skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Federal Reserve policies to ease interest rates and purchasing securities (via QE) have the effect of inflating asset prices.

Wealthy people are often paid with assets (executive stock/option grants), work in asset-managing businesses (hedge funds/PE), and/or hold more assets than the poor (business owners).

In my view, the Federal Reserve is mainly responsible for exploding income, not that technology doesn't play some role as well - but, if it wasn't for exploding asset values, VCs would not be as desperate to invest in crazy money-losing ideas to automate XYZ (causing unemployment elsewhere) that they can sell to a bigger fish.

(Interested to know if the Fed is a disputed explanation.)

It seems strange to me that we have such a simple root cause but complicated ideas for how to stop it, other than curtailing the Federal Reserve.
Workers' savings become worthless through inflation.

Voila! Wage slavery.
I agree. I switch to the desktop version whenever I can. And if I can't, I tend to avoid the page. But the reason is mostly different: Often I know the desktop version and offering me the mobile one means that I need to relearn where stuff is. I guess, that is different for people who go online on a mobile device, only.
I wish my local meat delivery folks would use a service like this. Would make it much easier to coordinate with the drivers.
You'd also think Thoreau a dick for renouncing society for a time, yes?

What he needs right now is to acknowledge that he's just another ordinary human

OP is on an experiment to put his ordinariness as a human being to the test. I'm grateful for a view from the sidelines.

"A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good but for neglecting his neighbor's." -- Whately

And a man is called arrogant not for how much he strives to better himself but for how he belittles his neighbor.

Sorry that you feel belittled.
Blinkenlights – a simple status dashboard app for iPhone
I made a bookmarklet for that reason:

javascript:m=document.querySelector('meta%5Bname=viewport%5D');m.content=m.content.replace(/.*(width=%5B%5E,%5D+).*/,%22$1,maximum-scale=10,minimum-scale=0.1,user-scalable=1%22);

And a second one to disable CSS-based responsiveness:

javascript:m=document.querySelector('meta%5Bname=viewport%5D');m.content=%22width=1024,maximum-scale=10,minimum-scale=0.1,user-scalable=1%22;
I still hate websites tailored for mobile devices. I can't believe Google is encouraging companies to do this and penalizing those that do not. Almost every single website that I go to that I notice is different on mobile is different is ways that frustrate me to no end. Off the top of my head I can't think of a single website where I prefer the mobile version on a mobile device over the full version on a mobile device. I'm not saying they don't exist, just that they are extremely rare.
There's so much wrong with running semi-arbitrary obfuscated code from random other people. And yet so many people do it every day without a second thought.
>There are some ventures into building modern airships, with mixed success.

Where mixed ~= no. The luxury of pre-WW II zeppelin travel is something of a red herring. To the degree there were a market for travel at the equivalent cost of trans-Atlantic Zeppelin travel, you could pretty much have it in a wide body aircraft. After all, Pan Am's original 747s had a first class lounge upstairs which today is (universally, as far as I know) used for additional business class seating. High-end seating on airlines like Emirates is pretty luxurious today but the modern preference tends toward individual suites rather than space given to common areas.

>I recon modern people are too impatient to travel 4-5 times slower than what they're used to.

Well, even if the travel is relatively luxurious I don't have a burning desire to spend a couple of days in a relatively confined space although your general point is probably true. On the other hand, I'm sure lots of the people who travelled by ocean liner or zeppelin would have jumped at the chance to go from London or Berlin to New York in under 10 hours.
An earlier article did a much better job layout why this is a huge problem for independent farmers:

"The family farmer who owns this tractor is a friend of mine. He just wanted a better way to fix a minor hydraulic sensor. Every time the sensor blew, the onboard computer would shut the tractor down. It takes a technician at least two days to order the part, get out to the farm, and swap out the sensor. So for two days, Dave’s tractor lies fallow. And so do his fields.

