skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You stupid shmendricks!

Hosteurope is a German hosting company.

And we Germans have only very limited freedom of speech here!
This is mainly why I write software...
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=DannyBee
DevFreeCasts – A huge collection of free screencasts for developers
Most nonprofits are still profitable for the staff. Sometimes immensely profitable, for the CEOs at least.

However, most companies provide value to customers. This article proposes companies that do so without any staff or owners. I don't think that's very realistic, but it is intriguing.
GNU social and GNU FM
10 Recommendations for Entrepreneurs Who Hate Norms
"It could be said that the job of bridge toll collector was invented in San Francisco."

Romans did collect taxes for using a bridge 2.000 years ago.

There was the alternative of crossing the river yourself or hiring someone to do it(ferrymen).

I have been working in automation for a while. It is true that companies could fire more and more people and replace it with robots because they are less expensive.

It is also true that now people could compete with big guys much cheaper because robots will become dirt cheap. We are starting to see with 3d printers(that are robots themselves).

War has started, big guys are ok with people playing with toys in their basements, but want to make it illegal for small guys to compete with them.

This is what software and business patents are about. Only big guys, most of whom were in the past little guys , creating a legislation in order to make it impossible for newcomers to do with them what they did to others in the past.
Currently, if a company disposes of all of its workers and replaces them by robots (minus a bit of left human staff for administration), the profits end up entirely in the pockets of the owners instead of getting redistributed to the working population.

Therefore, I believe that companies operating this way should pay a "robot tax"; the funds gathered by this tax must be redistributed as unemployment/social benefits or, better, as guaranteed income.

Otherwise funds will accumulate in the hands of a very few and not be put into any productive use - hell, just look at Apple's cash reserves, Apple alone could bail out Greece and even profit from it. Currently, the Apple money is just lying around and doing nothing productive at all.
According to a slapdash google search, the 2015 federal income due to taxes is $3.9 trillion, and about half of that comes from income tax. 2% of that is $20 million dollars.

I want to say that that's not nothing, but the Rosetta equipment alone cost €220 million. I'm not even sure how much of an impact $20m would have if you spread it across, e.g., the New York public school system.
"Will robots cause unemployment or create new types of jobs and increased leisure time for humans?"

Usual false dichotomy. It can be both, or neither. Robots are nothing novel. You can replace "robots" with "farm machinery" or "construction equipment" and ask the same question--except then, then answers are clearer, which makes the absurdity of this question apparent. Farm machinery probably created unemployment among farm hands. On the other hand, rich countries would not have the same standard of living they have today if half their labor forces were on farms.
At that point in time, the robot understand the real world well enough to implement it in software and make your software and real world exceptions match up.

At this point it's basically "We welcome our computer overlords." and not only programming will be at risk.
The second time, after removing the cookie, is much more easy (~46% to 99.67%). The conclusion is that there are, for the moment, few cheaters.
"Will robots cause unemployment or... increased leisure time for humans?"

These aren't mutually exclusive.
Hasn't this been posted on HN before...like, about a week or so ago?
In some contexts we have nearly removed all the people in this equation already. 85 people own as much as about half the world's population [1]. So, capitalism in the form we have it today, which includes companies, are simply a way to concentrate wealth among the few. Some of these few use the money IMO vicely, but a more equitable system would probably work better. I say this after having lived and worked in the US and the UK (less equal) compared to Sweden and Netherlands (more equal).

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/20/oxfam-85-ric...

Edit: clearer argument
Kolmogorov complexity and bacis things – Alexander Shen – 1'st day (2013)
My friend, you may be suffering from ALAS.

http://www.davidbrin.com/givingplague.html
Well at this point "labour" is free. The only logical solution I see at this point is basically communism. The only work left will be politics/ethics.

But politics is what we should replace first in my opinion :D

Side effect of free labour: prices going down a lot.
I thought it was the monitor itself, rather than the cable, that leaked enough EM radiation to reconstruct images.

Also: do LCD monitor leak so that someone can recreate the image on them some distance away?
Each variety tastes the same (a golden delicious apple tastes like other golden delicious apples).
The grafting does that among other things "Maintain consistency". A hardy root system that you mention is one.

I started looking into it because my dad has a giant apple tree thats much bigger than the ones I've seen in an orchard, but the apples taste surprisingly bitter.

