skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not just glib Malthusianism, it's neo-colonialism. It's paternalism and cultural superiority in green clothing.

In short: it's bullshit.

Oh, the poor little wogs, they lead such brutal lives, it's so sad that there are so many of them, if only there were fewer of them the world would be a better place. This is the sub-text that I see underlying these comments. It's "surplus population" crap yet again.

These are people. People with dreams and ambitions. People with lives and families. People who are capable of amazing things if given a chance. They're not just grubby uneducated unwashed masses. These are folks who will build the world of the 21st century, who will help lift their own countries out of poverty. These are people who will build fusion reactors, and space ships, and nano-technology. People who will cure cancer, create art, and music, and literature. They don't need people who think that they are wastes of resources, all they need is a chance, and just enough help to start building their own futures.
Yes it does achieve the same on a per-capita level. Do the math, and just start doing the part you intend to compel others to. If you're not willing to voluntarily take on one complete stranger and pay him a "basic wage" out of your own pocket, don't compel (with threat of fine/imprisonment) everyone else to do the same.

This is a terrifying piece of legislation precisely because it is a change in the very fabric of society, in how people are compelled to support others regardless of whether they will strive or squander - and that anyone choosing to not support such a devaluing of human worth will be punished via the police power of the state.
Soylent: How I Stopped Eating for 30 Days
This sounds pretty good to me. If they actually implement what they wrote about here, I think Microsoft could become one of the better big companies to work at.

(I have a friend who works at BofA. They wanted him to take on a new project that he wasn't interested in. As a reward for agreeing, they went back to his old performance reviews and changed them from "Meets expectations" to "Exceeds expectations" and then promoted him for excellent performance. LOL.)
An ordered key-value store with consistent secondary indices and simple transactions covers the needs of lots of applications (as e.g. the Google App Engine data store proves). If FoundationDB can indeed deliver consistency without compromising performance and scalability, they will probably have a bright future.
In short they wanted to make a new language called Dash/Dart that solved the problems around javascript.
I remember reading this on HN almost three years ago. Is there anything about it that makes it interesting again now?
Am I missing something here, when was this about Java and phasing it out of Android? I don't think that's a likely plan but if you have any evidence to the contrary I would love to see it. Java is pretty pretty central to Android to think that it's somehow going to be "phased out", that would be more like destroying the entire platform.

I know everyone loves to hate on Java, but I'm always amazed by some of the wacky things people say ...
My guess is that's the majority view, though of the Danes I know (mostly younger and internationally oriented), they tend not to put as much emphasis on the language specifically, and more on culture. When there was some discussion over mandatory Danish lessons for employees at my university, a few people half-jokingly suggested that if the goal is to integrate foreigners into Denmark, then it would make more sense to start with mandatory bicycle lessons, since this is one of the bigger integration failures. Then move on to explaining the rules for building smørrebrød, an introduction to drinking beer from a can while sitting on the side of a canal, etc... and language only much further down the list of integration nice-to-haves.

(From a practical perspective, I do think bicycling is more important to integration into local culture, at least in Copenhagen, than language! But parts of Copenhagen are already de-facto English-speaking, especially trendy nightlife areas like Vesterbro... perhaps not as much as Berlin, but getting there.)
I think that's an accurate assessment. It certainly wasn't stack ranking that made J Allard leave. Microsoft has an inward looking culture because there is so much money to play with when Microsoft launches a huge initiative like XBOX or Windows Phone. Google's "moon shots" and Apple's "hobbies" are not instant tickets to the top of the organization.

Overlaid on those high-stakes struggles for control and prominence are some correspondingly huge egos, whence come dogmas like "Everything Windows."

The Enterprise part of the company suffers less from this because the growth there is more organic.
You'll be interested in this project, then: http://blog.awilkins.id.au/2012/12/go-in-browser-llgo-does-p...

It's important to emphasize that PNaCl is a platform. We currently provide front-ends for C and C++, but nothing prevents you from writing your own, for your own language (or an existing one). As long as you emit PNaCl bitcode, Chrome will run it for you. The PNaCl bitcode has a definition here - https://developers.google.com/native-client/dev/reference/pn... - and we're working on making it more precise.
A game that lulls players into a false sense of security and then obliterates them is not "balanced"... although it's disputable whether "balance" is even a meaningful concept in a single-player game. That's a terrible feedback loop for the player. FTL has a lot to like about it and it deserves its popularity, but the game has some massive flaws related to randomness and difficulty.
Much of it will return to the economy in the form of spending.

Also, I imagine that wages will react to it to some extent, offsetting some of the cost over the long run.

Lastly, the mitigated effects of poverty -- from more IQ focused on productive ends to improvements in childhoods to reduced crime -- could lead to an actual "profit" from this whole scheme.

