skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all,

> Machines are incredibly dumb. Even these machine-learning wizz-things. They can do statistics, inferences, correlations.

Do you think human brain does something more? All we can do is statistics, inferences and correlations, and we do it poorly.

Moreover, there is an even bigger problem than 100% automation of everything - namely, the automation of 50% of jobs. What are we going to do with half of the society being unable to find any job? And that most likely includes your or mine parents, siblings and friends, who will no doubt come to us techies for assistance. And if current trends continue, it's 10 years away, not 100.
I've often found myself clearing clutter as the most productive way to procrastinate, telling myself that I'll do better work once I'm organized. Unfortunately, that's not usually the true outcome, so in some ways I'm fooling myself and not really addressing the cause of my demotivation. I appreciated that this article (rigorous or not) challenged me to take a harder look at my behaviors.
Ask HN: How do we get rejected by seed investors?
1. We're new to the Bay Area, so don't know anyone connected in the startup world.

2. We're a strong team, very close, and one of us is a very strong and experienced hacker. Both of us lack any kind of prestigious pedigree (fancy private schools, etc).

3. We have a real product that is extremely cool and much bigger in ambition than 99% of what investors see every day. If (and I mean if) it succeeds, it really would be one of the big important internet companies.

5. We're extremely dedicated. We've sold our possessions and turned away very comfortable jobs, when we really can't afford to. Hard work and sacrifice are not an issue.

6. We already have some paying users, an extremely receptive audience, and need money to help us grow.

I could go on, but I'll stop. I just wanted to give some background. We're very serious and have read a ton of advice. Yet we're still pretty much mystified about how to even get investors to tell us "no".

We're ready to hear no, we just want to hear something. So how does a great startup, run by a couple of nobodies, get rejected by investors in Silicon Valley.
What alternative are you proposing? All I see so far is basically, it's too hard so let's not even try.
How would you not? You still need to get something you like, which is always hard and subjective with design.
An auto-unclose process that examined web logs for direct hits from google might be nice too. And closed question that gets N hits from google probably deserves to be reopened with a special "google wants an answer" tag.

I usually (always) search google for my problem de jour. And frequently (enough so I remember) the first stackoverflow result is my exact question... but closed. Probably happens once or twice a month, and usually on something "thorny" (i.e. no clear cut answer... so "primarily opinion based" answers are fine... I can compare the top voted answers and decide for myself).
Indeed. Lea writes a cogent article about a pervasive problem of sexism and hostility to women in education and industry and her personal experiences with it. From a thousand yards, a few of her individual examples seem that they might be a bit overblown and unfair to the other party, perhaps based on her own assumptions from being on the receiving end of so much blatant sexism. But picking them apart one by one to debunk her experience and narrative is invalidating her experience and condoning blatant sexism and hostile workplaces. It's real and it's wrong, and even those whose intentions are harmless should pay more attention to what they are saying and doing and be fucking professionals. You don't code with your dick, so there's no need to wave it around in the workplace.
D&D character generator shut down by Hasbro after running for 20 years
As an Australian developer, any sales to Australian customers include 10% GST (Goods and Services Tax).

Apple send a monthly GST report containing the amount of tax we need to pay for our Australian sales, which makes reporting super-easy.

Side note: Apple don't charge the tax on top of the price, so earning a 99c sale from a US customer (net revenue ~$0.70) is far more valuable than a 99c sale from an Australian customer ($0.63)
I wasn't suggesting we invent jobs to keep people busy - I think we should strive towards employment being required for no one. Once food and material goods are post-scarcity, absolutely they should be provided to all.

But as long as anything is scarce (and experiences are, broadly, and I don't think there's any way around that), we'll have something like "employment". It might start at "I'll sing you a song if you massage my back" barter-style, but that evolves into currency eventually.
Silicon Valley's Cult of Nothing
Using TDD to Learn Theory of Computation
Definitely depending on the type of organisation, you'd need to tweak the incentive structure. And yeah the ideal scenario would be the entire organisation working together to automate all of their processes, and for everyone to share in those benefits.

The basic, not fully thought out idea, was that if you automated your own job you got the full bonus. If you automate another person's job, you both split the bonus 50/50.

I think with most jobs, automation would definitely involve programming and tech skills. But there would be a lot of non-tech tasks as well, such as thoroughly understanding their workflow and processes and identifying more efficient practices.

"Automation" can also be a combination of computer and human outsourcing too.