Dave asked me if there was some way to bypass a bum sensor while waiting for the repairman to show up. But fixing Dave’s sensor problem required fiddling around in the tractor’s highly proprietary computer system—the tractor’s engine control unit (tECU): the brains behind the agricultural beast."

Source: http://www.wired.com/2015/02/new-high-tech-farm-equipment-ni...

So basically, the concerns are very reasonable - operations cannot rely on systems that are put out of commission without a way to fix relatively minor issues on the spot.

While the system is trying to protect the farmer for liability purposes, if that farmer overrides the safe guard, liability shifts. The choice should be with the farmer and not John Deere lawyers.
In fact, there's Hacker News Enhancement Suite [1]. Collapse threads, see which comments are new since your last view, etc.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
As someone who likes to share data sets via IA, their hiding of the plain list of originally uploaded files behind a non-colored link that only gets highlighted on mouse over made me furious many times. I don't want to have to combine a simple "download my data there" with "then move the mouse there and see how it is actually a link and oh by the way the actual files I meant to link you to are available if you click that".

I totally understand their motivation and I think it is great to present the potentially popular parts of the archives to the public in an "experience". But it worsened my user experience and motivation as a contributor(!).
Kolab, Collabora to collaborate on LibreOffice
It is fantastic to watch.

Custom farming was the wave of the future in the early 2000's, when you had to have special equipment to do it. Now anyone can do it themselves with this equipment. You can spot apply chemicals and fertilizer, reducing cost and environmental impact. There is a literal overhead map with red-zones, for when you get bored and want to watch something. Combine this technology with gps guided auto-steer, and the machine operator becomes a bag of meat sitting there to turn it on and off as needed. I have a long-time friend who does custom farming. He's really good on his PSP and Gameboy something-or-other.

As for "However from the way things seemed when I spoke with the salesman it is the very opposite." That's a salesman. He wants to sell whatever he has; if he had old equipment, the market would be swinging that way if you asked him. His impression will always be that people want what he's selling. . . .
I got a very decent offer to work in house in a different city in the area where commute is sucks.

I accepted it, rented a tiny yet very comfy place 5 minutes walking from work and enjoy every moment of it.

I don't even need car here at all.

Additionally to that I had a chance to learn really cool stuff i haven't had a chance to get into before and this likely will guide my career going forward.

I been through my share of glamour of working from home and after few years is sucked. I felt more like I'm suffocating without communication with likeminded professionals.

Just my experience ....
I always wonder whether the legal framework for software has ended up different than other things because of its fundamental differences, or whether it's because it was invented in a different era. Is it software that is different or is it the modern legal structure that is different?
When I used to fly from London to San Francisco regularly, I had everything down to a routine including the exact amount I could manage to squeeze into carry-on only so I could walk straight out at the destination. Despite that, it took me 16 hours door-to-door for an 11 hour flight. So even with a plane trip that long, about 1/3 of the total travel time was on the ground.

Of course that depends on your distance to the airport, but there train stations very often have a solid advantage. E.g. going from where I live in London to anywhere I'd like to actually go to in Paris via the Eurostar is faster because the train terminals on both ends are more conveniently located.

So the answer is "it depends" but unless you live much closer to the airport than the relevant train terminal it generally takes a quite long flight before air travel is faster. Even then, I will often prefer train if it is "only" a bit slower, because of perceived convenience and comfort (e.g. I'd easily pick one hour more on a train vs. 30 minutes shorter journey if the latter involves additional legs, such as getting off a plane and lugging my bags to a train or bus station to get in to town).
The intangibility of code makes the marginal cost of a copy $0, which in turn raises the spectre of copyright law.

You can't copy an engine made of steel, so copyright law is moot.
The 'no true country' fallacy at work.
Disagree. I use HN on mobile for it's speed, not readability. Would love it if HN had a least one media query to allow for better readability on mobile.
Floating currency only matters when you buy stuff from someone else who deals in a different currency. Although you sort of right in that "globalization" could be a cause. That is, "why hire more workers at high salary when I can hire dirt cheap and ship the product here?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containerization#Toward_standa...

