skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know, I would normally let this sort of argument go, but you've stepped on a pet peeve of mine and it's been a while since it got some fresh air.

I dislike arguments that focus on a particular consequence producing a particular strain of human misery, and dare the reader to disagree at the risk of being cold-hearted. I find the argument inappropriately personal -- focusing as it does on the virtue and piety of the person. But mainly I find it . . . well, myopic. Near-sighted.

Take the outsourcing we're discussing. The suffering of the fellow who loses his job and maybe his house and has to move back in with his parents is one piece of the equation. The other piece is his counterpart in China who lives in worse conditions, and wants to work hard to improve life for him and his family, but lacks the opportunity.

And then there's the cheaper product itself. There's the company that makes more money, which affects its shareholders and stock prices, which in aggregate affects people's retirement accounts. Perhaps one of them is in danger of losing a house? And then there are the customers, who can now afford the cheaper product, or who can afford more other things because it is cheaper. Perhaps one of them is in a tight situation, too?

And that doesn't even include tertiary effects. Perhaps this cheaper product is used as a component for something else new. Perhaps a whole new technology becomes feasible now. Perhaps it changes the world. Where does that fit in the equation?

That's why the argument strikes me as myopic. Our notional blue collar worker may indeed be miserable, but who is to say his misery outweighs everyone else's? Why is he special? In fact, I find the reasoning to be kind of . . . maybe not exactly racist, but kind of people-ist in some way or another. I'm sorry for the guy, but I don't feel his concerns ought to trump anyone else's.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try to figure out the impact of decisions on people at large. But I am definitely saying to have respect for how incalculable it can be, and to at least think in terms of all the people you can see right off will be affected -- and not just one class of them.

I'm also saying to use the right tool for the job. As a rule of thumb, I like industry to make progress, and charity to relieve suffering. Not that there aren't exceptions -- I myself am advocating the establishment of industry in a region as a way to improve conditions, and I certainly see the value of non-profit research.

But usually I don't want the wires crossed. If you're worried about the suffering of folks who have lost jobs and are having trouble making ends meet, the right approach seems to me to start or assist a foundation that helps those sorts of folks financially and educationally (or whatever). Limiting the help to, say, textile manufacturing workers, and having the help come in the form of keeping their jobs at the expense of jobs for folks in other regions, and ignoring an economic opportunity and possibly retarding progress in general . . .

. . . well, that seems to me really inefficient. And kind of morally dubious, too.
Well, the change is scheduled for December 28 this year, and the next leap day is February 29 of next year, so we're only talking two months here.

I assume the actual reason they chose that date is that they want to stick it in the xmas/NYE dead period which is mostly holidays anyway to minimise disruption.

Also, "time == money" is probably on the list of "things you're least likely to hear anyone say in Samoa".
There are a lot of devices out there - billions, in fact - that are not smartphones. There are a lot of devices that USE Qt today and do not have graphic accelerators on them.

Qt's processor demands are happily keeping up with Moore's Law and the ability of new processors, leaving very little for the developers.
Vectorial Audio Cassette in Coreldraw
In this Corel Draw tutorial I’m going to make an Audio Cassette. We will be using Gradient, Blend, Pattern, Contour commands while making this tutorial. So you may get better idea about these commands. I’m going to use Corel X4 for making this tutorial. But you can use any version of Corel Draw.
Lots of things are intuitively obvious -- but when articulated clearly, it is possible to understand them more precisely. That ay you can use the knowledge in a rigorous way, not just an intuitive way.
Apple overtakes Google to become world's most valuable brand
Mixergy Interview with Jessica Jackley (from Kiva & ProFounder)
Good point but I doubt it will cost even a fraction of nuclear in the future. I just remembered an interview from MIT Technology Review, about a year ago:

“The guys can be drunk when they place the rows; it really doesn’t matter. Our tolerance is plus or minus a foot.” [1]
Bill Gross, eSolar [2]

Unfortunately, the interview is behind a pay wall [3]. Seems like they found an easy and robust way to do pretty much all the calibration after construction and fully automatic. I wonder what the current status is.

[1] http://gigaom.com/cleantech/daily-sprout-258/
[2] http://www.esolar.com/
[3] http://www.technologyreview.com/business/24560/?ref=rss
Exactly. If WebOS "succeeds" on the desktop it will only be because the PC business is done. And in that case, being the world's number one PC vendor isn't very helpful.
If you search around the various different icon sets there are actually quite a few that that the article's author would probably deem "too realistic".