It will be interesting to see what actually happens!
Agreed. The other side of the count that most forget is that while Jobs was the guy who thought up and curated a lot of the great thinking that happened at Apple, He was also the guy that killed a lot of really good ideas/active projects that were not the absolute best of what Apple was producing in their respective timeframes (See: Newton, Pippen, Quicktake, OS9). This is a huge part of what made him a great innovator. Many companies don't have a "Jobs" to curate their ideas so they spend/waste a lot of money testing their ideas out in and on the public. (See: Dell Jukebox, Netbooks, HP TX2000).
Money isn't just for working full time. Sometimes you need hardware or software for compatibility testing. For example, suppose you were trying to build parsers/writers for PSD or XLS files. To test on older versions of photoshop or excel, you need access to those older versions (and most likely, the contemporaneous hardware). Those are real costs.

I also think the point regarding focus is misguided: if the money is specifically for embellishments (e.g. 100% compatibility), then you are in fact more likely to embellish

Finally, Ruby on Rails happens to be an exceptional example in terms of traction. Most open source projects never come close because the addressable market is smaller (the set of all people supporting a particular ruby gem is a subset of the people interested in ruby) and in those cases a bit of extra money is enough to take a hobbyist effort to a production-level product. That extra work takes time and money (for example, sitting there and validating certain results by hand) and oftentimes won't happen with an open source project.
The second point here is well-articulated. You don't have to "justify the high cost of web development." This is because you shouldn't be selling "web development."

You are selling a way for them to invoice their clients without Susie printing out 4 different Excel workbooks and walking them over to Accounting. You are selling a way for them to find customers that's more reliable than placing an ad in the yellow pages. You are selling a way for them to find which customers to upsell without Jeff the intern going into the basement and sorting through 5000 file folders.

And so on. Solve business problems, preferably ones that are pain points, and that have dollar signs attached. These are the key.
Yes. Those damn peasants moved around too much thanks to this new fanlged railroad, and caused the war! Brilliant.

Here's the funny part: your claim may even have some validity. But increased mobility is a very good thing, in the long run. I would argue that we need much more of it. I acknowledge it can cause problems in the short term, especially when there are very large differences in living conditions. But as the poverty rates in different areas slowly converge, I think this will become less of a problem.
It's a good idea, but (in my opinion, having only read the documentation for dbv) the migrations in various frameworks (e.g. laravel) are a better bet. For a start, you can go backwards as well as forwards if they've been written well, and if you're using them properly creating a new migration informs the rest of your application (models, etc) about changes to the structure.

If you're not using a framework, or you're trying to stay framework agnostic for some reason, this would be useful… Otherwise, not so much.
Not necessarily.

If two people are both performing at about the same level, they can get the exact same bonus. In a ranked system one employee must get more than the other, even though their actual output is pretty close to identical.

Not to mention when you make the ratings tied to rewards, as opposed to punishments, you're removing a lot of politics. Stack ranking discourages high performers from working together, as their performance rating is penalized by their proximity to smart people. Because stack ranking is inherently punitive, this also makes these employees less mobile. So not only are you stuck in a team full of super-ninjas who make you look bad, but the stack rank you got makes you toxic when it comes to internal transfers.

A fixed bonus pool won't fix the "everyone near me is too smart" problem, but it at least would give people a way out to another team. An otherwise good employee who rolled the dice wrong when picking teams does not gain a permanent black mark for it.
A single level of door upgrades is often enough, I've found. The second level is iffier.

But do keep in mind that door upgrades and a few others (I forget which) don't require extra power. That makes them much more attractive.
There are only three disk vendors now and I would assume that large customers buy from at least two of them. But knowing this information won't help you, because a new model from company X may be a dud even if the company's previous models were reliable. By the time any model has enough accumulated reliability data that you can tell whether it's reliable or not it's obsolete and you don't want to buy it.
What performance problem with FD? How many requests exactly are you handling per second with what code or processing? Are you sure its not what he just mentioned, ulimit? The docs say client requests so yes its just to make them.
Disney Cruise Line Ship Disney Magic Reimagined
23% of Americans Would Prefer a Female Boss (and That's a Record High)
>I think that is going to become a major issue in the future.

As hackers are fond of repeating: "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."

There are already huge surplus populations. This is in evidence in a brazen way in southern Europe as the crisis restructures economy and society and yet it is no less true in the USA.

One of the most pressing questions for contemporary liberalism is: What is to be done about these surplus populations? Switzerland has formulated one trajectory of response in the referendum for a basic income. Other wealthy countries take a different path towards control.

Consider this famous question posed by Michel Foucault: "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" Are these not all ways in which we already deal with surplus populations?

