skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've already been through waves of technology even more dislocating than the one you describe.

If you told a farmer in 1813 that, in the future, less than 5% of the population would be needed to grow all the food, he would assume that the other 95% would be mostly unemployed and starving. But he would be wrong, for the same reason that you are wrong.

As long as there are unmet desires, there is necessarily more work to do. When increasing productivity frees up capital and labor, it gets applied to create entirely new industries. Just because you can't imagine what they might look like (any more than our 1813 farmer could imagine what many of us do for a living) doesn't make them any less likely.

It is a logical impossibility that technology throws the bulk of the population into poverty -- either they have access to all the cheap robotic goods, in which case they are not poor in any meaningful sense, or they don't have access to the cheap robotic goods, in which case the robots are not competing with them in their ability to sell to each other.
"The word angadia means courier in Hindi, but also designates those who act as hawaladars within India. These people mostly act as a parallel banking system for businessmen. They charge a commission of around 0.2–0.5% per transaction from transferring money from one city to another."

<= Wow I remember as kid, going to an "Angadia" office with my dad to transfer money. Didn't understand any of it back then.
Maybe, but being the kind of person to hustle your way into a job in a situation he described is pretty impressive in itself, and he showed a lot of savvy in a short space of time in gathering the intelligence to work out the pitch that meant they had to hire him.

So yes, 'showing up' a lot is very important, but it's not the only lesson I take from his story by a long shot.
We'll have to see how this goes! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6435993
Working with AngularJS + Rails-api
The 'the entirety of English society' didn't do squad exept keeping her and her kids from becoming homeless and living on the street. She helped herself become incredibly wealthy. Do you think it's easy to find a pubisher? Try finding one when you're an unemployed, uneducated mum.
You sleep an average of 12.5 hours per day?
Is there any way a normal person can give out a punishment for a crime, and let thereby take another person as an actual, lawful, slave?
> Uhhhh... Way to prove the point, man.

I am not SV.

The point I am trying to make is that it is irrelevant that SV comes across as arrogance. Certainly not worthy of a WSJ article. Similarly, you can say that the article comes from an arrogant mindset the same way.

Silicon Valley might be "arrogant", but that's not necessarily a "problem". The premise of the headline is incorrect -- and hypocritical to say the least.

> Forget nanotech, forget good old mechanical engineering, forget aerospace, forget biotech, forget electric, civil, geological engineering. Apparently those don't exist, and the only technology that matters is code.

I put "code" is in quotes, in case you did not notice, and Silicon Valley has welcomed more industries than just cut-and-dry coding. By no means I believe code is the only important technology out there. (That said, while this is beside the point, code is an increasingly critical part of those other disciplines you mentioned.)
> to live the rest of my estimated 40-50 years on this planet in any way I chose

It seems like you quite enjoy what you do. When you retire are you just going to give up that completely? If not maybe it is something you consider. You can earn a pretty healthy salary not working 80 hours a week, and you might get some ideas of what you want to do when you have financial freedom, rather than just slouching in front of the TV because you are too tired from working so hard for the past 15 years.

Disclaimer: I'm currently earning >$100k working 40 hours a week doing Rails development. There are smarter people than me out there, there is nothing special about me in that regard. I just don't want to spend every waking minute working at 25.
I must admit that it has mostly been my laziness, mixed with a variety of real-life situations (girlfriend finishing her PhD, me having a tonsillectomy etc), which have delayed me adding paid account support. I'm finally back into the swing of updating it now and I'm aiming to get paid accounts in within the next couple of months at the latest. I'd be happy if the site just made enough to keep itself running, to be honest.

Thanks for the advice!
Actually, google is blocked sometimes, including .com, .cn, .hk. If you search some sensitive words, google will be blocked for a period of time.
Dropbox will save your head
That could be the plot of a great time travel movie!
Fairphone - A seriously cool smartphone that puts social values first
Another worthy mention would be Affilae (a 100% pure bootstrapped startup - no incubators, no accelerators, no funds raised and yet already profitable). It's B2B and not B2C though so perhaps not usually featured on these types of lists. ;)

https://affilae.com

It's a white-label SaaS affiliate and performance marketing platform providing tracking, attribution and analytics for running performance marketing networks and campaigns in-house.
Great, then all you will need is a human to translate your other contexts you're not sharing with the computer via your voice to an actual programming language.
<generalization alert>

Writers tend to be high-ideaphoria people. This should be pretty obvious.

