skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"it is not part of the capitalism idea that you must run that way from top to bottom"

Well then it wouldn't be capitalism all the way down? It would only be capitalism on the outside, socialism on the inside.

Capitalism is a system in which individuals are rewarded according to what the market will give them. If you don't do that you simply don't have capitalism.
"That isn't socialism, but boy does it feel like workers being more efficient when they seize the means of production—the compiler—rather than being coerced or exploited."

If you're interested in the notion of putting the means of production in the hands of the workers, you might be interested in some of the works of G. K. Chesterton and Hilair Belloc when they discuss what they called 'Distributism.' They're not full of much practical advice but they do provide an ideological alternative to the all or nothing ideologies of Socialism and Free-Market Capitalism.
That would be interesting, I wonder if you'd end up seeing conflation of several founders into one pivoted product.
I think he's an employee that's workin' for the man now!
Welcome Alexis
Mining for strained metaphor (prospecting as a metaphor for startups)
One thing that "capitalism" and "socialism" share is the connotations of control associated with them _by their opponents_
Crunchgear is pretty lame for a) publishing such an old story as if it was new and b) for not giving the other side of the story. Here's Facebook's response (from February of this year) http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/02/20/faceb...
"I don't like the idea of anyone forcing me to accept socialism"

Haha, so you are not socialist at all!!

Socialist is forcing others to accept socialist, in fact is forcing (other)individuals to give money to their "social causes", that could be different from those individuals have.

Is not asking politely: would you mind giving part of your money to this poor people so they can study?

No, it is taking by force his money if he doesn't want to, and consider it "a right". As my grandpa who lived in soviet rusia said when I asked what is socialism, he said: It is being generous with other people's money.

If you accept individual freedoms to choose, you are not socialist, not more that anybody else here.
Yeah, I just mentioned that as a way of saying, this point about compensation for input (time spent on something) vs output (the value of that something) has been made in great depth already.
Since future-dating your work is essentially stealing from the public domain [...]

I think you're under the impression that copyrights expire at some point, which isn't really the case any more in the US for corporate-owned copyrights, right?
Can't think of a friendlier person to represent YC. Congrats!
About 450 people. I would guess more than half are in the Bay Area.
Pros and cons aside, it's what the market will bear. Seed programs like TS and YC are getting/building quality entrepreneurs that are building real companies and raising additional funds. Why would they pay more?
"You're talking about small websites."

No. I'm not. I don't get where you think the danger lies?
As long as it's 6% of common stock, and therefore involves no special rights and therefore no loss of control, and as long as your startup will need to eventually raise more money, TechStars is giving you a bargain.

Raising is hard and quality advisors, warm introductions to investors, and simply being vetted and selected from a large pool of applicants will improve your chances of success (and therefore the valuation of the 94% of stock you retain) a lot more than the 6% of common you're giving up.
It's too bad that Scott Adams has no idea what he's talking about.

What makes him think that
A: The youth of today agree with how things are going
B: They are NOT trying to change things
C: The people in charge ARE NOT trying to maintain the status quo.

It's not so simple as just using a gun or muscle is it? We have laws, ones to do with economics and even criminality that can keep the youths marginalized. The older generation run the companies that pick and choose who to hire. In general, the real power of society is with the old.

I don't even see the middle-class (and old) majority having much sway over the rich who control politics in so many senses. Business interests have squelched a lot of progress for the current and last generation.

I find that Adams is pretty aloof to these sorts of ideas.

He also seems to be recommending a revolution of sorts.

"Society's founding geniuses engineered a social system that encourages the young people who have guns to shoot at each other instead of robbing old people. Forgive me for calling that awesome."

I'm not sure if this is a racially motivated statement.

It's also interesting how he uses "smarts" as a term when "manipulation" and "control" would do better to describe the way society works. I'm guessing he's a hard-core Rand follower. Great.
Discuss/Remind HN: Apple Live Event On Right Now 
Figured whatever Apple is coming out with today would steal the front page for the next few days - thought this place could be a good start for initial reactions/Live discussion.
Some of these sound useful but I think we could all do without the services that append more crap to your email. It's obnoxious.
I was really convinced of the "iTunes Unplugged" thing when a Daring Fireball reader interpreted the invitation that way, and now they're playing the MTV Unplugged version of "Layla."
Specifically they're patenting graceful shutdown of a graphical windowing environment, with a series of prompts to ask the user if they are sure that they want to terminate processes that cannot be gracefully stopped.

All of it seems blindingly obvious, but then it also doesn't look like a claim against any non-Windows OS would last 10 seconds in a court, as there are a ton of clearly Windows-specific claims.
"...here on HN, where one of our core assumptions is..."