As one method of social control, work, is becoming less and less available and more and more precarious the other methods of social control are on the rise. Pupils are staying in school longer. Ever increasing numbers of people are being sent to prison. Wars continue to be waged.

The workplace, the school, the barracks, the hospital, and the prison are not all just places. They are conditions.

The conditions that typify each are being sublimated throughout all of society and increasingly so. Leisure now often has a productive aspect, e.g., vaporous web browsing is monetized through ads. The panopticon was an innovation in prison design and now it is our experience everywhere.

The line between society and prison is blurring as more and people are under state control in the form of parole and probation. More generally, entire populations are having the conditions of prison thrust upon them through constant surveillance and the constant threat of search and seizure of their person, e.g., stop and frisk.

The future is bleak because the present is bleak. This bleakness just isn't evenly distributed - yet.

To innovate, in the HN sense of the word, is invariably to hasten this ongoing distribution. Every time the Internet eats an industry power and money is re-consolidated into the hands of fewer and fewer and the surplus population grows.

"Understood as a class, programmers occupy the same position today that the bourgeoisie did in 1848, wielding social and economic power disproportionate to their political leverage. In the revolutions of 1848, the bourgeoisie sentenced humanity to two more centuries of misfortune by ultimately siding with law and order against poor workers. Programmers enthralled by the Internet revolution could do even worse today: they could become digital Bolsheviks whose attempt to create a democratic utopia produces the ultimate totalitarianism.

On the other hand, if a critical mass of programmers shifts their allegiances to the real struggles of the excluded, the future will be up for grabs once more. But that would mean abolishing the digital as we know it—and with it, themselves as a class. Desert the digital utopia."

from Deserting the Digital Utopia: Computers against Computing[1]

[1]http://crimethinc.com/texts/ex/digital-utopia.html
I had pretty much the same experience. The $27 glasses from Zenni are a tiny bit sharper than the $200 pair from the big-name store at the mall, though the frames from the mall are Armani. I don't care much about labels, and I have to say the Zenni frames look better to me.
It's one of several approaches in that direction. Google's not particularly shy about pursuing multiple approaches in parallel for important priorities.
http://gonativeclient.appspot.com/demo has a Lua interpreter demo. There's also Python, but you'll have to build it yourself (naclports).
There difference is, theoretically, some teams could all be composed of high performers, and other teams disproportionately of low performers.

The forced curve before meant that every team needed to assign x% as high performers and x% as low performers.

Now, how you assign the high and low performers, from a limited pot of 'rewards', when every manager is going to want most of his team to be considered high performers -- well, that's what the 'forced curve' was intended to deal with. But I don't doubt it also led to increased competition and politics and decreased teamwork, as the one well-known critique of it suggested.
They get the same writes but not the same reads, so depending on the bug source it may not hit both at the same time. The read pattern itself may affect the way the writes are performed to the flash (delaying or speeding up writes pending for commit) that it may have a butterfly effect on the rest of the behavior and removing the disks from being in sync with regard to firmware bugs.

If you'd still follow up on your idea of using a read-only root like you did with CF cards and figured a safe place for the logs you could still use the SSDs in the same mode. Why not go that route?
It says 'LLVM style intermediate code'; why not actual LLVM intermediate code? What would be the reason for an alternative? If it would be actual LLVM code it would be easier to compile from programming languages and to different backends, right?
I command-F'd for "music" but I see no hits. I think that the music in FTL is great, especially for coding. Here's a link to the FTL soundtrack and other great stuff by the artist, Ben Prunty: http://benprunty.bandcamp.com/
I like the idea. One quick suggestion is to replace "Superpower". You're trying to use it as a verb, but it isn't (usually used as) one.
More freedom from side-effects (F#)
elaborate this gem of a statement please, idiot.
What do you deem natural though because if you mean naturally occurring in the wild then thats probably just about nothing that you eat.
Ruined? Most businesses fail, and most large businesses cause many others to fail (this includes IBM, Google and Apple) as well as providing the means for many others to succeed and prosper.

Even if you were right, I don't think the lives of Silicon Valley yuppies have been "ruined" in quite the same way as some of the victims of Chinese factory production lines....
Teaching Programming to Children Using Stories, Music, and Puppeteering
Well, maybe people will clean their own toilets and empty their own trash then. I do those at home (as do my housemates) because I like having a moderately clean home. If nobody else was cleaning the office I worked in, I'd clean it too, because it's basically a home.
In a mature market, marketing/advertising is zero-sum because it shifts demand from one supplier to another without altering the overall demand or supply.

The obvious case is a commodity, like wheat or soybeans or oil, where nobody bothers branding it at all until they get to a retail product. In the retail marketplace, the primary differentiation between one kind of cleaning product and another is the marketing, advertising, and associated superficial differentiations: coloring, fragrance, and so forth. That's why the largest advertising budgets are for companies with similar competitive products: GM/Honda/Ford/Nissan/Toyota/Hyundai; Procter&Gamble, L'Oreal, Estee Lauder; Samsung/Sony/HP; Progressive/Allstate/State Farm.

