skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Society as a whole gets richer, but within those confines the rich can get richer and the poor can get poorer. Granted the poor today (I assume) have a higher quality of life than they did 50 years ago, but their expectations for life are also (probably) higher and cheap credit means that they can live beyond their means and a deeper whole for themselves, while temporarily giving themselves the impression that they have money to spend.

Silicon Valley is producing these great billion dollar companies, but the companies themselves are only hiring a small fraction of the employees that similarly sized (market cap) companies have in the past. That is a bit of a problem. It means that incredible wealth is concentrated in one place, but without the filter down value that has occurred in the past.

These companies still have immense value to society, but the value as far as numbers of people employed is decreasing dramatically and that is a major concern.
>>Technology has always disrupted the low end of the workforce.

I'm not sure that's true.

The reason is underemployment[1]. when technology disrupts the jobs of educated people, they have options to find jobs that require lower education , or take a job with lower salary , because of their prestige, education and experience.

People with less skills usually have much less options , so instead of becoming underemployed , they become unemployed.

As an example , see the table at [2].

[1]there are two definition for underemployed. the official is a people with part time job looking for full time job. the other is a person looking for a job below his skills.

[2] http://collegeaffordability.blogspot.com/2010/10/underemploy...
This is a great example of "hacking":

1) Research a system to find a vulnerability
2) Exploit the vulnerability
3) Profit

Good for him but I think the real challenge will be keeping the house over the next x amount of years until his name is on the title.
And what are they going to do, reinvent Diaspora?
I've been working on this for a couple weeks, attempting to get it looking perfect and get it to 1kb. It's going to be going on stage at http://solskogen.no/ shortly, so I figured now is the perfect time to post.

As far as I know, this is the first ever case of a self-extracting PNG -- the file is a PNG that first is interpreted as HTML, which then unpacks the compressed code within the PNG to start the second stage. I plan to write a blog post about how I got the size down as far as it is, but feel free to ask any questions you may have, as I'd love to see this technique spread!

Edit: Requires Chrome and Firefox -- has been tested heavily on Windows and OS X, but this will eat your CPU and GPU alive.
What's it called, Moronymous?
Yet, another protocol from Mozilla? It has even less features and is way more complicated than the last abandoned attempt: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Identity/Account_Manager...
i know right!, enjoy your notoriety while it lasts
Looks fun. You don't need 3 forms. Keep it simple and quick.
It should be intuitively obvious Verizon did not expect her to actually go to court.
Can you give us a few details of what you did? This makes my i7 cry.

Edit: Just saw your explanation. Cool - thanks!
Kinda ugly, but:

(defun my-rename-symbol-at-point ()
(interactive)
(let* ((curword (thing-at-point 'symbol))
(to-word nil))
(if (null curword)
(message "No symbol at point!")
(progn
(setq to-word (read-string (concat "Replace " curword " with: ")))
(save-excursion
(goto-char (point-min))
(replace-regexp re-curword to-word))))))
This is a really interesting question; Just who will buy these things.

Last night as i was struggling to fall asleep I was daydreaming about "What will the internet and tech look like in 50 years" - I was thinking that in 50 years, the internet, and thus the world, will look a lot more like the dystopian future portrayed in CyberPunk from the 80's; i.e. the massive scale of global corporations and their influence over all aspects of our lives.

The people who will buy "these things" (That which is made in silicon valley, online digital product) shall be further gobbled up by both facebook and google - as the extending of their reach into our lives continues.

Their services will continue to be free to the users - the most useful of online services will be bought by them and made free to their users for the purpose of extracting use data from the populous in ever more accurate detail.

This data will be used to track, sell to and control the worlds population.

Spending habits.
Social habits.
Search habits.
Communication habits.
etc...

All watched, monitored, monetized and cataloged.

There is going to be an ever increasing class gap. The smartest of people will be bought into the system. Working on furthering its vision and capability.

The disenfranchised lower classes will grow, become more violent and be used as the reasoning for greater governmental control over the new economically unbalanced and violent world.
This is a good thing to keep in mind, but in this case, the patent really does appear to be about that vague as far as I've been able to find anyone explainng. The only difference from the title is that the patent requires the contextual action to have been automatically generated based on the content (it does not, however, detail any method for this "automatically generate" step).