Who comprises this 'our' that you so easily reference, and what matter is their assumptions to the actual truth of the OP's thesis?

Cringe-inducing groupthink, in excelsis. Careful you don't lose yourself in pursuit of community.
What scares me is sites looking at this as easy money. By that I mean they purposely go out and collect as much info as possible so that you will want to pay to "remove it". Even worse multiple sites doing it so that there is a never ending trail of sites to remove your information. It only takes one to get your info indexed on the major search engines.
> In that speech [Andy Grove] decried the U.S. patent system, explaining that in the early days of the transistor there was much more cross-licensing of patents and a greater spirit of companies building upon the same technologies -- even among fierce competitors.

At the time, however, the largest consumer of electronics was the U.S. government. They required second-sourcing of just about every electronic component they purchased. Intel had to share its technology to get that business. Do you think Intel would have licensed x86 to AMD otherwise? Once Intel got powerful enough they tried to go back on that deal, but the courts ruled for AMD. Even back then it was about money.
> Minus marketing and any government interference, capitalism rewards individuals for the value they contribute to society.

I suppose I don't buy this as an a priori equality. One problem is that when there are very large flows of capital, one can often make more money by skimming very small amounts off the top, than by creating new things. That's one reason finance is a better route to wealth than tech startups, even though tech startups create a lot more value for society: because when hundreds of billions of dollars are moving around, you only need to find a way to pocket a very small amount of it to get fabulously wealthy. More generally, rent-seeking, i.e. maneuvering yourself into a position where you can be sort of a private-sector version of the taxman, is a viable way to make money.

Plus, "minus marketing" is a pretty big caveat. It's quite possible to be successful in a "black-hat capitalist" sort of way, by not creating products that contribute to society, but instead by swindling society out of its money by getting people to buy your crap (even in tech, there's a whole affiliate-marketing underworld of tricking people into buying shitty ebooks). And, to pick a third problem, the economy is a rather complex dynamical system, and like many dynamical systems, is not driven purely by fundamentals (real supply/demand), but also by feedback loops and attractors within the system. So sometimes you get some really weird ways of making money that have nothing to do with anyone providing value to anyone else, but have more to do with asset bubbles and debt spirals and other such market patterns.

Not that markets don't often work, and might work even better without the government propping up the corporate form. But I certainly don't think we can a priori say that money transfers are a direct measure of value. I mean, we'd live in a pretty coincidentally amazing universe if it just happened that the economy, this very complex dynamical system that does not care about human concerns like "value" or "society" or "ethics", happened to end up 100% aligning with them. I think instead it's an open question when they align and when they don't, and if there's anything we can do to make markets align with value-to-society better.
I'd say all the things you mention – nice effects, clean windows and nice themes – are examples of where Ubuntu is beautiful. I agree that Ubuntu is quite beautiful, and it is getting better and better.

I'd say what is lacking most in Ubuntu is elegance, which I define as it having strong vision about how things should look and behave. On a Mac you can quite clearly see when an application does not fit, for example Google Earth and Firefox. I think this is in large part due to the elegance of the platform.

Ubuntu is also somewhat lacking in simplicity. I think in large due to their attempts to hide accidental complexity instead of working to fix it. This has gotten a lot better, but as an example, Ubuntu still spews files for applications all over the place instead of having them as an application bundle as on a Mac. Then you get desktop files to give you a single icon to click, but they hide the complexity instead of removing it.

Reading what I wrote I realize that there is quite a bit of overlap between simplicity and elegance. App bundles are both simpler and more elegant than spewing files for an application all over the place.
Btw, the live event url: http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1009qpeijrfn/event
Long Answer: Yes, stay tuned...
> The article is not titled "How to become a broadly smart individual" -- it's titled "Easy ways to fail a Ph.D."

That's why I said "This is OK advice if all you want to do is finish a PhD as quickly as possible."

Professors don't give this advice to students in the form "If you want to finish ASAP, take this advice, but really finishing ASAP isn't a good idea". They just give the advice, and it's bad.

> But you're perceived as wasting your advisor's funding, you're ruined.

I didn't say waste. There is a balance. And if your advisor treats you as a research technician, and only pays you conditional on working full-time on his research, you ought to change advisors.

>If you want to be a broadly smart individual, finish grad school as quickly as possible, become a professor, get tenure, and you'll have the rest of your life to study whatever you like.

First, ask any tenured professor and they'll tell you they have the much less time for free thinking then they had in grad schools. Grant writing, committee siting, etc., soaks up most of their time.

Second, the average age to get tenure is 39:

http://blogs.physicstoday.org/newspicks/2009/11/family-is-th...