In the small web dev company I was working for (launching internal startups), the "creative process" of designing website mockups was incredibly time consuming. I suggested we collect all of the customer requirements and collateral, and automatically outsource the mockups via API to something like MobileWorks/Freelancer/Elance/99Designs/DesignCrowd etc
Indeed. Our real problem is that of coordination, and that there is no easy path from here to there - if we keep just following the market's lead hoping it will magically solve everything, we're not going to get to that age of abundance.
Your comment shows a lack of understanding of what he's saying. You're not paying for software or payment systems, or anything, it's more like a tax. I'd get all of that if I just paid $100 and sold nothing. That stuff is provided for Apple's benefit as well as your benefit.

But there is benefit to be gained by not taxing the "poor". This is the same argument as the entire "regressive/progressive" tax regimes.

I mean, yes, 30% of fuck all is not a lot and well worth what you get, but that's not the point, Apple's not making much from the long tail, so why not give the long tail the economic freedom to experiment and grow and make everyone richer. That's the point. Let the small businesses grow into bigger businesses by alleviating the tax burden.

The point is that the big fat Rovio's of this world can easily pay for the Apple ecosystem by themselves. The take from the little businesses is relatively small, so why not cut them slack by introducing tiered pricing, allowing them to spend more on growing and advertising, or simply stay in the market, and thus increasing the growth rate of the overall app economy.

By using terms like "providing a service" and "platform" and "do all that yourself", you're fundamentally missing the OPs argument. He's not talking about the value of the services, the virtual bin men, or the armies, or the law systems, he's talking about the economy that pays for all that in the first place.
The human mind, while having less data storage, and being drastically slower for some types of problems, will stay significantly faster than computers at other types of problems.

We merely must learn to better teach those brains (matrix upload?), extend them (artificial memory enhancements and built in calculators) and utilize them for the problem sets they excel at.
Completely OT, but, if you file a Schedule C and are deducting 50% of the cost as a business expense, then effectively the meal actually costs less the higher your tax rate. In CA and at the highest marginal rates the state+federal deduction is worth around 20% the cost of the meal!
Betting BiOS Bugs won't Bite Y'er Butt? [pdf]
This is particularly problematic for virtual machines, which are starved of entropy (no sensors, audio device, etc.).

I have VM images begin without ssh host keys and have a service dependency on haveged: http://www.issihosts.com/haveged/ and http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/34523/is-it-appr...
Passion Is Overrated and Goals Are for Losers
There is little doubt that there is work for everyone. Problem is if there is profitable work for everyone.

For example, you will find countless people to help dig various archeological site, help processing the various museum collection still hidden in boxed, ...

Also "historically" is misleading. Historically the industrial revolution was one of the worst period to live - the conversion of those 90% to the industry was not a happy story. And the post-war golden age was after the worst wars ever.

We are also dealing with some hard limit this time. On the production side, we are hitting earth physical limit on about everything. Even on the consumer side, we are hitting some limit, even for virtual activities, there are only 24 hour a day for you to consume.

History is good to remind you to be optimistic. However, history is not a solution: some guy in 100 year may look back at this period as another great time in human history, but that's down to us find the details on how to achieve it.
I installed it on Windows, and Calc is still quite slow compared to Excel. My informal benchmarks have to do with data sets of maybe a dozen columns and a few thousand rows, graphing and calculating. I'd estimate an order of magnitude speed difference. Granted, this is probably not too high on the list of urgent improvements to broaden the appeal of LibreOffice for widespread use, and I love having it on a thumb drive to use wherever I want. If I've waited an hour to gather a bunch of data, I can wait a few more seconds to graph it. But at my desk, for serious crunching, I've got to have my Excel.

I could easily live without MS Office. Heck, I use Wordpad to compose text. I use relatively few fancy features of PowerPoint, and could easily live without it. But Excel remains a killer app for me, even as I've mastered data manipulation and graphing in Python.
Last chance to support North Korean dissidents
Why we like characters who battle institutions
I have dreamed on building a program that learns to program. Maybe I need to look into it again.
No, I'm correct and you're wrong. Irish, Polish, etc are nationalities not ethnicities.

Check wikipedia:

Sherpa (Tibetan: "eastern people", from shar "east" + pa "people") are an ethnic group from the most mountainous region of Nepal, high in the Himalayas.
Netflix has said publicly that they run FreeBSD 10 stable.
Here's a slide deck from 2013 that says they were running FreeBSD 9 at the time.
I think that in the US this is primarily a male trait. Guys are supposed to make fun of their guy friends. But you'll never see girls doing the same to each other. The cool ones will do it to/with their guy friends.
I'd be willing to bet you've never built a successful business that handles everything done by Apple in-house.

If you had, you'd already be doing everything yourself (and doing it better that Apple) and happily collecting more than 70%. Alternately, you'd have realized that beating this price is a major accomplishment and probably not the best use of your time, making the 30% is a pretty fair trade.