That being said, I think that often they are targeted more towards things like section header graphics than tiny buttons so I'm not sure how much of the criticism is applicable.
I frequently encounter people who insist that the US style government, while not perfect, is the greatest form of government, and they question how much room for improvement there really is. And yet, when issues such as increased surveillance arise, everyone is (mostly rightly) alarmed at the increase in power this could provide to the government. Cries of "1984" are an internet staple. But rather than only insisting that this new capability be denied to our government, I wish people would also question whether it is really a fundamental truth that government cannot be trusted with such capabilities or whether it's possibly just our current forms of government that cannot.

Just in case it's not obvious why we'd want a government spying on us, I'll briefly make the case. There might be some side benefit, such as automatically identifying emergency situations, but realistically the main benefit comes from increased effectiveness of law enforcement. Yes, that ought to be a benefit. If it isn't, that points to a problem with the laws or the way they're enforced. Increasing the effectiveness with which we can identify violations will not only lead to a reduction in violations, but will also let us lower punishments (speeding tickets would work fine at $10 each if every speeder were cited, etc).

Some people will argue that such a government could never exist. "Who watches the watchers?", the cliche goes. Well, why couldn't the answer be "other watchers"? Isn't that the idea of checks and balances? I don't think that there's much chance of a sufficiently better form of government emerging from our current political machine anytime soon, but if it were to happen it wouldn't be accomplished by getting everyone to agree on the details, many of which I probably imagine wrong myself. Rather, I think it would be accomplished by making the very idea of a better system of government popular, and getting people to agree on a transparent process and criteria for working out the details. (Well, there might be other ways. If someone posted instructions for a relatively easy to make, low cost nuclear bomb to the internet I think that, after a few detonations, we'd have mass internment that would give everyone ample free time to discuss whether a surveillance state is really necessarily bad.)
This is symptomatic of the whole EU enterprise. You might ask how it is that a totally non-elected person like Baroness Ashton, the so-called High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union and Vice President of the EU (I repeat, no one elected her bar a coterie of the elite in the EU) can call for the EU to be given a seat on the UN Security Council. By the way, the president of the EU is unelected as well. Oh, and the EU finances have not been passed by the auditors in 13 years.

I apologize for this off-topic comment but a little background for non-EU folk is useful in considering this latest EU nonsense regarding the internet.
Why Everything is Dirtier
An interesting side benefit this opens up the possibility of debugging languages that compile down to JavaScript, such as Coffeescript or Objective-J.

Just attach an editor or a terminal via a websocket, provide a mapping layer between the high-level (Coffee) and low-level (JS) source (line numbers, variables and such), and you're in business.
Tipjoy's embedded js & iframe widgets were measured, not just views to tipjoy.com

This made things off by a 100X overestimate. Whoops!
Bruce seems to be associating dissent with sabotage here:
Vibrant societies need a dishonest minority; if society makes its dishonest minority too small, it stifles dissent as well as common crime.

I disagree with this vehemently. Dissent is not crime.

And his argument that society needs a bit of dishonesty is also a bit odd. I see it as something any large cooperative system is doomed to end up with. This is also what his first paragraphs explains. And I think there have been software simulations which show how both "criminals" and "cops" naturally arise in a complex cooperative system.

I think his attempt to link dissent with crime and dishonesty is a terrible way to defend the need for dissent.
Good luck with that. I tried installing Ubuntu 11 on a system yesterday and discovered the installer hangs if you try to install it on a hard disk that currently contains Windows 7. If I didn't know how to manually use fdisk to reformat the drive I would not have known how to proceed.
I was on a recent trans-Pacific flight where they announced after landing that one of the flight attendants had completely skipped over her birthday (we crossed the IDL at about midnight) so we gave her a round of applause for sacrificing her birthday in the name of duty.

I cross the IDL semi-frequently and it always depresses me. It depresses me when I completely skip a day going west, and it depresses me when I fly back the other way and have to live through the same day twice.
What's supposed to trigger this sound? http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/static/punch-go.mp3
For the performance-critical parts you can still use C++. A web application does not allow that. Heck, as I said in my grandparent post, you can still use C++ for everything if "JS is not good enough".

Most people in the real world care about development turnover time. And as you say, developing in Javascript is a lot quicker than in C++, so why not write the non-performance-critical parts in JS?
Predictions are news? How about I predict 250 million users in 4 years for React OS http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

I'd be willing to wager that my prediction has a better chance of coming true than Shuttleworth's. But the truth is that neither has a very high chance of happening.
Thanks! The two names always confuse me. Owning two Acer EEE PC didn't help ;-)
This must be a training map since only one side is supposed to have weapons here.
Why wouldn't RMS be considered here?
His "right to read" [1] is certainly looking prophetic of late.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Impressive! More eye-opening than any HTML5 (Canvas) demo that I've seen
The engine compartment is going to be too hot, and the trunk is basically a metal box, so you can still pretty much rule those out.

