skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That doesn't mean renting is cheap. I'm paying $2165/month for a 3-bedroom apartment in Irvine (i.e., $25980/year).

I'm not complaining since I earn a good salary as a programmer and our apartment is in a well-managed complex in a nice neighborhood, but it would be easy to spend more and difficult to find something substantially less in the same general area.

But it does serve to confirm the article's thesis that California is becoming increasingly bifurcated between a high-paid "knowledge class" and a de facto servant underclass, largely composed of illegal immigrants (e.g., Irvine's landscaped parks and streets are beautifully maintained by an army of gardeners, but there's no way those gardeners can afford to live in Irvine). The traditional middle class is being squeezed out, and long term I do not believe that's healthy for California as it's too reminiscent of the very wide disparity of incomes that I've seen in the third world.
>I've often wondered if the failure of green ideology to take off is Asia is due to the absence of the Judeo-Christian hole for it to plug into.

My take on this is that most Asian countries are newly industrialised - chances are that a young persons parents or grandparents were once dirt poor. They aren't interested in sacrificing their newly-obtained living standards for an ideology that looks mostly self-serving to any disinterested outside observer. Greenpeace et al trades on guilt, just as the Catholic church does. Asians just want to build exciting cities of the future and become rich. Something the rest of us used to want to do but have now lost the stomach for. It's the classic case of third-generational squandering of wealth, on a very large scale.
“Have To” Is a Relative Phrase
Excellent post. This is an issue I've pondered a lot. Most of the jobs lost in the first few rounds of computerization and automation were replaced by service jobs. A lot were high end like medicine or education, but most were low end. High paying manufacturing jobs were replaced by burger flipping. In Japan they are experimenting with replacing these service jobs with robots. What happens here when robots are cheaper than minimum wage plus benefits? Do we have permanent 40% unemployment? Legislated 25-30 hour workweeks? A permanent crash in housing prices because no-one can afford them?

I think history shows that we will have a structural realignment of our society. For better or worse, California will be at the front of it.
Because the state was swimming in money from tax receipts because the economy was doing so well. It's easy for legislators to give out stuff when there's a surplus.
I have it, and love it. You can just disable 4G to save on battery.
My instinct is to say that this is another case of correlation not implying causation. On the surface, we have two facts:

* California has a huge budget deficit

* California is declining economically

I don't doubt that these two facts are true. Nor do I doubt that both facts affect each other. However, California is one of (if not the) largest economies in the US. I seriously doubt the situation is this simple. To place this solely at the feet of the state's progressive politics is a bit partisan. To me, this reads like a set of conservative talking points dressed up as an intellectual policy paper.

EDIT: Not coincidentally, City Journal is published by a conservative think-tank: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute
A theoretical risk of chilling speech is enough to ban a service that could bring high-speed internet connectivity to underserved communities?

Free weekly newspapers exist in most major cities. They are -- gasp! -- entirely advertising-supported. That money could chill speech! It could drive small operators who can't afford to advertise out of business! Perhaps we should ban that dangerous business model.

And yet, those weeklies present a lot of interesting commentary. And help a lot of businesses thrive. Turns out, the payola pays for a lot of community benefit.

There's a lot of fearmongering going on about how small changes in the internet delivery/pricing model will destroy everything good about the internet. That's irrational paranoia.

The internet will survive whatever conspiracies Verizon, AT&T, Disney, and Google dream up -- as long as their backroom strategizing isn't carved into federal law via regulatory capture.

And if the incumbents manage to shake down customers for a few more dollars -- that will incent the creation of the next generation of route-around communication technologies.
Timothy J. Sturgeon’s "How Silicon Valley Came to Be" covers this as well:

The fact that the San Francisco Bay Area’s electronics industry
began close to the turn of the Twentieth Century should lay to
rest the notion that industrialization and urbanization on the
scale of Silicon Valley can be quickly induced in other areas.
Silicon Valley is nearly 100 years old.
It grew out of a historically and geographically specific
context that cannot be recreated. The lesson for planners
and economic developers is to focus on long-term, not short-term
developmental trajectories. Silicon Valley was the fastest
growing region in the United States during the late 1970s and
early 1980s; but that growth came out of a place, not a technology.
Silicon Valley’s development is intimately entwined with the long
history of industrialization and innovation in the larger San
Francisco Bay Area.

See http://web.mit.edu/ipc/publications/pdf/00-014.pdf I had blogged about this in 2008 at http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/05/steve-blank-on-secre...

Three good books on how Silicon Valley came to be

"Understanding Silicon Valley" by Kenney http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Silicon-Valley-Entrepren...

"The Silicon Valley Edge" by Lee, Miller, Hancock, and Rowen http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Valley-Edge-Innovation-Entrepr...

