skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ski bum and surfer bum is a decision. Living on the margins of what used to be a middle class isn't. For the vast majority of people in the US, they're working longer hours for less pay, and, as the article says, less vacation.

The idea here at HN is that we can create and do things so that we aren't the paper-pushers and moist robots that make up the 'normal' workforce. In past economic times, their hope for those of us that could make life more productive for the gen. pop. was that we were able to make life 'better' for the majority and able to have much more quality of life than quantity. Even if you are 'allowed' your average 8-10 days vacation how disconnected are you really? A lot of people I know are required to have their phone on or be ready to respond to an email request if it comes in.

A real vacation like in Europe (where many countries equal or better US productivity) might be good for the US economy in general. Talk to anyone that is a creative, that ruminates on new things, and you'll find that most ideas come at the least time of thinking (the shower, a random walk, etc). When we're relaxed and living and letting our conscious slide a bit that sometimes we're at our best in coming up with the greatest thoughts.
> It is a simple fact than many people (especially those aged 50+) are basically not re-educable.

This is nonsense. It greatly exaggerates a small age-related difference in the acquisition of new skills.

I have five Android apps on Google Play, I picked up Android programming over the past two years in my spare time with no great difficulty, and ... wait for it ... I'm 68.

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=paul%20lutus&hl=en

So much for your appeal to simple facts.
Mike Moritz, Chairman of Sequoia. Aaron Levie, Box  Charlie Rose
I've often said that English is to programming as Latin is to medicine. Programmers will be writing "if" statements and "for" loops long after no one uses "if" or "for" in daily conversation.

So it is as important for programmers to understand English as it is for doctors to understand Latin. Of course, most doctors may understand Latin, but they wouldn't be able to converse in Latin. In that sense, English is also the programmer's lingua franca.

That term -- lingua franca -- is an interesting one. In addition to being used as a colloquialism for "a common language" it was also, itself, a language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca . Just as Lingua Franca eventually took on a life (and grammar and vocabulary) of its own, I expect "hacker English" will, over time, do the same. In fact already my (English-speaking) wife thinks that I'm speaking a foreign language half the time when I'm talking with colleagues over Skype.

It's less important to know "English", and much more important to speak, converse, and communicate with other hackers using the lingua franca of the day.
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(1) Have freedom of the press so that the press can put out the information needed for an informed citizenry.

At the time the bill of rights was written, the term "press" did not refer to any sort of news organization. It meant a literal press - the idea was that publication by anyone with the means to publish was not to be restricted.

Nowadays everyone has the modern equivalent of a press so it is unfortunate that the meaning of "press" has been narrowed to a poorly-defined set of semi-official news distributing organizations.
There is a difference between reading and speaking English.

While my spoken english isn't very good I'm able to read advanced technical books, manuals, news, and other texts without any problems.

I rarely have the opportunity to speak english. That's the problem.
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In the first case, is it voluntary if the shop owner fails to point out that the brand I do want is there, but is hidden? How about if I explicitly ask him for it? Or if I am clearly an uninformed water customer, and don't know that the brand of water I am buying is nowhere near as good quality as the other brand he hasn't told me about?

For the other two cases I agree with your assessment, though I'm not sure that it is strictly "rational to extend basic good will to others". I do think that is the right course of action, I just don't think it is rational. That kind of behaviour is rational in situations where it might be reciprocated, but when no-one is going to know either way, I think that good will is only extended as a cultural artifact (which is a very good thing!)
I know that many programming languages (for example C), have long had tokenizers that are non-English. So the language is the same, the words are different.
Why not rewrite it? - it's a good exercise, gave him another arrow in his programming quiver and gives people who prefer python the option to use it in python rather than ruby.
When I was learning Basic in school, I wasn't really caring/realizing that all of the keywords can actually be translated to Russian, I was just learning them by heart like proper nouns. On the other hand, seeing languages with syntax in Russian (like the scripting language in 1C CRM) always makes me smile ("so ugly, unusual and funny").
Indeed. More like, the person that has recorded your encrypted message probably won't be able to read it until they're able to get a hold of the session key, perhaps by gaining physical access to yours or the receivers phone, or by installing malware on either phone, or because of a flaw in the (p)rng that was used to generate the key.

