, we will continue to fumble around, some abstaining completely, others totally absorbed and addicted until we find a way to balance and new social norms are set, when it's not the 'done thing' to just stare at your phone endlessly while with friends etc
We've never tried socialism where all the workers are replaced by automation. I suppose it could work, but I'm doubtful. People just aren't meant to live that way.
Relevant to your point and this article's Northwest angle, I note that the Car2Go[1] service has become fairly prominent in the Seattle area. It's quite different to services like ZipCar, in that Car2Go has worked out a few key details:

1. Smartphone apps that show you the location of the nearest cars and allow various interaction.

2. The ability to walk up to any car not reserved/in use and take it.

3. Parking deals with the city -- just park in any public parking spot, no worries about metering.

These attributes raise convenience considerably vs. some competing carshare services and remove ceilings on how many vehicles can be injected into the local system.

For anyone following Horace Dediu's Asymcar[2] podcast, Car2Go fits right into their theme of exploring what will really disrupt personal transportation as we know it today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car2Go
[2] http://www.asymcar.com/
How well are you paid? You don't have to give specific numbers, just like in comparison with the average. I've heard rumors of people getting paid a shit ton of money to maintain these sorts of systems but those might be just rumors.
It's short-sighted to think that you have an understanding of a person's job after reading a tangentially related article and thinking about it for five minutes.
The US doesn't block YouTube, Facebook, blogspot, wordpress, imgr...uhm...they don't block anything that I know of.
My point, perhaps too veiled, was that as the amount of work that humanity is required to do approaches zero, so too does the likelihood that humanity remains the dominant species.
SEEKING WORK - Las Vegas / Remote / Relocation

Proficiencies:

* Programming Languages: C++ (with emphasis on modern C++11), C#, GLSL, OCaml, Python, Bash
* Networking: TCP, UDP
* Technologies: OpenGL
* Operating Systems: Linux/Unix, Windows
* Source Control: Git, Subversion, Mercurial

Github: http://github.com/det

Email: chris@detrino.org

I also lurk on FreeNode IRC as det if you would like to have a more casual conversation.
>they are also willing to reject established traditions, ignore elder class values, listen to classical music

>classical music

What?
> Can someone explain why people on HN seem to conflate mental illness with writing an operating system?

Nobody here does. It's just that this specific guy happens to have written a simple graphical OS from scratch apparently without anyone else's help.

He also believes God speaks to him through random noise and posts random text created from mixing up Bible verses as being what God just said. He is, really, classic schizophrenic. There's no other way to say it. He hears voices nobody else can hear and he believes it is God talking to him.

> Is this just the HN attitude of having just learned js/ruby yesterday and being afraid of low level details?

Now you're just embarrassing yourself.
Yes, on the other hand, those things flow more freely in China.
Interesting - there are hundreds of millions of iOS devices out there and their average user spends more money on apps than the Android counterpart.

Are we already at the point where Apple is irrelevant to the app vendors?
It just seemed like an odd choice to have to make when signing up. I didn't know how I was supposed to interpret the choices but more importantly I didn't know whether one or the other might end up affecting the account in a way I might not like in the future. What happens if I sign up as a 'thinker' then decide i want to 'make' something? Is there a 'thinker' account type and a 'maker' account type? It's fine in terms of a philosophical exercise but I want to know how it affects what i'm signing up for.
If you think the majority of people would just lay their lives to waste because they don't need to doing the bidding of others just to survive, then you are wrong. 99% of able-bodied and able-minded adults would not succumb to idlery.

Applying for SSI/SSID is an incredibly dehumanizing process. It takes over a year if you are lucky. You will be denied for any reason they can possibly find. It is guaranteed you will be denied for your first application. You have to prove you are disabled to them (disgusting really). You must have documentation. It goes on and on, but they honestly hope most applicators either die in the interim or just give up on 'improving themselves'.

Really, if there is a miniscule amount of people who will abuse the system it does not at all outweigh the good it provides. If your qualm is with said abusers, profile, detect, and prosecute them. Society is not going to collapse.
> She doesn't have an incentive of having more than N children, after which payments degrade considerably.

Meaning she gets less money than she got for the first few. But not no money, just less.

> if N is 2, what you subsidy is normal healthy families.