"Regional Advantage" Saxenian http://www.amazon.com/Regional-Advantage-Culture-Competition...

See also this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=908026
I think there's a scrub rule about '!' since it's a predictor of a biased headline.
The era of techno romance
I don't think an intelligent person would believe that once a tiered internet were in place that there is a high probability of it changing.

There are a number of historical precedence that provide some evidence that it could change.

In the early days of internet access companies like AOL charged different rates for access to their (non-internet) network and the real internet. That went away.

In non-US markets tiered access is quite common, but hasn't proved to be a massive problem. In Australia (where bandwidth caps are common), most ISPs provide "non-metered" access to some sites (gaming servers, download mirrors, the national broadcaster), and many mobile access providers run promotions for "free facebook" etc.

Generally, consumers find these things annoying to keep track of and switch over to a higher-cost plan where they don't need to worry about them. Some very price-conscious consumers (eg, students) benefit a lot from them at the cost of some convenience.

Gradually companies seem to be dropping the more complex of these plans because of the customer confusion it causes.

(I guess I should insert some witty reply about how my belief in this possibility precludes the possibility of me being intelligent. Unfortunately I'm going to have to rely on there being a question as to if my lack of intelligence is causal WRT my lack of witty response, or vice-versa. Sorry).
--with privacy exceptions are too many - and remedies too weak--

well - thank you for putting so well what i was trying to say in my lengthy comment

i interpret your insightful statement as saying that a human -body- has no privacy and no right to privacy -because- the entity who violates the privacy of a human body is the same entity who -defines- the exceptions --and-- the remedies

human body has no right to -define- what human privacy is

and there is only 1 entity who violates the privacy of human body - that entity may have different -names- but it is the same being

the being who has the absolute right to violate the privacy of a human body is the --same-- entity who also -enforces- the -remedies-

--and-- who owns your privacy -is- your master

a slave has no privacy

in other words the owner of your right to privacy tells you --i grant you privacy but -i- reserve the right to violate your privacy as i wish-- what kind of right to privacy is that

which means that - that entity who violates the privacy of a human body has the freedom and right to violate the privacy of the human body - if that entity -owns- the right to privacy of the human body -then- human body -does not- own its own privacy

might is right - and whoever has the right to -define- is the mightiest

in the case of privacy - your right to privacy as a human being can only be violated by an entity who is not a human being - so a mother entering her daughters room without knocking - this is -not- the kind of violation of privacy we are talking about - in the airport your right to privacy is violated by an entity who is not human but a -bodyless- human

or maybe - we -are- talking about the same -kind- of privacy as mother-daughter privacy - the mother enters her daughters room without knocking to show that she -the mother- can violate her -daughters- privacy and -therefore- she -the mother- is in charge

for some unfortunate reason the authority -loves- to prove again and again that -she- is the authority -and- for some reason authority appears to be -she-

the same goes with human body - the entity who owns the right to privacy of a human body must show -again and again- that -it- or that bodyless and -therefore- genderless entity who owns the human right of privacy - must humiliate the human body again and again by scanning the naked human -body- and violate the most sacred privacy of human body and prove that human body has no privacy - to prove that -it- is the owner of the human right of privacy
I studied hypnosis intermittently for a couple of years. It's a powerful tool that can help one make changes. But it's not a mechanical process that produces the same results every time; there's a lot of mutable state involved. It's better to treat it as an exploration and see what happens. Skepticism need not get in your way. Just let it take the form of curiosity for a while.

The most important variable is probably how good the practitioner is (and whether there's a good fit between that person and you).
Figuring out what sort of business you want to start, (or, in hindsight, have started) impacts everything from whether you should raise money to how to compensate your employees.

Interestingly enough, the corollary is also true. Figuring out what sort of headaches you want to deal with helps you decide what sort of business you should start.

I prefer release early/often, grassroots B2B customer development, and bootstrapping over large development cycles, long-handed B2C marketing, and funding. That is precisely why I focus my efforts on creating cash businesses that are finely targeted and strive for profitability as soon as possible.
No, but I lied about it just now. (This is a convoluted bit of self-referential logic and a joke.)

Seriously -- a demo where I was logged into a server and monkeypatching the DB locks because they were broken for the piece of the site the marketing/sales guys wanted to show.
Probably not. I'm also a pencil fan, though I've fiddled with other tools, and have a decent Wacom.

The Wacom could replace most other tools... if there were any decent high-volume + organization sketching applications out there with proper tablet support. It's very nice, and I'd love to have all my notes in my computer, but things don't keep up or they look like crap or they have no tablet support or they provide zero tools for sketchers who use sketching as a form of memory.
battery life extenders? drop your iphone to recharge it?
This is a very useful distinction, especially for partnerships. I've seen many partnerships in my role (as a business coach) where this distinction has been the root of all their disputes - one is choosing to invest for the future in an equity business, while the other is choosing to maximise the immediate cash income.