It is open source, so at least it is trivial to create a clone that interops flawlessly, while copying off plaintext to a third party (That's not a flaw with the project as such, but it is a risk with using "security" software in general -- how do you verify the security software? In some ways this is made worse by app stores -- because they delegate trust away from the user and into obscurity; the appstore assures you that the app you installed is the app someone uploaded -- not that it does what you think it does).
Cant agree more. These days, I lead and train a dev team here at codersquare in Vietnam. For recruitment, English skills, esp reaing + writing are weighed as much as technical skills. And I provide English lessons on a regular basis as well.

Can't really emphasize enough the importance of English in software. I've had bad experience with devs with weak English skills.

1. Can't google for the right terms so normally finding a solution takes 3 times longer than a dev with proficient E skills.
2. Can't name functions/classes or comment properly thus producing bad qualiry code.
3. Misunderstand requirements sometimes. This one can be very costly.
4. Takes much longer time to study new stuff.

2cents
You are still talking about absolute poverty, not relative poverty. If somebody got seriously ill and could no longer afford food, for example, then that's not just relative poverty, they actually have a serious problem.

As for "running as fast as you can just to stay in the same place", well that depends. Why would I need to advance? I already have everything I need. I don't work at all, and disasters aren't likely to be much of a problem since I don't have a lot of expensive assets to lose. If I ever need healthcare I can use a government scheme (I don't live in the USA btw). So in this regard, you could say my lifestyle is partly subsidised by the government.
I vaguely remember Linux Torvalds saying he developed linux in English, and it didn't really occur to him to develop it in Finnish, since English is a better language for dealing with technical issues.

From my (potentially quite flawed) understanding, English, French, and German are all good languages for capturing technical concepts, but English won out in general, simply because it's much bigger - more native speakers (thanks USA) and more widely spread (thanks British colonialism).
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It's been quite ironic to me. 'losing an accent' or rather, 'gaining an American accent' to 'speak English', or rather 'American English'. That said, I've seen people from the USA move to England and over several years they started speaking better English with less of an accent.
I'm taking this as a very tenous opportunity to quote
a scene from The Simpsons where the country bumpkin character says:

"I only speak good ol' american, if it's good enough for Jesus it's good enough for me"
The existence of the data would be enough to infer a relationship that shouldn't exist at all.
One thing I found can be helpful is to imitate a native speaker, as if you are doing an impression of them. I think there is a part of us which remaps phenomes from a foreign language in to our mother tongue, which creates the accent. However, if you imagine you are mimicing someone, like a comedian, a different mental process happens and you replicate more of the nuances.

When I was trying to learn Mandarin I had the good fortune to get instruction from a friend who is a native speaker and a concert pianist.

In order to teach the tones (chinese uses pitch to make vocabulary distinctions) she convinced me to sing the words. She literally wrote the tones out on staff paper (i am also a musician) and i treated the phrases as little songs. It worked surprisingly well.

I realized that it was really hard to make myself speak that way. I felt ridiculous singing at people. In a certain sense it felt artificial, as if I was making fun of them. But I think that is what it takes to start the process of speaking new sounds. You have to let go of "your" voice and "your" way of speaking, which is rooted in your native language's sound, and almost assume a character who sounds like a different person.

Full disclosure: I don't remember much Mandarin anymore. But if i were learning Spanish I would try the same thing. I would imagine myself as a Spanish dude and "put on a Spanish accent" as if I were acting in a movie.
BI isn't so much of a radically new idea because nearly all if not each and every (at least non-developing) country in the world already does provide some sort of welfare and/or unemployment benefits.

Currently this is generally done in a highly inefficient manner though dozens or hundreds of different subsidies and benefits, and it costs a lot to process everything through a thick wall of bureaucracy, and it still ends up being unfair and unmotivational to many. The canonical class of problems is that it doesn't make sense to work because your benefits received would drop in direct proportion to what you get paid. Or it's simply forbidden work even a little in order to be eligible to receive benefits.

The point of BI is to redistribute the already redistributed money in a fair and simple way: everyone gets something that may or just may not be enough to live on its own, but there are no questions asked and if you work on top of that, you scoop most of the extra money to yourself after taxes.

If you're really, really a scrooge you might just make it with the BI only if you're willing to drop your standard of living a couple of decades back. But most people want more money and they'll work for it, if it's five hours a week or 20 hours a week, and they don't lose BI if they do. For any middle-class adult, BI would simply translate into a slightly lower tax rate. They would still get $500 of BI per month or so, but because they would make $5000 per month in salary on top of that the significance of BI would be marginal.
It's funny that you mention it - I would say that using "the", "a" and "an" might be the most difficult task for me when I try to speak English. I tried to learn the rules but it seems to me that there are so many rules with so many exceptions that I am unable to get it right - it feels overwhelming and I am never sure whether I used it right or not. I cannot grasp the concept intuitively. Any trick to overcome this would be greatly appreciated.
The money that Twitter makes is the tax dollars.

