skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a Swiss I'm not completely opposed to the idea of basic income, I just think it's too early. Right now we still need most of the workforce to create our current level of wealth - our unemployed rate is pretty low, usually around 2-3%, and work efficiency is one of the best in the world - it's a well oiled machine where every cog still counts, including lower incomes. Even with the current GDP, paying that bill would be incredibly difficult, but I'd expect the GDP to even sink for some time, until positive effects can come in, making the whole thing a gamble with the well being of 8M people. Not worth it.

However, going some decades into the future the whole thing might look different. Given that we can manage to still gather the planets ressources without stagnating, uneducated jobs will become less and less important as more and more can be automated through robots, intelligent information systems such as Watson's successors and so on. At that point the ratio of revenue to salary will be extremely skewed towards highly educated jobs, making it (a) easier and (b) probably necessary to channel some of this wealth to insure everyone can keep up with education. Note that we already do that now through a wellfare system that allows anyone to get by and get a degree, even at the prestigous ETH Zurich (tuition 1400$/year). At some point a basic income may become cheaper than a welfare system, but that's not now.
The shutdown will not save money.

First, the shutdown does not affect expenditures. Those have already been voted in, and the shutdown will not retroactively change those allocations. Those that voted for the shutdown do not intend to revisit those allocations because they benefit from them just as much as anyone else involved in legislation. In particular the ACA already has the force of law as non-discretionary allocation.

Second, those of us who remember the first time through this particular political dysfunction in the ninties can do the math. It cost us a couple billion back then. This time it's going to cost us an estimated 2% of our GDP this year. If you do not understand the implications of that number, I'm not sure what to even type.

And that's assuming the political theater is concluded before the treasury starts defaulting on already sold bills as part of the debt ceiling fight. If that happens we enter a new global economic regime. The US will lose its astoundingly privileged place in the global financial markets as the lender of last resort. A very likely outcome is that Russia or China will ascend rapidly to become the world's foremost economic power for the next century or more.

The only people who benefit from this action are those who think they can loot the building while it burns.
But holy fuck, what a phone.

"You had me at scrolling."
> Maven is broken by design

It might be, but it still has it's merits. It was one of the first, and many other improved tools can't work without it's repositories.

I still like the IDE support for MVN: e.g. IntelliJ draws a nice dependency diagram that I find useful, even if I don't use Maven for something else in a project.

Maybe it's biggest mistake was that dependencies are global by default, and not local (like Node's NPM). If the dependency structure would have been local to a project, than many of the pain points I encountered with MVN in the past wouldn't have even existed.
I really, really hope Google buys the elliptic curve cryptography patents from Blackberry, and makes them public domain. ECC is the future of cryptography on the web, and we need them to be public domain. We may be able to work around them, but it's better to be safe than sorry.
you tax people on income, because they have the attachment to money they have not yet received. Also, it is a liquid payment, so the costs of re-distribution are lower as there is no illiquidity losses. If you tax property, then either you are taxing liquid income anyway, or you are forcing the sale of assets (the latter is inefficient, economically, because of asset specificty).
Relax, it was just a theory not an absolute declaration of my perfection.

It would be interesting to see accident statistics comparing left and right side roundabouts. Maybe there is a difference.
No. Unless you consider you'd be able to transform the team, either by education, or by replacement.
You're overlooking how expensive poverty is. I don't have numbers, but this may well end up being cheaper than the alternative.
Among other things, ludicrous speed, and a reasonably decent debugger.
Yeah, with 64-bit ARM chips and 4GB+ RAM devices coming out soon, it's time for Google to prepare an ARMv8-based SDK at least. They wouldn't need to support earlier hardware, since they're not that powerful anyway.
>and I think it is interesting it keeps getting passed over.

If you think it's being passed over then you need to try and generate interest in the language, like posting articles about it you find, or if you find none, write one.

Same goes for benchmarking, it's unlikely that people who aren't interested in the language will write benchmark-versions for that language so it's up to those who are interested in it to provide them.

Which is what someone did in the Rogue Level Generation Benchmark where I recall Nimrod performed very well.

http://togototo.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/benchmarks-round-tw...

From my own very cursory glance I'm not quite sure why you would compare Nimrod directly to Go, I think it's more aptly compared to something like Rust, with both having optional garbage collector, generics, macros etc.
Yes http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/d...
How many creatures does cats kill every year?
I'm very interested in trying out rubinius alongside MRI. I have two big questions, if anyone knows the answers:

Does anyone have any pointers on how to keep the latest RBX up to date in RVM?

Will heroku be supporting RBX's new weeklyish release cycle?
Do you have any citation to support your claim that Switzerland is not a high cost country ?

A simple google search shows Switzerland as one of the most expensive countries in the world. Usually following Norway or Denmark. So why am I factually incorrect?