This leads me to wonder, when wages stagnated around 1970 in USA, did they start lifting in developing world?
I found that when using my iPhone 6S I really do not want to browse "mobile friendly" websites. I actually prefer websites which do not have that.

For example, Google News is 10x better if it is not mobile friendly: I can see overview, with pics, etc.

Am I the only one?
Nginx 1.8.0 Stable released
Disagree. The family owned farmers care too. For the big equipment, like combines, there's a handful of people everyone pays to have their fields harvested. This person get's compensation in the form of money and other services (someone else will plow their field for instance).

People own their own tractors and share time to get things done, otherwise you'd have to own all of the equipment (which is only justified when you've got a giant factory farm). More of the small farms own new tractors, as the 70s era tractors have been overhauled to the point of junk.

This is the current status of small town Iowa at least.
I absolutely despise the fact that all sections are collapsed on load on mobile. That means "search in page" is broken and Wikipedia without search in page isn't Wikipedia at all.
Texas has a project of a high speed train between Houston and Dallas, it would link the 2 cities in 90mn (instead of 3:30h of driving, or 70mn of plane. So if you spend more 20mn more at the airport than at the rail station , the train would be faster.
http://texascentral.com/the-facts/

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/T...

It's a privately own project, supposedly ready in 2021.
And he lives in Portland.
Polyculture farming may be the next big thing in farming, enabled by machine vision automated systems.

A typical small farmer in Saskatchewan can harvest 100-200 acres of wheat by himself on a single day using a modern combine harvester. Manual harvesting is not an option.
Should have gone with "Onfleek".

Otherwise, nice.
Friendly reminder for all that HN favorite Eric Raymond was on the Rabid Puppies ballot: http://voxday.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/rabid-puppies-2015.html
What are the yields like? What would doing that for all food do to the price of food?
And that table view is a great addition! But still, everything focuses on graphics by default.

I meant things like https://archive.org/details/texts where random, weird icons are displayed that say very few things about their collections while using up quite a lot of space and visual attention.
Nginx 1.8.0 stable has been released
And "at least 40 hours a week" is another subtle caveat. This obviously includes all the drivers putting whatever time they can into it.
That logo looks similar to the Visual Studio 2010 one:

http://imgur.com/9BB0B3w

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Visual+Studio+2010+Logo...
Urban Death Project
It hasn't changed much. My company tried using it to build a store for a client since it's what her distribution house recommended.

It's trash. We spent more time trying to get a theme to load properly than we did actually working on the theme.
Would love a desktop version of this, to be able to edit bigger pictures. Currently, generating laptop desktop backgrounds is very slow on mobile devices. It's also hard to position the points exactly, and the result cannot be zoomed. It's fine for mobile sizes, but a desktop app would make it much more pleasant.
I was referring to compilers in early 2000s vs compilers now.
I give a repo a star if it's something I use or think there's a pretty good chance I'll use in the future (bookmarking). It also means I like to stay up-to-date with their development, as least at the surface level. I built http://sibbell.com for exactly that purpose - it will notify you any time a repo that you star (or watch) has a new release. I don't like to "watch" repos on GitHub though because on a project of any size, you get flooded with emails...
the numbers would look a lot starker if abortion figures are added into the mix. Abortion rates among the black population are higher than the whole.
Actually, I wasn't thinking of Japan. Anyway, low-speed makes more sense with cities, right? Getting from downtown to an airport, for instance.
I've finally come to understand why I care so little about income inequality. Income is not the only measure of wealth, I don't even consider it the most important.

I was hanging out at the bar the other day with this software developer from India. He had brought a puppy with him to the bar. While I was playing with the puppy and we were chatting, a girl comes up to us and wants to play with the puppy too.

