skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way I understand it is this (sorry,a bit long winded):

The world is run by gigantic bureaucracies and owners of capital - who all value continuity and predictability above all else. Given that the world has historically been a madhouse of crazy, and most of us are doing materially better than before, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what would be wrong with these priorities. "May you live in interesting times" is a curse, and for a good reason.

Sadly, a specific vehicle of stability and predictability is disengaging most adults from the majority of their waking hours. After the maslovian needs of food, sex and shelter are fullfilled the average 9-5 desk job does not seem to provide in average fulfillment for the higher level needs.

One element of establishing stablity is organizing work in the large scale in industrial taylorian fashion where the labor input of the individual position is predictable. The easiest way to do this is to divide the work of the organization to small enough pieces so that individual work responsibilities are easy to communicate, transfer and, perhaps even more important, measure. Small, piecemeal duties are often felt as non-important since they are so simple to perform and thus not mentally fulfilling.

The three stages of engagement from best to worst are commitment, compliance, conflict - most employers are satisfied by compliance, and one of the easiest ways to statistically enforce compliance is through observing the work directly or through reports: thus we get the endless reporting. The reason this works even if no-one is reading the reports 24/7 is that most people are extremely uncomfortable with cognitive dissonance of doing one thing and saying the other, and usually align their actions with their reporting.

Thus we get the disengaged, prozac-crunching desk jokey of the early 21st century.

I think the best leaders recognize the critical difference between commitment and compliance for organizational output. Thus we get the start-ups "we want only passionate people here" spiel - they aim for organizational commitment from composing the organization from atomic committed individuals. But this does not work in the long run unless the organization culture as a whole is dedicated to maintaining commitment. There are various cultural tactics to achieve this. Most of them are about maintaining a team spirit and there are agressive and compassionate ways in which to achieve this. But since it's about culture and human condition I'm not sure if there are any text-book approaches to maximizing organizational commitment unless one engages in full-scale brain washing as employed by cults and historically by some states.

Since there is no ethically recognized textbook-standardizable sure-fire "commitment tactic" it is understandable to me most choose the "compliance tactic".

I don't believe these are necessarily conscious choices, but rather a product of cultural evolution of various industrial management memes.
Australia had/has state provided third party vehicle insurance as part of the required yearly vehicle tax.

Aside from economies of scale and protection from risk this was also incredibly useful in that one could (if qualified) legally drive any vehicle displaying a valid windscreen ticket.
I live in Sweden and right now we are automating the service industry as well.

You order fast food from a touch screen, you buy your train tickets from a machine and the supermarket cashier is being replaced with a self-checkout.

Meanwhile I still have about 50+ working hours every week. I pay about 65% of the money I make in tax so the people that were laid off through service automation can receive unemployment benefits.

I think there is room for improvement within this economic system.
The last time the US followed an isolationist foreign policy, the Europeans got themselves into two world wars in a row. It's true that Europe has a continent-wide mutual defense agreement now. What you didn't mention is that it's called NATO and the US is the backbone of it. That's part of how it works. Otherwise you don't get the combined forces of Europe, you get indifference at best and European war at worst.

Look at East Asia. South Korea can't afford to defend itself from the North and hope to maintain their standard of living, Japan is barred by their own constitution from rearming (and if they did, that would start a regional arms race), and Taiwan would have no hope of maintaining their self-determination by themselves.

I will be the first to say that the U.S. has followed an unnecessarily aggressive foreign policy. But a very large part of how the world works depends upon the American military, and if it just went away, we would all be poorer and less safe for it.
US lawyer argues chimps are people too
It may have been that, but from where I sat, most of it appeared to be fiefdom disputes. For example, the head of IT was displeased with this unit because it didn't use Citrix, his mandated solution, for all its needs.

Why? Because it didn't work. Especially not when they tried to make 100 people use Citrix over a 10Mbit connection to servers situated on another _island_.

Even worse, we were allowed to install Firefox, gasp (This was back in the days when IE6 was the go-to corporate browser). Such untried and unproven software! But we had a killer argument for tabs, so we got it.

But it earned us the enmity of a reasonably powerful bureaucrat in head office.
Someone Quantified Which Subreddits Are the Most Toxic
The Chinese live in Richmond and West Van, the Indians live in Surrey, and the other ethnicities (Aboriginals, Caucasians, etc.) are getting squeezed in the middle. It's quite sad.

