skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A thought experiment: Imagine a pre-singularity world with near-intelligent anthropomorphic robots which can do most manual tasks - including resource mining, food production and building more of themselves. Imagine most menial white collar jobs have been replaced by clever software written by people on this site. There are still some jobs for humans to do - in game design, fashion, service, music, etc. But any way you look at it, there are not enough jobs for everyone to do. Lets call this the "high unemployment future."

Currently we exist in a "low unemployment present" but if you believe a "high unemployment future" is possible, you should reasonable believe we're smoothly approaching it. So if you think my thought experiment can come to pass - we need to be very concerned.

If you're going to bring out the tired argument about how the cotton gin didn't cause mass unemployment, instead I would challenge you to paint a picture of a far off future where most jobs haven't evaporated.
San Francisco:  Experts say beach radiation unrelated to Fukushima
The GPL is not "infectuous" or "viral" or any of that nonsense. The GPL does not spread on its own. Your code isn't going to catch copyleft by sitting next to some free software.
The gambling demand for Bitcoin
Ask HN: what's the best way to find the right medical specialist in the US?
I moved to the US 1.5 years ago, and I hate the complexity of the healthcare system. I have muscle pain on my right shoulder, and after hours of internet research, I still don't know a good way to find a medical specialist that can take a look at my shoulder and fix it... Aaaaand it should also be "in-network", since I don't want to pay more than needed. Suggestions?
>> Also your plan requires that everyone work primarily on laptops

That's not a bad idea either way. Then you take your computer home if you want to work from home, or after hours.
M&A Game Trailer - Coming Soon in 2014 | A game by ansarada
Clever of you to notice that.
Nice. I searched for "jazz" and got what I thought was just a generic/scraped page about jazz (no recommendations, just general "What is jazz" stuff). It wasn't until I scrolled way down that I saw the artists. I was about to close the window - "What is this? There's nothing for me to do. I already know what jazz is!"

So it looks like the list is scrolled by artist first name. Yikes.

How do you get the track licensing?

I clicked on Alex Skolnick, for example, who is not a jazz artist. Will he get a royalty as a result?

Are there commercials?
M&A Real Life Game
Does anybody work for a software company that doesn't issue laptops as the primary PC? I haven't had a desktop in 10 years and just assumed that was the norm.
I feel sorry for Google's shareholders if this is what they think.
I find the title kind of ironic, given that sweet.js is still a compiler. :P

However, it is true it would be better to have one standard-ish compiler that can just execute whichever macros you throw into it.

That being said, you still run into the issue that `sync` brought up.
Actually, i doubt it. The machine code that ends up running at the heart of a disruptor is pretty minimal, and it executes precisely zero lock or atomic operations when handing an object from one side to the other. I am not aware of any other message-passing system that lightweight. I would be genuinely interested to hear about one.
What is so important about privacy? You're supposed to be working, aren't you? I can totally understand privacy when you're dealing with sensitive date that shouldn't be seen by other people.
I see what you're saying, but data don't exist in some sort of pure state. All data are collected in a particular fashion. You can get most of the shenanigans you're implying for metrics with data collection as well.
Managing Jenkins builds of multiple Git branches
Magnus's Finite Automata course was one of my favorites at GaTech and I'm sure you won't be disappointed with his Coursera offering.

Anyone in the Santa Monica/LA area want to take a stab at this competition?
In the time you spent venting your frustration about this, you might have been able to dig up something interesting for the conversation in here. Also, you can beat stuff like this for raising interest in technology. Case in point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsnKzK6dX8Q
Wonder when Google will have their self-driving fleet taking people from the Las Vegas airport to their hotels during CES? It would be a great publicity stunt.

"Currently California, Florida and Nevada have licensed autonomous vehicles to be tested on their public roads, and Google's fleet of 24 robot Lexus SUVs (sports utility vehicles) have clocked up about 500,000 miles of unassisted driving so far without any reported mishaps."
Sorry, we just kind of threw that together in Perl to meet the deadline! ;;
Because "free software" is a term made up by the inventors of the GPL, and defines it.

Supporting BSD and Apache licenses as compatible with free software is something done in addition to supporting the GPL.
Tried again, this time I get an 'o'. http://cl.ly/image/0e1A2c2i1Y16
His whole idea of "consciousness as a state of matter" thing might be taken a bit more seriously if he could provide a conscious object...

who doesn't want a sentient sword?
Do you know some examples of this for French, German or Japanese?

I know about the French Academy, for example. I would have assumed their influence didn't extend much beyond orthographic/spelling conventions.
> I've even seen spaces with rows of inside sales guys on phones cold calling two desks over from very frustrated developers.

We have that. If there wasn't a short dividing wall between us, I could kick one of our sales directors in the shin. There's four more in that particular section.