It's not clear why the engine compartment would be too hot. Most automobiles have a slew of electronics stashed under the hood, and they work just fine, across a huge temperature range.

Also not clear why the trunk is ruled out, for a system that is "spliced right into your car's electrical system." Many cars have the actual radio stuck in the trunk, and they work just fine, since the electrical system includes an antenna.
Spork Testing Tip - Caching Classes
In software development, I am cynical of any tool, language, or process that promises to somehow make a team of ineffective programmers produce software of value. However, given a team of developers with some sort of baseline competence, I strongly believe that some tools increase their effectiveness while others hold them back.

Translating this to forms of government, I conjecture that if we elect ineffective and/or untrustworthy officials, and if enough untrustworthy persons obtain power in unelected positions, I doubt there is any system that can somehow prevent them from doing bad things. But given a certain critical mass of honesty and effectiveness in the people placed in charge, some forms of government provide superior results to others.

I am not going to say that America has the greatest form of government here, but is it possible that what we have here is a people problem, not a government problem?
Electronic tracking is a very cheap way to gain a lot of possibly useful information about potential suspects. It thus allows government to keep us safe without spending a lot of money. There are only two downsides.

First, innocent people may be singled out to be tracked without having done anything wrong. However, tracking, by itself, does not negatively impact the life of the person being tracked. Most are completely unaware of it, and those that are aware that they are being tracked have nothing to complain about: there is no expectation of privacy while traveling on public roads. And, as the technology gets cheaper, more people will get tracked, making the "singling out" less significant. When everyone is tracked, no one will be singled out.

The second downside to electronic tracking is that it vastly increases the power of government. But most people view this as a good thing. A more powerful government can keep us safer. If it can do it cheaply, so much the better.
That line of reasoning neglects the existence of automated data analysis. Not all spying comes with a spy these days.
Yeah even with a US passport it is annoying to get three months for the entire group of countries instead of three months per country. Do they not want our tourism money?
Well, someone gains by making money on someone else's work. I don't see how this can become a boost to regional economy unless it includes getting paid for material produced in other territories. There are pretty strong arguments to be made on getting rid of software patents (in case they have them in Ireland) but treating them the same as copyright comes across as incompetence IMO.
Subsurface ocean may explain Titan's orbital wobbles
Incremental encryption for "Private Editing in the Cloud"
I never fully grokked it. I'm jewish and I don't mind playing the nazis in strategy games. While I can understand why it would create a negative gut reaction at first, don't we ought to as logical creatures transcend such emotions and not let them govern our actions?
Not that it's really related to the actual substance of the article, just to the title, but personally I've never had any ideas, or even done any real thinking about current ideas, while in a shower, whereas when having a bath, I have.

I don't know if that's completely random, whether it's something specific about me, whether it's because I will spend longer in a bath than a shower, or because I enjoy having a bath more, and tend to relax more. Or some other reason.
KT brings 4G WiMax support on iPhone 4
I got excited when I read their intro that talked about how mobile platforms lacked the real estate for proper debugging, until I realized there's no way this is going to help in current iOS mobile app development.

I'd be surprised to see Apple adopt this. It would be interesting to see this supported in the iPhone simulator at the very least.
My understanding is that Skype makes the bulk of their money off of international calls bridged Skype to that country's local telephone service (which is often substantially less than calling cards, or direct long distance).
Palantir worth more than $2 billion
And yet one more article assuming that if bitcoin doesn't totally replace all the world's currency it will be a failure.
Hey! Another PR hit for that Microsoft "Google Iceberg" infographic.

Although this article didn't use the exact phrase "Google Tax", it still talks about it as such. The comments are quite humorous, even the potty-mouth-troll.
IPhone versus Windows Phone 7 Coding Presentation
You pay for the data you transfer. Tethering is simply an "unauthorized" (by the vendor) use of that data

Wait, does anyone charge a per-kilobyte data charge? I thought most plans either had unlimited data or some large cap.
Admire your focus to cut scope and ship! Don't forget to soft launch on HN!
The Perils of Sample Code
Bruce isn't saying that dissent is a crime, he's saying that the extreme measures we would need to use to reduce dishonesty (good) would also have the negative impact of stifling dissent (very bad) - so we shouldn't use these extreme measures.
I like what OP saying there.

For me it works like this (not just programming, but car tuning, guitar playing, house building... all random stuff i like to do, often not for profit):
1) get excited about something
2) forget about rules, advises from experts/"experts" and do it how you feel you should do it. less constraints in the beginning - more chance you will never notice these artificial walls.
3) get stuck many/many times in some basic stuff, because of #2 =))
4) start to read/learn/ask knowledge from expert sources.