That may sound nice but it's not as neatly put as that. The way you phrase it it seems the Caucasians are the victims here, being squeezed on all sides by the Chinese and the Indians. Certainly the struggles of the Aboriginals are well-documented but Caucasians have certainly been profiting off the soaring real estate prices. If there is anything that "forced" Caucasians from many areas it was the rising value of their homes. Many have profitably sold their homes and either downsized or moved to other towns in BC (Kelowna, Okanagon). West Van was mostly white (in part due to restrictions on ownership to whites-only: http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/05/16/b-c-property-titles-...) but if those West Van homes are now occupied by Chinese people then the previous white owners certainly sold them for a handsome sum.
The 'Kindergarten Clairvoyant' Behind Consciousness.com
Court appointed bailiffs have been used by myself to recover owed cash on a couple of occasions so they serve a purpose and a good one. If people enter a contract they can't fulfil then there needs to be a method to obtain appropriate compensation.

As for the rest, I agree.
Maybe we should simplify law and then translate it to (open) code with the goal to automate and reduce bureaucracy.
The US military also effectively subsidizes the national defense of a large portion of the world, much of which we trade with. It's because of our treaty obligation to defend South Korea that, instead of investing in an arms race with North Korea, they can afford to manufacture cell phones and cars and televisions and trade them to us. Likewise for Japan and the NATO members.
Which is why we have off-shoring, and stagnant or dropping real income for that segment of the population that still has a job.

Are these good things? Is it a good thing when a private equity investor starts stomping around your startup demanding you treat your hires like exploitable assets and not like friends or colleagues you respect?
Hi! I saw your post and I think its interesting; however, I don't seem of your criteria as follows:
1. I've prototype and I'm in the process of setting up the website to start getting beta customers;
2. I'm not in the bay area.
3. I feel its a real problem and a potentially big market. Its not a photo sharing app at all.
4. This is the most interesting criteria.

If you are okay about not meeting the first and second criteria, then I'm willing to share a bit more with you.
And that's supposed to follow the Reinheitsgebot [1]? :-)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinheitsgebot
It is still insurance when administered by the government and payed through taxes.
When did you fall asleep? Find out when you closed your MacBook lid
> Anyway, my long winded point is that public sector isn't inherently inefficient, and private sector isn't inherently efficient. Any sufficiently large organisation sprouts a self-sustaining bureaucracy.

I completely agree; the public sector part I was in is probably a bad example as it's probably some of the worst places for bureaucracy and politics. It was incredibly difficult for anyone who wants to use tax dollars wisely to make headway.
How will programming change in the coming decade?
I've never seen actual bugs due to a misunderstanding of the concept though. It seem to be mostly a terminology difference between c++ and Java cultures. It is correct to say that Java passes objects as references, but it is technically wrong to say that Java is pass-by-reference. But since Java has only one way of passing objects, this terminology confusion does not lead to actual problems.
I think the confusion was largely created by the author. When he asserts that nothing in Java is passed by reference, he's using "reference" in the C++ sense. Then he says things like "references are passed by value", which uses "reference" in the Java sense.

We should be consistent in terminology. If we accept Sun's terminology, then objects are indeed passed by reference. If we're insisting on the more traditional C++ terminology, then Java has no references, only pointers.

The author recognizes the two meanings of "reference", but isn't sufficiently clear about which meaning he's using at a given time.
In general, you can make that sort of broad argument about anything. For example, you could say slavers were trying to reallocate labor from where it was less productive (African subsistence farming) to where it was more productive (building the American economy).

The point being made here is whether Private Equity CEOs are contributing anything substantial apart from concentrating capital. The answer to that has to be no. Private equity firms (the refashioned lbo firms, not vc) have a history of preying on medium-sized solid businesses where they strip the company of assets, load it with debt, and eventually pocket gains at the expense of employees and other stakeholders.

That said, I agree with you in that a PE CEO is a bad example to use in this case. A PE firm is not neutral-useless, it is deleterious to society.
Early variants simply "passed by reference" by virtue of not having local variables or functions at all. A "function" would be implemented by the programmer as a subroutine that used a specific set of the global variables available for its input and output values.
I read this as a rant from someone saying technology hasn't come far enough, but spent decades of his own time not doing anything about improving technology for society himself. He sounds like a consumer, complaining about the service he is receiving. The fact that he could have lived his bohemic lifestyle shielded from this so long is evidence of how well it has been working. There is certainly a problem with inefficiency, but usually that is driven by the humans inside of an organisation, people, like him, who get comfortable with their position and who only think about their here and now and not about the long term impact on themselves and society in general. Now, at this age, he comes up with theories and ideas of that sounds like that of a student with a naive understanding of the world, with 'better' ways of doing things and blaming 'the powers out there' on the problems, it's no wonder that he gets widespread support from the student age populations of social networks.
http://newstoday45.blogspot.com/2015/03/nail-care.html
how does this reduce accessibility? javascript interpreters are not hard to find nowadays.
nice http://newstoday45.blogspot.com/2015/03/nail-care.html
Digging Deeper into Java's HashMap
It blows my mind how you can enjoy the company of an animal and then not only eat them -- somewhat understandable as we need to eat to stay alive -- but... encouraging their ritual slaughtering? I'm speechless.