Sometimes it's noisy and annoying, but at least I can put on headphones, turn on music and/or white noise, and ignore them - they don't even have that luxury most of the time, if they're on a call with a client. Devs being noisy? They have to deal with it. Their neighbor on another loud call? They have to deal with it.

It can suck for everyone, but at least we have more options for dealing with it.
It's the universal truth of open floor plans. I still remember trying to decide if I wanted to annoy the owner, tech lead, or lead designer when it came time to kick one of them out of the conference rooms so some developers could get on a conference call.

That's what is so funny about this whole discussion on open floor plans: it comes up over and over again even though scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows they are bad, employee satisfaction is shockingly low with them... but we can't seem to kick the habit!
Is there some result in the theory of random graphs that says that you can't have a graph of a certain size without developing hubs? It seems to happen in most systems.
App developers cannot write code that correctly renders at an arbitrary multiplier. It's been tried and it never works. Having 1x mode and 2x mode does work, which is why Apple uses that approach.
How a Google PM Validates Features
You and the comment to which you respond both seem to be mistaking the specific example on the sweet.js homepage, which is explicitly described as providing ES6-standard functionality early, for the limit of the possibilities inherent in a hygienic macro system. This is a pretty grave mistake, in that it makes understanding the proposition at hand nearly impossible.

sweet.js is more or less a Lisp macro system for Javascript. Gaining some familiarity with Lisp macros would probably serve you well in terms of being better able to understand what's on offer here and how useful it can potentially be.
I imagine people will be relieved to hear that Fukushima is not (yet) the cause, but will officials clean-up the beach?

>“It's not normal. I've never seen 400 cpm when I just wave my Geiger around.” he said. “There has to be something radioactive for it to do that.”

Weiss is no amateur; for 40 years he has made a living designing Geiger counters, most recently for International Medcom Inc. After he verified the hotspot, he took a sample of the dark sediment and sent it to his company's main offices in Sebastopol for analysis.

International Medcom CEO Dan Sythe later put the dirt sample in a spectrum analyzer to view the radioactive “signature” of the particles, the photon energy associated with each isotope. What he found was different from cesium-137, the fissile material used in the Fukushima reactors. He would know – since the 2011 meltdown, Sythe has visited Japan nine times to help map the cesium fallout.
Why CES is Relevant to the Valley & Startups Once Again: Fluidware
While many CES goers and media outlets are championing this CES as the coming out party for the Internet of Things (and it is in a way), “fluidware” is the real force behind the breakout of the Internet of Things and the reemergence of startups at CES. More -> http://blog.bytelight.com/post/72677134214/why-ces-is-relevant-to-the-valley-startups-once#.Us2cN2RDvU4

Interesting take on why we're seeing so much startup buzz at CES after really not seeing anything there for many years.
Why do 1-3 people offices inhibit communication? I can't see it.

You can also have a central or conference room for communications, or coffee corners connecting the offices.

I think, Joel Spolsky has shown a real good example:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html

His office does give both: Everybody can retreat, but also a huge area to communicate, live and exchange in community.
This has been discussed on HN many many times, and I could probably just dredge up old posts and cut and paste them, but rather that re-iterate those, let me focus on the following: how would one falsify your thesis? What would it take before we could confidently agree that automation was not creating an equivalent number of jobs as it was creating?
Estimates Number of Asteroids Worth Mining (Spoiler: Not Very Many)
Cubes are not cheap. Price them some time. The last time I saw figures, the were considerably more expensive than offices made of sheetrock and steel 2X4s plus modest desks.

They do increase potential density of employees.
I can't speak for meditation, but over the last couple of years I've noticed that as I'm going to sleep and my mind is sort of just running along that every so often I can actually catch myself losing my short-term memory. It's like somebody pushed the reset button on the internal monologue. It takes about 3 or 4 seconds.

(It's terrifying what your brain does in sleep....)
I gave you a method for determining standard usage.
I really like Excel for adding up columns of numbers. Any task where you want to see the data (and the quantity of data is low enough to realistically be seen) and the operations performed on the data are relatively simple and straight-forward.

But once the operations start getting more involved, I really start disliking Excel (or any spreadsheet). Excel shows the data but hides the formulas. At this point, I very much prefer a script.
hahaa.
The probability for software engineers is 4.2% in the paper.

All jobs will be automated in 100 years in my opinion (if technological development continues). In fact, work itself will be automated away. (But some will continue to 'work' for other reasons than gatheting resources).
Came here to echo this sentiment. I find that Github's issue search is so painful that long and overly-descriptive titles are essential for finding anything relevant, especially in a project that uses issues extensively.
JavaScript compilers aren't only for syntax sugar. Closure Compiler, Dart2JS, and GWT are optimizing compilers. Most large Google applications for example would be hideously large without an optimizing compiler.
The problem with this logic is that it assumes a zero-sum game, and a constant demand.