In either case, you would not be complaining.
Wow, thanks for the down votes. I wonder if they were from the founders? It would definitely count as bad PR.
I can't tell if you're trolling, or if you really do think my refusal to entertain the idea of a worldwide Jewish banking conspiracy is alarmingly anti-intellectual.
Yes but, in light of that, this would be a simple solution apple could implement overnight if they wanted. I'm sure they won't for political reasons but I hope they think about it.
You can find the following slides from BSDCan 2013 that state Netflix runs FreeBSD 9.

https://people.freebsd.org/~scottl/Netflix-BSDCan-20130515.p...
Devs probably wouldn't find the split so bad if the general fee charged for apps was higher. It must be pretty hard to make a living on 99 cent apps unless you're wildly successful.
Sometimes it is forgotten that what is of 'value' is what is inherently scarcer. Today, it just happens that there is a shortage of automating agents (programmers, AI scientists etc.), once this opportunities (STEM) become common, they won't hold much value, and humans will value what is the next scarce thing (Hand crafts, Arts ? The future will tell)

We also need to remind ourselves, that the rich cannot feel rich without an army of poor underneath them. I can guarantee having the very rich people shielded from the rest is actually not an evolution of our race.
Other technologies will make the need for jobs obsolete.

It's called a post-scarcity society and it must be achieved at the same time or slightly before most jobs become automated.

A molecular re-arranger would be the holy grail of a post-scarcity society.

Also, you're not giving enough credit to the human brain. Whatever it does, we can't even get close to replicating it with current computer technology.

Yes, they can emulate a bee or an ant with computers, but that creature doesn't have the ability to reason and come up with ideas, and dream (as far as we know and are emulating).
No, Mecurial revlogs are not approximately simple. They were designed to be an append-only log for individual files, in the same way that CVS and RCS performed file-level change repositories. This choice causes problems when doing file renames and history merging because you need to either duplicate data or provide complex pointers between filenames which may not even exist in the tip.

I wrote a post comparing the file layouts a few years ago:

http://alblue.bandlem.com/2011/03/mercurial-and-git-technica...

The TLDR is that Mecurial revlogs were designed from lofty architectural goals (append-only formats, designed to be parsed forwards) whereas Git is just an object soup with pointers to other objects in the same soup. As a result, different file storage mechanisms have been created (direct file, push to remote HTTP/S3, BigTable etc.) and new features (bitmaps, packed archives, delta compression between the same and different filenames) have been grafted on over time. The format is also versioned, with feature versions being added at a later stage to the transport protocols that ship packs of these deltas between versions.

Frankly the only valid criticism of Git appears to be 'The command line flags are a little funky' and given the extensive Git tooling that has been built (it's provided by default in Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ, Xcode and others) the fact that command line tooling takes a bit of getting used to is really such a non-issue that I'm not going to waste further time talking about it here.

Mercurial is dead, but its fans just haven't noticed yet.
I would suggest a VBA implementation in Calc would do a lot for getting LO taken more seriously in the business world.

Also bear in mind that Office is a moving target. Office 2016 is due out this year... http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/22/microsoft-announces-office...
How to Come Up with Business Ideas
> If you automate away your non-tech co-worker ... will he get the bonus?

Yes, and you get nothing. It's fair; just don't automate away other people's jobs, automate away your own.

> If someone automates you away, will you get anything?

Yes, 100% of the bonus. It's not a choice, you must leave. I still think that's fair.

> If you keep automating away your co-workers, who's gonna be left to help you automate yourself away?

You don't automate away your co-workers unless you like doing free work. Problem solved. If you have the most difficult to automate away job, you entered into it knowingly. The market will ensure that those jobs will be higher paid by supply and demand.

This model doesn't require cooperation to work, just a relatively clear set of job responsibilities and a clear definition of what it means for you to be automated away.

I actually really love this idea, from an employer's perspective.
Reading the comments here is somewhat frustrating. Even the most recent ones seem to miss the significance of the RNG bug being in the -CURRENT branch only.

They found a bug, and it will be fixed. The fact that this bug was found in -CURRENT is a good a thing. This is a pre-alpha, not for production release. The development model is working as intended, no?
> The human mind ... will stay significantly faster than computers at other types of problems

This is controversial. Semantic tagging of photographs used to be something that was done much better by the human brain, but all of a sudden it seems like computers are catching up fast. I hesitate to say there's any one domain that we won't be able to tackle algorithmically/via machine learning in some way.