Waiting until you're 40 to do your independent, free thinking is a good way to make sure you never do anything original.
The hard part is how do we verify that the records were actually deleted. Is the info still sitting on random backups somewhere. It seems that once it is out there, it will be very hard to put back in the box again. Personally that concerns me.
Uh oh, the live productivity chart of Hacker News readers is plummeting...
You're operating under a very narrow, incorrect definition of socialism.
People have touched on this, including the parent article, but this needs stating in BIG SHOUTY CAPITALS:

PhDs are the last mediaeval guild apprenticeship standing, with all the ceremony and all the anachronism that implies.

Seriously. You're apprenticed to a master, you have to produce a meisterwerk, then they let you in. The entire thing is a historical accident. Remember that and everything else is... well, it's still crazy, but you can get the thread of it.

(yrs, PhD (Cantab) 2007 - http://www.lexical.org.uk/science/thesis/)
That's all right. Using my Mac I rarely have to anyway... and really wonder if I even need to.
Woman Loses Truck to Craigslist Scam
Without this comment, I wouldn't have given the parent a second glance. And without that, I wouldn't have realized that "slouching towards" is a phrase I easily recognized without being able to recognize the source. So some googling (hah!) later, I found the text of The Second Coming by Yeats here: http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html

And it turns out, as the GP says, that Gibson is making a wonderful and highly relevant reference to the poem.
Also an excellent quote, and entirely appropriate.
First thing I noticed watching from the iPhone: timeshifting on the stream.

I can pause, go back and catch up live. I can't recall having seen this before (on iOS that is), so I wouldn't be surprised if this is linked to whatever they'll be announcing. (though that might just be wishful thinking :))
Unfortunately, the people who are saying things like "re-organizing health care is Socialist" are also the type of people would wouldn't care that there is a distinction that might be relevant. They have conflated socialism and communism, and there can be no reasonable types of communism.
It is very simple. A purely capitalistic society can contain, tolerate, and even encourage totally egalitarian organizations in any form the participants deem prudent. A purely socialist society on the other hand cannot tolerate capitalistic organizations in its midst.

Violence is embedded in the assumption that society can be organized in a socialist manner.
I met Alexis at Startup School in... 2006? I can't think of many people better suited to an "ambassador" type role.
I'm just guessing, but a bit of experience in research and fabrication is behind the guesses.

The first successful devices are usually the result of a more finicky and expensive set of processes. Also, all the fabrication steps have been ordered, and if necessary had their process parameters pushed out of otherwise optimal zones for the machines in question, to make the desired device come out right. So, after making the first ones they had to find a way to make them with better, commercially viable, yields. Also they had to develop a process flow to make memristors at the same time as, or at least compatible with, the other steps needed for the other devices that will be needed on a marketable chip. It is common to push necessary support circuitry for a device off the initial test wafers (if for nothing else, it helps reduce the variables, if the devices don't appear to work, was it the new device under test or the amp you put right next to it on the chip; better to put another test device in that space, have two to test, and use an off chip amp to test them).

In addition, there may have been issues with the materials used or waste products produced. You can play around with small amounts of more expensive materials in research. Similarly, disposing of small amounts of very nasty waste products can be fine on the research scale, but dealing with the amounts produced after scaling production up might make the venture unprofitable.

Also, many of the process steps may have been far more "hands on" than mass production demands. So all of those have to be automated and process parameters for them optimized.

All of this is based on academic research experience, which, afaik, doesn't constrain itself as much to sticking as close as possible to the established tools as industry research might. But with a whole new class of devices like this, I imagine even an industry research group wouldn't let a little thing like lack of an established, trustworthy tool for a job stand in the way of a promising avenue toward success. I'd say six years is doing very well considering all these issues and many of them are probably still in the process of being ironed out.
I don't think there really is a popular definition for capitalism. People who use the word always use it to mean what they want it to mean, usually in the context of praising or criticizing capitalist society.

The best definition (in my ever humble opinion) is that capitalism is a society where the means of production live in a free market, which is completely consistent with what the GP said.
When he talks about "young people with guns" I think that he is talking about the US military. I don't know if I agree with him, but I'm positive his statements aren't racially motivated. I'm also positive that this has nothing to do with Randianism.
Here is a live version of the sounds of various sorting algorithms. Done using HTML 5 audio - http://bit.ly/sort-sound
Cool, thanks! Very interesting stuff. Nice of you to share some of the "secret sauce."
I think the real solution here is that whenever you claim patent protection, you also include the expiration date of the patent.

This eliminates the problem old left-over stock marked with expired patents. It also eliminates the problem of forgetting.
Neat !!
I think you put it very clear:
1)The good about capitalism is that it rewards high squiled-hard workers individuals fairly based on objective results, not on ideology and prejudices(subjective) like socialism.

2)The bad is that "everybody love their children, family and friends". That means those near those highly successful people get unfair advantage(nepotism).