FWIWI, most businesses I've encountered are cash businesses - some consciously ("I bought myself a job") and many through lack of realisation that there is an alternative they can choose.

I agree wholeheartedly with the point that companies change over time - founders need a cash reward for their effort at some point, and companies (Microsoft is a great example) will often reach the peak of their equity build, in which case switching to cash may be in the better interests of stockholders, employees etc.
Sigh, I was just joking, obviously. I guess my sense of humor is kind of .... orthogonal to yours.
I think you mean that as a sovereign borrower, California can freely default or unilaterally impose a restructuring on its creditors. California is the debtor in this case. Federal bankruptcy courts wouldn't be able to interfere.

The wild card is what the California Supreme Court would do? While the state has sovereign immunity, in a default any creditors would certainly file suit in state court. There isn't much law covering the situation so it is conceivable that the judicial branch would order the executive and legislative branches to raise taxes or sell assets in order to meet obligations. That would create a constitutional crisis.
I have a Uniball Vision Elite and it's by far the smoothest writing implement I've used. I can't say it's anything like a pencil, but if it's fluidity you're after, that's your pen.
Exactly my point: what we create is incredibly tightly tied to why we create, especially if you're looking at it from an evolutionary standpoint. I wouldn't call it an isomorphic relationship, but darn close.

You also have to consider that our creativity has been created by the equivalent of billions of the individuals with more computational power than the most powerful computer in the world right now, running for thousands of years of recorded history. Absolutely nothing we have done with computers approaches this, especially when you consider just how unexplored computer A.I. really is. If we call it ten orders of magnitude more "power", we're making a phenomenally conservative estimate. What could you do with a computer over a billion times more powerful than everything that Google owns?

I'd say our less-than-10-billionth computational efforts have in fact created a couple creative things. Which puts them about on par.
I don't think an intelligent person would believe that once a regulated Internet were in place that there is a high probability of it changing either. Now, if it is regulated properly, that's a feature, not a bug, but that's a big if.

I'm certainly not one of those individuals who believe that any regulation is bad regulation, but there is a not-insignificant chance that regulating the nascent wireless space before it has truly matured will result in bad regulation. And once bad regulation is in place, it can be very difficult to change in a meaningful way.

It seems to me that there is danger in both approaches: an entrenched base of huge corporations pushing an unregulated tiered wireless internet is a bad future. Likewise, an improperly regulated wireless internet is an equally bad scenario.

As I understand it, this deal does not sacrifice a neutral wireless internet for a neutral wired one, it merely eschews applying neutrality rules to the wireless internet while proposing neutrality rules for the wired one. Which is very different from the assertion that this deal puts a tiered wireless internet in place.

Which, given its nascent status, seems like the most prudent approach.
I think you'll find that even most of the warehouse picking is done by robots.

http://robotland.blogspot.com/2009/09/warehouse-robots-on-mo...

To work your way up at Amazon, you'd need to enter at the base level in either engineering or marketing. And that's no bad thing.

All of society benefits when mundane tasks are automated. Sure, those warehouse workers never get that job, but there are jobs at the robot makers, robot technicians, systems designers. The freeing up of this labour enables it to be deployed elsewhere, making everyones lives better. I don't see anyone complaining about cheaper books.

Your examples of mechanics and checkout operators are just red herrings. There are always better ways to do your job, even if a computer talks to the engine. There's being better organised, better communicating, harder working, faster and better. It's complete nonsense to say that a mechanic can't make it to supervisor or service manager because a computer does all the diagnostics, or to use the reverse and say the only way a mechanic was able to be promoted was by being a whiz at using a timing light, even if they were lazy, sloppy and uncommunicative. And you're forgetting the improvement for the customer, whose car is serviced quickly and accurately for an ever-decreasing cost in real terms.

Much of your thinking seems dangerously close to the broken window fallacy. Improvements in technology drive productivity, and increasing productivity is what underpins real improvement in living standards.
What are you saying?

Standard Oil + More Volume = Cheaper Shipping / Unfair Advantage

Competitors + Less Volume = More expensive Shipping

Google + More Volume = More Expensive Delivery

Competitors + Less Volume = More Expensive Delivery if want higher tier, no change otherwise.

I don't understand your position.
There was a time when I wouldn't pay for this sort of thing. Nowadays I actually prefer to pay as I feel there is less chance that someone will recognize its use elsewhere. In other words, I think you're smart to go after the premium, "no, it's not free" market.
I hate to be critical in a terribly ad hominem way, but I find programming/tech articles written in that '13 year old boy who has had a little too much fizzy pop to drink' style with the 'hilarious' l33t-speak aren't really helping eliminate some of the more negative preconceptions of us hackers out there.
It's definitely possible to make nuclear plants earthquake-proof, so long as you choose a site that isn't located directly on top of a major fault like or something. The French EPR, for example, comes this way standard. Or if you want to look at really radical solutions, consider floating reactors like the ones Russia is working on:

http://finger-tree.blogspot.com/2009/11/floating-nuclear-pla...