Not only "ritual" and "slaughtering" are words that should give goosebumps when used together, but even encouraging it, when you don't even believe in that barbaric procedure, it's frankly inhumane.
Ask HN: What happens to unsubmited or partial applications?
I assume YC doesn't bother to look, because they have enough polished works to consider.

What if you are a company that wants to get on YC radar, wouldn't mind feedback or advice, but isn't necessarily looking for funding?

Is YC interested in partial apps, or should we not bother?
Verhuisdekens,pakdekens voor meubilair bij migratie.Verhuisdeken om te verhuizen
Right, and those sellers are selling to that market almost exclusively. If buyers from that market then are forced into a situation where it's harder to buy the product they want from other suppliers of course the suppliers supplying it will see a spike. They're capturing a larger portion of a small market.
Can you try to explain how they did that in the case of Guitar Center?

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/08/guitar-center-private...

The theory and reality of private equity do seem to be worlds apart. Much like the theory and practice of high speed trading.

In theory they reallocate capital more productively. In practice they seem to make money by squeezing workers, taxpayers, investors and even their own customers (some of whom seem content to squeezed - CalPERs, for instance).
a) Off-shoring is a consequence of poorly thought out and even more poorly enforced tax-laws, not private equity firms.

b) If you have a private equity investor stomping around your startup, it's because you solicited their investment. If you didn't want it, don't take the money. Simple.
> The downtown core is one of the few places in the world where people live and work in the same area...

> commutes range from 5-30 minutes (and that's going to cover people who walk, bike and take transit).

So, in general, it is like a classical European city, where the streets are even full of life after the end of the workday? If that’s true, than this is actually amazing.

And creates the new question: Why did it work in vancouver, but not in so many other cities on the american continent.
Sure, that was good for you.

I don't think anybody would argue that these jobs aren't good for somebody. The real question is whether they are contributing to society at large.

I know somebody who hired a lobbyist too. Worked out great.
In Europe, companies were originally gifts of a private trading monopoly made by a monarch. The Post Office model happened a lot later.

There should be more of a distinction between "efficient" used to mean "gets things done effectively and invents new and clever ways to get things done while saving everyone time and money", and the capitalist meaning of "accumulates profits by screwing everyone except senior management and perhaps the stockholders."

It's perfectly possible for the latter kind of "efficient" company to be very inefficient in the first sense.

In fact if you have a market with a very limited number of established large players, it's pretty much the default.
The current HN title: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary.”

It's about people who think THEIR OWN jobs are unnecessary. The author seems to spend half his time repeating this on comments sections, even when the very titles make it clear. Because people give the least charitable (and incorrect) interpretations.
Fair description. I would say the quality of life will easily be higher in Vancouver depending on what you value, despite the slightly lower wages. Healthcare is much more affordable than the States, the public transportation blows Seattle out of the water. Housing is much more affordable than SF and on par with Seattle. Skiing, biking, and outdoors in Van is closer and cheaper.

Easily as diverse as Seattle, just different. Startup community is more vibrant than Seattle, more personal than SF -- but if you want a cushy job at a large tech firm, Vancouver is not the one.

The Vancouver up-and-coming is where it's at. Tons of my friends and colleagues are moving from all over the world to take advantage on the rise up.

Invoke, Highline.vc, WavefrontAC, Spring.is, Launch Academy, are accelerators powering startup names you all are familiar with. Not to mention the Canadian government basically throwing money at tech through grants, tax rebates, and mentorship programs because they recognize it will carry the economy no matter what happens with natural resources. Not sure what subsidies you think are expiring.

I get offers from SF regularly but it's not worth it. My friends there tend to get overworked and leave after burnout. Vancouver is a place to set down roots -- Canadians know how to enjoy the weekend and each other's company outside of work events.

Background: Living in Seattle for a decade, founded a startup in Vancouver last year, have many friends and past work in SF.
You absolutely CAN write swap in Java:

void <T> swap(T a, T b) {
// use the Unsafe to copy a's memory to a temp buffer
// then copy b's memory to a
// then copy a's memory to b
// Caution: Don't pass Integers or anything, okay
}

Or, if the objects are Beans, just iterate the properties and swap them one by one. In fact, if you know you're dealing with beans, the two don't even have to be the same class, as long as their properties and types are the same.
The noun form of "retard" (and the word "retarded", depending on context) is a much different thing than "retardation" or the verb "retard".
IMHO, one-way data flow + immutability competes with (beats ?) observed mutations in many use cases.

See https://youtu.be/I7IdS-PbEgI, and more specifically https://youtu.be/I7IdS-PbEgI?t=21m29s
> the retards

See, this I would say is kind of insulting.
First a disclaimer: I am the founder of Qiqqa.com, which I wrote while doing my PhD at the University of Cambridge, and without which, I quite literally would have failed to complete my PhD.

