skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is not about robotics, it's about cheap labour displacing expensive labour through outsourcing and companies capturing some of the vast difference in cost. Which also means it's temporary, since incomes (and thus costs) rise in the poorer countries, and any excess margin eventually will get competed away.

That said, since "temporary" here may well last several generations, there's plenty of societal upheaval ahead.
It won't. Inject too much robotics and we will have no money to spend on their products. The wheel must keep spinning. If the human labor is replaced by robotics everywhere we, as humans, will have no earnings and without any income the market will freeze as demand will go down as well. All I can say, we're living interesting times.
I typed in https://news.ycombinator.com/ and it removed the https:// from my query. http and https are not the same URL, and in particular may have different "blocked" statuses!

Also FYI: it gave an error when I entered this HN submission, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6666214
Not exactly the same. Guaranteed minimum incomes are conditional: as you make more money, they phase out. This makes them significantly cheaper than basic incomes, which you get regardless of how much money you make. The former makes more sense on the face of it, but it exposes workers to very steep marginal tax rates when they're trying to move from the underclass to the middle class. Trap enough people in the underclass, and the apparent cheapness of the guaranteed minimum income no longer looks so cheap.
It requires extremely few reviews in the app store to get an average. This app had not yielded an average yet. Glad the writer is not breaking even with this yet.
Context - Visualize your design ideas
I think we all know the precedent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

And yeah, if it gets really bad, violent protest is just a more extreme continuation of unions.
pure gargbage
I haven't taken them very often, but I have had a couple really great experiences with the M15 1st/2nd Ave SBS. Due to cascading traffic lights, efficient boarding, and wide spacing between stops, it's almost as nice as taking the subway.
>>What would really interest me ... vers 6 to vers 7<<

All the measurements are in CVS so you actually could get at measurements for different versions.

>>What would really interest me ... alternative JVMs<<

Please take the program source code and the measurement scripts and publish your own measurements --

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.php#languagex

>>what is the delta when I move an identical benchmark from a Debian box running -i386 to -amd64<<

Just open 2 web browsers and look ;-)

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/measurements.ph...

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32q/measurements.ph...
I recently switched to Ubuntu from FreeBSD because of driver support problems (i.e. not willingly) and here's my take:

* Unity: I don't see what the big deal is. Granted, it's a subjective thing. As someone who generally dislikes DEs and would normally use just a tiling window manager maybe I don't appreciate the finer points in DE wars. I've been reluctant to install Xmonad because of the fear of what might break, and I have to say I've had no particular annoyances with Unity which I wouldn't have with any other desktop environment. Indeed, all the annoying stuff actually comes from GNOME components that they left. I find the Dash and HUD quite nice.

* Online scopes and advertising. In recent years I've come to the conclusion that a free (as in beer) general population friendly OS just isn't going to happen. The work needed to polish things to compete with Windows and OS X in this aspect is extremely boring. No hacker (or even average programmer) is going to spend his free time doing that. You have to be paid to do it. The money has to come from somewhere, thus advertising. I'm not a big fan this, but what Canonical is doing is at the moment our best shot of having a viable desktop OS which just works and lets you get on with your life (and even Ubuntu isn't there yet). And you can disable it with a single switch. Big deal.

* Shuttleworth trolling people... Well, it's certainly legitimate to not want to use an OS developed by a company owned by a person who says controversial stuff, but I don't see the technical angle. For example, is OS X better of worse because Jobs was a strange type? And as for Mir (that's what the issue revolves around), if Mir is a bad idea Wayland is also a bad idea. You just can't think Wayland is all peachy and Mir a horrible thing because they both basically do the same thing. All the talk about splitting the community (what community would that be?) makes no sense -- if Canonical decided they need complete control of their graphics stack it's a legitimate decision, and no one has any moral ground to attack that decision. In developing Mir they are not interfering with Wayland in any way, they are simply not participating. (BTW, I don't think either Wayland or Mir are good ideas, we'll end up with the situation we have in OS X, where X can be tacked on when necessary, and it is often necessary, with who knows what kind of crappy support.)

I'm no fan of Shuttleworth or Ubuntu, I really just don't care about either on any emotional level, but I'd like a FOSS OS which is also free as in beer AND just works on the desktop and lets me get on with my work and life. After you get to a certain age in life, fiddling with the OS gets old real fast.
Marx predicted it long time ago.