All productivity and excellence is used now to fuel an organization which punishes those who are productive and excellent.
Essentially, by keeping the basic income guarantee sufficiently low that most people don't want to do that. Note that having everyone want to work is not necessary or even necessarily desirable, you just need to be able to maintain a low enough dependency ratio that the working people don't have to sacrifice much more than what they gain from such system.

I personally think that the employment market for next few decades will continue to be characterized by endemic structural unemployment. We will continue to destroy jobs faster than they are created, through automation and efficiency improvements. What's going away especially quickly are the "middle-difficulty" kind of jobs -- between highly trained specialists and burger flippers. For a simple example, self-driving cars will soon revolutionize long-distance trucking. They won't eliminate the jobs completely, but they will significantly reduce their number. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the USA. How do you retrain a 55-year old truck driver to be a software engineer? If you can't, should he go work at Burger King for a much lower wage instead? Maybe as a society we could just allow people like him the possibility of not working at that point?
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Fewer sysadmins compared to previously. And sysadmins with lesser political capability.
Don't bother, they are just yet another resume black hole.
great list! thanks
Let the few people who are content with being modestly poor be.
About 1. it is so true. When I was the first developer at a startup in Stockholm I told my boss that we should really do all the documentation in English and only talk Swedish on the phone or in personal email. When starting we've only been me (from Germany) and two swedes, my boss and the guy with the money.

The first person we hired (that is besides me) was a Spaniard who didn't speak Swedish. The second was also Spanish and didn't speak Swedish either. The third was from Ukraina, she spoke Swedish quite ok already. And this went on in this direction, Norwegians, Greeks, more Spaniards, etc.

So our decision to go English all the way made hiring much much easier from the beginning and now English became the language half of the staff is communicating in even if you meet them in person.
I don't think you've got the right understanding of why people are against sw patents. The argument is that applying an idea to a slightly different domain already provides enough value that it doesn't need to be encouraged by patent protection. I don't hear many people saying it has little value. The number of companies supporting themselves completely on the proceeds of selling key-value store software and services trivially shows that there is a lot of economic value in non-innovative implementations of ideas.
Uncommon, sure, but still correct. Myself, I like "who'd've" and similar. Never seen in written English, but quite common in spoken English. Who'd've thought you could put two apostrophes in the one contraction? :)
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Thats a great way to encourage the employees to work harder. anyone disagree?
C++ templates are Turing-complete
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> I guess I was influenced by Lisp at the time, with car, cdr, cdar, cddr, etc ;-)

You saw that naming scheme and thought "wow, that's sensible"?!
TechCrunch should just make a deal to officially syndicate the big startup stories from AllThingsD instead of scrambling to reword the news they break.
> I am from Pakistan. When I tell colleagues to master English, they think I am still mentally under British imperialism.

They're not wrong. It's just that you're right.

If they're bothered by the imperialism, then they should get to work translating.
On the one hand, fewer sysadmins means fewer chances for a Snowden to turn up among them. On the other hand, it means, should a Snowden turn up among the residual personnel needed to implement the automation, he/she can do even more damage.

However, this is neither here nor there, since automation is hard, and Alexander the Geek can't make it happen simply by giving an order, despite his four stars. But promising it is a way for him to explain himself after getting caught with his pants down. See, Congress! We recognize we have a problem. But trust us, we have a plan! We have a solution! Not.
Universal Analytics has a built-in feature for cookie-less tracking already: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

Edit: I guess this is what the OP's link is actually using.
Kind of off-topic question but:
Could you provide any option to contact you? I have a couple of questions with regards to MUMPS and I'd like to - if possible - drop you an e-mail.
I didn't make a request nor did I ever pretend to know the answer.

What I do know though, is wanting someone's job to be automated soon so she can pursue her hobbies on some personal hope for a basic income, which there isn't a historical precedence for either, is not something she should be excited for.
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I did something like this using C++ template metaprogramming, which means you can make use of the compiler to figure out the types for you, and you just have to write class templates to produce the English description. It's described at http://blog.asymptotic.co.uk/2011/02/c-type-declaration-deco... , although somewhere along the line the markup got corrupted so the code samples don't quite render correctly.
It's even better for netflix. They has the technology to allow directing decisions , small and big, be decided by data :

http://gigaom.com/2013/07/25/at-netflix-big-data-can-affect-...
Depends if a gpupdate /force has been done or not
But humans aren't just satisfied with being alive. They all have hopes and dreams; they have needs, sure, but also wants. We need food but we also need some pride. It may not make sense to you, it may not seem logical, but it's human. Lottery tickets are a way to have hope: that it's going to be ok one day, better than ok. A smart phone says, I may be cleaning toilets but that's not who I am.