They aren't advertising to get new customers into the market: they're advertising to shift customers to competing suppliers.

Samples pulled from adbrands.net list of top 100 US advertisers. There are many, many more clusters there to illustrate the point.
Given that it's a very accurate description for the recent history of mankind from about the mid-19th century until the present I think it's rather tendentious to label it as "hopeless" let alone "utopian".
Bandwidth may be a problem then. I mean, your gains in mining would be seriously hurt by the bandwidth costs. Also, if more people start mining this way, there will be more competition and your earnings will decline. There's also the case of some users maliciously feeding you false results. So you'll have to introduce redundancy to the system (I'm not sure if you get punished for false results apart from simply not getting paid though).
You're assuming that Amazon doesn't design things any differently for their Chinese site vs. their US site.
Maybe he could have Microsoft disclose the deal they made with the NSA over the purchase of Skype and the change in encryption practices. Or is that not the kind of improvement he is talking about?
The two are tied -- the reason Google didn't enable NaCl outside of the Web Store is to avoid architecture-tied NaCl code from becoming common on the web when PNaCl was in the pipeline.
I don't need to see source code to use a software. Maybe I need to see source code to get some ideas to help me with my own software I'm building that I'm having problems with.
I beat the final boss the second time I met it, without teleport or cloaking. I had maxed shields, nearly maxed engines, and a fuckton of lasers. Cloak and teleport are fantastically useful, but despite what everyone says, there is no "required" kit to beat the boss.
I'd be keen to see if someone has written a streaming JSON encoder.

This looks interesting: https://gist.github.com/akaihola/1415730

Edit: dataset looks like a really interesting library!
I think that's what people are trying to tell you. You say "Europe" like it's a thing. A monolithic entity that needs to address the complex problems that exist in Africa. But Europe is not a thing. It's has a complex set of its own problems. Gates is using "Africa" as a shorthand for the same reasons you used "Europe" as a shorthand, because it makes it easier to

1. Deliver the message quickly and clearly and

2. Bring people to the discussion who don't or can't have a complexed or nuanced view of the problem, but would like to do something to help.

I, for example, may have money to donate or some skill to assist, but I don't really want to commit myself to understanding "Africa". I'd rather leave that in the hands of someone who does understand it. That's what people who try to gain the limited attention of the public do, oversimplify. And regardless of what the public says, they want that simplification. My head would spin if I had to know every nuance of every specialty just to make a decision.

Also, Italy was hardly a colonial power in Africa, but Belgium was. So we're back to sum up a difficult history to a way people can wrap their heads around it enough to write a check.
No, money should be confiscated by a tax collector and redistributed systematically to all citizens __without__ some bureaucratic process which determines eligibility. That's what basic income means.
If the human eye was a digital camera, it would have 576 megapixels
> Ehh, who said anything about violence or killing? Where did you get that idea?

Easy:

> I'd rather live in a society where everyone pays more in taxes

How do you think taxes are enforced? Not by asking nicely, and not by the Happy Fluffy Peace Fairy. Taxes are collected under the threat of violence.
This.

Bill Gates is a massive investor in Monsanto, if you are naive you might think Bill Gates is a saint. He is really just a globalist with an extremely stubborn perspective of the future.

Think of his contributions to IT: Proprietary software.

Anyone that is a fan of Bill Gates cannot also be a fan of humanity unfortunately.
They just announced their portable native client. (http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/11/12/google-launches-port...)
Yes, JRebel is great but not free.
Anyone know why it takes so long to load any of the demos on http://gonativeclient.appspot.com/demo/bullet ? They simply take way to long.
I really really hope that this+pepper.js will allow you to deploy Ruby/Python/Go as client-side languages for the Web. Does anyone know how (P)NaCl interfaces with the DOM?
I would order this in a second if it was available in South Africa
I haven't played the new version yet, but you might consider playing the vanilla version 'til you start to get bored, then upgrading for some new experiences.
PNaCl has been in development for a while, I'm having trouble understanding just what is being announced here. Is PNaCl now enabled by default in Chrome?

I also hadn't seen pepper.js before, is that new?
I almost wet myself.
> My only worry about this program is if it will indirectly inflate the cost of everything.

I personally see this being too tricky for companies to try unless they're a monopoly.

If I run company A, and my competitors company B and company C raise their prices, I'm going to maintain mine, to increase my profit flow. Alternatively, company B and C don't even try raising their prices, for fear of competition doing what I mentioned.

Thoughts?
> More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives.

I rather think living is a necessary prerequisite to living better.