In my experience, many successful businesspeople are not high-ideaphoria people. They may be very smart, talented, etc., but their tendency is toward singular focus, rather than an exploration of the interplay of ideas. So it seems natural they would tend not to write/blog. (And yes, I realize there are many exceptions, James Altucher being my favorite.)
The problem with this parable is that it equates two different scenarios. A fisherman without extensive financial resources is not the same as a person with extensive financial resources choosing to fish. Here's some alternative endings, in a country without social and medical support in place, for you to consider:

1. The fisherman develops a serious illness and finds he can no longer support his family. His wife, who was barely getting by on a fisherman's income as a housewife, finds herself working at a local bar, serving drunk, lecherous men every day and night. His son and daughter find themselves unable to afford an education and really don't want daddy to die. With mounting medical bills, the son finds himself involved in crime to support his family and is eventually sent to prison for life for a crime he didn't commit. The daughter meets a wealthy man and everything is great until he starts hitting her. But at least she can support her father, lying on his deathbed in hospital. Daddy eventually dies but by that point she's stuck with 2 kids married to a man she hates.

2. Oh but medical welfare would solve the problem in #2? Setting aside that this is contrary to my stated scenario (a country without medical welfare), consider this scenario: the fisherman loses his fingers and toes in a freak fishing accident.

3. Oh but somehow he managed to afford an insurance policy that paid out on disability? Setting aside how unlikely this is to be for people barely making a living wage, consider this scenario instead: the nearby waters are polluted by an American oil extraction firm, and the fisherman finds himself scrubbing toilets at McDonald's to support his family. The American happens to come by one day and leaves him a nice tip.
Any good links/articles about this?
Very nice parable, I love it.

It seems to easy to get stuck in between the two, though - working hard, but not hard enough to retire early, but still not having time to enjoy life as the Mexican fisherman.
You could also just buy some Bitcoins at relatively non-volatile times and wait for a year or two, then sell them.

The value has been going up dramatically during the last few years pretty consistently and demand is steadily rising.

Bitcoin is gaining popularity in China quickly and they trade quite some volume on the exchanges now.
Thanks for your feedback. I know what you mean. VersionEye has already a pretty good GitHub integration. Currently we are working on automated change logs. And I want to work together with TravisCI and CodeShip to run tests against newest versions. I think together with automated testing it can be very valuable.
I maintain a couple open source projects by myself. And I don't release new versions just for fun. Releasing a new version is a lot of work. If I do it than there is always a very good reason for it. For example BugFixes, SecurityFixes, New Features or Speed & Memory Optimisation. And I think if somebody else is releasing a new version of an open source project he has the same reasons. And that are all good reasons for me to update. That's why I started VersionEye.
One day, it's "the excess number of choices confuses the typical consumer", therefore corporations are bad.

The next, it's "consumer industries are consolidating into fewer, better capitalized players", therefore corporations are bad.

In reality, I just think people who aren't that successful like to make infographics.

Beats working, or, you know, actually risking anything to create something in the world.

By the way, in non-capitalist countries, how many different entities providing toothpaste, or home mortgages, do you think there are, and why would you prefer it?
How to program unreliable chips
Congratulations. This is an amazing app (that I discovered only because you put the code on GitHub). And going through the code is very interesting. It's sad you went through burnout, but I can see why. Any chance you will blog a bit about the technical challenges you faced? There is quite a lot of code, I'm sure you have a lot to write about.
That's a problem if it's your economys main currency. If the aim for BitCoin is as the worlds second currency, then that's not so serious, as long as the volatility is not so high that people are reluctant to take it in payment.
It's not a problem even if your economy only has Bitcoin. Deflation is not a problem.
For a quick introduction this might be worth a look (not really language agnostic though) http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H...
It's a real circlejerk.
An aside on UI: am I the only one who still romanticizes about monochrome yellow/orange/light-blue-green on black line-art interfaces? That second PLATO terminal on the article reminded me of that (kind of like this LCARS screen: http://lcars.org.uk/lcars_files/LCARS%20MSD_Enterprise%20B.g... edit: or this: http://www.lcarscom.net/all_mini_avis.gif)

When I'm on Wikipedia or some tutorial site, I still sometimes imagine myself looking at the same content in a futuristic monochrome view.
The product looks pretty good imo. You should start charging soon.
Btw, which one of DigitalOcean's cloud servers are you using? Did you find it reliable for a startup? Also, do you mind telling how many users you have?
100K req/day translates to about 1 req/sec, which you can run on anything using any technology with zero scalability problems. it can probably run on my old TI calculator ;)

even if traffic has high peaks, scalability is not your concern.