Normal healthy families of social parasites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadya_Suleman
I was taught to not judge a book by its cover and I've seen some remarkable stuff with terrible covers. Did any of you read it or just make the immediate cover judgment?
Advice from a person who as described does not sound like anyone who has ever worked at a scrappy startup.
> A default payout to both unproductive and productive people.

But the idea under discussion is a guaranteed minimum income, not a payout to everyone. It's meant to help those at the bottom, not Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.
Replying to your first point, here's the relevant law (FAA 702): http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1881a
Can you still use Office dlls without the Office GUI clicking away in front of you? Is this a limitation of using COM with Office?
> Now you're just embarrassing yourself.

No actually, I am not embarrassed to point out that this problem exists on HN. Read any comment thread that deals with low-level anything. It's painful.

Edit: Prerequisite: to feel just how painful it is, you must understand the topic being discussed.
SEEKING WORK - Remote (or in central Vermont)

My background is somewhat twofold, in security/crypto review and building high performance distributed systems for trading. I'd be especially interested in projects involving reviewing code and protocols for security flaws, distributed systems development, low latency network code, and the design and coding of security critical components.

The majority of my production code has been in C++ and Python, but I'd be happy diving into a project in C, Java, Scala, Go, or Rust. I mostly use and develop for Linux.

Some past open source work is at https://github.com/randombit

Drop me a line at lloyd@randombit.net and we can talk about what you are trying to do and if I'm the right fit for your problem.
This is a fantasy. There has to be diminishing returns at some point--there has to be a tipping a point where the Luddites are actually correct... it just wasn't 1811.
I feel that often such discussions tend to the extremes: either do nothing, or replace everyone with robots. The happy middle ground, for example, is left out because it's the least controversial.

There are some jobs that are best automated. The BART "train operator", for instance; it is _already_ automated! People don't realize that the BART train runs by itself; the "operator" just hits the "close door" button when needed.

Or, for example, the cleaner who is (purportedly) supposed to clean the cars. A Scooba-like robot would do just fine.

On the other hand: a customer-service job is best done by humans (for now), because when we need help, it is reassuring to speak to a person instead of Siri.

So casting this debate as one between "replace all humans" and "keep the current inefficient system" is wrong.
Basic income is meant for purchasing goods that are essential, which means that those goods are already being purchased in the volume required. Prices are set at the margins (imagine fighting for the last loaf of bread), and if everyone is buying the same amount as before, then prices won't change. What will change however is the prices of discretionary goods as any additional income people make goes towards these.
I'm guessing there is an element of 'you don't know what you're going to find until you start digging' aspect to it.
Fear of buccaneers opens a vast "data hole" in the Indian Ocean
We're all just 1 technological improvement away from failure.
Appington (funded startup) - SF Bay area, remote ok. http://www.appington.com/jobs

We help add voice prompts to mobile apps. This leads to a better user experience, increased retention, and has elements of science (measurement, analysis) as well as art (emotion, copywriting) to it.

Generalists are great as we have everything: on device code (Java/Android, ObjC/iOS), AppEngine for the servers, MongoDB, web (Bootstrap, HTML5, Jinja2, jQuery, Flask on server), and various bits in between all working together.
I did google him. The impression I get from HN comments:

1. I see posts making fun of this guy's mental illness.

2. I see posts making fun of how he's working on an OS.

I don't think either one is particularly cool.
... okay, somebody finally beat ASP.Net webforms.
Said people in every historical state that was slowly sliding towards despotism.
1. The post was intentionally provocative. I said so in the post. I don't really care about the blame as much as the solution.

2. It is a serious dilemma for me. I've worked in, and now I teach industrial automation. I have probably automated thousands of peoples' jobs away. While I don't believe it is my fault, or my client companies' faults that there are box packers and fruit sorters who are unemployed. I do feel enough responsibility that I should at least advocate for the people's sake. I also don't think it is the fault of the workers. One thing I do know is that wide-scale automation of labor is a potential social disaster if we don't figure out how to handle the transition gracefully.