His intentions became nakedly known when he kept saying over and over that "me and the puppy are a package deal." As I was leaving to head to the restroom, he starts going on about how he's "recruiting" for a boat trip in the Caribbean. When I got back she was gone, obviously unimpressed.

It got me thinking about the dating market. No woman I know has wealth anywhere on their priority list for men they want to date. That guy could have been telling the complete truth about yachting in the Caribbean and she'd have had the same reaction. Who wants to spend time with a boor even on a luxury yacht?

If he'd been legit Mr. Darcy, sure, I'm sure she'd have been eating out of his hand.

--------------------------------

If I wanted to, I could fairly easily jack up my yearly salary by anywhere from $25-50K by finding another job. The reason I haven't done that yet is simply that the switching costs vastly dwarf the (slight) standard of living increase that the bump would afford me. When I look to move the needle, salary just doesn't look attractive. Just having one is the big win.

I hold that money is cheap right now precisely because capital is worth much less, relative to other kinds of wealth. Who is killing it right now? Apple. Samsung. Global commercial institutions. Finance has accomplished its goal of making everything fungible, now the only things left that are worth anything relative to anything else are precisely the things that finance can't replicate, like an amazing company started by an amazing genius.

So, no, capital accumulation is not worrying to me, because it's obvious to me that we live in a much richer world now than we ever have. Doesn't look that way on paper, but that's because we don't have a way of representing, in the numbers, the idea that money itself isn't worth what it used to be. Capital accumulation is exactly what would happen if everyone started subconsciously realizing that cash is no longer king. They'd place their investments elsewhere, leaving some poor sap holding the big bag of worthless paper.
Looks like after your "evil" public disclosure, they now added security contact: https://github.com/laravel/framework/commit/69e5c3c1daca8454...
> Article is just wrong. One does not own software on device he buys. Software ownership means that one can issue new licenses, which is clearly not a case here. One can not just start selling Windows, because he bought laptop where they are installed. You just get license to use software.

This idea needs to die. Copyright ownership means that one can make and distribute copies of software. Software ownership means you own one or more copies, which you should be able to with as you wish within the bounds of copyright law. You do not need a license to use a book; you do to copy it. Software should be the same, and that companies like Deere, GM, and 8,476 software companies are trying to assert the validity of this "license to use" is a perversion of copyright law.
The Bankster War on Cash JPMorgan Prohibits Storage of Cash Safety Deposit Boxes
nginx.org: nginx-1.8.0 stable version has been released, incorporating many new features from the 1.7.x mainline branch - including hash load balancing method, backend SSL certificate verification, experimental thread pools support, proxy_request_buffering and more.
The Use of Workplace Productivity Drugs Is the Probable Future
The Fall and Rise of U.S. Inequality, in 2 Graphs
A Chinese friend once told me she can't see her own nose. And the thought of us whites constantly having our nose in our field of view was funny to her.
Probably not. BBC made the UK series, GP says Sky licenced the US series.
How to Configure Passwordless SSH Login in Linux
Writing Tips for Designers
Thalidomide is the poster child for not doing enough animal testing in fact. Had this being tested in a few macaques instead to stop just with the rats tests (inmune to thalidomide) had save us a sea of tears. The life of about 30.000 people, mothers, fathers, sons and daugthers, will be very different today.
You don't think we can hop on the momentum there? "This craft ice cream delivered on-demand to my door is #onfleet".

And thanks :)
Above Avalon: Betting Big on the Camera
Related story from Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/20/t...
You know it's not the webdesigners that make that decision, right?
The Future of Cancer Treatment Is (Almost) Here
Maybe a BIT off topic...but I've got some experience here...We're seeing the death of EXCLUSIVELY family farms. The truly family farms that are surviving and even thriving are those that are diversifying. They're using their tractors to plant their soy beans than leasing them to the neighbor to plant their corn or wheat. Leasing their neighbors trucks to deliver their corn while the neighbors use them for wheat. All the while keeping the trucks/tractors/* on the move the entire year.

