skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I said about efficiency in China is a faithful description of what academic econ commonly says.

You patched up their argument.

Still, my explanation for why China is sewing the buttons and South Carolina is not is correct: The government in China makes their young women offers they can't refuse. The young women in South Carolina can do just as well and, with better nutrition, medical care, information systems, transportation systems, public health, public education, communications systems, connections with customers, etc., actually do better. But, still, China is CHEAPER, and they use other advantages.

Why? China wants the business, and the basic facts are not from academic econ or efficiency but from some centrally planned economy to attack a market and take it. It's not economic theory or even being more efficient; instead it's international economic strategy, and academic econ ignores it.

You asked why we shouldn't just let China have such work and have us concentrate on more advanced technology. Well, that's an excuse, and it's silly: The businesses in South Carolina are now toast, and their suffering does nothing to help US technology, net, likely hurts it a little.

So, we had an asset in South Carolina, and we just threw it away. Academic econ doesn't count that asset as a loss, but the loss is huge, and so is the resulting loss of social capital and the increases in public expenditures.

Sure, maybe slowly over time we should get out of the button sewing business, but the way we've done it is a disaster.

More generally, there's next to nothing that China can actually do more efficiently than the US can. So, they sell us stuff just because they are cheaper, not because they are more efficient.

Sure, I'm about to buy parts for a server. It will have a motherboard with 10 SATA ports and 2 GbE ports, from Taiwan. If the board were made in the US, then it would cost me more, maybe three times as much. The US contribution will be the design of the AMD processor, the Kingston memory, the design of the Seagate hard disks, maybe an SSD, and especially the Microsoft software. Then the crucial work will be mine, the software the server runs, using the Radon-Nikodym theorem (with, say, von Neumann's proof), yes, some Hilbert space results (work from von Neumann and others), and some of my original work, and be high technology.

Still, we shouldn't be killing people in South Carolina, and the academic econ profs say that doing so is optimal.
I sometimes wonder: say we removed all of security controls at the airports - how many more terrorist attacks would we actually see?
Self posts tend to take a little longer to show up in the "ask" section. They'll stay there a bit longer too I think.
Agree. It's positively dangerous to assume a simple, selectively chosen set of questions are a basis for public policy recommendations.

Take the argument about minimum wages increasing unemployment amongst the unskilled and the young, for example. It's not too difficult to infer an implicit policy recommendation from the answer to that question...

If, however, you had asked the question "minimum wages increase unemployment overall" you would find a much lower level of agreement (not least empirical observations of the introduction of minimum wages in many jurisdictions have contradicted that claim). There's no inconsistency here since there are plenty of plausible economic mechanisms for believing that imposing a minimum wage leads to a countervailing increase in older, more skilled labourers, but even amongst the subset of economists that believe the actual effect of a minimum wage is to concentrate unemployment amongst the young and unskilled you'll find a large degree of dissent over whether this has good or bad implications for society and the economy as a whole.

It's possible to agree wholeheartedly with Mankiw's simple observation of minimum wages => youth unemployment whilst disagreeing passionately with any policy recommendation against imposing a wage floor, even using narrow economic efficiency criteria.
For some reason this page immediately crashes Safari on my iPad. Can see it for an instant then window closes and back to iike screen.
Wave Chief leaves as well, for Facebook: http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/29/rasmussen-facebook-google/
> It's Apple's store, they get to set the rules for their store. I have no problem with that. I may grumble at the rules they choose, but I'm not going to cry about it.

Conversely, a GPL'd program is the author's work, and if some other developer submits it to the app store, the author is perfectly within his rights to waste Apple's time and demand either GPL compliance or removal.

> Little developers don't have much leverage.

Except when they do; such as when Alice submits Bob's GPL'd program to the App Store. If Bob cares more about enforcing his rights than having his program in Apple's virtual toy store, he's got plenty of leverage.

And if Apple has to spend time and money taking down apps as a cost of maintaining its own bizarre and finicky rules (which cost 3rd-party developers plenty of time and money), then it's exactly what Apple deserves. Poetic justice, even.

> That's life. BFD. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a big deal.

In the grand scheme of things, humans are a tiny dot in an infinite cosmos. In the human scheme of things, it may matter a great deal whether we end up with neutered app dongles instead of real computers in our pockets.

> If the worst thing that happens in your life this year is that your app falls afoul of some persnickety little Apple rule, you're still living better than the vast majority of the humans on the planet who would LOVE to be so afflicted.

There are (at least!) two fallacies in your argument: Apple's bad behavior is justified (1) because there are worse things; (2) because the harm it does to anyone is not sufficient to reduce them to desperate, third-world, dollar-a-day, tapeworms,-warlords,-and-cholera-level poverty.

