skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Labor costs are lower in much of Asia, but it's not that simple. Shipping costs, risks to IP, loss of flexibility and accessibility to the manufacturing operation all factor into the picture. There are plenty of examples of manufacturing operations returning to the US for these reasons. Germany is a higher cost labor market than the US yet you don't see much of this simplistic scenario where physical operations inevitably flee high wages.

The big issue driving away these operations on net is the regulatory nightmare of employing Americans and running a plant. You have OSHA, the EPA, and an ever growing body of employer mandates to contend with. Also, the US is now a high tax country from a business perspective.
but we don't scrape content. our search results do have abstracts but they are smaller than Google's, and in some cases they actually are google's.

so, i think you have the issue confused.

Also, on #1 I think most SEOs would say your wrong. More pages does NOT equal more page rank. It's the EXACT opposite.

MORE QUALITY PAGES and more QUALITY links = bette SEO from what the top SEOs have told me. I hope this helps with your site.

all the best,

Jason
Dos Toros. Open for a few months. Best burrito in the city. Lines can be crazy since the NY Times reviewed it a few weeks ago: http://events.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/dining/reviews/06unde.h...

IF the Dos Toros Taqueria just off Union Square brings to mind the sort of fresh, quick and cheap eating found at Mexican joints in the San Francisco Bay Area, that’s by design.

It was opened by Leo and Oliver Kremer, brothers from Berkeley, Calif., who worshiped Gordo Taqueria, a Bay Area favorite founded in 1977. Dos Toros is something of an homage.
ComScore Falls On Controversy Over Pricing Strategy
The difference is that Disney functions in a market environment, where the CCP functions as a governing body.

In a market environment we give exclusive control of intellectual property to certain parties because we want them to develop that intellectual property. If we didn't give Disney exclusive control over Some Random Princess (TM), then they will be less incentivized to develop the Next Random Princess, since their expected profits from creating Next Random Princess is much lower when anyone can make a movie about Next Random Princess. However, we like having movies with interesting characters, and we would like companies like Disney (as well as many other companies) to create interesting characters for our enjoyment. So we increase the profit motive for them by giving them exclusive control. We believe that the creation of new intellectual property outweighs the value of having free access to existing intellectual property.

With a government body, incentivization doesn't really make any sense, since there aren't competing governing organizations. Instead, we want our governments to be as open as possible, because we can only have one government, so we want to be able to criticize and influence the way it works. Note that while revolutions may be a solution to this problem, they are often bloody, and an open, flexible government is a far better solution.
Its not the morality but the expectation of the housing prices bouncing back to normal like the rest of the economy that is keeping them from walking away.

But the issue with realestate is that its not as agile a market as stocks or commodities. the volatility observed in a month in the stock market is probably going to be observed in a year in real estate market. And I am not not even talking about the phase lag but the different scales of variation between the 2 types of markets.
An attack from first principles:

Among the various kinds of power, force is special, because force is the only power that involves active harm. As political scientists see things, the fundamental role of government is to maintain a monopoly on the use of force.

We distinguish liberal democracies from other governments based on how they distribute the authority to use force. Liberal democracies are systems designed to treat each citizen as equal. We treat factors that oppose this equality as bugs[1]. We build subsystems that permit transfer of this authority without the use of force.

Both democracies and other governments use force to maintain their monopoly on force. (Though democracies tend not to need to use it as much.) The difference is that democracies use this force with authority that was freely given to them.

Copyright was created in the belief that it would increase the wealth of a society. It is enforced with authority. If a majority of the population felt strongly that it wasn't working properly, there is a mechanism for changing it that does not involve the use of force. We treat factors that interfere with this mechanism, such as corporate sponsorship of politicians, as bugs.

Censorship by government is a kind of force designed to preserve the monopoly on force. Copyright is not an exercise of power, censorship is. The use of power involved in enforcing copyright isn't designed to preserve the power itself. (Disney doesn't run the police yet.) Finally, if the citizens of a liberal democracy doesn't like censorship, they can elect a new government that does away with it. Citizens under other forms of government have no such recourse.

Moral relativism gets my heckles up.

