skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Amazon Picking Challenge, to do that job with a robotic arm, is underway. Finals, with live robot demos, are on May 26-28, 2015, in Seattle. That's the next step, and it's not far away. In a year or two, robots will probably be handling everything rectangular, like boxes and books. There may still be a few people around for odd sizes and shapes. Not many.

As for "there will be jobs building and repairing the robots", Amazon has about 30,000 pickers during peak season. Kiva Systems has about 600 employees. Because all those little mobile robots are interchangeable, there's not much need for on-site maintenance. There's someone on site to replace wheels and batteries and do basic diagnostics, but seriously broken ones are just shipped back to the factory.

The Kiva system requires little installation, which is why it's being deployed so fast. Previous systems required conveyors, stacker cranes running on tracks, and lots of specialized, custom machinery. Kiva just needs a flat floor, markers on the floor, and WiFi.

Here's what US employment looks like, by sector: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm
Manufacturing is only 8% of the labor force, yet the US makes more stuff than ever. US
manufacturing is doing great. The drop in output after 2008 has been completely recovered. Manufacturing just doesn't need many people. The jobs lost never came back.

In 2012, retail employed 10% of the US labor force. Remember malls? (See deadmalls.com) No new indoor mall has been built in the US in 10 years. (OK, American Dream Meadowlands in New Jersey is still under construction, after 12 years, three bankruptcies, and a roof collapse, but that's a political boondoggle, part of a stadium complex.) Online ordering doesn't need many people. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates show a small decline over the next 10 years, but those numbers predate Amazon's recent growth and are probably optimistic. The BLS shows employment growth in transportation and warehousing. Probably not going to happen.

This is the future, and the future is now.
I created one here: http://vocowl.com

Source: github.com/pathikrit/vocowl
These self judgments also tend to be correlated with judgments made by friends, family, spouse, therapist, and with personality tests. In other words, even though there are differences between the groups, people are relatively self-aware.

I'd be interested to see here if friends in face-to-face contexts perform similarly to the Facebook context.
I remember talking to a few people in high school about me studying CS because I wanted to become a developer.

They all my IT-friends were like, "Don't do it man. No one needs new software! Better be an administrator, in the future they will be needed to manage all the IT stuff that already exists, but there will hardly be anything new on the marked!"

That was 2003, right before the social and mobile boom.
...not to mention the habit of triggering assertion errors when combined with let-scopes.
There is still a scuffler on my family farm. I don't think I've ever seen it in use, but if it came down to using it again, it would just mean that I would spend more time in the field and less time programming, my other career. It wouldn't necessarily translate into more jobs for 'unskilled' people. Not that I would consider scuffling a unskilled job in the first place. You've got to keep it within that tiny window between rows, which is not exactly easy in the absence of robotics (which does make that point easier, and about the only way it is still done today; frequently with edible beans) but the logical conclusion to that is, again, not employing people.
Clearly, because game theory is the ultimate theory of the nature of the universe, consciousness included. /s
The point is not the 3Gb of space. We will offer plans with more space and unshared/guaranteed network capacity.
It's insane.

He literally said 'there's something behind this door, we don't know whether it's a guy with a rocket launcher or an innocent baby, so let's throw a grenade in there and 'gain the initiative' whichever case it may be'.

I never quite understood raids in the first place. Between scoping out a house, arresting any individuals outside as they walk on the curb while entering an empty home with a warrant, and raiding a house delta-force style with guns, an unknown number of people in the house with no knowledge of what you'll find. I'm sure house raids have their place, but to me that place feels rather limited. Raiding someone's house because of something like pot, or selling nachos, with grenades and all?
> Dr. Evil runs Monsanto. Where they’ve turned large tracks of fertile land into a barren, sterile wasteland that can only grow their GMO crops.

I don't precisely think that's a correct characterization (as someone who is employed by a subsidiary of MON). Let's rephrase that:

- Large tracts of land have been planted with high density crops without weeds and highly resistant to pests.

This year I believe the record corn harvest was over 300 bu/ac. That's a vast improvement compared to 100 years ago.

I was taken to a research area earlier this year and took two photos of corn at a demonstration plot - one circa late 1800 farming practice, one circa 2014 farming practice.

- https://plus.google.com/116106755607615316501/posts/hvUBLxsj...
- https://plus.google.com/116106755607615316501/posts/H76wXT2U...