Time to market and quality of people is. If you are going to do it mostly by yourself with some help later in the game, then do it in PHP. If you are going to hire people anyway, you might get a better talent by choosing something else. A blogging platform doesn't need a node/go level of concurrency. so don't discard rails and djungo.
Things where all strategies are fair: war, love
Yes, the 204.232.175.* IPs went away, 192.30.252.0/22 are still here.
Why limited it to that. It could be extended to monitor all sounds including spoken voice. That then could be turned into text and they could detect if people speak about crime. Stop crimes and terrorism at the root!
...when the US standard of living peaked.

The US standard of living peaked back when the bottom 10% didn't have a flush toilet, houses were half the size they are today, amenities like air conditioning and washer/dryers were uncommon and entire families shared a single car. Many medical problems were simply incurable, and many of the technologies that make our lives happier (modern media, online dating, video games) simply didn't exist.

You clearly aren't using "standard of living" in the same way as the rest of us.
Wow that's terrible. Stay at home Mom's don't just "watch the kids and scrub floors". There is an incredible amount of work and responsibility that comes from maintaining a home and raising children. To be dismissive of the work that they do because you have a naive understanding of it is simply being shallow and unkind.
You're thinking about things from the TSA's perspective, think about it from the traveller's perspective: they are waiting in line, knowing full well that all of this shoe taking off and public cavity searching is unnecessary, and now they have the added knowledge that if they complain there is a man standing nearby with a gun.
He's probably not including weekends.

But weekends are the way that people do 80 hour weeks.
Agreed. But more jobs are coming back to the US thanks to the systematically destruction of the value of the dollar vs other currencies. It is becoming cheaper to produce in the US. More jobs, but not more 'real' wage that is. The Yuan has moved up 32% since it low (when it was 'pegged' to the US dollar). The Euro is 'strong' again against the dollar as well despite all their problems.
I have a question that I have often wanted to ask of someone that knows something about declarative programming. In my day job, I spend most of my time worrying about trying to make my code run faster (I do low-level user-interface work - building the libraries that application UIs then use, so it's all about moving pixels as fast as possible, getting data to the app as fast as possible etc. If I need to make a SW blit run faster, I go into the function doing the blit, and I may replace some of the C code with some SSE-style vectorised assembler. Or I may choose to run an expensive SQL query once a day, storing the result in a binary file that is then used to feed application data requests, or other things of that nature.

I just don't see how those kinds of optimisations could be done in a declarative language. Do I just have an unusual use-case, or are these languages seriously constrained with respect to the types of programs that they can be used for?
I'd assume he means work week. 8 hours sleep per week night.
Some of us work in compliance based industries where its a necessity rather than a choice. We still use what could be considered a favourable stack on HN but we deal with masses of sensitive personal data. We're not oppressed: we're professionals. Big difference.

We trust people to run programs on their computer, just not ones that download other programs and ones that have dubious signing or security policies.

The prevailing attitude amongst startups and even big businesses of blasting everything carelessly with shotguns because it's the latest and greatest needs to die. Quality and therefore trust is suffering.
On the other hand you can get bankrupt due to:

1. Share market crash.
2. Change in government regulations.
3. Getting sued.
4. Or simply bad luck. 90% of all business fail anyway.
That's not how it works.

In the real world, some of the 10% would be slackers, and some of the 90% would think up ways to enable the slackers in return for some of their income. They, in turn, would need to employ more of the 90% to satisfy demand. Indeed, whole new classes of "goods" would be defined, such that only members of the 90% would be qualified to provide them. Of course, the 10% would strive to automate these away, only to find new classes arising of slackers with new demands to be satisfied by new entrepreneurs among the 90%.

As a particularly lazy member of the 10%, that has been my experience. Long may it continue!
The summary you need is that the article is written by Steve Blank.
Thanks Aturek!
I'm working on an RFC for an Internet protocol that works like Hawala:
https://github.com/mleonhard/hipp
Amazing PhonShow
I know you think that because I read your blog post, however the limited amount of knowledge I have on the subject suggests that it can be a pretty bad problem.