I searched for 'worlds most expensive countries'. Maybe I did something wrong ?

Of course I know everyone doesn't live in Zurich but the average cost of living is still relatively high outside of Zurich/Geneva. Also, I mentioned in my initial post that this is a good deal so we are in agreement for the most part.
Americans frequently forget that they are a 4% minority on Earth.
Everybody who has experience with a computer that is.
There are many more people on Earth that were not exposed to the current paradigms of UI and they would benefit from sane symbols.
I wish China wouldn't be banned from cooperation on International Space Station. It's a warmongering decision, nothing else.
It doesn't matter. Nobody went to jail and everyone bought an iPhone. Who cares?
Luckily, there's a vast, vast array of options other than going to Silicon Valley. Any city decent sized city around the globe will have options available.

Outside of a couple critical mass areas in the US -- I'm thinking SV, greater Boston, NYC (just because everyone there is in their own little bubble ;) ) -- it's just another job.

And if you're not in the US, I wouldn't even know where this sort of SV halo exists.
Wow, I hope they vote no. I moved to Switzerland recently to avoid the dominant socialism in northern Europe. But they are one of the last liberal stands down here, so there is a good chance it will fall through.
As much as I like the idea of 200$ dev machines for students if they already have working laptops by far the easiest and uniform solution would be to distribute virtual box images, have students install virtual box and develop inside that, even that cheap Acer would be enough to run a ruby dev virtual box.

You can even install all ruby gems, packages and w/e you need for the class before you distribute it for convenience.
> It still annoys that tiling window managers all seem designed to be hard to use to configure

i3 really stands out. Instead of requiring user to hack with specific language (haskell for xmonad, lua for awesome.. )it has a simple config file with clear documentation.
I get your point, however is it really true to say that? If it were, people would sell the currency to get out while the going is good wouldn't they? How could it stay consistently over priced?
Top 15 Cheap, Safe and Friendly Countries | Kimeshan Naidoo
1- if other members of the team commited yesterday, and I can't pull in the morning, at least it's inconvenient, and at most it's blocking.

2- what good would that do to me to be able to create a new repo, from my outdated local copy, when the other member is not available in the morning to push his latest commits?

3- yes we could systematically push to several repos to reduce the risk. But if the boss was conscious of that risk, we would just avoid it entirely by having our repos on our own servers instead.
The text and GUI integration describes exactly why I fell in love with Linux. There is a GUI, but I will be damned if there are things (save some terrible GNOME cruft from personal experience) that cannot be facilitated the terminal commands and scripting. Around the same time in college as I discovered Linux and began really exploring, I started a sysadmin gig at school maintaining Winboxen, and the inability to script a lot of core stuff (this was before Powershell, but my opinion is little has changed beyond "this is the crap Microsoft thinks you should automate") is incredibly frustrating and what drove me to admire the utilitarian approach of Linux and other UNIX environments so so much. That is why Linux, *BSD, and even in a small way OS X make me really happy.

Oberon seems to harmonize both. That is very cool, and definitely would be an OS of choice for me.
About poorly paid boring jobs: either they're socially necessary and will command higher wages, or they're not worth it, and we'll manage without them.

The main interest of minimal income is to shift the power balance between employer and employees: today, most employees have a choice between complying and starving. Actually in many countries they have to do both. With minimal income, it becomes a choice between compliance and comfort rather than survival. Negotiation between them and their employers can happen again (people still value comfort)
It's interesting that most of the comments here are about the point that non-tech people hate silicon valley people. The most interesting part of this article for me was the fact that these companies are changing the world but not helping or contributing to their own local areas. As businesses are more easily able to reach a global market, rather than having to build from a small area and grow, they seem to be caring less about social responsibility. It would be interesting to see how something as simple as shutting down Twitter's free employee meals/snacks etc. and instead subsidising purchases at local businesses would affect the local area.
There are so many people excited about all these "equality" bills, and nobody criticizes it.

So I'll just leave it there:
http://paulgraham.com/inequality.html
Interesting that they are aiming to such high-spec systems. I guess they need the performance to run existing games at adequate speed. But trying to go to retail with a $1000 box (my guesstimate for i5-4570/gtx760 setup) will not be easy.
>> Imagine what it would cost IBM to keep people trained in building new versions of every product they've ever invented!