I maintain that Apple's behavior is not justified, and I choose to forgo their iOS platform and its attendant riches. So far, I've been able to subsist on more than a dollar a day, cholera-free!
If you create a popular app you will get ripped in public. At least here you have a chance to respond quickly.

The HN community provides insightful & quality feedback that would otherwise be provided by a user.

To me, it's a no-brainer. The benefits substantially outweigh the costs.
Thats okay, I'm a php developer and you couldn't pay me to touch ruby ;)

I don't like the feeling of someone else doing the work for me
So many books have been written about this. If you are genuinely curious, read The Production of Security (and justice is covered too) and other Rothbard or Hoppe writings.

Joe Civilian will likely seek out producers of police services and insurance services (rather than rely on his own daily gang fights), both of which will out of self-interest police each other against abusive behavior, and private courts of law have often worked exceedingly well in the short spans of history where they were permitted by oversight or accident.
Off the top of my head, I don't know of something like that. I went to my own website to see if I had something like that listed and I don't seem to. I do have some links to educational resources (though I really don't maintain the site these days so there are probably a lot of dead links). I imagine a good homeschool list would be able to give you a lot more links to kid-safe websites than HN can. Though a quick google turns up this list: http://ivyjoy.com/rayne/kidssearch.html

(FWIW, I basically did give my homeschooled sons unfettered access to the web with two rules: 1) no porn and 2) no learning how to blow up the world.)

FYI: I copied and pasted the wikipedia URL you posted and it tells me something totally safe for work:

"Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for Fisting/ in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings.
Start the Fisting/ article, using the Article Wizard if you wish, or add a request for it.
Search for "Fisting/" in existing articles...."
Only 2 percent of nonsalaried workers earn minimum wage.
Carnegie Mellon's Average GPA is still a 2.8. Hasn't changed in a long time.

One thing I have noticed and could be interesting though - is it possible that students are getting better at the material over time?

I'm a TA so I have access to exams from past years. It is most definitely the case the exams just keep getting harder. Exams from 5 years ago are complete jokes in comparison to exams these days, but students seem to be keeping up. It may be that they are just exposed to the material before college now. Any comments?
My argument is that most things that potentially take a lot of time are blocking by default in Python, which makes it a bad fit for making non-blocking servers... I am not arguing that blocking servers have better perfomance than non-blocking servers...
This is definitely a terrific way for learning new stuff (you have now the HN community watching you). However, don't also forget that for most applications, their success/failure will be also determined by the spit and polish applied on them. Don't get carried away over the "quantity", always be mindful of "quality" too.

Update: I read your intention behind this here: http://terrorified.com/?p=786

Now I better understand your motivation. All the best.
"And on that day you really want to be working on AdWords where the money is and not on the cool projects."

Alternatively, on that day, you can find another cool job at another geek-run successful technology company(if you are any kind of hacker, which you probably are if you are working on these cool projects). Once this happens, you probably don't want to keep working at Google and see a great company decline to yet another middle manager driven MegaCorp. (There is some debate on whether this process is underway there already).
You're talking about Apple, which has less than 10% of the worldwide computer market. What about Dell and HP? Currently the software commands the hardware, not the other way around.

A lot of businesses depend on MS Windows and lots of other x86 software, too much for a simple switch to ARM. Apple could do it because they have a firm grip on their ecosystem, but the rest of the market isn't in such a position.
Airport biometric scanners 'failing to protect Britain's borders'
The website is down[1] as for 8:30 this morning. This either means they can't keep it up for bad coding, or Diaspora has more of a following that we give it credit for. I still am interested to see where this goes.

[1] http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://www.joindiaspora.c...
Security is hard. Biometrics are hard. Doing biometric security even harder. While there's always going to be a failure rate for any biometric authentication, I'm surprised that there's no fallback mechanism to spot it occuring.

Does HN know of anywhere else these scanners are being used? What are your thoughts?
Microsoft developed NTLM because LM sucked and made it the default in Windows XP. However, for backwards compatibility, it also hashed the passwords to LM, so, well, you can crack them just as easily.

From Vista onwards, I think, LM is no longer used.
Creating a Great User Interface For Your Web App
The IRA managed to cause plenty of fear by bombing shops and train stations. From Wikipedia:

The Troubles' impact on the ordinary people of Northern Ireland produced such psychological trauma that the city of Belfast had been compared to London during the Blitz. [104] The stress resulting from bomb attacks, street disturbances, security checkpoints, and the constant military presence had the strongest effect on children and young adults. [105] In addition to the violence and intimidation, there was chronic unemployment and a severe housing shortage. Vandalism was also a major problem. In the 1970s there were 10,000 vandalised empty houses in Belfast alone. Most of the vandals were aged between eight and thirteen. [106] Activities for young people were limited, with pubs fortified and cinemas closed. Just to go shopping in the city centre required passing through security gates and being subjected to body searches.
This has been open source since April 2009.
At this point in the game, can any new employee expect to get options that are not insanely diluted?

