skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Most of the jobs he categorizes as "bullshit" all share an element of arms-race components to them. i.e. if my competitor has really good telemarketers/lobbyists/corporate lawyers, I'd better have one too -- _or they'll beat me_. How is it that that reflects some sort of keep-the-masses-down 1% malfeasance?

The way I understand it, these pointless 'arms-race' jobs are jobs tend to also produce little to no value to society. They may produce value for their bosses in the form of making the boss look good to the uber-bosses, or they may provide value to their company as a means of maintaining competitive advantage in the market place.

These is less a direct function of the skills of the workers than a function of the roles in which those workers are placed. Some corporate lawyers clearly do provide non 'arms-race' value, some IT professionals only provide 'arms-race' value.

I don't think the existence of these jobs is a direct effort to "keep-the-masses-down", but it has the effect of mostly wasting worker's time in roles where the main value is how they help maintain the wealth of that 1%.

Of course, this an all or nothing proposition. Many jobs produce some mix of actual value vs 'arms-race' value. Separating these is not necessarily straight forward.

> Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2]

I... don't think those statistics show what you want them to show. Does that number of "musicians" only include those for whom it is their only/main source of income? I also don't see any breakdown in those statistics on lawyers for "area of specialization" but based on where they are employed. I don't know if Graeber's specific claim is true, but there do appear to be 5-10 times more lawyers than musicians in our country.
Lifting body
Of course this occurred to me, my comment was more of an emotional response to "complaints that it's unreadable are unfounded".

If quite a few people are saying that it's unreadable, you don't just dismiss them as making "unfounded" statements.

> The demoscene doesn't exist because of a bunch of programmers trying to make the lives of every other programmer more difficult, it exists because people like the challenge.

I'm pretty sure that this doesn't need to be stated.
As a white Eastern European male in a US university, I had a privilege of paying out-of-state tuition out of my pocket (which was about 8x the in-state amount), while being denied most forms of aid and not allowed to work. And I had to take classes about how privileged I am! Didn't feel very privileged. Could it be that the concept is flawed?
White-collar employees 'work' (periods of focused concentration) a lot less than 40 hours

There's definite truth to this, but it's also true that, as many hackers have attested, moments of downtime and wandering attention are often where new ideas come from. Sample:

I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their mind at any given time. I'm often mistaken about it. I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.

For me anyway, a surprisingly large amount of time spent staring at walls or out windows may be "work" time.

In addition, I'm a grant writing consultant (see www.seliger.com if you're curious), and a lot of a given day consists of pitching new work to callers, or editing, or waiting for someone to edit what I've written, and so forth. That stuff often isn't sustained attention per se, but it is necessary to the function of the business!
I am reminded of a quote from an economics professor. "Why do big nations have a lot of jobs, no matter how much they are producing? As it turns out, this is a very interesting question"

This is the robots-are-coming-for-us fallacy rearing its head again. Once again, the premise is that we only need certain things -- food, shelter, electricity, internet, health care. Once robots make these things, well dang, there won't be anything else for the rest of us to do, will there?

No, no, a thousand times no. Humans value not only things to keep them alive, but scarcity and novelty. As the basic needs become automated, huge industries will continue to explode devoted to creating scarce and novel things for other humans to collect and consume. Most of these "bullshit jobs" are in this sector.

I find these essays always have some kind of value statement, either implied or outright -- "what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialist in corporate law?"

It says that if you had a magic wand, we'd have more poets. If I had one, we probably would, too. But it tells us absolutely nothing about why there are jobs that folks don't like, or jobs that you or I might find useless.
Something that worries me is that while all the attributes the scorecard uses are good, there's at least one other I care about (in addition to those listed).

Uploading my contacts.

Even TextSecure does it. I'm still looking for something that gets a deserved perfect score and doesn't go near my contacts.
Mooltipass: Open Source Offline Password Keeper
The Bullet That Could Solve 3-D Printed Guns’ Reliability Problem
I like that fact that the decrease of working hours per day, is becoming a mainstream discussion. I've seen other articles popping up elsewhere the last couple of years. That's good.
Those same gas stations also have power outlets if need be.
Bingo! Hence the human craving for hierarchy, someone above me to tell me what to do with all this free time.
I have - it was the required book to read for the entire freshman class of my university (across all majors).

Even if you accept its findings (they are debated) - it merely answers the question of why Europeans were victorious.

It doesn't question whether the society built by white men is good - but merely answers why :)
Very good point.