Quick, guess which one has the best yield/acre - and which one has the best environment for honeybees. I'm not a beekeeper or an agronomist, but I strongly suspect that the focus on anti-weed, anti-pest farms is aggressively hostile to non-food production. I'm inclined to believe permaculture is the sustainable way forward, but I have no idea how to feed the planet with permaculture without a massive human die-off.
Incentives do not excuse psychopathic behavior.
Here I suppose: https://gist.github.com/maxogden/d96123138522c84cdb25
How Nonemployed Americans Spend Their Weekdays: Men vs. Women
I think there is a big gap between PM and developers , if given a specification sheet mentioning requirements "CLEARLY" and giving enough time for testing a developer will deliver the product as specified .
Also not forgetting that there are always very tight development cycles which come as people at management level over commit promises to clients not understanding the current team capabilities .
It comes from the early x86 processors not having an "no-execute" permission bit for page table entries. In the AMD64 bit architecture, an NX bit was added.
Interesting point on number one. There is a big movement against the free movement of labor in the tech world, but that free movement of people is the life blood of high tech companies.
A great way to stop identity politics becoming an issue is to bring it up unprompted through a throwaway account on Hacker News. Anonymously singling out specific members of the community that you dislike and labeling them as bad actors is particularly helpful.

Oh, wait...
"It seems to me that it is self-evident that most low-skill labor, at the very least, is in the process of being automated and is therefore going to be unnecessary. "

I'm not sure this is restricted to low-wage labor. There are plenty of low-wage jobs that are just complex enough to make automation more expensive than wages for the near future. Driving is a good example here (for now).

And there's plenty of high-wage jobs which are quite automatable - accounting (TurboTax), financial management (wealthfront/betterment), lots of software operations work (AWS tools), etc.
It's good for side by side docs/code as a space saving alternative for a multi-monitor setup.
Uber Steering Data to Boston
Magic Numbers of Quantum Matter Revealed by Cold Atoms
It looks like iojs is only going to ship features once they've shipped in Chrome without a flag. The compelling reason to use the features is that they're useful!

EDIT: I don't think anyone is going to be sympathetic to holding back from using conveniences because people are choosing to stick with an old runtime. It's a different ballgame than the browser.
I've read the same about the Rwandan Genocide.
I'm curious what one might expect something like this to cost.
I think this is a pretty aggressive timeline.

These technologies are certainly nascent -- but they have been, and will continue to be. I doubt that we will see widespread adoption of ALL (or even 25% of them) over the next 350 days.

More likely -- using Diamandis' own descriptive memes -- I believe many of these technologies are likely to hit an inflection point (i.e. where their exponential growth becomes an observable phenomenon) in the next five years.

> VR - obviously FB is making a huge play here, but Magic Leap is the real (pun intended, if you've seen the promos) elephant in the room. And I have a hunch that their technology won't be ready for at least another 18 months. And it's not even VR, it's AR (which I think is going to be easier to swallow for most consumers).

> Mass Market Robots. Roomba is already around. The question is robots for what. I don't see the killer app quite yet. Perhaps as industrial assistants? Amazon already uses them to great effect in their warehouses. But that is well out of the public eye.

> Autonomous vehicles. Sure, I'm planning to buy a car with autonomous capability in the next 18 months, but full explosion of this technology is going to require governmental concurrence, and lots of work by the insurance industry. And neither of those work very fast. If only for this reason, I see 10% market saturation as at least 4-5 years away.

> Drones "everywhere". They're still toys with remarkably short battery life.

> Wireless power. My personal sense is that Apple is the market-leader in expectations management for mainstream adoption of this sort of tech. And until it's integrated, I don't think it will see widespread adoption.

> Data + Genomics. No idea. But I do have some up-close experience with a non-public project in this area, and I have to admit I'm shocked by what they're able to do, putting large datasets to work. Here I agree with Diamandis that we might see something spectacular happen over the next year. But what -- I don't know.

> Sensor explosion. It is certainly coming. Not confident in the next year.

> Voice Control. Very much agree here, but because of the Apple Watch. All of a sudden an entire generation that saw Siri as a nice-to-have will now see it as a need-to-use -- and this will cascade downmarket to the Google and Microsoft ecosystems as well.

> 3D Printing. Upcoming patent lapses and adoption by large-scale corporations will likely drive this -- not consumer leadership. The biggest news I saw in this was Local Motors' initiative to build a 3D car manufacturing facility in Washington, DC. Once that happens, all bets are off because both corporate and consumer sectors will start to understand the true implications for the technology.