I guess another reason they like grafting is the trees stay smaller and its easier to pick the fruit.
Most interesting possibility: there will be an inflection point in the way we do production & distribution. The capital costs and inefficiencies of distributed production fall every day (internet to distribute knowledge, ever-advancing low-N fabrication technology) while the disadvantages of centralized production increase (capital is becoming more important, labor less important, meaning the average split of the proceeds is ever more extractive). At some point people on the bottom rungs will find it advantageous to work for "communes" instead of employers. Scare quotes because there's a lot of back-to-nature & peacenik baggage associated with the word "commune" that doesn't necessarily apply here -- it's just a different structure for production and employment that avoids the deleveraging effects of forcing people to compete for a spot in a shrinking global pool of jobs. The communes I'm picturing would make heavy use of industrial technology and compete against one another for people by advertising the benefits they offer vs the labor required for membership.

Less disruptive: mandatory reduction in workweek to restore supply/demand balance in unskilled labor market.

Costly but traditional: Basic/minimum income. Expansion of traditional welfare programs. Society creaks along having found the minimum handout required to keep people from doing something about the problem.

Cynical: civic unrest, police crackdown, rinse, repeat, spiral out of control. We've all seen the movies.
From the outside, there appear to be significant advances; it's just they seem to come in clusters, rather than linearly. The news has turned into science fiction!

It would seem CNNs were a significant step up, but the author hints at inferring structure as the next tack to take.
I am from Koramangala and work in a 'cofounder role' at a startup but would hate the idea of coming back home to more startup-conversations. Co-working spaces and meetups work well at solving most of the problem. The others aren't really problems- i have all of #2 and 3.
This is fascinating and well written.

I tried the unrotated sofa image on Wolfram's ImageIdentify and it correctly identified a settee [1]. So it presumably gathered that from the shape of the image rather than the pattern. It is peculiar though that it can't see the shape under a simple rotation. Or perhaps the margin of confidence levels between sofa and leopard were so narrow that a rotation was enough to tip it in favour of the leopard? I'd be interested to see the inner workings of this.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/6f6Co5O.png
A lot of programming has become routine. Think of all the programming involved to build even a 1/10th of the functionality of what can be created, literally, in a single command. Yet anyone who is acquainted to programming and web dev would say that running the Rails generator does not obviate the use of programming. And for those who are relatively experienced, this automation is a huge benefit, allowing the programmer to focus on designing more features and expending more of their creative energy on non-routine work.

In other words, as some programming tasks becomes routine, many more non-routine tasks become available to us.
Unless it is literally sitting in a vault (it isn't), Apple's cash is being used for stuff. Here's an article about that:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1246081-apple-does-not-have-...

I don't really get the idea of a robot tax, why make special rules for one particular type of productivity? Should accountants that use better software also pay higher taxes than less efficient accountants that use simple calculators and paper?
If a lot of people went into programming, then it would become the new working class.

In places like India or Argentina, the median salary for programmers and computer scientists is really low(1/20th of theUS). Its only a stronghold for so long.
KUTSAL KİTAP GHWSBB VE TANIMLAR
A non-profit which isn't profitable for the staff, i.e. pays salary, isn't going to be around for long, if it isn't primarily volunteer work and then the money to operate is subsidised through other means. Which is ok, but not sustainable in many contexts. (Attacking non-profits CEOs feels like a straw man in this context, and doesn't really add anything.)
>The best and brightest will find jobs as these programmers;

People like William Shockley had the idea of paying people not to breed further. If our society really does hit a point where we simply don't have enough jo s, maybe his crazy idea is worth considering. Though hopefully without his original racist tinge.
Ownership of the robots that do things.

Robots will do most of our jobs. For example, a robot will cook for you, a robot will make the laundry, or grow food, in other words, it will be a slave.

No such of problem if you own the robot and whatever it creates.

Again, most Romans did not work, and society worked well in the end for the owners.

We don't need jobs, we need the wealth jobs create.
A few comments:

1. Salesmanship is involved in all companies - whether that is done in person or online doesn't matter - it is a fundamental part of any business.

2. Enterprise software sales - particularly to the largest corporations, absolutely does not run like an old-buddy network anymore. While it is true that it is still partially a relationship sell (particularly getting in the door), the amount of hoops you have to jump through in terms of getting buy in from various stakeholders, to getting through procurement, means that it is increasingly difficult to sell to the largest corporations. Average close for an enterprise business is likely between 12 and 18 months.

3. Software is not required to be new, different or any sort of high-level technology to be valuable or sell. While you're right that a forum or a wiki or bunch of online polls could satisfy the requirements, they may not work from a process, security, intuitiveness or any number of other points-of-view. Value is often created in software not from being unique, but from finding a valuable use case that is currently underserved and creating a product that matches that exact need.
I'd probably think both.
That's right, CNNs tend to be more concerned with textures rather than with overall shapes. One problem is that CNNs discard a lot of pose information of the detected features during pooling. Another problem is that there is no top-down verification such as "hmm, leopards always have {heads, legs, tails ...}, I should scan the input for these... nope, it doesn't fit at all, I should exclude everything that has {heads, legs, tails ...} from my interpretation." In a human brain that likely happens in some distributed fashion without considering individual classes, but by just inhibiting everything that can't be verified upon looking twice (or more times).
It's amazing how some people are trying to reduce the population and others are trying to help people live longer. Wouldn't it be interesting to get them all in a room together...
Probably not the same source, but some interesting data available here - https://data.cms.gov/utilization-and-payment-explorer
I am aware of the link and the laws, I actually run an advocacy group for ex-offenders nationwide, so pretty familiar with this topic.