Isn't this kind of innovation restricted to the Kittygrams that operate at large scales, though? Kittygram will need to reach a large mass of users, get bought out, face the need to extract specialized data from images, and finally hire expert engineers to work on that problem before they can innovate.

How many startups get to that point? Even if the Kittygram founder had a vision of building an innovative object recognition solution and merely used Kittygram as the means to an end, it feels as if there must be a more efficient way to solve these problems.
Import SVG to Scribus using this workflow:

http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/getting-cmyk-colors...

Then setup CMS in Scribus and validate your output in the output preview dialog which can check for e.g. totalink coverage.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?

The example I gave is a logical one, which just happens to also work on occasion in the real world. It does not rely on what sort of trader I am, it is a thought scenario, which can and does work in the real world.

Logically, if a large number of people are using a specific TA signal to make trades, their trades will move the market to a degree. Then if one knows what that signal is, one can reliably make money using the same TA signal.

So even if the actual TA signal is a completely random walk, an alert person can make money from that TA signal if they understand that the market will move because some powerful players are using the same signal for whatever reason.

TLDR: A bullshit signal can be used to reliably make money.
I am mainly speaking to jobs that require a lot of critical thought. Your brain like the rest of your body can get fatigued, but unlike most of the other muscles in your body it is not easy to increase its conditioning.

IE mental exhaustion, there is a limit to how much intensive mental work everyone can put in in a given period of time. This is mainly to what i am speaking of.

And yes of course there are BS jobs, I never said there wasn't. There always will be, its just a matter of nothing is perfect.
all share an element of arms-race components to them

Sometimes arms races (in the figurative sense) can lead to better performance! This week's New Yorker has a splendid example of this in James Surowiecki's "Better All the Time
How the 'performance revolution' came to athletics—and beyond" (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/better-time). It's not easy to excerpt, but he points out that athletes used to barely train at all and now they do it all the time; musicians are better; elite students are "better" in many respects; manufacturing has improved. As he writes:

as the sports columnist Mark Montieth wrote after reviewing a host of games from the nineteen-fifties and sixties, “The difference in skills and athleticism between eras is remarkable. Most players, even the stars, couldn’t dribble well with their off-hand. Compared to today’s athletes, they often appear to be enacting a slow-motion replay.”

What we’re seeing is, in part, the mainstreaming of excellent habits. In the late nineteen-fifties, Raymond Berry, the great wide receiver for the Baltimore Colts, was famous for his attention to detail and his obsessive approach to the game: he took copious notes, he ate well, he studied film of his opponents, he simulated entire games by himself, and so on. But, as the journalist Mark Bowden observed, Berry was considered an oddball.

The whole article is wroth reading.
For sure, that's certainly one of the things that he misses. The midnight pizza deliveryman has a 'bullshit' job where he does nearly nothing because the 1 hour of real work over an 8 hour period is worth it to his boss. Most professional/service work has a large component of this type of availability.

But yet we still try to maximize for 40. If we automate the pointless bits, we don't scale back Bob's hours to 20 and pay him the same. We expect 40 again (never happened in the first place) or reduce his 'hours' (read: pay) to 20.

Maximizing for 40 is arbitrary for many jobs.
> So instead of going home early and cooking, working in the garden, bettering themselves, or watching tv, many show up to work and have strange meetings about nothing, conversations at the coffee corner, work unproductively on a tasks that could be done efficiently if they hadn't already been at work for 7 hours, or fuck around online while nobody is looking. It's great for eBay and Facebook, not so much for the kids in day care.

“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.”
– Dave Barry
I know a gifted kid that was accelerated to higher grades. Lonely and sad. Not a lot of friends that much older than him; no dates; no hanging out. 16-18 yr olds don't want to talk to a 14yo, especially in high school.

So maybe we have to work with what we've got - 14yo that can learn fast - so teach them fast. Can't do it in the regular classroom, so gifted class. Socialization is apparently an issue there (why? same age group as other kids have, same teacher - what's really different?) so work on that.
I tried sending you an email to both email addresses I could find. Both bounced. If you ever need to talk, I'm here: gall amine at google's email service.
I do most my concurrent realtime analysis in C or Java.

The biggest issue I run into with realtime analysis, I work in flow measurement systems so you may never encounter this but communication errors.

Having a value randomly flip from 50 to -30 just for one data point can throw you stand deviation, averages, etc. Straight out the window. And potentially ruin a solid test.

What I find you want is a very threaded model. I normally just throw threads at the scheduler and let it sort out the details.