I believe the key statement that has been iterated over and over here is that only 10% of scientific papers are ever worth reading. And probably only 10% of the text of those 10% are worth reading. They are they 1%.

This means that you end up with hundreds (if not thousands) of papers that you think you might have to read, but have no way of knowing whether or not you should until you have read them. Chicken meet egg.

I built Qiqqa (and wrote a PhD) to solve this from two broad directions: using human intelligence and using artificial intelligence.

USING HUMAN INTELLIGENCE: While a load of people recommend printing out a paper to read it, I believe that that course leads to a lot of future pain. Highlighting and annotating while you read is absolutely important. It allows you to skim through a paper and highlight only the important stuff. Then you can come back later to properly read the important papers – only once you have skimmed enough papers to get a more general sense of the domain you are exploring. If you have printed out papers, it is very difficult to quickly regroup and reread your annotated papers. However, if you have highlighted your papers on your computer, laptop, tablet (or even phone while travelling from Cambridge to London), free products like Qiqqa (or www.pdfhighlights.com) offers you a simple annotation report to pull out all your annotations to not only remind you of what and where the important fact are, but also to let to jump straight to them to get reading immediately.

USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: An interesting side effect of reading more scientific research is that the more you read, the more you have left to read. Every paper you end up reading will make reference to another few papers that you probably should read; like The Magic Porridge Pot. To solve the problem of ‘what should I read next’ (the working title of my PhD), I built into Qiqqa the capability for it to ‘automatically read the papers for you’ using machine learning. To this end, when reading a paper, Qiqqa can recommend to you the most relevant papers to read using something called Topical PageRank which calculates the relevance of a paper to what you are reading not only by its similarity to what you are reading, but also by how well received (cited) that paper is in your community. Think of it as having your own personal Google where it biases results to satisfy your personal predilections. You can read about how it works at http://aclanthology.info/papers/topical-pagerank-a-model-of-....

Good luck with your research!
Jimme
That's very interesting. I guess VRAM doesn't get powered off during reboot and (today) it is huge, so the chance of interesting information remaining is big.

Mitigation strategy: Ctrl-Alt-F1 and work in text mode. (or just fill up video ram doing stuff in your machine after doing the sensitive work)
Bullshitness is not an all-or-nothing quality for jobs, that's part of why they're so hard to get rid of. You can find some justification to every job, but this justification can be dubious, or can not be worth the cost in human energy or social side effects.

Most jobs are somewhat bullshitty not because they solve no problem, but because they solve it in grossly contrived and ineffective way. That can be crushing, when you realize you're a cog in a Rube Goldberg contraption.

To take your example, private insurance against life-threatening events is very difficult to make effective through free markets: you need so many regulations to define what's cheating and prevent it (which criterions a company can discriminate against, preexisting conditions, transparency...) that you end up with a cost/effectiveness ratio even worse than that of mandatory, state operated systems from Europe.

There are also many jobs which are zero-sum games: if you do marketing or advertising on a non-elastic market, the job you do luring your competitors' customers is undone by the person doing the same job on your competitors' payrolls. It's, plain and simple, an arms race, and it's as wasteful as the USA/USSR one. Those jobs exist because markets aren't good enough at reaching multilateral disarmament agreements (except against customers' interests, as oligopolies).

More generally speaking, free markets are a stochastic optimization system that's (1) very slowly converging, which means an awful lot of resources are spent slowly crawling towards an optimum (2) pretty bad at escaping local optima and (3) navigating a space full of negative singularities (monopolies). We're stuck with a lot of bullshit jobs because they're doing OK at micro-optimization, but they're often quite bad at macro-optimization.
"Violation of the intellectual property and impersonation or deceptive behavior provisions of the Content Policy"

How is that an acceptable removal notice? What intellectual property or deceptive behavior does it refer to?
You don't need to tell them to work, just to be on-call :)
I should have known better when I ordered the book.

Hoyte's first intention, writing a 2nd Volume for Paul Grahams On Lisp, which goes into detail about macros, is actually quite good. It just does not live up to "Volume 1".

And about the 1 percentile and "only the best" talk: Lisp and Lisp Macros are not really "magic". They are accessible to programmers like you and me and if someone does not bother to write them it is not about lack of understanding, but lack of time it takes to write them properly.
> * Most papers are useless (to you at the time you are reading them)

I would say that most papers are worthless. The publish or perish mentality in academia leads to more noise and less signal. You really have to fail fast on papers, find the seminal ones and the few under looked gems related to your topic that can hopefully be fished out via Google (though word of mouth is important).

Also, if you publish, try not to be part of the problem.