It seems to me that Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb ought to be prior art, but maybe there's a technicality I'm missing, because that seems like a big one for the lawyers to miss.
I think that the terms 'anonymous' and 'social network' are reasonably opposed to each other. If you have enough connections it's probably reasonable to be able to figure out who you are, especially if one of the people in your social network has been identified.
Redhat does not rely on patents or licencing. I wouldn't even be surprised if they did not hold a single patent.
Honestly (and depressingly) I think the best examples of software patents used for good are the software patents written to protect from exploitation... by the software patent system- i.e. Creative Commons, GPLv2, BSD Licence, ...
Whose twitter username is "Twitter username" in the third choice?
Similar, in Ruby:

module Utils
extend self
unless defined?(Utils::VALID_CHARS)
VALID_CHARS = [("a".."z").to_a, ("A".."Z").to_a, ("0".."9").to_a, %w[* $ ! ? ( )]].flatten
VALID_CHARS_SAFE = VALID_CHARS.clone
VALID_CHARS_SAFE.delete_if { |v| %w(i l o 1 0).member?(v) }
VALID_CHARS.freeze
VALID_CHARS_SAFE.freeze
end
def strand(len=12, safe=true)
chars = safe ? VALID_CHARS_SAFE : VALID_CHARS
(1..len).collect { chars[rand(chars.size-1)] }.join
end
end
Not quite; Engineering Society of Detroit job fairs of the past few years feature hundreds of unemployed people with degrees and masters' degrees and experience.

You can say "it's their fault!" but was it really "stupid" to go to college, get an engineering degree, and get a good job at a Fortune 10 corporation that was considered "widows and orphans" stock? And, no matter how excited you are about your own company, wasn't it an objectively safer choice than joining a Web startup with no barriers to entry, no economies of scale, no brand recognition, no customers, no earnings, and no revenue model?

And yet what would a SV startup say to a 30, 40, or 50 year old automotive engineer who said "well, I don't have much Web development experience, but I have taught myself some frameworks through blogs and Websites and Kahn Academy?"

Things really are different outside the Valley.
I usually write an isDefined() in JavaScript projects. Testing for typeof foo !== 'undefined' makes me want to vomit.
A social network lead by hacktivists? I'm sure the general public will come flocking...
The person you want to "annoy"
HN & G+ == more entertaining and lots cheaper than cable.
Not especially. I prefer one more Zuck or Gates or Jobs to a million more middle-class whoevers.
Tumblr Releases API v2
>The Tata car is a ridiculous piece of metal that should not be called a car.

Why, exactly?
Where do you live? Chances are if it's in the US, I could name at least six alternatives to your current ISP for you- just as you could name six other bottled water brands.
You probably already know this but another trick is just to assign an "empty" lambda to the event.

public event SomeDelegate MyEvent = (sender, e) => {};

Or better yet

public event SomeDelegate MyEvent = delegate {};
Pretty cool hack! I'm looking forward to the blog post.

It doesn't seem to eat my processor too much. In Chrome with AMD processor it's sitting at about 25% CPU usage.
Perhaps what we need is a radical shake up of our schooling system, but also a re-evaluation or how we raise our kids. Chew on this:

"Nearly 6.2 million students in the United States between the ages of 16 and 24 in 2007 dropped out of high school..."

http://articles.cnn.com/2009-05-05/us/dropout.rate.study_1_d...

Yikes. Something stinks. In this day and age unemployment is going to continue to be really high if there are 6.2 or so million students dropping out of high school / university per year.

America (and other western countries) are not creating labor intensive industries anymore (with the exception of wars -- sad, but true), so these drop-outs are going to have real employment troubles for the rest of their 50+ years of life.

Something's gotta give.
I use the following like so: from($('.foo_element'), 'text')

That way if I change the html structure I don't have to to change a million jquery selectors, I can just change the from function in one place.

// Access one particular element from another.
function from(start, end) {
start = $(start)
if(start.parent().hasClass('headline') && end == 'node')
return start.parent().parent()
if(end == 'nodes') return start.children('.node')
if(end == 'headline') return start.children('.headline')
if(end.indexOf('.') != 0) end = '.' + end
if(start.hasClass('headline')) return $(start.children(end))
return start.find('> .headline > ' + end)
}

(I'm still somewhat new to Javascript, so this may be a well-known pattern.)
If you need to proxy through nginx on your own server to pad some external api's json (to enable jsonp), wouldn't you be able to put that server on your own domain? Obviating the need for cross-domain jsonp?
here are a few more:

baR2mJpMfgecD6Ut
fgyc54yA4FS2kM85
beb4HZFy4FPxBqHp
I think his assumption is that the owner wouldn't want to "out" themselves as they are on the lamb from tons of mortgage back payments. Once the owners emerge from "MIA" to try to get him off the property, the bank would sick their lawyers on the owners.

So in this case, it's a matter of "I dare you to come clear me out from your house - but if you do, here are some banks that would be really interested in your current phone number"
25 minutes to do a copy? I remember it taking about 45 minutes per disk to do a backup copy.

I also remember having to break out the oscilloscope every time I played F-15 Strike Eagle and Psi-5 Trading Company to re-align the disk head. Until a friend gave me cracked copies, which allowed me to simply play the games. (By that time I had purchased two copies of Psi-5, after the first disk refused to recognise itself as a valid copy!)