With Alaska I would beg to differ to some extent. The term "unconditional discharge" simply means no parole or probation. Alaska still has other restrictions though based on the type of felony that was actually committed. So while it may sound simple on the website it becomes convoluted in the actual law.

As for my reply regarding saying they can't vote, I stated that here more as a generalization in the context of this discussion. You are right if you make that statement to an ex-offender it is going to have a negative context, whereas if you tell them they may be able to vote they are more apt to find out how.

The fact remains though that the laws work against, and not for, the ex-offender upon release. My point was simply that we continue to punish through the laws of collateral consequences. If you want to see just how in-depth and convoluted collateral consequences can be, take a look at this site by the American Bar Association:

http://www.abacollateralconsequences.org/
The flexible connector between the LCD panel and whatever PCB is in the system will leak.
Even if you parked $200 billion in cash in a vault, its removal from circulation for any meaningful amount of time would generate a purchasing power increase for every other dollar holder.

The idea of a robot tax is not a rational one. It's based off of an emotional response to the fear of workers losing jobs and income. It will become a very loud, common argument over the next decade. It rests upon the incorrect notion that productivity gains through automation must inherently result in fewer jobs - when in fact, history has proven the exact opposite to be true (the industrial revolution being the overwhelming proof, but there were prior examples including the agriculture revolution). The most productive economies are always among the wealthiest for the median of people, and come in at the lower quarter of unemployment rankings.
($3.9T / 2) * 2% = $39 billion
They don't have to be, but right now I'd argue that they are.
By that reasoning we should have been paying a 'robot tax' for a long time (and an outsourcing tax as well).
> So I guess, there's still a lot of work to be done.

And I think this is the most interesting part.

One of the most depressing things about all of the "this image recognition algorithm performs better than humans on this task" is the idea that we've pretty much solved the problem, and it's just a matter of some more optimization and tweaking to handle a few edge cases.

This kind of problem, where the dominant solution simply gets it so wrong, and the problem cases are uncommon enough that any statistical solution is generally going to treat them as noise, reveals that in fact that there is likely plenty of room for entirely new, novel ways of approaching the problem to handle these kinds of cases better.

It's actually more exciting that there's so much more to be done, than to say "well, it's basically a solved problem, we just need to do some tweaking and optimization."
Thanks for the reply! You're right, I should have been more clear - the goal would be to autogenerate Thrift IDL at compile-time from annotations in our C++ source, to avoid having to hand write the IDL. So more in the sprit of Swift rather than a direct parallel.
Show HN: Idealyzer – Analyze app ideas before writing code
Out of curiosity I drew the US wealth distribution on a linear axis a while ago, and it's really insanely packed to the left. As in everyone but a couple thousand people are in a single pixel column on the left with less than $100 million. Half the population are within a wavelength of light's distance of 0 on a linear wealth scale. The point is that wealth is nothing like a normal distribution - the very rich are so rich that even millions of dollars is nothing in comparison.

http://www.righto.com/2013/03/wealth-distribution-in-united-...
GORUCO 2015 live stream
I'm not sure it's absurdly overblown but individual advances/findings can be way overhyped or at least over-generalized. ML/AI has been incrementally delivering pretty impressive results within certain constraints. That's great but there's then a widespread tendency to extrapolate those results to the broader case--and then absurd/stupid-looking results happen.

We certainly see the same thing with autonomous vehicles. Given very accurate mapping and a particular set of environmental and type-of-road conditions, cars can do so well that it's tempting to say they're 95% of the way to fully-autonomous. But dump them in a Boston snowstorm and you see they're really not even close. (Which isn't to say that bounded use cases can't be very useful.)
CPU FlameGraph for Java App (Profiling)
No worries thanks, it's been a while since I've read the details about it.
Urzica moarta planta medicinala-dead nettle herb
This article reminded me a quote by the commissioner of the United States Patent Office in 19th century. He said: "Everything that can be invented has been invented." and then quit his job :)
That's actually a very interesting question. And it's actually not clear that the second scenario would be better. A lot of problems would come along with people living twice as long. And who's to say that the other people would be able to afford that tech, even if it were freely available?
Furthermore, the idea of the "one single algorithm" followed by extinction that the parent poster proposes is overly simplistic.