The issue in the article is starting to hit medium sized farms. When old tractors broke they pulled them into the shop and fixed them. Now they can't even diagnose without having the local dealer come out. During harvest time a tractor being down for 12 hours is HUGE. Like make it or break your year huge.

Even the "medium sized" tractors require a service tech with a laptop to come out for almost everything. Want to shift around your planting? Tech. Get a new field? Tech. Changing the type of seeds? tech. Farmers HATE those techs.

Also this issue is a HUGE issue in cars and other consumer things. Which is where it will probably be fought in the end. If I buy a car today, in 20 years it's pretty assured I will NOT be able to find a computer or any information about the ECU on how to tune the engine or use the ECU to diagnose drive train issues. They're hiding the ECU specs in the name of safety and emissions. In the end it's hurting consumers and shops in a big way.
XProlo? Extreme Proletarians? So they like, eXtremely don't own the means of production?
If they could get 100k people to use Amazon affiliate links for all their purchases, they'd have another revenue source.
Can you drive safely while sneezing, wheezing and coughing?
I am uncomfortable with you deleting the name of your startup.
But savings != income. I can see the argument that eroding peoples' savings would eventually reduce their bargaining power, but on the graph the effect seems almost instantaneous.
Aren't stability and "dealing with negative externalities" also services? Without goverments people would seek them elsewhere (other forms of ruling, insurance companies, etc.)
I found this example helpful:
https://github.com/DanWahlin/CustomerManagerStandard
"Paranoid C" would be a new language. It's just far easier to define a new language in terms of an extension to an existing language than making a new one from scratch. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I mean, C++ started as an extension to C in the same way.

The reasoning for having it an extension is mainly so that current code can be trivially ported.
As long as people are allowed to build enough, it seems like a problem markets are pretty adept at taking care of. If no one wants a super small place, the price will drop until someone finds it interesting.

The space itself being extremely expensive is - in some cases - possibly a symptom of people not being able to build enough.
Here's a plug for Open Source Ecology. One of their designs is for an Open Source tractor, made from inexpensive commodity parts. The advantage is the plans are open & maintenance is also open.

http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
Is your name a play off the slang term "On Fleek"?
Independent farming is under siege by corporate agriculture, but it isn't dead. And independent farmers need tractors too.
The first time this issue was reported I did some digging, and yes a lot of the drivers were Muslim. Or rather, you could very easily infer so, because only a few of them actually said that, or made it clear and then changed their story when they later learned their religion wasn't a defense. One person changed their story to "severe allergies" for instance.
I know they care, too. But, they lack the political pull, money and time to address these issues.

Small town Illinois is similar to Iowa apparently, except for the last section. We do share labor, and rent/trade labor for the use of large machinery. But, the market for older machinery is still very strong. I bought 2 1970's masseys at auction last year, and one small mid-90's JD this year. The bids were competitive, but the price was fair.
Couldn't you just put a paper cutout hood at the bottom of the screen? Seems like it would serve the same purpose.
How to get 25k visitors/month [Ebook – No Charge] [pdf]
Store Secrets on S3 Using Amazon KMS
Richard Stallman spent the last 30 years telling us this would happen.

As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage rights.

As soon as tractors contain computer code, you don't own them anymore, you are granted a license to use them.

When will it stop? More and more everyday objects are incorporating software and firmware in many different forms.

I remember reading Stallman's short story "The Right to Read" in the 1990s. I found it alarmist and completely unrealistic. I read it today and am forced to recognize that Stallman was exactly right.
T Monitoring Buyer’s Guide: Does Your Monitored IT Estate Need Encryption?
Chinese mobile phone app lets you hire thugs to carry out beatings
No, just the part about not allowed to modify nor even examine the code on my computer, that is under license.

As for the iPhone, I think the way it works is definitely not acceptable.