Earthquakes are just another engineering challenge, and one that nuclear engineers have been dealing with successfully for decades now.
I think one of the most powerful images left over from the original Hewlettt Packard organization is the first one on this page: http://www.hardwaregeeks.com/index.php/site/comments/trip_to...

This is how every organization I've ever respected has been run.
It's the perfect thing to do while you're watching videos or listening to podcasts.

I can't really watch anything or listen to a podcast at the same time that I'm coding. But there is still stuff I really want to watch. This week in startups and some Mixergy shows etc.

But only sitting there watching videos can be very boring, so it's good to have something to do with your hands.

Also. There are so many formulas, techniques, etc. You gradually gain a greater understanding of how the cube works, etc.

I recommend it. Great hobby. But don't be one of those losers that tries to impress a whole party by solving one, it's really lame to cubists.
Really good point. I was thinking of putting this in the post but decided to not get into it. Thanks for pointing it out.
Google Agonizes on Privacy as Ad World Vaults Ahead
Absolutely agree - founders should think through what they want from their business up front, and what sorts of headaches they do or do not want to have to deal with over time.
If they're in a repeatably measurably different state, that's the very definition of not being hogwash. The key word is "measurably". The interesting thing is that if MRI techniques have established a repeatably measurable distinction between people who are in a trance and people who are not in a trance, that's a far bigger deal than the specific finding reported here (which appears to presuppose that).
When are people going to give up this notion that companies are evil or good?

Hey, I didn't start it, Google did. If a politician stands up and says, "Elect me because I'll do the best backroom deals for you, my constituent," you know what you're getting. You don't elect her and then complain that she's in bed with lobbyists.

But when she calls for transparency in government and bringing a new broom to the legislature, you have every right to be outraged when she's discovered steering fat consulting contracts to her college buddies.

It's not an issue of whether Google is evil. It's an issue of whether Google is Hypocritical.
Why the National Debt is the Wrong Problem to Care About
Be careful that you don't mistake passion for dogmatism. I have seen a few pro-nukes who treat it as a happy death spiral, but they seem to be the exception.

(Definition of happy death spiral: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ln/resist_the_happy_death_spiral/ . Does anybody have a more common synonym for this that wouldn't require explanation? Links are a little awkward on HN.)
If the russians could have won through total air superiority, they would have. because they had it, and it didn't make the difference.

I imagine that flight was a greater advantage when it was new, before the insurgents figured out how to effectively counter it (which is to say, to hide amongst civilians friendly to the enemy or to stay underground)

but yeah, I think, at this point, advances in asymmetrical warfare techniques have largely neutralized the advantages of air superiority.
How's that different from TV? It often goes over the same pipes, but it's not internet.
http://www.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-Science-Lore-Kitchen/dp/0... is a good book that discusses culinary science, and it costs a lot less than $450.
> but implementations are slow

Well, think about this: One major reason hash functions like sha1 aren't recommended (as opposed to, say, bcrypt) for encryption is because they are optimized for speed and so it's faster to generate lookup tables or to iteratively search for the password. So unless it's slow because the implementation itself is crappy, this might actually be a good thing after all.
The erasers tasted really good, though.
I'm a homo psychologist and I just know...
FTC Halts Cross Border Domain Name Registration Scam
What's wrong with offshore drilling? Yes, GoM events do happen but are very rare. You can't go around being completely risk averse and not doing anything - this is the whole problem with the green ideology. Why not drill the oil and get the tax revenue, bring in the jobs, get a little industry going? This is what the article is about : refusal to let private enterprise get on with making, doing, exporting, building.

As for alternative energy - by all means continue R&D but drop the tax subsidies and using the government to 'pick winners'. The subsidies starve other technologies of capital, funding and attention while prolonging the life of unsuccessful technology. The only way the energy problems are going to be solved is by letting free enterprise innovate and compete to a solution. Governments can't and shouldn't pick winners. Let any energy solution live and die on it's merits.

To me your reply sounds as though you acknowledge the problem (green regulations and intervention) but aren't willing to accept that the solution is to wind it all back and let solutions develop naturally. Green regulations should be restricted to reducing pollution and preserving areas of natural beauty, not stomping on every little use of the earth to provide, and certainly not picking future energy direction. Set the rules of the game, then let private entreprise go and come up with the solutions. Oil will cease to be an issue once better, cheaper alternatives exist.