There's a reason the mainframe forward-compat date is 1964, it's so they don't have to!
Arduino Tre Sneak Preview
I'm using rcs for quick and dirty versioning of my config files. Very easy to do. Clean. Zero config. No dependencies. No fluff.
450W seems a little lean for a Titan...
2500CHF is just high enough to pay for the essentials. The United States is a lot cheaper than many parts of Europe.
A $30,000 designer leather handbag (they exist) is unaffordable for me. I could sell my car, cash in my bank account, give up my apartment, and live in a box on the street with my designer bag. But I'm not going to do that. That's always what "unaffordable" has generally meant.
The same with Chrome/Adblock/Ghostery.
Colorful Statement? Germany's Olympic Uniform Seen as 'Pro-Gay'
Is this for everyone? In other words, if you're working, is this on top of your income?
People hold CHF as a hedge against inflation and/or government defaults, not as a growth investment.
Remains to be seen. That's why it's a great idea that a small country like Switzerland might test out this at scale, because then we can see if the vocal opponents who use your argument are right.

You have a legitimate point, but I think a lot of the most vocal opponents of a basic income have a political agenda beyond wanting a system which is good for everyone.
Not to talk about an enormous spike in unemployment rate, just like in all other countries where you get paid money for not doing anything. I.e. in Denmark where I come from, we have 400.000 people - out of a population of 6mill - who gain nothing or very little from working, to a point where it don't make sense to work at all, compared to just receiving unemployment pay. And logically people opt to just not work.
I assumed I had missed a story. I've just run the oddest google search I've tried in the last little while.
Actual quote was "Burgernomics shows Switzerland has the most overvalued currency"

So, in terms of this limited real-asset convertability, yes it would be true (see footnote above).
Well it's not like the proposal is to divert 34% of the GDP into a black hole. A state cannot afford to divert 34% of its resources (materials, workforce, etc.) to build a fancy statue. But the only direct cost of this proposal to the economy is a small administrative overhead. All the resources that these 34% GDP represent are still there, unspent, in the hands of people.

We can argue of course about the indirect consequences to the economy, e.g. how it would affect the competitiveness of Switzerland if unpleasant jobs suddenly require a more attractive salary.
Try the integration, if you don't like it, you can always code it later ;)
Back-to-Basics Weekend Reading - Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router
Debugging Perl with hdb
I think it’s a crazy amount, but not necessarily wrong.

Mongo is the most popular NoSQL db

The interweb of the last 5-6 years created a large demand for JavaScript developers; this db (and or NodeJS) allows them to get into DB programming. Now that I think about that its like Windows did for OSes or Word for typing or HTML for web. So the growth potential is pretty large.

I think the best deal on a biz like this they can sign support contracts with an infinite number of customers to support their product, saving the customers money when shit breaks. That alone is a few million a year.
>How large is your sample size there? I have only seen -O3 in the default makefiles of audio/video encoders. Those tend to be a natural fit for -O3

Well I very much implied 'performance-oriented' programs as we where discussing 'performance' generated by compiler options, which indeed are a natural fit for -O3.

For which my 'sample size' would be software like encoders, archivers, emulators, 3d renderers etc.

Obviously there's little point in using -O3 on your text editor (yes, extreme example), basically for any non performance-oriented software -O3 will likely only serve to increase the binary size as any potential gains will be unnoticable.

>I wish! Packagers love to fool around with the upstream sources and makefiles to make them conform to whatever "standards" they have.

Not really my experience with Arch packages, but of course I haven't looked at the PKGBUILDS for even 1% of all available packages, basically only those performance oriented packages on which I rely.
Congratulations to Brian, Dirkjan and all the other people involved in Rubinius. This is great news, I'm looking forward to test my apps on Rubinius 2.0!
I agree they have the right to organise and speak like any other group.

I just wonder why they think they ought to be given any special consideration when it comes to policy making, or be able to use their status as law-enforcement officers (a group the public give weight to) to voice such opinions.
Furthering this issue, why does the U.S "ban" China from the ISS? NASA collaborate with Russia on the ISS pretty closely. So I'm unsure why China is anymore worse if we are talking about espionage...unless that's not what we're talking about.
>> Their argument was that weed charges gave them leverage on going up the ladder from the street-level dealers to higher-ups.

Very broken logic there. Could equally apply to anything that has been prohibited. About what I expected I guess :)
Dumb investors try to buy Twitter shares, instead invested in a bankrupt company
Ivy is "only" a dependency manager, you can't build stuff with it. Gradle was originally based on Ivy but they decided to roll their own Ivy/Maven compatible dependency engine.

Gradle is a very powerful engine: we use it not only to build Java/Scala/Groovy code but also to drive our continuous integration/deployment cycle.

Again, it obviously depends on your requirements, but if you have to deal with large and complex projects, with lots of submodules to build, do consider Gradle.
Show HN: UVA Solutions
C++ solutions of some UVA Problems I coded while training for ICPC.
270+ solutions and counting.
It would be great if people help in compiling all solution in one place.
I'd agree. Also cooling Titan+i7 in a tiny box might be a challenge. But on the other hand Anandtech measured whole system consumption for Titan being 430 watts including a 130+ watt CPU. Drop 50 watts off the CPU and it doesn't sound so bad for a 450 watt power-supply.

edit: Tech Report says 323 watts for whole system in their Titan review, so it's certainly feasible.
From the story, it seems NASA has no choice but to implement this despicable law. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I hope I am not.