I guess if you're a Lars Rasmussen-class talent you're going to get some special class of stock to entice you to come over, but what about the rest of the new hires?
It's not accidental, because LM only supports passwords up to 14 chars. What's worse, is that they are two 7-character passwords, which you can crack separately, basically making cracking the entire LM keyspace trivial. I think there are rainbow tables that cover all of it (I have a few but they don't contain symbols, I don't think).
The C Programming Language(K&R) and The Unix Programming Environment are the best to start off with.
I'm in a very similar position working with Ruby/Rails, and I struggled for a while trying to figure out what to do. The approach I settled on was to work through another tutorial, but try to add features and much better design. In other (more Halloween appropriate) words, to really flesh out the skeleton that the tutorial gives you.
LOUIS VUITTON Damier CANVAS MEN'S BILLFOLD
So many experts leaving Google. Is that a bad or good sign?
That said, the acquisition only closed very recently. Within the last few months if I remember correctly.
> I cannot see them giving up client-Side Silverlight that easily; controlling the whole stack is an advantage for them just as it is for Adobe

It's only an advantage if the stack is relevant. Silverlight is not.
Thanks for the advice. It is an advertising network to help website owners sell directly to advertisers. I doubt techcrunch an other big pr sites would want to cover us. I was thinking of a paid pr release.
I was really responding to the start of this thread, but the larger situation, including for your questions, is just awful. I wrote something: The economy is IMPORTANT, but academic econ is a disaster. So, we have to roll back from academic econ and proceed mostly just empirically. For that, the AIG problem, etc. clearly show that we do need much more data. Net, we just didn't know accurately enough to know what was coming even to see within 6 percentage points in the unemployment index, say, from 4% to 10%.

Policy makers in DC just didn't have any solid advice, from academic econ or elsewhere. So the policy makers took chances and hoped. Such things don't happen in public policy where there is solid advice: E.g., we know darned well just what the F-22 can do. Aeronautical engineering is highly competent; academic econ is not.

Academic econ needs to get real, and start like biology did -- get the data and be descriptive. Actually, physics did that, too: Get the data on the motion of the planets and eventually observe that the orbits were ellipses. Finally (1) invent calculus, (2) postulate the law of gravity, (3) postulate that force equals mass times acceleration, (4) argue about motion under a central force being in a plane, (5) finally derive that the orbits have to be ellipses as observed. Easy it's not. But have to start with observing reality, and here academic econ fails.

We will be safer if we use a lot of good empirical data and a lot of common sense and prudence and set aside bad theory.
My dalliance with smart drugs - and the lesson I learned
Being Against Climate Change Legislation Is Just Like Being For Slavery
There must be many factors that go into 'what makes a good entrepreneur'... and many fallacies as well.

I'm 60. My background is neither in entrepreneurship, business nor computer technology... but rather a strange combination of cultural anthropology and the arts.

A few years ago, out of my interest in cultural evolution I came up with a simple idea... an easy way to think of it is as similar to x-box points but instead of for games... its for political/charitable contribution... (small money, large numbers and immediate feedback as a response to "Citizen's United decision... is more powerful than might at first seem apparent).

(Anyway, patent has been just granted for the method. If anyone's interested there's a demo at http://www.Chagora.com which was all I could afford to get built.)

My only point here is that whether its because of age or lack of experience or the fact that neither political party wants anything changed I've been unable to get any interest at all from entities I'd have believe would at least have a few questions.

Of course it could be just a dumb idea... but I don't think so considering the feedback I'm finally starting to get. But it took a patent before anyone would pay any attention to a 60 year-old, non-techie old hippie... (and bankruptcy, foreclosure and credit ruin).

Sorry for the slight rant but its been a tough 4 years.
Ask HN: stopping caffeine
So, I stopped drinking coffee for two days and I'm sleeping 10 hours per night. I used to wake up naturally after about 7 hours of sleep. Anyone else had this when they stopped? (I used to drink more than 1L per day)
That's really comparing apples to oranges.

LLVM can compile to intermediate code in order to make code optimizing passes more generic and better-defined, to cleaner separate compiler components and phases, to better abstract multiple architectures and to impose restrictions that make some analysis and optimization easier (like enforcing Static Single Assignment for forms), you can create a VM that runs IR directly and distribute that, among many other reasons. So IR does eventually make it to machine code, otherwise it won't be able to do anything.