[1]: Newspapers are our bug tracker, and an unsolved problem is to figure out how to build a new bug tracker.
http://www.ageofconsent.com/ageofconsent.htm

Not necessarily up to date.
Agreed. I hate to say it, but TechCrunch had some of the best coverage at the time of the FCC statements. A pretty good overview of the statements is here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/18/google-reveals-full-fcc...
Why It’s Pointless to Debate Which Language or Framework is the Best
"And let me emphasize, any homeowner who can afford his mortgage payment but chooses to walk away from an underwater property is simply a speculator -- and one who is not honoring his obligations." - Paulson

Every time these GoldmanSachs critters open their mouth is yet another oblique reminder that the masses are brain dead.
I read this a while ago:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001076.html

I still decided to go with the 2x24's. In the end though, it may have been a waste. Afterwards I introduced myself to Ubuntu and the virtual desktop features really separated my work well enough that I probably didn't need the extra monitor anymore.

A couple months later and I'm now on a 17" Macbook Pro. With Spaces configured to my liking I don't miss the additional monitor at all.
I have a _programmer_ friend that acts like that customer...
Recycling Digital Goods
I suggest HN to create a label for this kind of GW deniers's propaganda; it would help me avoiding it.

HN is begginning to look at the place where conspiracy theorists like to meet. We already have GW deniers, people that claim that smoking doesn't cause cancer, ... I wonder when the creationists and anti-vaccines crowd will arrive.
GTFO my ARPAnet, then. Seriously, DARPA has always invested blue-sky technology with the aim of securing a long-term strategic advantage for the US.

Just think of the impact (ie cost savings) that a general-purpose manufacturing infrastructure could have for defense procurement, never mind the wider world of business. I see significant strategic value in this, and think DARPA has more than justified its existence as an incubator for new technology rather than being a subsidy dump.
This is how societies break down.

An example is set at the top, by those in power, that self-dealing and self-interest above all ethical standards is standard operating procedure. Eventually this moral decay 'trickles-down' and people start to realize that they are chumps if they don't start playing by the same rules.
How To Start Your Own Country
"Do as I say, not as I do." comes to mind.
Hi Daniel, indeed it does.

Actually I think you are referring specifically to:

"Let members invite others to the Album"

There are two reasons for this:

1. We make it VERY easy to be private. If you wish to have control over each user that has access to your album, just un-check that and you are done.

2. We believe we are private by default because if you create an album and I'm not invited by you or one of your friends (that you previously invited) I can't see the album. That is different than being able to see your media for the simple fact that if I'm friends with one of your friends without being invited.
Bruce Damer on building the EvoGrid
there may also be the issue of credit score. if you file for bankruptcy, it's harder to get a loan in the future. the prospect of future loans may be more valuable than the difference between what you owe the bank and the value of your house. that said, i suspect most people aren't thinking about this
Score one for Android, then!

However, I find it only works reliably with sliding, not touch-clicking. Which is interesting, given that clicking seems to be sufficient in Firefox.
Am I the only one who has to think twice every time I see one of those controls; "does the text mean that it's currently off, or does it mean that sliding it over there will turn it off"?
Copyrights are monopoly rights that the state assigns to individuals for the public good. The public good here is not just creation of works (both original and derivative) but also their consumption. Copyright law has always been concerned with finding a healthy balance between the two. This is why fair use is protected and also why copyrights are required to expire.

Now the reason the internet is such a big deal when it comes to copyright, is that it makes distribution, and hence consumption, much much easier than in the past. In fact, it also makes creating derivative works a whole lot easier. So there is a strong argument to be made that the good gained by weakening copyright laws would outweigh any harm. In fact, this is the argument Google is making with their book scanning project and related settlement.

The fundamental issue is that because the model of the world on which our current copyright laws were based has changed so radically, we should consider rewriting the laws to obtain a better copyright balance.
It's not accessible. In my tests, I attached a label to the checkbox. Clicking the label text doesn't trigger a switch.
Elegant, and one seems to follow from the other. The only problem is that the analogy is wrong.

Copyright seeks to improve customer choices by creating profit incentives. Those who are willing to invest can create, and those who are willing to buy, vote with their wallets. One hand washes the other, and copyright law simply maintains the proper incentives for the system to work.

Censorship in China seeks to maintain a central focus of power by suppressing alternative ideas or organizations, which when shown the light of day might be more popular. There is an inherent conflict of interest which leads to depriving citizens of the ability to control how they are governed.

So whereas copyright preserves profit incentives but leaves the market to decide the winner, censorship in China puts one product on the table (CPC/PLA), and prevents others from being considered.
It's interesting to see the norm asymmetry (i.e. homeowners should just sit and take it) playing out in the Fool comments.
One thing I don't feel the article addressed is that there is a range of being underwater, it's not binary. I bought after most of the deflation of value had occurred, but not entirely. I'm about 3-5% underwater right now. But abandoning my house (even if I was not concerned about the ethics) would still be bad, because percentage fees on getting a new one would eat my "savings" entirely. To say nothing of the beating my credit rating would take.