Worst copy protection I ever encountered, until Lotus 123 came along.
When linking to a google plus page, please use something like (plus.google.com) and not (google.com). Perhaps it's just me, but when I see a story by (google.com) I tend to think it's an announcement/ info form google themselves - and not just some guy with an opinion :-)
Bourbon does this and much more : https://github.com/thoughtbot/bourbon
"The sheep era is over. The interwebz are no longer your prison."

Isn't the problem with being a sheep that you're anonymous? I don't get it, to me Anonymous exemplifies the metaphorical herd perfectly.
Thanks!

It isn't too be on the CPU for most people, but for some reason it's eating a massive chunk of CPU-time for some people -- seems to be only in the latest Firefox nightlies, but i'm not seeing it here, so I'm unsure of what it could be.
> If I write a great piece of software, patent it, then run a business selling it, then that patent does me (and my family) a lot of good. I worked hard to create the software, and I should reap the rewards.

Your non-trivial software is already in violation of scores or even hundreds of existing patents. You should get as many software patents as possible to cover your ass.

> Patents are necessary to encourage people to innovate

[looks around] In software, this is not the case.

Software patents are a good idea in theory, but in practice, the baby needs to get thrown out with the bathwater.
> theoretically compiler could have inlined slice
> and looked one level deeper to see that.

I'd suspect that optimizing Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, n, m) at the v8 level would yield pretty significant gains, even if no other arguments-object abuse was supported intelligently.

For almost any complicated operation on the arguments, your first step is to convert it (or part of it) to a true Array. Most libraries do that using Array.prototype.slice, in my experience.
I consider lower crime rates a public good.
Just requested pretty much the same thing for google-plus (as I didn't see your earlier request) ... so ... +1
> Society as a whole gets richer, but within those confines the rich can get richer and the poor can get poorer.

But, do they get poorer?

> Granted the poor today (I assume) have a higher quality of life than they did 50 years ago,

Good - they're getting richer.

But, why does the sentence continue.

> but their expectations for life are also (probably) higher and cheap credit means that they can live beyond their means and a deeper whole for themselves, while temporarily giving themselves the impression that they have money to spend.

Huh?

The fact that US poor can be better off than ever before has no connection to easy credit.

In fact, even with the easy credit and the resulting bankruptcy, they're better off now than past poor.

Note that I'm not arguing for stupid credit policies (pushed mostly by govt). I'm pointing out that they have nothing to do with whether the poor are better off now.

Oh, and most poor people didn't get into the cheap credit problem because they didn't even qualify under the stupid standards.

However, the efforts to prop up folks who bought what they can't afford have kept folks who saved out of those houses. It's unclear why that's a good thing.

For the good of society, banks need to lose money on stupid loans.
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Firstly, Dawn uses ion engines for primary propulsion, this enables it to rendezvous with two separate asteroids, something that has never been done before. Secondly, Dawn's primary science instrument is an incredible imaging spectrometer right out of star trek. It will create a high resolution global map of Vesta (and later Ceres) except at every pixel it won't merely record greyscale data or even a few color channels it'll record an entire high resolution spectrum from visible to IR wavelengths. It's secondary instrument is a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, capable of probing the sub-surface compositon of the asteroid.

In terms of raw high-tech instrumentation, New Horizons is close, but Dawn's use of electric propulsion sets it apart.

Personally I'd rather not pick favorites, but Dawn is definitely the van guard of a stunning new generation of scientific spacecraft.
Interesting. I think that in terms of creating a just society (which I do consider to be "good"), I'd much rather have a million more middle-class whoevers. There's no real way to resolve disagreements on questions of "oughts", though, so I think we just have to agree to disagree.
The GPL, BSD, etc. licenses are licenses, not software patents.

I can't think of a good software patent. It's not a software patent, but there was IBM's attempt to patent patent trolling which was a rather keen bit of legal satire. I think it actually failed in the face of all that prior art, but I might be confusing that patent application with another one.
There is a difference between Indian companies and Indian government. Indian government is full of failures. Indian companies a little better. Tatas developed $2500 car. Tatas developed $15 water purifier that does not need electricity or expensive refills.
Do you have a quad core CPU by chance? 25% is the max that a single-threaded process would use. (Someone please correct me if this is wrong, but at least this is the behavior I've observed.)

That being said, this uses only 10-12% CPU on my quad-core machine.
And this is why I love HN. Thanks for the writeup :) I have rapportive for a few years and love it!
Fail. The whoevers pay most of the taxes in the US and are the ones who purchase your products. One "killer elite" just isn't making that much $$ for Facebook, Google, ...
People that are unsatisfied with their lives are more likely to commit crimes. Depending on how much they think they have to lose, they may commit wildly irrational crimes as well.
I agree, though also I have found my self making aliases for lots of things and using them for a year on a box - then moving to a new machine/new job and not recalling how to do any of the things manually.