Example: If we have 10 guys making hydrogen cells, and all the sudden we can replace them with one robot and one guy, and that takes an unviable industry to a viable one, well then they are going to need a lot more robots and guys, a lot more than the 10 they previously had.
I think the culture of the office matters, too. If there's a culture, of, "Hey people are working here let's not be loud." and "She has her headphones in so let's not bother her." then it won't be too distracting or have too much noise.

Conversely, if an office with a closed office plan has a culture where closed doors are common and it's rude to knock, then collaboration will definitely be hindered.

We need to collaborate and to work in peace and quiet. This is probably why it oscillates between open and closed office plans. Neither solution is perfect. The best solution is probably default closed offices with a culture of having your door open and lots of collaborating spaces that are actually used.
I don't see your approach as necessarily "more deeply interconnected."
I understand the reason for picking GPL for the editor. The, rather large, downside I see to this is that effectively all plugins are now GPL, correct?

I run a small side business sell packages for Sublime Text and considered the concept of something similar for Light Table. While you certainly can sell GPL software, you can not prevent redistribution, so you effectively get into the business of providing support. I can't foresee being able to run a small support business without catering only to the enterprise. And even then "small" would be a relative term.
I wonder whether it would be possible to write a D interpreter as a front-end for an existing database? If everyone with a PostgreSQL installation suddenly found that Tutorial D was only a 'yum install' away, it might catch on.

I mean, strictly speaking, that would make PostgreSQL a noSQL database ...
Sounds interesting. Could anyone please point to more literature along these lines?
Work at home / coffee shop / park is a pretty cheap option. Give the boss an enormous office big enough to hold the whole team at some discomfort, but its only used for team meetings or the occasional (rare) large team effort. Head down grinding is done at home or somewhere else.

Also sub-team meetings often happen at a coffee shop. Three dudes at starbucks not the whole dept or whatever.

I've also seen people working at the public library, although its difficult because so many parent use it as a day care center drop off site. Aside from the homeless shelter antics.
I see what you're saying and agree that it is unfortunately unrealistic. I still feel like life would be easier if we all used the same convention.
> My point is, there is other stuff out there in the universe (mental stuff) that is different than physical stuff, that seems almost impossible to be explained as physical stuff. I believe in the physical sciences, evolution, and mathematics, but I don't think that they fully encapsulate all that there is, nor can they definitively explain things like consciousness (they at least need a little more added to them).

See, physics has explained the mechanics of what happens when you put cheesecake in your mouth. You do experience electrical signals in your brain. It is reproducible.

You're just refusing to correlate that phenomena to what you feel, which is okay, because it's not entirely obvious, feeling is an internal feedback process. But consider this mental experiment: if I blindfold you and stimulate your brain the same way as cheesecake in your mouth by the use of electrodes, would you be able to discern?
Permissive licenses (or "licenses" like SQLite's Public Domain declaration) like BSD/MIT have lower barriers for use by many organizations, and many of them will contribute back because having a bigger community involved in maintenance benefits them, even without a GPL-shaped gun to their head.

That community effect can make BSD/MIT/etc. better for users.

The idea that GPL is "best for users" seems to rest on at least one two assumptions, both of which are flawed:

1. No one considers licenses when they select free software, so that someone who would use a piece of software under a permissive license will use it under a GPL-style license (discounting the fact that there are organizations that simply won't touch software with GPL-style terms, that would use it with BSD-style terms),

2. People always and only give back when legally required to do so.
Also -- for those interested in ruby -- basic syntax highlighting appears to be there already (I just downloaded the release and looked)...
Exactly. Consider that automation would be pointless if replacing N foo-craftsmen with foo-machines necessitated the hiring of N equally expensive foo-machine repairmen and assemblers.

Automation reduces jobs, wages, or both.

Nevertheless, we should embrace it. Increasingly strong social safely nets can be used to take up the slack.
Elegant 3d Geometry manipulation with JS
See all the functions which are funM. mapM, replicateM, etc... For a newbie having to use a different function to apply to a monad vs. a pure function is confusing and not necessary.
The chrome extension from getadblock.com? It worked for me on Windows 7 and Chrome 31.0.1650.63 m. My Adblock version is 2.6.
Apache Mesos: Open Source Datacenter Computing
As soon as I saw the Title of this paper, there were two ideas that sprung up:

1)"Sokal Hoax"

2)David Deutsch, Max Tegmark, Some Other trouble-maker

Max Tegmark has done similar things before:[1]. He is also related to the FQXi which is funded by an organization that has sometimes promoted explicit religious agendas in a scientific context.
However we should be judging every paper by its merits alone & the rigor of its arguments.
The only problem is that work of this nature is very interdisciplinary, so who is qualified?