I hope this kind of politics does not creep into other areas of American life.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Right now the cost of our social insurances is somewhere around 20% of GDP[1]. This covers all bases to enable any poor family to let their children escape poverty through education, thus minimizing structural poverty and its effects that will bite the USA in the coming decades.

The proposed basic income seems to come out at around 34%. Now tell me (a) what basic income will achieve more than what we have already in Switzerland and (b) how we should come up with the remaining 14%.

[1] http://www.pa.uzh.ch/news/NeueLohnreglemente/Sozialversicher... left column: percentage of salary paid by employee, right column: percentage paid by employer, so just add all those numbers up
The medical device tax is a good example of malicious bureaucracy. How can services be subsidized by the goods applied by the services?

The first-order cynical answer is that medical devices are primarily used by rich Republicans who can easily afford a few percent extra on their artificial knees. It requires no imagination to see why a left wing moonbat would vote for such blatant pandering.

The second-order cynical answer is that poor minorities have worse health, and a huge unfulfilled need for medical devices. Thus the device tax is a ghastly unintended consequence of well-meaning liberals.

The third-order cynical answer is that it is an intended consequence. They want Lashonda's artificial pancreas to pay for little Cindy's counseling. Much like lotteries exist to get poor people to send rich kids to college.

The fourth-order cynical answer is that the whole thing is secretly a ploy to generate plot material for someone's Dune/Washington, D.C. crossover fan fiction.
I know no more than I read in the last 10 minutes, so I have a question for you:

How serious is a referendum like this? When a government pushes a major change. They need to back it up with a lot of analysis. Where does the money come from? What the major economic impacts. What do the big businesses/industries/unions/Chambers of Commerce/ etc think of it.

The referendum system sounds like a good idea for issues that are mostly moral like abortion or gay marriage. They're all about what we think is right. This one is economic, its about feasibility and tricky second order effects. So basically what I'm saying is.. has anyone really checked that this actually possible?
9Gigs of disk space...
Rubinius 2.0 Released
Isn't it strange that one arm of the government, ie the NSA, can get PRISM and all their extremely complex surveillance and correlation programs up and running but these much simpler and more straightforward web sites are generally failures? If anything it speaks to the quality of work that Palantir does, and the government should get them to do all the work as opposed to IBM Global Services or Accenture. Imagine if IBM or Accenture developed PRISM? We would have nothing to worry about then since it would be a complete failures.
Good work.

Have you developed your own technology for this? Care to share how it works in a nutshell?
I wonder if they might bundle them with most Valve steam titles, so that people feel that they would get a lot for their money. (on the other hand a lot of the people excited for the SteamMachine probably owns a lot of Valve titles already)
Or maybe it's because you simply never hear about failures and shortcomings of such top secret systems. I am in fact quite sure that PRISM had its share of delays, annoying bugs and performance problems.
Is there a possibility of something like this for python? or is there already?
Yes.

The software engineers rather directly.

The others are there to support the software and other engineers.
I'm tempted to resort to hyperbole of my own, but suffice to say that if you work for a defense contractor, the fact that your job doesn't directly contribute to people being exploded does not absolve you.
Yes, this is unconditional and on top of any other income you get.
* > who would do boring, low-paid work with this sort of basic income *

Software and automation.
99.99% availability is almost always predicated on 24/7 uptime numbers, not 24/6 plus an extra 22 hours.

If you say to someone "We have four nines of uptime", and they ask how you apply kernel patches, and you say "oh we just do it during our 1% of downtime", they'll boggle at you, and for good reason.
This is great. Could there be an RSS or Atom feed?
PyPy?
http://pypy.org/
I looked at all these tools... Then carried on using Makefiles. Seriously, people, building has been a solved problem for decades. Let's all stop fooling around and concentrate on actually writing code!
Does this issue affect FreeBSD drivers as well?
LIMITLESS - New POP SINGLE
Implemented with a GC enabled systems programming language!
It's funny you should mention that last part, because that's exactly the situation in Denmark. We have in my opinion a waaay too high basic income, and there is a growing problem, with people who'd rather live on governement payouts, than get a job. And the nationalists are getting anxious about immigration, so there is a populist party that is against immigration, that is getting bigger and bigger support. It is overall a shitty situation.
James May (of Top Gear fame) got fired from Autocar magazine in the 90s for similarly smuggling a message into the magazine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JamesMayAutocar.jpg
I think it's an interesting idea. Worth trying in a small country with competent government where a cockup has no effect on me.