In short - try and then learn right way.

Again, it works for me, but I believe - this way of thinking is true hackerish way.
Dissent is the expression of opposing opinions from the law. This often takes the form of crime.

When Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, she was expressing dissent. But she was also violating the law, and therefore committing a crime.
Fatcow for Business Website
It makes sense that the shower is somewhere you can really relax and think. It's the one place where you really can't be doing something else that is more important. You can't check your email, you can't be thinking that you should be writing a paper for some class. You can't do anything but shower and think.

In college there were multiple times that I came up with solutions to programming problems while I was in the shower because my mind actually had time to take a break.
Corporate Rule of Cyberspace
Google I/O countdown to the keynote kickoff
Most of the ideas I get in the shower aren't appropriate here! :)
This is either bad satire, or a bad idea.
Does anyone know if it comes with a networking stack?
The second downside to electronic tracking is that it vastly increases the power of government. But most people view this as a good thing. A more powerful government can keep us safer. If it can do it cheaply, so much the better.

First, "most people view this as a good thing" is clearly an appeal to popularity, which is a fallacious reasoning. At one time, most people believed slavery was a good thing. Discuss.

"A more powerful government can keep us safer." The word "can" is a weasel-word. We are not debating whether the government "can" do something, we are debating whether they actually do something. I challenge you to strengthen your statement by claiming that the increase in power given to the government is actually keeping us safer.

"if it can do it cheaply, so much the better." Hanging around startups, I have become enamoured of the idea that when certain things become extremely cheap, the entire dynamic changes. Radio car phones existed when I was a teen-ager. Then analog cell-phones, then digital cell-phones. Each new wave of technology was cheaper than the previous one. At some point, untethered phones became so cheap that the entire dynamic around telephony changed, and it changed very quickly.

Getting back to cheap spying on people, if you like what they are doing, then doing it cheaper seems to be a good thing. But at some point, it becomes so cheap that the entire dynamic changes. For example, if these devices were so cheap that they could be disposable, why not spy on everyone, all of the time?

This completely changes the dynamic of law enforcement. You don't start with a person suspected of breaking the law and spy on them, you simply spy on everyone and save everything. When and if you become interested in someone, you open up their file and voila! All of their movements since they bought their first car, all of their rental car movements, all of the movements of everyone who knew them and might have given them a ride, going back decades.

I need a bit more meat to the assertion that this scenario is "so much the better" before I will accept it.
The primary test that I put any kind of leisure activity through is whether or not I feel better in some way during or afterwards. Most of television, for me, doesn't do that; it's a convenient way to fill some time, but leaves me feeling generally less energized than when I started.
Chemicals and Electricity
QT is trying to keep up with the state of the art in GUIs, which means flashy, animated, and a lot of eye-candy. This requires (relatively) heavy GPU power, hence the OpenGL requirement.

That's a choice they made. They expect that by the time when Qt5 is ready, all customer-facing devices will have a decent GPU.
Their theory is that you'll never use 2 GB on your phone alone, so if you want to tether, you'll actually use close to 2GB, and well, that's an extra charge, citizen.
> you get to slam "jjjjjjjjjjjjlllllllllll" to position your cursor.

Incremental search, dude.
I get ideas while out walking, no iPod and preferably no other people about. Exercise too (of a sort).
Surely it's much, much easier to just put it on your neighbour's car. They'd probably believe they were getting real data or your partner was using the car. And could probably never accuse you of tampering as they couldn't be sure it wasn't just a mistake by the planting agent.
Did you read the article? The issue here is internet censorship; the Pirate Bay guys are just getting involved because they tend to also be opposed to censorship.
typo: I meant 0.01% per day.
For all intents and purposes all creation is incremental. In the sense that someone sees something, and says "Hey, that's a great idea, but it would be better if I changed it like this...".

Prove this to yourself: find out who invented television.

So, weaker copyrights would encourage incremental innovation, the kind that really takes place. Adding a "fair use" doctrine, which is "radical" reform in the article, almost certainly only helps the content creators in that it frees up other people to reference previous creations, driving interest in, and use of, those previous creations.

As far as radicalizing copyright into so-called "Digital Rights Management", remember: "DRM is about political and economic subjugation".
One of the Ways How You Could Plan for Failure
IMHO, author's point is to motivate future programmers to create stuff. To create stuff you need right attitude and to be excited about it.

Algorithms on other hand are already created. And “When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability.", tastes to algorithms in this case..
Play error page opener for IntelliJ