> Bitcoin. Agree in principal. But just as important is the underlying blockchain technology which could revolutionize many more things than simply currency. But yes -- here too, adoption via Apple is the leading indicator. And I believe that ApplePay (and potentially even an Apple currency) is the future.
Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop
Show HN: FPP, a powerful 'tinkered' version of Firefox Portable
Folks:

Firefox Portable Plus (FPP) is my attempt to finally make a version of Firefox Portable that is independent of the host computer. VLC Media Player is completely integrated into the installation so that it will play most audio and video formats embedded within a tab in Firefox. Adobe Shockwave Flash is also built in and FPP will ignore any versions installed on the host computer. There is also the option of using Java through JPortable from portableapps.com.

I have 'hand tweaked' the skin and added over 40 extensions into FPP to make the 'look & feel' of the browser is esthetically pleasing as well as being intuitive and functional. I've also made dozens of the most popular 'under the hood' tweaks through 'about:config'.

This is a public version of the web browser that I use every day. Instructions on it's use, it's many, many features and how to modify it yourselves can be found on its web page.

tinker
It's free on Dreamhost. I don't use them for hosting anymore, but still keep a few domains there. 10 bucks a year for .coms.

The interface is ... almost ok. It's cluttered because it's used for more than just domain registration (think it's cPanel, actually) but the registration part is ok.
And this is the problem with guns, imagine if the police didn't have any guns and they would have to approach him by first. Obviously they outnumber him but know (unless he has a lethal weapon on him) there shouldn't be any lethal force. Guns escalate the situation way too quickly to a life threatening one ...
Definitive guide to mistakes startups make raising money
I didn't know disney create real robots! Interesting article. Well, I think it's about time they do.
How to Fix OnePlus One Battery Drain Issue? • Vlogg.com
> But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

Yeah... you solve that with employment contracts, not discriminatory hiring practices.

I really don't see how saying "smart people will get bored and quit" is any different from saying "African-Americans are lazy and will eventually stop showing up on time", or some other nonsense.
I felt like he got thrown under the bus with that whole uproar, and was glad to see him in there.
Most people use their PC for multimedia, among other things of course.
Not that many startups allow 83-b elections early on. It costs them a few $k when someone does this. It doesn't necessarily have to (it's just paper filed with the IRS by the employee), but that's what they're told and that's what they went through when they did their own 83-b paperwork. So that's what they think everyone needs to do. Honestly, there really aren't any legally required paperwork involved with 83-b, but the entire ycombinator crowd is convinced that there is. Perhaps it's bad knowledge by the YC figureheads?
While I think Pandas are a far better way to deal with spreadsheet type data, using xlrd and xlwt come in handy when you are dealing with irregular spreadsheets.
What happens when you replace "Capitalist" with "Free Marketer's"?

> http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=capitalist
There's nothing wrong with non-high end hamburger restaurants. The problem with McJobs is that they are designed to disenfranchise and maximize the fungibility of the people who work their so that their wages can be driven even below subsistence levels.
> That's a vast improvement compared to 100 years ago.

You don't even have to go back that far. At the local elevator there is a highest corn yield award from the 70s hanging on the wall. The winning yield was 120 bu/ac. Though we don't quite get to 300 bu/ac in this area (yet), but 250 bu/ac isn't unheard of.
This post is super cool and deserves more love. Physics constraints are super flexible. I've thought about using them for some pathfinding type work but have never tried. This is an even more far removed use. Very clever! I love it.
Stack smashing attacks are no longer possible, since:

1. ProPolice detects most attempts to clobber the return address.

2. You can't set the return address to memory you control the contents of, such as user input, since that memory is writable and therefore not executable.

3. The remaining way to get code into executable memory is to write a file and have the program mmap(2) it. Address space layout randomisation makes finding this code difficult, even if you have the ability to smash the stack in a way that bypasses ProPolice.

The difficult cases (like the trampoline case mentioned) are usually problematic because they are programmatically writing small functions in machine code, then executing them; basically this requires the discipline to write the function and then immediately flip the page from writable to executable. Implementing a JIT compiler like the JVM would encounter similar difficulties.
The biggest, baddest Linux hypervisor known to mankind.
I can unalias my `alias node=node --harmony` now!!
The actual "discussion" was not about who invented string interpolation (I was talking about shell/`sh` string interpolation btw. which predates Python, Perl, and Ruby). It was about who they "copied" the syntax from since using a backslash as opposed to a dollar or a hash sign isn't quite as common. And none of the languages, including Scala, mentioned here uses that exact syntax. It's just an attempt to trace back syntax decisions to where the authors of the language might have seen it. Fun and games - lighten up. ;)
Arent you supposed to be happy when you're successful? Well, maybe not eveything that makes us happy comes from the success we get. But happiness in itself is a success... I think.	8866309
I'll be brutally honest. Most of the early employees at most startups aren't very good engineers. In fact they're pretty mediocre. That's why we get the term of technical debt. Take your options and experience and move on to the next gig. Move aside so the better, more experienced people can clean up your mistakes without you fighting them every step of the way.