Typically you want IO/error handling done in its own heavy thread for each from of IO. Or each source, Ethernet, DAQ card, etc. Luckily ethernet does most of this for you.

Next your post-error processed IO should get sorted into something, normally a structure of some sort, and dumped into a generally read only structure.

This structure is read by 2 threads. 1 logs it, 1 processes it further (before moving to another thread to be logged).

This lets your processing be largely independent and have no IO slow down. Which is handy when your approaching ~20GB/hr+ of data streaming. Most of what you get, and generate internally doesn't have to be logged, unless you really like buying hard drives.

Also by keeping these separate you can have multiple processing threads. But when you do be on guard. Haveing 1 IO -> N processing -> 1 IO will result in data arriving at the 2 be logged IO not in the order it was recieved.

You will likely want a catch all thread sitting between logging and IO to sort the last ~500 items by time stamp, so they can be logged properly.

TL;DR

1) Make sure you keep track of when it arrived log it in the same order

2) More threads are better then none.

3) Make sure communication errors don't occur (if your using TCP the OS does this for you).
What in the hell is wrong with political agitation? Had no idea the system was working so well for you! :)
Around 2003/2004 a local magazine called NAG (http://www.nag.co.za/) had an opinion piece at the end in which the author theorized using beacons for an inverse purpose: attach Bluetooth fobs/beacons to your keys and then triangulate given how your phone scales the signal strength of the BT signal. IIRC it would have only worked with Nokias because no other brand implemented this Bluetooth power consumption optimization spec. I do remember the article indicating that such beacons could be found with a little bit of effort.

The only piece missing from the puzzle was that phones only have one Bluetooth aerial, so triangulation would have been impossible. It would still be possible to determine unitless distance.
Just the initial data-set alone is going to be incredibly mis-representative of software in general.

* Most-starred projects mean these are all successful projects. Much software is not successful.

* A successful project means there are likely more-experienced-than-average engineers coding.

* Most-starred projects will be older, more stable code-bases than most software.

* Open Source development is a small slice of software development.

* Github is a sub-set of Open Source development.

And I expect there are a myriad of holes to poke elsewhere. In general I distrust any research that surveys GitHub and tries to make claims about software development in general. It is lazy.
As long as the President's success is measured by the unemployment rate, these jobs will exist.
Close to Scheme? Not really.

http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/07/18/javascript-isnt...
Prime packages are treated better than Express; tracked better and always delivered. In my PO nothing is more important. A misthrow of a media mail or regular parcel gets delivered the next day (misthrow = put in the wrong hamper and not noticed until the truck gets loaded; the correct carrier has left); whereas if a Prime parcel is a misthrow, they send one of the "gargoyles" (i.e. newly minted temporary $16.50 hr workers) to deliver it that day.

Sometimes people still don't understand Sunday delivery and don't look for it or expect it.

USPS get ~$1.50 per parcel from Prime. (trying to recall redacted pdf with that figure). EDIT orig reversed

True story> Because 100% prime delivery is required, after checking the nightly report and found one amazon not delivered, a supervisor had to knock on a customer's door after 8pm and ask if he could scan the package. The package was already in the garbage and had to be given to the sup. [This is an extreme case but it does reflect the "emergency" hyper nature given to Prime parcels.]

If in fact the status you receive from your Prime packages are "refused" or "unable" it could be many things.. from bad (they want to stop the "clock") or most likely other things: Dog in yard; no safe and secure place to put the parcel; It is raining like hell and your regular carrier knows you don't want wet diapers (oh, by the way Kimberly Clark Amazon delivered diapers are exposed on the bottom; great for store shelves but not good if you leave them on a wet set of stairs);
I know what you're getting at, but I'd be reasonably confident in speculating that there is just as much slacking off on construction projects as any other employment. Some of it maybe genuinely waiting for something to happen (crane to move something, cement truck to arrive etc). I'm not sure whether you'd count that as slacking off but it's certainly not working.
Google and Facebook spy on you. Help us create alternatives that don’t.
Poweliks: persistent malware without a file
Excellent. I was looking at CSSTransitionGroup a few days ago and would have definitely have used this if it was available. Baking in a couple of default transitions is a great idea. Are you planning on creating an npm package?
TextSecure does it in a nice way: https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/
Can't that kind of "work" be done just as well while doing yardwork or cooking or similar things? I don't see a strong reason to confine employees for 40 hours a week for that.
Here is the link to the Jawbone.com

http://jawbone.com/store/buy/up3
>To me, the tell that he defined "bullshit" as "jobs I don't like or understand" is that he lumped in actuaries with telemarketers -- does he think providing insurance has no value?