If you spent a year or more working a minimum wage job and living off of it, you too would start to do some of this. It's just human nature.
Hmm, I still don't see it. Can bitwise OR be implemented with just MOV?
I think you missed the boat on some of that delicious sarcasm, there, pal.

Just a friendly reminder, folks: always remember to close your sarcasm tags. Some people only understand well-formed XML.
I once had a job interview at Opera (the browser) in Oslo. They said: "Ok we want you to work here, but you _really_ need to improve your English." That was a couple of years ago and it was literally the first time I spoke more then one sentence in English in a conversation outside of School, haha :D Since then I did improve it quite a lot.
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I remember in high school they simply used a header file that redefined the keywords of the language in french.

Something like "#define SI if" #define "TANT_QUE while" etc...
Cliches like this are OK. What really annoys me is that the top rated comment is invariably a straight-forward contradiction of the original article's thesis. Like this comment here.
http://xkcd.com/1053/

For each of these irritants, perhaps someone has just recently discovered them and is keen to appear knowledgable the next time the debate comes up.

If I had my way, a comment that matched something like /^This\./ would result in an immediate hellban. I don't know why this particular habit annoys me so much.
Occasionally there're ones that're both; The worst case is when they're both, and also key parts of production infrastructure.
Cool idea, although I expect everyone who understands the English version would also have understood the C version.
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On the other hand, now their wages are entirely disposable income, right?
Can't talk for everyone but I always use English in all my code for everything (Variables, Database, Filenames etc.)
Because it's a real pain to be consistent otherwise. In the beginning I used to write parts of my code in German because I thought it would be easier to understand but it just made my life harder in the long run because I had to deal with inconsistencies all the time.

And after my initial trouble with some special characters like the French accents (é, è, à etc.) and the German umlauts (ä, ö, ü) I made myself do everything in ASCII.

General rule is: Code and back-end stuff 100% English and only basic ASCII characters. Front-end in UTF-8/LAT1 but when possible avoid placing special chars in code (example ü in HTML only as &uuml; not as ü)
Recently I read Pinker's "Better Angels" [1]. Using archeological records, he argues that dying from a violent death was extremely likely in hunter gatherer societies.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature
Good catch. GA added this after we came up with our solution. We are using custom Javascript code that uses Measurment Protocol to send data to GA.

EDIT: Client Id still needs to be generated for Google's Analytics.js. In my experience, the approach we took for that works quite well without using complicated browser foot-printing.
> do modern languages support Unicode for things like variable names?

They do, but there's not much point in taking advantage of it outside of string literals: you're risking someone whose environment isn't set up to handle it coming in and getting barfed over for... what marginal benefit, really?

I googled "unicode variable names" and got this: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Unicode_variable_names
I had a strange notion recently that if you were to drop the average person (not an Einstein or a Hawking) and dropped them into say the 1500s Europe.

Most people think we'd be regarded as super smart and awesome. This comedian explains most people don't know crap[1], we only know the high-level.
I think that even if we could find things we understand to teach it would be largely not viable (how much stuff around us requires machines and precision?) and likely wouldn't reach any audience to become a mainstream idea (even above people thought it ridiculous that germs exist).

I think we'd find people of any time to have clever methods to do their tasks and we'd learn from them and become indistinguishable from the average guy at the time.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVxOb8-d7Ic
I think what you're talking about is a different problem. Terse and clear code that solves precisely the problem it means to solve is a good thing, provided the overall design of your system is flexible. If you design the proper components for an adaptable system, making each component terse should make maintenance simpler.
I think English is also easier than many languages.
I wonder: isn't that becoming true for all knowledge work?

With the great university courses available in english(MOOC), best web content both formal(research journals) and informal(forums/sites) available in english, And tools usually give error messages in english ,doesn't english give huge advantage in most knwoledge areas ?
This is one of those Poe's law moments for me. I can't tell if you're doing a parody or just believe a crazy thing.
The conclusion is worth reading.

"As long as someone else implements the compiler."
Typical british humor.