"According to Marxist analysis, class conflict within capitalism arises due to intensifying contradictions between highly-productive mechanized and socialized production performed by the proletariat, and private ownership and private appropriation of the surplus product in the form of surplus value (profit) by a small minority of private owners called the bourgeoisie."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism
Jason Cohen a.k.a "asmartbear" blogs regularly and he was the CEO of WPEngine before handing over the reins to a new CEO.
The most appropriate reply is http://mybfolder.com/picture.php?id=971 I think ;)
PLATO (computer system)
Good idea - right now, the best proxy for this is to look at the % of clients who re-hire and their comments. While I agree that 5 star systems across the Internet are inflated, I always use rehire % and really scour the comments when hiring on Elance.
The comments in this code are very sparse. It's easy to think "this code is obvious and needs no explanation" when it's your own code. But even if I can tell what the code is doing, a comment explaining why is a big help in understanding context.

I'm guilty of this in my projects, and one of the things that helps me understand better what and how to comment things is to run the code through something like Pycco or related side by side doc generator.

I use Pycco on my systemverilog code and it works nicely and has greatly improved my comments too.
Security, for one. It is much harder for a web app to key log your phone than to a native app.
Direct link http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/10/more-nsa-leake...
I think there are quite a lot of studies showing that discrimination is indeed occurring. But if I allow myself to speculate, maybe that is for the average man vs the average woman. This was presumably a highly attractive woman.
> Robots aren't going to be cooking anyone a six course meal or directing the next Star Wars movie any time soon

Of course they won't be directing Star Wars - although a case might be made that that would be preferable - but I don't see any reason almost all cooking will not be done robotically 10 years from now. Hell, try and buy a non-sous-vide steak these days. That's a dramatic step towards automatic cooking right there.
I do enjoy reading 42Floors posts that get linked here, and of course SVN by 37Signals.
I got a refund from BFL well outside the 60 day window by using the 'nuclear option': the PayPal executive escalations team. It's been months and they still haven't gotten close to shipping orders around the time I put mine in.

I'm kinda sad that I won't be mining glorious coins. I guess it's a bullet narrowly missed.
Prolog was on my list of "neat to learn languages" but I never got around to it.

Any Prolog fans here to sing its praises?
If you want JSON output, then there is httpbin.

curl https://httpbin.org/ip

returns

{
"origin" : "192.168.0.1"
}

It also supports getting the user agent [0] and headers [1], among other things.

[0] https://httpbin.org/user-agent
[1] https://httpbin.org/headers
ghost on digital ocean FTW. I stood up mibileappstack.com in minutes .
"Silicon is Perishable": With all of the computing power perishing, I wonder if outdated hardware could be bought on the cheap and used for some non-financial projects. Could this become a boon for malaria research, SETI, or some of the other non-profit research programs out there?
What's the problem you're trying to solve, first off?
What else are coffee shops for?
> This is why I think it be important to have a language designed to express algorithms and can be verified of correctness to a certain point.

Do you mean math?
The Global Netflix Platform (2011)
I've found ifconfig.me to be excruciatingly when I actually need it. Like takes 10-30 seconds for a response just to get my IP. Sucks that someone got the vanity domain and put a shitty server behind it.
That time has already passed. Mining rate isn't going to get any better than the ASICs available now. I think the turning point was around August or September. Though if the exchange rate is at least $400 or $500 per bitcoin, that would change for a little while.
As it is, I find it hard. If you stick to bundler/npm/etc would there be benefit it not only notifications but an automatic update feature? Tie it to git where possible to have a "newest" branch that keeps this out of master and/or tie it with the likes of Travis CI to make sure things didn't break. There's almost too many moving parts but I see high value in keeping a project on the latest dependencies without much involvement from myself. Its not foolproof though and may be too error prone to pull anything off without pulling your hair out.
It wasn't ASUS that got slapped down, it was Acer. ASUS, Samsung, Huawei (and probably others beyond Lenovo) have had no trouble distributing AOSP-based products without Google services. Acer's situation was different for two reasons:

1. Aliyun (Acer's partner in this) was distributed pirated apps via their app store, including pirated Google apps: http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/09/15/aliyun-app-store-con...

2. Google claimed that the Android-based OS that Acer and Aliyun had built did not pass the standard Android compatibility tests, in violation of Acer's agreements with the Open Handset Alliance (a prerequisite for their license for the various Google apps). I'm not sure if a third-party verified this claim before the project was killed, but it's plausible. And we do know that most of the non-Google products OHA members distribute in China should pass those same tests. They're usually the same as products the member is selling outside China with Google services, with the exception of China-specific radios.
here's a discussion on zhihu.com (in Chinese): http://www.zhihu.com/question/21951887
$100/mo from http://assembleyourpc.net - a simple tool for assembling pc online.
Is it proven, yet, that the simplex algorithm has a smoothed polynomial complexity? Last thing I remember, there were still looking for a variant of the simplex that had that property. (The ellipsoid method and inner point methods are already proven to be polynomial, so we do know that linear programming is polynomial.)

> Its worth noting that smoothed analysis only really makes sense on algorithms where perturbing the input only changes the answer a little bit, so you need some sort of "numerical stability" style property for the underlying algorithm one way or another.