Why LLVM is better than GCC is a different question. It's better, in my opinion, for being a much cleaner, more well-architected, modern, and much much better modularized code base. Also, I am a happy person when I read Clang docs on parsing vs when I read GCC docs on how to manipulate GIMPLE trees. There are also more objective metrics, like the front end being a very nice, portable library for parsing C-derived languages and exposing more functionality via libclang. (This makes very code-aware IDEs more possible and much easier to write, the use of C syntax for custom work, making custom code scanners and analyzers far easier, etc, etc)

Find more out at http://www.llvm.org
You are correct. However, pursuant to the use of NTLM or LM, neither of which are salted non-US ASCII characters are about as good as you can get without ridiculously long passwords.

For anything else, ready salted is definitely the best crypto flavour.

Having said that, a few years ago I co-ordinated a distributed effort to create rainbow tables for standard Oracle database accounts. Oracle's crypto mechanism uses the username as a salt. It meant that we had to generate different (but small as the algorithm was crap) tables for DBSNMP,SYSTEM etc. The same applies to WPA-PSK - don't use a common SSID in the Church of Wifi tables.

I guess the moral of the story is that salting alone won't get you out of the woods. You need to think very carefully when it comes to crypto, and get as many second opinions as you can.
To me, this looks like a very big piece of why he can do this and many people are simply not able to make this kind of money: I charge $100 per hour, which means if I work 4-6 hours per day, five days per week, then we're in decent shape financially and I'll have enough time left over to make significant progress on AppIgnite.

If I could charge $100/hr, I could replace my current job with about 5 or so hours of consulting per week (or scale it up a bit to have a more lavish lifestyle/pay down some debt), and then be free to do whatever the heck I wanted the rest of the time.
There is clothing that's desgigned for very quick removal. But I am quite sure wou would be in a lot of trouble for a stunt like that before everything gets sorted out.
Mistype Twitter Or Facebook, Win an IPad (Or Not)
Drop.io has paid features and additional storage for a fee. I've been a paying user for two years. Paid accounts were even mentioned in the blog post announcing the acquisition.

Seeing the recent development of the site and the evolution of Dropbox made it clear Drop.io wouldn't be around long term.
Has Linus ever mentioned Github?
Cool, I like what I see OP.

One comment: AppIgnite looked like APPL or AAPL (Apple) on first glance, since 'l' and 'L' can look pretty similar on some fonts.

That said, all the best!
I like it! Like probably most hackers, I have done a ton of "just for fun" projects that never got anywhere. It surely would be nice to have a place where everybody can watch for opportunities to throw in recycle-worthy stuff and maybe start something new.
The Creative Phase
Craigslist headquarters moving to downtown S.F.
Do not miss this chance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_bombings

I suppose the time when people could do that is at earliest, the most recent of those incidents.
---What I said about efficiency in China is a faithful description of what academic econ commonly says.

Moving production to the location with the highest comparative advantage is the most efficient things for a market to do, that doesn't imply that the final producer is the most efficient producer.

---Still, my explanation for why China is sewing the buttons and South Carolina is not is correct: The government in China makes their young women offers they can't refuse.

So what about all the young woman in Taiwan where this happened before China was the low-wages threat? What about South Korea before that or Japan before that? The "offer they can't refuse" is that if a young woman goes to a factory she makes twice as much as she did on the farm, but with better access to "nutrition, medical care, information systems, transportation systems, public health, public education" than she would have had on the farm. From a global welfare perspective its a lot better that three Chinese women go from desperate rural poverty to moderate (by global standards) urban poverty even if it means some woman in Carolina going from working in a textile factory to a lower paid job at Walmart.
It has been nearly 12 years since I've visited the US. I was hoping to go there in 2003 but unfortunately the TSA and DHS put a stop to that. I've made a conscious decision that I do not want to go to the United States if I'm going to be treated that way. As beautiful and wonderful the country and it's people are, it boils down to a choice. Either you're happy being subject to what in anywhere else would qualify as sexual assault or taking pornographic pictures, or you don't go. I choose not to go.

Should all of this end I would love to go to New York, San Francisco, LA and the many other wonderful places in the USA, but until then I'm not happy to go. The only thing that would get me there would be specific unavoidable business.

However, I would like to thank the TSA and DHS for the opportunities I have had to visit all over Canada (another great North American country with great people) and I'm hoping to hit the Carribean and Mexico next year.

It's a definite loss for me that I may never return to the US, but I have to make a stand somewhere.
Moving beyond the 'Java is dead' hype
Better than that: silicon penis enlargers.

But it will a short time before someone makes an explosive one.
This remark (near the end of the piece) mirrors what I was thinking:

I mean come on, Jason Calacanis is rich, his wife stays at home and they have a night nanny. Not exactly a tough situation. What’s tough is single mothers and fathers trying to raise their kids by themselves. Me and the “Jasons” have supportive spouses who are at home for big chunks of time.