To really make it worth walking away you really have to be underwater by a lot. I don't think that 100% of the people who are underwater are down by 30% or 40%. Real statistics on that would probably be more helpful.
One issue the article ignores is the damage to your credit. I would assume that having a foreclosure on your record would make it very difficult to get credit at a reasonable interest rate in the future, and that some of the people who continue to pay on a nonrecourse mortgage are accounting for the effect on the price of debt they may wish to incur in the future. I expect that this factor is ignored by economists because it is difficult to quantify.
Tape is dead Long live tape
I feel sorry for you mapleoin
The make and model of the tablet itself barely matters. They are likely Windows tablets. The software is what matters. The only question in my mind is whether or not a tablet with the capabilities of an iPod Touch/iPhone will enable better software.
This is an important point that I think supports the overarching message if this article and the Paulson quote. The system of credit reporting has been setup to support this "debt as a moral obligation" assumption. The fear of poor credit scares people into continuing to pay.

In reality, a bankruptcy only lasts 7 years on your credit report and most banks will start lending after merely 2-3 years.

Underwater homeowners should look at the longer time horizon and see that it will take quite a few years for their assets to be above water. That's several years to re-build their credit with a much lower cost of living.
Sadly, the HR department and/or Consult Hiring is familiar with the concept of "ASP Developer" not with the concept of "core fundamentals".
I think your analysis is off. It's not a matter of the ease of committing the crime, it's a matter of the punishment fitting the crime. Clicking a mouse is no more work than pulling a pistol's trigger, but we have completely different expectations for the implications of those two actions.

Western societies have had the idea of proportionality between a crime and its punishment for over 3,000 years[1]. The reason this ruling is so shocking is that the punishment is in no way proportional to the crime, regardless of the ease of committing it. Thomas-Rasset was convicted of creating copies of 24 songs. The issue is not how easy this was to do; even if she had to tediously carve the tracks into vinyl records with a fork, her punishment would be no less shocking. The magnitude of this crime does not fit a punishment of millions of dollars, or even tens of thousands, because the harm to the victim of the crime is so slight.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
Hey, as I say in the post - I make no claims whatsoever for the visualisations. They were strictly for fun, and I'm a bit surprised to find them on HN. However... choosing colours along the Hilbert traversal of the RGB cube is good if you want a sequence of many colours that are maximally distinct, where similar colours (here "similarity" is their distance from each other in the RGB cube) are as close as possible to each other in the sequence. In fact, the Hilbert curve's properties guarantee that this sequence will be near optimal - we don't know how to do better without restricting ourselves to some subset of the RGB cube.
So a quick summary would be: "Geeks" are mostly interested in technical details, rather than touchy-feely stuff, and (often incorrectly) assume their conversation partner is as well.
Apparently nudity is not even required anymore for images to be considered child porn, so you're not even safe if you aggressively remove all images that most people would consider inappropriate. From what I can tell, there really is no unambiguous line, and that's disturbing, because there's no way to keep a site "sanitized" against this sort of thing.

The upside is that I don't think there have yet been child porn charges brought against web service owners for things that their users have uploaded, since it's usually against the terms of service to upload such things and courts realize that owners of a web service can't be expected to police every piece of user-uploaded content.

And FWIW, I find this very appropriate for Hacker News: it is a disturbing legal trend specifically caused by people's reactions to new technologies, and you can bet that the people responsible for this push would love nothing more than to spread this type of thing to the Internet. I don't think we should be too concerned that they'll succeed, because most normal people see the lunacy in all of this, but it's still worth keeping an eye on.
Wow, I'm really surprised by all the 30" -in favors-?

I use 2 24" in monitors and love it. As for having to turn your head... that's a very minor concern if your keyboard and mouse are centered (or sightly off center) you can see both monitors fine.

For me I use textmate on one monitor (main) and have web-browser, Adium, Skype open on the second monitor - organized so all three are "on top". Works like a charm.

I have another box with a 30" monitor, but I use it mainly as a review station. Window organization is a bit of a pain on that large of a monitor on OSX.

I would have to agree that that for media (games, movies, video editing) the single larger monitor is better.
Free markets are also deeply rooted in strong and fair contract enforcement. That's the bounds-check on self-interest.
Boston.com: US Battlefield robot had security hole | The Security Times
PROTIP: Try hiding the the width and the float on p and/or the padding and width on the 'div div' with firebug.
He's referring to the fact that when the iPhone was released, Jobs strongly played down the importance of a native SDK and played up the idea of making iPhone-centric webapps. It was some months before they released the native SDK.
12 things we want to see in iPhone OS 4.0
This article makes a good argument that free markets don't work on morality, instead they are rooted in the assumption that everyone acts in their personal best interest.