Deflation is regressive - it harms those who need to spend the most and leads to concentration of capital at the expense of labour. It punishes those with debt, which will make it difficult for normal people to ever acquire large capital goods e.g. a house (by the way your argument that lenders won't mind negative interest rates because their final value is worth more than what they started with is wrong because it doesn't take into account opportunity cost - lenders compare the returns not against the current value of their holdings, but against their other options e.g. putting the money in a hole). It reduces the velocity of money and therefore economic output. You say that at least it redirects it to the areas that are most important, which may be true, but nevertheless, it shrinks the pie from which we all partake, and reduces the rate of growth, a problem in a world with a growing population. Bitcoin would also suffer from similar problems to gold in that in bad economic times, all the capital needed to recover would flee the regions suffering, making any recovery much more difficult.
Rip DVD to iPad Mini Retina with the Best DVD to iPad Mini Retina Ripper 
Rip DVD to iPad Mini Retina with the Best DVD to iPad Mini Retina Ripper
I'm impressed by your ability to ignore good advice and common sense.

I presume you haven't been in an organisation where all the hot new things come in and screw things up with this kind of thinking?

In general you just get that lot trained when the next wave are incoming...
I need to figure out how to get in on this bidding process...
man -t ascii | lp -
There is no federal law about Marital status discrimination, only state law, and not all states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_law_...

Note that California does prohibit it, but it seems to be a recent law.

This http://www.unmarriedamerica.org/column-one/01-08-07-californ... implies it was around 2007/2008.
> mining bitcoins is just a way to distribute the 21 million coins to people

No. This is a common misconception.

Mining Bitcoins is necessary to keep the network running and secure. Distributing Bitcoins is just a side effect to encourage people putting number-crunching power at the network in the early stage, as this is what makes the network secure in the first place. The additional coins will become tiny and vanish over time. They are continually replaced by transaction fees.

Over time, the Bitcoin users will pay the "mining people" directly, via transaction fees, for doing all that hard number crunching with their specialized hardware.
> Everybody would generally be better off to throttle the rate [...]

You're wrong about this. The Bitcoin network would be _much_ worse off (verging on useless) if the global hashrate was throttled. The purpose of mining is not, as you said, to distribute Bitcoins. The purpose is to make it extremely difficult to append a forged block to the blockchain. The higher the hashrate, the more difficult forgery is. The reason that so-called miners receive Bitcoins is because the hashing takes resources (e.g. machines and electricity), so there needs to be some incentive to perform this service. The fact that it happens to distribute Bitcoins is convenient, but ancillary. (There are other ways distribution could have been done.)

Read this link for further information on why you want the global hashrate to be as high as possible. Basically, if a single attacker could match the hashrate of the network, they could do very bad things:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_...
If 10% wall themselves off, they'll need only 1% to feed them. So the 1% walls themselves off the remaining 9%. But then they'll need only 0.1%...
What? You are clearly in denial or living in a bubble:
US Census report shows entrenched poverty and declining living standards

"The report provides a snapshot of a society in immense crisis. Poverty is at a near-generation high of 15 percent, close to the high point since the 1965 War on Poverty, the 15.2 percent rate reached in 1983. According to Tuesday’s report, 46.5 million Americans, including 9.5 million families, live in poverty.

Some 20.4 million people live on an income less than 50 percent of the official poverty line, 7.1 million of these being children under 18. More than 48 million remain without health insurance.

More than 31 percent of the population experienced some period of impoverishment during the years 2009-2011. Median household income, at $51,017, was slightly lower than in 2011, and down by 8.3 percent from 2007. The number of people 65 and older living in poverty increased from 3.6 million to 3.9 million between 2011 and 2012."

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/09/18/cens-s18.html
Ask HN: What is up with the "scroll your own movie" websites?
There seems to be a hype around websites which provide no controls except scrolling like this http://www.mozilla.org/de/firefox/os/

This is a terrible user interface. It is basically a video where you have to scroll for it to play. You keep ending up with half complete animations all the time and sometimes it is really hard to see that you even can scroll. (The above site even provides helpful blinky downwards arrows at times.)

Can anybody tell me what the merit of this method is? Is it just designers trying to show off?

And when did the firefox turn into an actual fox instead of a red panda?
ConEmu can't fully replicate the CSRSS terminal behavior. It breaks pretty grossly when using advanced console functionality that works correctly in CSRSS's own terminal.
You are assuming that people are able to consume 10x more to keep economy going. I would say there's a limit to how much a person is capable to consume. If nothing else you have only 24hrs a day to engage in consuming.
Doesn't it need to be connected to a computer to work?
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