[1]http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/16-is-the-universe-actu...
I have never been to a conference with "booth babes" but this question I have also asked:

"If CES attendees feel intimidated by a booth spokesperson, why is that spokesperson chosen to do the job? Why not let the models dress down, adopt girl-next door makeup, and proactively demo the products instead of standing around in heels waiting for the next photo opp?"
Ah, I encountered this coming up when various friends were enrolling in computer science courses at Universities. Curriculum either followed an 'engineering' format, a more EE to CS bottom-up methodology, or they followed a top-down thought process.

The reasoning for bottom-up is that there are fundamental aspects of the bottom up approach that truly teach the fundamentals that are necessary to become a great computer scientist/engineer/developer that I don't think any other method provides.

But the top-down approach is appealing for one reason it seems: It's friendly. I would not be surprised if the retention rate for top-down was greater than the bottom-up. Using something like Python, Java, or whatever other conventional blackbox language is easy, comfortable, and immediately demonstrates to a student the power of programming. The practicality of what they learn is evident. Ideally, interest in this would continue down the line. 'This is really cool, but how does Python actually work?'.

Unfortunately, it seems that most people, when presented with a working blackbox, don't care to see how it actually ticks. It takes a certain special someone to open up a watch, disassemble and reassemble it. So who knows how well the top-down carries over into learning the fundamentals.

The bottom-up has the drawback of intimidating the meek. I certainly was one. I would have benefited from a top-down approach, as I am one of the types who like to see how something ’ticks’.

So therein lies a trade off, would you sacrifice the known quality of your curriculum for better retention? Having someone learn something, is better than nothing, but that’s up to people like Prof. Dijkstra to decide.

EDIT: spelling/coherency
You can't just take a rasterized image and scale it up or down, the result would look horrible. You need to scale things while they're rendered, and as long as you only do vector graphics like drawing lines and rectangles, that's fine. However, real-world UIs traditionally use lots of bitmap graphics, and those, again, simply can't be reasonably scaled. And PPI scaling even the vector graphics stuff requires major changes to the software and graphics stacks involved, given that historically everybody has simply thought in terms of pixels, not the angular size of screen elements, which is what's actually relevant to the end user.
- a Bitcoin exchange which can support fast algorithmic trading

- an encyclopedia of objects that can be combined together (your algorithms are such that you can find from their 3d shapes, specs and connectors which parts / machines can be combined together).

That should keep you busy a few years ;)
> massively wealthy AAA studios

Straw man.

> who don't want to give back anything

Straw man.
Assuming you have a working VPN. We have one from a long dead company that barely works on PCs and for Macs we had to hack a solution ourselves.
I've always wondered what would happen if I told management "you guys made us work in a Dickensian sweatshop floor plan? Okay, how about I bring my own cubicle from home, and install it around my place here? I'm pretty good with DIY projects, you guys don't have to spend anything, I'll just fix the problem on my own. I'll paint it in the corporate colors and all, don't you worry."
Unless it's noisy at or near the desired communication frequency, it is trivial to isolate the signal and completely mute out the noise.

In this example, at ~19 kHz, a properly configured high-pass filter could easily remove any human-talking sounds.
With strong AI, wouldn't 100% of U.S. jobs be at risk? On the bright side, as software engineers, I would think our jobs will be the last to go.

My guess is as a species we'll just find something else to do, just like we always do. Who knows, maybe inefficiency will become fashionable at some point.
PriSchool: A Radical New Approach to Prison Design
The customers as a whole don't have more money, because half of them just got automated out of their jobs. Maybe enough new jobs come around that it isn't a long term problem this time, but there will come a time when essentially every job could be done by a computer. What then?
Well of course your brain is keeping a certain state, even while in complete meditation. So what is the point? It is not like reaching a certain meditative state would make you superior among others, or a super-human even. Many have suggested that people reaching such states eventually do return back, and for some, such states even dissipate eventually if they don't keep up with the practice.

Ultimately, the idea is that the state of 'here-now' (whether arrived through practice, observation or heck even induced through means of substance - though there are differences) is the state when You are not your mind anymore. So in that sense, looking at above suggestion about memory, I would simply ask: what is the need of a memory?
By this logic why would anyone contribute to the OSS of large corporations like Oracle or Facebook? I'm also a game developer and was able to open source a chunk of AI software to the development community which has been used in commercial games but also many education and personal projects. That would not be possible without licenses like MIT.
2013 Capsicum year in review
Are you sending and receiving on the same computer? I feel like that might cause issues. Are you able to use two separate computers to test?
That's not really how things end up working, though; if you're living hand to mouth you end up spending all you make. If you're wealthy, you save much of your wealth.

Yes, people have more money to spend, but no, trickle down economics doesn't really work out for the jobless.