Maybe it's a psychological thing, but really good engineers are never employee #1-5 at a startup. They just aren't.
The real question is: Httphub may be a valid alternative for those who don't need a super featured backend ?
For userland, JITs continue work because you can still explicitly request mappings that are both writable and executable. W^X is a default policy.
For the previous generation: "IBM doesn’t publish prices for mainframes but the word on the street is that it is around $80,000 per core for a [Linux/Java core] compared to $400,000 per core for regular [cores] that mostly run z/OS" http://www.enterprisetech.com/2013/10/09/ibm-slashes-hardwar... I'm not sure whether that's the amortized total price or just the activation after you've already bought the machine.
>which enabled working-class people to own fairly large amounts of clothing for the first time

Actually...

"English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists. And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?

Faced with a peasantry that didn’t feel like playing the role of slave, philosophers, economists, politicians, moralists and leading business figures began advocating for government action. Over time, they enacted a series of laws and measures designed to push peasants out of the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of self-support."

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/08/the-rise-of-bullshit-...

In today's world, austerity serves the same function as the enclosure laws. Reduce public sector demand for labor so as to push down wages across the board.
But I am inclined to believe Ulbricht here.

You don't even need to believe him, as long as it casts doubt on the prosecution's narrative. I'm interested to see what digital forensics the government relies on to prove association with the evidence. Is he guilty? Probably. But that is not sufficient for conviction, at least in theory.
> The main point seems to be that it's run on an open governance model

Ya, I think the main problem is that no one has any idea what that means from a practical sense. Will my code go faster? Will I get better support? etc.
I assume the policy is W nand X rather than W xor X. First I've heard the term, so I'm risking pedantry to make completely sure.
I was actually running a hosting company in 2006 and we had a lot of domains under management at eNom. ENom charged us $8.95 per domain per year, and we charged our customers $15 per year for registration through us. (I went back and looked up our prices back then just for this post.)

Domains haven't been $70 each since around 1996 or so.
They're sticking the strict semver with no tags, and explicitly wanted to abandon the 0.x version numbers, so the TC decided to do 1.0.0 as the first release but make it clear that it's not production ready.
The design is a bit tacky and has too many useless elements. The extra long thing next to where the SD card goes into. Why is there a slit there? Just to remind you of the old Apple II? It's not needed and Apple would never do that.

That Apple logo on the front is nothing Apple would do. Lower left? nah. Apple would put one Apple logo on it. On the back. Maybe even none at all (look at the Mac Pro).

The headphone jack seems perfect to pull the thing down right on it's screen. The blue glow on the back? really?

Apple designs are about removing the bezel and letting the computer disappear and let the screen come out. This thing is like 60%-70% computer and 35% screen. This isn't a "facelift", it's a mock up of a design regression.

This would never be something out of Cupertino.
PayPal Here Will Launch an EMV Card Reader Later This Year
IT departments are threatened, but it's really not Docker doing it. Docker is somewhere down the list behind AWS/GCE/Rackspace, Chef/Puppet, Mesos/Deis/Flynn, and really good hosted Active Directory services.
Since there are features in Io that are neither in the current version nor planned for the future versions of Node, I guess Io.js should be explicitly specified as an engine in the package.json file of Io-specific modules. Tracking those modules will be a good metric of how well Io is received by the community.
>Manufacturing is only 8% of the labor force, yet the US makes more stuff than ever. US manufacturing is doing great. The drop in output after 2008 has been completely recovered. Manufacturing just doesn't need many people. The jobs lost never came back.

The US doesn't make more stuff than ever as can be verified by:

* Taking one look at the gaping US trade deficit.

* Taking a look at all of the manufactured items in your home. How many say made in America?
cool! but it get hung when zooming out several times
My example was from shell string interpolation/`sh`, which predates TCL by more than a decade. Not sure where your "I'd like people to study PL design history" comes from. It sounds kind of pretentious tbh.

We were looking for popular languages that use a syntax similar to `\{x}` for string interpolation. TCL uses a dollar sign, so pretty much as far from the C# syntax as possible (inside of the limited syntactical range out there). At least this page does not list any language that uses the same syntax: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/String_interpolation_%28included.... But maybe your vast knowledge of PL design history can provide information on one that does?