3. I'll double down and tell you my opinion that "euthanasia" is really too kind a word for what happens to the sick who are also poor in this country. Do I think it is deliberate? Maybe, judging by the priority policymakers have placed on alleviating the problem.
It is a simple fact than many people (especially those aged 50+) are basically not re-educable. It is pointless of you to try to start an argument over blame or whether they should be called failures, because such a discussion does nothing to solve the problem, and does not even effectively address the question of whether the problem should be solved.
It doesn't affect it all. The question was just for my own data analysis, as you said. Sorry for the confusion.

Aside: so far it seems Thinkers and Makers are evenly divided, suggesting that both sets of people find the idea equally interesting.
Pandora removes 40-hour-per-mont limit on free mobile listening
Well my reasoning is because angular have a so called model. It's scope.

Angular doesn't need a model, it's a MV whatever. Where as ember is MVC. The framework is MVC and it's M is not complete at all. So judging from an overall framework ember is not complete in that respect where as Angular is.

Like come on, 1.0 and hey our M in our MVC framework is incomplete. Um... that's shouldn't even be 1.0. 1.0 to them is the api is going to be stable but not the emberdata, the model. Really?
Sorry to disappoint you, but my job isn't as such the maintenance of a legacy system. We write new code in Caché, which includes things used by a wider world like JavaScript and SQL as well.

Ask me again in two or three decades, but our codebase is continuously being touched in all places and there is an ongoing drive to weed out legacy code all the time. But just on the side I've been able to get rid of about 30% of all the legacy code here without spending that much time on it at all mostly with the help of grep, in part because our system has now moved to being 100% web from a desktop client.

As for salary, never enough :P, but considering my age, the economy, and my lifestyle I'm pretty happy.
if some of your friends are girls,
tell them of your desire, and they
will kiss you or find someone else
for you who'll be happy to kiss you.

if none of your friends are girls,
then focus instead on finding some;
talking eventually leads to kissing.

-bowerbird
I think we may work for the same company. Does it rhyme with 'Shmeppic'?
Eventually, all blue collar jobs will be replace with machines. Only the people who make the machines will remain employable. Eventually, white collar jobs will be replaced too; we're already seeing this in the field of law where an army of clerks is no longer necessary. I'd imagine health care will be a prime target given how outrageously inefficient it is in the US and the percentage of the GCP that flows into it. Its very easy to imagine a society where at least 25% of able bodied, working age people are categorically unemployable not just working itself out.
I see there are no engineering openings in Tokyo. Any chance that you would hire people in Tokyo to work remotely with one of the engineering teams?
So, who's up for writing an LLVM backend?
How To Spot A Perfect Business Idea That Can Grow Quickly
> I hadn't considered the >100% tax rate on the impoverished, either. I wasn't even aware that this happens - it sounds absolutely horrific, and should be abolished posthaste if it's anything like you describe.

It's a > 100% marginal tax rate. Emphasis on "marginal".

It happens every time the government decides to give something to the poor. A person that just crosses over the criteria used to determine who is poor has a >100% tax rate over that extra income. That means, if they work more they lose money - something called "poverty trap" because it effectively entraps people into poverty.

The solution to avoiding it is to simply give the money for everybody, and create a progressive tax that gets it back from the richer people. Or, in other words, basic income.
I noticed a family in an airport a while ago --- the parents and the two children were all engrossed into their own mobile phones. I felt very sad and have since then trying to reduce my mobile phone consumption.

I do take a lot of photos with a DSLR in the name of photography, but sometimes I wonder whether I am missing the bigger picture (though I do think I am a better observer and appreciate nature/beauty/patterns etc. better since starting photography).
Events like this are a reminder of why technology like Tor and I2P are so important. When I was working in China, I was surprised by the number of people that were aware of Tor and those that I introduced it to were thrilled to have their freedom back. In Thailand, I found it installed in Internet cafe's to access blocked sites.
360pi (Ottawa, Canada)

For those who are interested in big data, working with the top retailers, crawling the web and the latest technologies.

Some of the open positions:

- Lead Development Representative
- User Experience Designer
- Webkit Crawler Developer
- Data Import Developer
- Implementation Developer
- QA Automation Developer

Message me if you're interested or apply through http://www.360pi.com/about-us/careers.aspx
somebody -- namely the person who down-voted this --
seems to have a very thin skin, and evidently is not
able to take my advice. oh well, such is life, i guess. :+)

-bowerbird
Nphysics – 2 and 3-dimensional rigid body physics engine in pure Rust