Given that no political system has been able to improve (2)(who were those that had the privileges to cruise the Volga, feed-educate better their children in SU but communist party members? who has the power and the companies in P.R.C today but comunist party members?) I prefer capitalism.
Whether or not alpha varies (and my gut tells me that it doesn't) this discovery is telling us something new about the nature of the universe, and that is indeed exciting.
Yes, that's a real problem. I'd wager that many companies have no idea whatsoever where all the copies of your data have gone.
That has been available since they introduce the live streaming. It really depends on how many segments the live stream tracks. The more it tracks the longer you can pause.
Only in Japan, real men go to a hotel with virtual girlfriends
I wonder if we'll ever see the mafia holding such an archive, and asking for payment in exchange for a clean record.
The same is true in math -- it is rare for mathematicians to move directly from a Ph.D. to a tenure-track faculty position.
If you're going to bring opportunity cost into the equation, don't forget the physical and mental well-being that comes with gardening. That hour of daily digging, squatting, etc. might very well offset a daily hour at the gym or reduce physical issues associated with a sedentary lifestyle. Also, the satisfying act of gardening might very well reduce one's need for drugs and therapy for mental problems, which, sadly, are all too common today.
I agree with you completely and apologize for the accidental downmod. The arrows are too close for iPod users.

There are almost certainly some low cost methods that have yet to be considered seriously but it's a tough problem that will require tools we haven't even developed yet.
It's funny you say that because when I fist published the article I froze in horror because I thought it read "Flies" instead of "Files." Strangely I still read it that way...Crap I just did again when rereading this post...
Actually, I read the patent differently. They seem to be claiming that a series of prompts is slow to the user, and that they've invented a more efficient and faster system.

1) Non-GUI applications (or applications without a window) should be terminated automatically
2) Applications with a top window can veto, but when they do the other applications are removed from the screen, so that the user can focus on the application veto-ing.
3) Users can be presented with a "Shut Down Now" button, to force the shutdown, ignoring any application vetoes.

Also, remember the description is not part of the patent, only the claims section is. As far as I see, the claims are OS-agnostic.
7 Jobs Companies Are Desperate to Fill (#2: software engineering)
The only thing I don't agree with is "Aim too high."

I can't imagine surviving at a top-ten school without having a focused research vision from the start. I'm not saying you should walk in hoping to prove P != NP, but who wants to dedicate 5+ years of their life to working on someone else's research project? Not to mention that these are typically the best years of your life.

I think the real key is to aim for a the top of a hill, not a cliff. You need to pick a goal that enables you to make gradual progress. If you start out by saying "I plan to build the best race car in the world"-- that's fine. Your first paper may be on improving the tires, then a follow-up with an even better tire material, then you discover that square tires can be used instead of round ones (thereby disrupting the entire field of tireology), and before you know it you have a PhD. You never reached the top of the hill like you expected, but you kept climbing.

Disclaimer: I don't have a PhD (yet). :)
It's for reasons you said that I'm glad the word "socialism" is being reappropriated from Marx. The world needs to be able to talk about socialist forms of society without this talk being tainted by Marxist theory and the shadow of communist history.

Maybe then I'd be able to talk about economic systems outside of small groups of smart friends, without some guy butting in about how Obama is a communist or how the bank bailouts demonstrate capitalism is broken or how Marx said [insert one of many popular misinterpretations of Marx here]. Maybe we could have intelligent discourse in the media on this subject without the risk of some Tea party douchebag accusing everyone of communism, and people believing it..
>> (a) become a broadly smart individual

> Do you need to be in grad school to achieve this?

No, but grad school is a fantastic place for it. Just because you can (partially) make up for a missed opportunity doesn't mean that missing it wasn't bad.

> Learning the skills involved in focusing on one area can then be applied to another area later on.

The fact that skills involved in one area can be applied to another doesn't mean you shouldn't be acquiring skills in many areas. In fact, it supports my point.
Well, you can parameterize this strategy with an arbitrary permutation P of {1, .. 100} in the following way. If you open box containing N, instead of next opening box N, you open box P(N). If the warden's placement of numbers defines permutation Q (box N contains Q(N)), then this new scheme will have each prisoner find his number if P composed with Q has no cycles of length greater than 50.

Now, if you randomly picked a permutation P, then by symmetry since you don't know anything about the placement of numbers, you'd do just as well as with the original strategy. On the other hand, what you've proposed is that the warden has told you that choosing P to be identity results in failure. So if you exclude identity and pick one of the other permutations for your strategy, you'll fare a little tiny bit better on average.

You can do even better than this by picking from a more specialized class of permutations for P. I'll leave the problem of finding the best class for P as a follow up.