Aren't there discrete alternatives available?
IMO the entire health-food, dieting, naturopath industry is a placebo for lazy people who will try literally everything and anything to avoid exercise.
what are some differences between this and chocolatey?
Yes, spot instances are significantly cheaper than even reserved instances. For example, a 3-year heavy utilization cc2.8xlarge instance costs $0.49/hr (with $10K up-front!), whereas its costs only $0.27/hr on the spot market (with nothing up-front). Your spot instance could run happily for several days or it could get killed 5 minutes later if there's a price spike. You have to accept uncertainty in exchange for the cheaper price.

Combining reserved instances with spot instances in the same pool can be a good strategy because you get cost-savings while also maintaining a minimum capacity. You can also spread spot instances over different availability zones, since spot price varies across zones.

FYI, I created an app that charts spot prices over time across various instance types, regions, and availability zones:

http://ec2price.com/
This is so wrong it is ridiculous. Take this example. In 1959 it took one month of an average income to buy a Sears washer dryer. In 2012, it took less than 4 days average income to buy a far, far better washer dryer. http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/appliance-shopping-1959-vs-...
Except you had all those pesky FinCEN forms to fill out, right?
Have you read the article? The proportion of GDP paid out to labour vs capital had been stable for quite some time. So the answer to your question is: almost all the time so far.
the flat fee is not the only spot where money is made on these transfers. the big one is giving you a bad rate (so effectively the bank takes a percentage anyway). also they make money through holding your cash rather than transferring straight through.
From the excellent UR essay [1]:

Okay, let's apply a gross reality check. You're an alien. You're
observing Earth with an infinitely powerful telescope from Alpha
Centauri. You have a simple question. Since 1950, has human
civilization - or American civilization, which amounts to pretty much
the same these days - advanced or declined?

Apparently the easiest way for Sam Altman to answer the question is to
trade it for a different one. He is not alone in this. He asks:
since 1950, has human technology advanced or declined? Clearly, the
alien, you, I, and Sam Altman all have the same answer to this
question.

Any question with an obvious answer is a stupid question. "Is an iPad
more advanced than a Smith-Corona?" is a stupid question. Who asks
stupid questions? Obviously, blithering idiots.

But we can compose an interesting question by factoring out the stupid
question. Which world would Sam Altman rather live in? 2013, with
iPads and teh Internet? Or 1950 - with iPads and teh Internet?

In a sense, this 1950 is just as real as the "real" 1950. Neither
exists. Sam Altman cannot pack his bags and move to either the real
1950 or my imaginary super-1950. Both exist only as thought
experiments. It is not hard to construct or define the super-1950,
though - one run of a time machine, with a printout of Wikipedia,
would be pretty much all the real 1950 needed. Send the technology
back to 1945, and you'll have iPads by '55 at the latest. Those guys
got things done.

The interesting (and scary) question this thought-experiment asks is
whether, aside from technical progress, human civilization has
advanced or declined since 1950. In actual reality, this too is a
stupid question. The answer is no less obvious - I assert.

[1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/sam-...
I think that may be the joke. Though this is the text, so I'm not sure.
OP didn't make a loss on Bitcoin. He made a loss on Butterfly Labs.

Consumer mining these days is only profitable for narrow windows — you need to take delivery of one of the first miners in a new ASIC generation to have a chance.

It's much smarter to invest in Bitcoin directly.
For what? Living deserves an income? Can I opt out?
Why u mad?
Reminds me of LOLCODE [1]

[1]http://lolcode.org/
Is there something significant in 3.12?
That's a great situation in which to use a class: state you don't want to pass in every time it's used. It doesn't seem to connect to the idea of a decorator, though. Rather than decorating the function, why not just make it a method of the state-managing class? Or if it shouldn't be so closely coupled, why not just pass it the result of invoking a different method of the class?

I don't imply that there isn't a good example of a decorator that should be a class. I just don't think we've seen one on this thread yet.
It took one worker in the household to pay the bills...

While the "other worker" sat around and had her nails done? No. There's a reason women joined the work force en masse, and it was because the money they could make and the satisfaction they could attain in the work force was worth more to them than whatever value they produced scrubbing floors and steaming vegetables. Was that a mistake? I don't think any of the working women I know would say so. Why leave money and fulfilling work on the table?

This nostalgia is absurd. Look around. Go ahead and even ignore whatever revolutionary device you're using to browse HN. Ignore whether you're black or Hispanic or Asian. Ignore your extra eight years or so of life expectancy. How much of the modern world simply disappears if you remove what wasn't available in 1963? And if debt is the catastrophe waiting to happen that you seem to believe that it is, you will be comforted by the fact that Americans have decreased their indebtedness by over a trillion dollars since 2008.
17 Equations That Changed The World
I think the OP was referring to the chef's work in designing courses and menus more so than the manual labor of cooking.