Assuming the sheer level of interconnectedness and computational ubiquity where every conceivable piece of matter used by humans out there has a bus or exports a remote API for most of these far-fetched AGI apocalypse scenarios to work, it's probably wiser to worry about crippling cyberwar way before AGI is even a consideration.
CPU Affinity for Node.js Process (Improving Node Performance)
I think the EFF needs to send its people on a copywriting course, this article is so poorly written it's almost unreadable.
And you will be replaced by software writing software.
I'm so confused as to what this actually does and the use case. All I see is the same sentence on the site, no actual breakdown as to what the use is or what it does. Can anyone clarify? Thanks.
>Even Ayn Rand said that government should only be in the military and judicial business, how did we end up to the right of her?

You didn't overall. The idea of left and right politics is a false dichotomy and false mechanistic analogy, but I get what you are saying.

I take issue with even calling these prison co's "private". Corporatist is more accurate. To be truly private there would also not be monopolies on lawmaking... police and judges should all be privatized. Government should be abolished and politician should no longer be a job option.

Those companies who lobbied along with politicians for unjust laws, like punishment for putting any substance in my body so long as I harm none, all ought to be branded criminal and punished themselves. This is the position[0] of consistent, anarchist libertarianism, and those such as myself who hold these positions are not fans of Ayn Rand BTW[1].

[0] http://www.walterblock.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/b...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIk5C2qsRH8
It is quite something in terms of money but it feels like nothing? 2%? 3%? 0%? Those can be simplified to 0% which makes day to day living easier.
Hey - I'm the guy described in the post - if anyone wants to ask me about anything to do with effective altruism, 80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can, GiveWell (which I didn't cofound but is part of the same charitable movement), or what Derek Thompson's household habits are, please do so! :)
I dare you not to notice some patterns with the names:
http://www.justice.gov/opa/documents-and-resources-june-2015...
I would argue that it is still happening today (1)(2).

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_of_Native_Americ...

(2) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wic/summary/v020/20.1ralstin-le...

"... Estimates indicate that, from the early to mid-1960s up to 1976, between 3,400 and 70,000 Native women—out of only 100,000 to 150,000 women of childbearing age— were coercively, forcibly, or unwittingly sterilized permanently by tubal ligation or hysterectomy. Native women seeking treatment in Indian Health Service (IHS) hospitals and with IHS-contracted physicians were allowed neither the basic right of informed consent prior to sterilization nor the right to refuse the operation. IHS also subjected mentally retarded Indian girls and women to a contraceptive known as DepoProvera before it received approval from the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) in 1992.

From 1970 to 1980, the birthrate for Indian women fell at a rate seven times greater than that of white women. This dramatic statistic indicates that the sterilization and birth control campaign was significantly more than an attack on women in general: it was a systematic program aimed at reducing the Native population, or genocide. The United Nations recognizes prevention of births in a target group as a form of genocide. Attacks on the reproductive capacities to indigenous women in the United States continue today through the use of chemical contraceptives such as Norplant and DepoProvera. The latest threat is a new form of nonsurgical permanent sterilization known as quinacrine sterilization."
One's fear of robots taking over the world is usually inversely proportional to the number of times they've debugged a brownout.
In Portugal a similar law will start to be applied from July on. Most storage devices will see an increase in the price so that "copyright holders" can be paid, when what you just want is to store your own photos. ridiculous.
There are lots of unknowns left in this world, and lots of exploring left to do. Space, curing disease, and finding additional sources of clean water and energy are all areas that require lots of work and human ingenuity. The challenge is getting people educated to do work in these fields and allocating capital properly. The unskilled labor market was known as the illiterate labor market 100 years ago, and we overcame that challenge, lifting those people up and educating them on how to read. The same can be done again, we just need to figure out how to do so.
You SHOULD say "Convince me" about any branch of mathematics. There's more things to study than time in a lifetime allows.
No the labor isn't free, it's extremely expensive: R&D, installation, maintenance, replacement, operation, electricity, shelter, transport, insurance.

There will never be a scenario under any circumstances in which labor is free. It rests on a principle that guarantees that: energy will never be free, nor will all the other requirements such as materials, buildings, et al.
It's like how the ice block men lost their jobs to the invention of the fridge. It's unfortunate but we got to move forward. Plus those people have free will to improve their skills and work somewhere else.
Blinking Is Seeing – Apache Spark Visualized
MLSSoccer.com did this last year during the playoffs.
It depends on what you believe. If you believe that there is life after death, and it's a better one, then living longer on earth isn't necessarily better. I think if you talked to a lot of people who are actually elderly and actually nearing natural death, some of them would wish for another lifetime's worth of years (if it came with renewed health), but some of them would be ready to move on.