I read it with just the opposite meaning. I understood it to say that the actual, observed behavior in the mortgage market is that howeowners are being moral. The Fools seem to question why people would act following their morals rather than purely financials.

And this points to one of my favorite misunderstandings of economics, and one that I'm surprised an economist would fall for. Economics is NOT about just money. It's about why people make a choice for one thing, foregoing another. And it's all tied to what people value.

It seems to me that this article validates that people really do value behaving morally, having a clear conscience. And I'm glad, because I don't want to live in the world where people take advantage just because they can.
Do you have examples of big companies abandoning debts like that? The opposite actually comes to my mind: large companies being destroyed by their inability to get rid of underwater debts (putting aside big banks' recent problems, I'm thinking of Enron here)
If there was someway to manipulate the way credit is damaged by looking at individuals so that only sub-prime borrowers are punished - that would be a possible solution. Let the responsible buyers walk away without penalty. But I understand that this has a potential for regime change and is far fetched in our situation.
Successful capitalistic democracy requires a moral foundation. Many things that are arguably "in the best interest" of an individual are not in the best interest of a functioning economy, and not honoring one's agreements is one of these. The fact that corporations are not being ethical does not justify on a moral basis the same behavior by anyone else.

Further, if the coming predictions of high inflation turn out to be correct, the people who are still holding their mortgages will be paying them back with cheap dollars vs. people who walk away from their current debts and then need to borrow again later.
Here's another list of free bookmarklets, including find in page, various translators, and view page source (haven't tried them myself):

http://ipuhelin.com/en/safariplus/
The Asian supply chain of Apple's tablet.
> Its not the morality but the expectation of the housing prices bouncing back to normal like the rest of the economy that is keeping them from walking away.

Then they could walk away, and buy a different (cheaper) house, or buy first then walk away.
I agree with this assessment. It definitely isn't a binary decision. Just as it isn't a decision that should be taken lightly. Obviously there are ramifications to abandoning a mortgage and all the risks and benefits need to be weighed based on every situation.
The Motley Fool seems to have forgotten this, but rational-agent theory is a useful fiction, not a statement of reality. The best analogy I can think of is Skinner's behaviorism; rational-agent theory seems to fail in the same kinds of places as behaviorism does, too.

Look up the "Ultimatum Game" for a particularly effective demonstration of where it fails -- and the commenter here who points out that rational-agent theory would destroy civilizations is completely correct. (Mental exercise: apply "the tragedy of the commons" to a defensive war.)
Is James Cameron Avatar curse or praise in Oscars
You are obligated to do what your contract says. Your contract says you can walk away and the bank gets the house. If the bank didn't like that potentiality because they were speculating on a loan, then apparently that's all of our problem.
This makes sense if there is a button labeled "off", but in this case the middle of the slider is unlabeled. The part you interact with (at least if the slider were a physical object) is different from the part that displays the state, which sidesteps this ambiguity in a pretty clever way.
Several comments argue that democracy makes all the difference. Why?

Theoretically, the copyright law can be changed to limit it to 20 years. In practice, it can't, despite the fact that more or less everyone who understands the issue and isn't either a lawyer or Disney employee agrees that it should be limited.

In some respects, the U.S. is a real democracy. On this particular issue, voters have no say, because they can't vote directly on the issue.

I support copyright, just not the version that Disney bought.
I think what he is trying to say (though it might be worded a little wrong) is that by enforcing copyright a country is enforcing what is generally considered an attempt to maintain a fair balance (note: no comment on whether this is successful or not) on content distribution to stimulate positive net gain.

Compared to a government enforcing what is generally considered censorship and a negative net gain.

(if the vast percentage of the world agreed censorship of the type China exhibits was right, then, well, yes it would be "right" - but that is much more of a philosophical question)
Ask HN: What should I learn next: Ruby or Python ?
I'm coming from a C/C++/PHP/Javascript background. I'm not sure which to learn between Python and Ruby. Both language are very similar and lately, Ruby seems to get a lot of hype (thanks to Ruby on Rails). However, Python has Django and is the language of choice of Google so it can't be bad ;) Which one would you recommend me to learn ?
Really? If anything, over the years the use of computers and standard UI's have trained us you to associate light-shades to OFF/inactive and bright-contrast or colour with active/ON.
Interviewing Insights and Test Frameworks