> extend them (artificial memory enhancements and built in calculators)

My phone is already my artificial memory enhancement. Communication is via a high latency, unreliable interface, but it's (for all intents and purposes) an extension of my brain ;)
I agree. $30K/yr is a lot of money, but it shouldn't put anyone on the street. Sure, it might not allow you to live a glamorous lifestyle in they valley, but you have the freedom to move somewhere a lot cheaper to live if you're a single developer pulling $70K/yr from an iphone app. If you don't want to make that compromise, then you should be looking for a second source of income, or start living within your means.
There's an interesting little passage where the protagonist of Use of Weapons, experiencing the Culture's society for the first time, meets a sociologist who works part-time cleaning tables at a cafeteria -- even though the job could easily be automated.

“I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway" - the man laughed - "people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And," the man said with a smile, "it's a good way of meeting people. So where are you from, anyway?”
According to Google [1][2], the overhead is negligible.

[1] https://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.h...

[2] http://blog.codinghorror.com/should-all-web-traffic-be-encry...
It re-creates items even when they have unique identifiers? Is that a bug?
Well, NATO and the US on themselves are at the border at least with Poland. I guess discussions with the rest would be quick with any kind of "movement" there.
I am writing a short stories book (as an amateur), I was looking for a better tool than Word (not that I can't write in it, just that I don't feel confortable in it). I followed your passionate comment and I am installing LyX right now, after getting assured that you can also use LyX to create a letter or a novel or a theatre play or film script.

Thanks for the comment
This is always a possibility. Groupon being the poster child for that of course.
Ok, maybe you weren't suggesting that but I see this tossed around quite often - that people will always find new jobs and therefore we can keep requiring everyone to work for sustenance. And we're inventing many bullshit jobs right now - not to look too far, half of the work done in web development is probably contributing to nothing else than zero-sum games of companies trying to out-advertise one another.

I agree - as long as resources required for basic survival are scarce, there will be employment. But the point is, we shouldn't try to maintain the status quo as long as possible; we should jump to letting people live without a job the first moment this becomes feasible.
Good typography and layouts are informed by the ideas and story an author is trying to convey. If we are to say we want an author to care about the communication of their work, they should take an active interest in how that work is presented. The act of writing and the act of designing a text are separate activities but rely on heavy collaboration between the designer and author, even if those two are one in the same – to say that an author should eschew learning how the subtle marks of good typography affect their text is akin to asking a good comedian, musician or performer to ignore how a theatre's production comes together.
Yeah thanks for the Android vs iOS rundown. We now all know the differences between the two, but none of the things you listed are the signatures of a premium product, merely a product that better fits your desires. Other than that, it's completely off topic.
Why would a good capitalist pay years of salary, percentages of the company, or whatever else you're talking about offering, when they can simply outsource the automation job for $5,000 to China? And then fire you.

And then hire you back on a $5,000 1099 contract to automate other people's jobs?

You seem to be trying to come up with some sort of "fair" system, as if that were how compensation works now or ever will work.
Yes, I guess this is it and we probably crossed the line now. I'm curious how this will end if everybody wants to save their faces.
Ok, so how about when you're an accountant? Now your employer has a strong incentive to pay someone extra to eliminate you, and you have no way of automating yourself because you don't know squat about programming.

That's the kind of situation that needs to be handled.
Your bias is really showing. Brazilians don't have far fewer freedoms than Americans, in fact I'd say some of the freedoms brazilians enjoy are far more important than those in the US.

That doesn't mean Brazil is perfect, it's certainly not. It's a country with a lot of problems, but to say it is authoritarian is just straight-up false.

This is just a small list, there are many more examples if you bother to look for them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unite...
Maybe I'm weird but I found Basil to be likable. He's like a more competent, better-spoken Homer Simpson.
For Qemu 1.3 and later, there is VirtIORand where you can have VMs attach to a HWRNG on the hypervisor, then food that into the kernel CSPRNG. This should be imaged by default, so on first boot, each VM has enough entropy for key generation.
I understand where he's coming from, but in almost any analagous case I can think of, the tiers go the opposite way -- you pay less percentage on a $million in revenues than you do on $1000.

When you have only $1000 in revenues, you're actually paying very little for what Apple is providing. When you have a million, you're paying an awful lot, and are probably wondering if you can find a way to keep more of it.
> This is because iXsystems (Jordan Hubbard) hired Kip to implement it for FreeNAS (and, presumably PC-BSD),

I believe EMC Isilon has also sponsored the work.

> not because the FreeBSD community thinks it needs a new init system.

Right. Kip is working on it because someone hired him too. But practically, this is how large-scale efforts get done. Some FreeBSD-using corporation hires / builds out a larger project in a way that is acceptable to the community and it is incorporated into base.

I do think the community has come to more or less that consensus at this point, though. The camp that is fine with /etc/rc hasn't started raising loud complaints about the idea incorporating a backwards-compatible launchd to replace rc.