That aspect of restaurants, of course, is a creative endeavor, as is directing a film.
Great post! ;)
The user agent is useful for debugging. If users of a certain browser never submit a form, the site owner needs to know.

Anyway, feature testing and benchmarking can be used to create a user agent fingerprint. Hiding the user agent header just keeps it "secret" for a few weeks until the big trackers all switch to fingerprinting.

Just give up on hiding identifying information. The promiscuous model used by web technologies is not securable. For instance, timing analysis can be used to determine which sites you have recently visited.
Are you questioning your operating assumptions enough?
I understand where you're coming from, I'm not so sure though.

Everything that isn't housing, healthcare, or higher education is vastly cheaper today than it was before. Food especially.

The 1960s was also the same time that rivers were so polluted they were catching fire. That would never happen today- and that has a cost associated with it. Your food is significantly safer. So is your water. So is your air. So is the building you're reading this in.

There is vastly less crime. This has been expensive- we've locked a lot of people up to get there, and paid lots of money to police. The mafia is basically gone, and modern criminal organizations are pretty limited in scope north of the border. There are still bad places in the US, but there are awfully few no-go zones.

Media is better now. It's cheaper, it's broader, it's better, it's more democratic. This is true both for news and entertainment.

The national debt is a bullshit non-problem.
> From my experience FreeBSD documentation is often outdated and no longer applicable

You were using an open source project and as such feedback is critical. Can you list the bug report you filed on the problems?

> In my opinion incorrect documentation is worse than having no information as it often causes more problems and frustration.

That is your opinion of course. IMO experience, having outdated docs is much better than having none at all.
Is there a single example of arrogance in this entire article? My guess is the headline write/editor was having a bad day. I don't think that was the intent of the writer.
Have you ever bought a house? It's exhausting and expensive, and it's not as easy to "vote with your feet" after the neighbor decides to make his new place into a hotel. It's not like changing pharmacists. These protections exist for a reason.
1) the linked paper PROVES simplex has polynomial smoothed complexity. So yes, this paper proves it.

Interior points etc have polynomial worst case complexity, which is a different notion ;)

2) yes, theres discrete alternatives, but they're not as problem agnostic as "numerical stability"
Me? Perhaps 10 total between certificates of deposits, IRAs, my work 401k, a credit card, and some savings accounts, along with my regular "main" checking account.

It is really invaluable to figure out where I'm wasting money and can improve my spending habits.
The Prolog class I took in college wound up being one of my favorite classes (although I was alone on that amongst all of my friends).

I always liked the idea of declarative programming, it felt very natural when I first learned about it. That being said, I didn't have much use for Prolog after finishing that class. (I wrote one fairly small application at my first job, but really nothing else).

I think that if you're interested by any of the recent developments around the Kanrens (or Core.Logic if you're a Clojure programmer), you'll find yourself better served by at least having a passing familiarity with Prolog.

I also find that SQL feels to me quite a bit like Prolog (you have to sort of squint), and I find myself liking writing SQL way more than you're apparently supposed to from how much people complain about it online. That might have nothing to do with having learned Prolog, maybe my brain is just wired wrong.
I suggest googling "Goldman Sachs starvation".
I think the primary point is that the successful founders we can think of don't blog regularly. I could think of a few exceptions to this that have been mentioned in other comments (Freedman, Musk, Spolsky, etc). However of the exceptions even fewer blog on a regular basis.

There will always be exceptions to this and I hope people don't read remarks like Keith's as how-to guides. It's only a pattern that fits the mold. Don't think that your time is always too precious to 'share insights & experiences' as Hunter stated. That should have its time and place as well. It's very helpful to outsiders such as myself.
Yes. But you're not too late to make strawman comparisons to perishable commodities with low inherent value. That market is still quite strong.
It does feel a bit like the whole article is trying to justify the title. I think it should fall squarely under the Editorial byline...
As someone who travels to China fairly frequently I can say I've found this site to be inconsistent.

That said, different locations within China have inconsistently differing levels of blockage (for instance, you can access many more places from within the greater Shanghai area than from within nearby Hangzhou and can find differences in what is available between Hangzhou and Beijing) so I think it is difficult to definitely state that this or that site is completely unavailable from anywhere within China.
Perhaps ethical standards vary among different locations or specialties? That's certainly true in other fields besides medicine. Also, there is often a difference between stated ethical standards and the ethics implicit in common practice.

In my observation, physicians are as a whole more ethical than are many other occupations. However, they're still human.
So basically you have to micro-manage the project in extreme detail, which:
a) takes up a lot of your time; and
b) requires in-depth knowledge of programming tasks.

That doesn't strike me as a very useful arrangement. If the guy had that kind of time and knowledge in the first place, why wouldn't he just build it himself?