Quite a lot of it doesn't, and the less value it creates the more profitable it tends to be. Take PPI for instance.

While some of it has value, it swallows up a LOT more of our GDP than it should (much like the rest of the FIRE sector) and creates a multitude of bullshit jobs.

>Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2].

I bet those corporate lawyers earn more in aggregate.

>Ultimately, it seems like Graeber wants to return to a butcher-and-baker economy, where all our jobs are focused on directly providing services to consumers.

I don't think so. He is just highlighting the fact that the almighty market is not so efficient and has a lot of us doing a lot of pointless bullshit a lot of the time for no reason.

i.e. we're developing the worst excesses of the Soviet Union.
>>Are there any other real alternatives you could recommend to give them a try?.

Dropbox has a native linux client which can not be said for either OneDrive or Google Drive.

I use a mix of Dropbox and BTSync right now
I wonder if the problem is exacerbated in the US by the lack of guaranteed time off.

That is, European workers (for example) can better fill a 35-40 hour work week because they only have to work ~47 weeks of the year, whereas in the US, many feel lucky to have even two weeks off.
I work at a large bank in the US. We build websites. Internal websites. The company employs maybe 300k people in the US alone. None of the websites gets more than 10 hits a day! There are 5 websites. And we have 40-50 people to support just that! If all these websites disappeared overnight there would be no difference to the bank. And to the society.
The best part: the bank has been rescued by tax payer money. If it went bankrupt -- as it should have -- I would be working productively somewhere else. Unless "somewhere" else is also supported by the tax payer money and artificially cheap credit, FED rates at 0% full economic cycle now.
The solution is more capitalism, not socialism. I.e. let them go bankrupt! This is what capitalism is all about. You take risks. You win, big payout! You loose, you go bankrupt! This is capitalism, not tax funded corporations. That's socialism for the rich. But don't call that capitalism, please! Interest rates at 0% for 7 years?! Set by whom? Capitalist free markets? Or socialist bureaucrats who know it all better?! Who sets the rates? Mr. Market or Ms. Yellen? Get rid of the FED too. You will see jobs like mine disappearing. And forcing me to do something more productive than slacking off for $120k / year curtesy of the tax payer.

Capitalism in crisis is all about reallocating work force from unproductive work at looser companies to do something great at productive companies! That's what bankruptcies are all about. Yes, my bank should be history long time ago. Its assets should be taken over by a bank that didn't make the stupid mistakes. And smart people who avoided those mistakes. This is what the bankruptcy process is about. Then this new CEO that weathered 2008 crisis making his small bank winning party here and taking over assets of bankrupted banks -- would see that nonsense and fire half of the staff. So they can go do something productive! This is how it works in true capitalism. We don't have it though because we believe in socialism. So yep, pay for your zombie bank (and my salary!) because the people who you voted into the office, didn't let the markets work!
> Western culture really doesn't allow us to just show up for the 15-20 hours we really work and get paid the same salary as the 40 we say we do.

There are exceptions. As an academic, I have that freedom. If I don't feel like working, I have no pressure to stay at my office. On the other hand, I often work during the evenings, weekends and vacation. I wonder how I would adjust if I had to switch to a regular job.
Show HN: Shortdiary – A Diary for the 21st Century
Volunteerism too, providing services or simply comfort to others free of charge, whether they be family, friends, neighbors, the elderly, the sick, the poor, is a non-free-market activity. The less free time a person has though, time away from market-driven, payment-required jobs, the less freedom they have to: work on tasks pro bono, pursue hobbies, interests, contribute to a vibrant caring community, participate in government or petition it, learn new things, experiment, think, write, get creative, explore, and simply pursue their own happiness in life.
JavaScript still rules GitHub
Lovefield – A relational query engine for IndexedDB
Its about building a family, which is more than one person. To call its purpose child-raising is silly; folks stay married after the kids are gone. A family can be a grandmother and a grandkid; a Mom and a child and a grandchild; three kids raising one another after the folks die in an accident; two Moms and three adopted kids (like my cousins are). Its arrogant and small-minded to reject any family that doesn't look like yours, and worse yet to try to legislate other families out of existence.

In fact, if marriage is 'almost destroyed' as you posit, then we need more, new styles of family if kids are to have a chance to grow up fed and clothed and loved enough.
Corporations for which VS/Win licenses don't matter are usually exactly those which don't let developers use F#. So what's your point?
I think this also points to people with startups. Not working 40 hours - and yes, I mean real work - is often not an option.