Years ago, when I was at Lockheed, we had to do a bunch of stuff in support of devs - and after having them "train" us on the ridiculous install of their product, we wrote scripts and aliases to get the job done - but then after some time were wholly dependent on the scripts and couldnt do it by hand any loner.
"Avidavit of adverse possession"?
What I've notice, anecdotally, a lot of people with college degrees, particularly those with liberal arts major are taking jobs, that years ago, mostly people with high school diploma would take. There is a lot
of hiring in Silicon Valley, in the tech space in general, but they are mostly hiring hackers, people who can code or design. And college degree is not required to learn how to code and design.
I can't tell you how to make things better, but I'll describe my product search process. For the sake of example, we'll assume a few things:

- It's a high value item (I won't waste much time researching items less than $100 unless I'll be using it more than 10% of my waking moments).

- There's enough differentiation in my available options that my time invested in the research will significantly improve my chances that I'll be satisfied with my purchase (like comparing features on a TV, researching specific technology used by specific camera bodies, etc)

First, I'll check the available market and figure out what the range in prices is. (What's the most and least I can expect in the market now.) If this is in line with what I'm willing to pay, I'll continue. I'll figure out which features/specifications are the most important to my satisfaction. If I don't know enough about these specifications, I'll read up on the options and see what is better and why they're better. (Sometimes finding reliable resources tends to be difficult.) Getting an idea on what the cost is for one feature over again is important. Then, I'll narrow it down to two or three models that I'm interested in based on the best intersection between the features I want and the price I'm willing to pay. I research to see if the market is seasonal (will I get a better price during April vs December) or tends to offer discounts or sales on what I'm purchasing. This will help me decided if I should buy now (when buying now is as good as any other time, as it is with technology) or if I should wait for a more opportune time (when sales and discounts are worth waiting for). Then, if I have any ways to pay that give me added benefits with the purchase, I'll briefly consider those options (like paying with AmEx to get traveler's insurance or cash back for a plane ticket versus my bank card which gives me points on flights).

Not sure if you want more detail than that, but that's the gist.
It is very common practice in India to refer to Tata company as Tatas. I guess this is more because the Indians look at them more as a family and less a company. Tata is a family run business with several people having the surname Tata. Hence we call them Tatas. It is not really a grammatical mistake but an colloquial term.
So I periodically think this is true, and wonder "Why do I get paid so fantastically well for just drizzling some AJAX goo on top of pre-existing APIs?", and then I actually talk to Real People (TM) and remember that I inhabit another planet from them.

On their planet, being able to calculate the area of a rectangle reliably, the first time, makes you anomalously good with math. The notion of programs as long strings of instructions, followed sequentially, with predictable results is a fantasy: computers are observed to operate mostly randomly, all of the time. Some days I go to my Googles and it's the Googles with the box in the middle,a some days I go to my Googles and it's the Googles with the box at the top. Why does Microsoft keep changing the Googles? THIS IS SO FRUSTRATING.

You and I might think there is a distinction between programs and data, and we could describe how these exist in different places in a hierarchical file system on a computer, which is an abstraction over sectors on a hard disk. Every technical word in that sentence is scary juju to most of the population. There are many otherwise intelligent people who cannot open MS Word without a document emailed to them first. If you took away the document, they wouldn't know how to open Word and wouldn't know how to correct that.

In addition, many folks who are unemployed or underemployed in the United States either cannot read this post or cannot understand enough of it to answer simple questions like "Does Patrick think that programming is hard?"

You can certainly become a passable programmer in 3 years starting from being well-educated, intelligent, and reasonably skilled at knowledge work in the information economy. If you're 3 for 3 on those, you don't have a problem right now.
Namecoin and .bit
So capitalist societies don't have inheritance?
stupid buzz is stupid
Have driven Tata Nano and must say they put an incredible engineering effort into building that thing. It is a good car for that price.
It's an interesting question, but of the several responses so far the only one that actually tried to provide an example is getting voted down. My guess is that is going to happen to any answer that provides any example of a software patent being used for good is going to get a bunch of down votes, making any discussion pointless.
I stole this from mongrel2, but the check macro is pretty good for error handling in C

#define check(A, M, ...) \
if(!(A)) { \
fprintf(stderr, M "\n", ##__VA_ARGS__); \
goto error; \
} \
}

And you use it like this

FooClass *create_foo_class()
{
FooClass *fc = NULL;
int rc;
fc = malloc(sizeof(*fc));
check(fc != NULL, "allocation failed");

rc = do_something_to_foo_class(fc);
check(rc == 0, "do_something_to_foo_class(...) failed");

return fc;
error:
if(fc != NULL) free(fc);
/* Other cleanup */
return NULL;
}